by Ruth Brandon
The problem Schueller faced was the problem all cosmetics and toiletry manufacturers face—that their products are almost indistinguishable, and that brand loyalty must somehow be engineered despite this. Publicity is therefore all important. As Helena Rubinstein observed, “There’s nothing like a clever stunt to get something off the ground.” Her favorite campaign was the one for the fragrance “Heaven Sent,” when in the late 1940s thousands of pale-blue balloons were released over Fifth Avenue, each one bearing a sample of the fragrance, with the tag: “A gift for you from heaven! Helena Rubinstein’s new ‘Heaven Sent.’ ”
Schueller, too, realized that he needed a really huge publicity campaign. He returned to Bleustein and Radio Cité, and this time he did not confine himself to mere jingles, but bought an entire program, the extremely popular Crochet Radiophonique, which he interspersed with catchy advertisements for Monsavon and sponsored singing contests, broadcast live from different locations. For six months nothing happened. Then sales suddenly took off. Monsavon took and retained first place in soap sales. Schueller was vindicated.
Sales of L’Oréal also rose during the 1920s, not because of any advertising campaign but because of a new hairstyle: the bob. The fashion for short hair began during World War I, when many women took jobs in factories. The popular film stars Clara Bow and Louise Brooks were famously bobbed, as was Coco Chanel, the up-and-coming fashion designer, who cut her hair off after singeing it one day. Just as Chanel’s straight, comfortable clothes meant the end of corsets, padding, and petticoats, so her new short hair did away with laborious, long-drawn-out hair-washing and -drying sessions. Women everywhere began to cut their hair. Like lipstick a few years earlier, the bob became the symbol of a new freedom and independence. Men were horrified. “A bobbed woman is a disgraced woman!” thundered one in outrage. “ . . . How strangely ill at ease our poor shorn sisters would have been had they been present in the Bethany home that day!”18
Schueller, too, was gloomy—not because of possible troubles in Bethany, but because L’Oréal’s sales had always been predicated on women having lots of hair to dye. He anticipated a catastrophic drop in demand. He could not have been more wrong. Short hair needs frequent cutting, and only men’s barbers had the appropriate skills. Faced with a female invasion, they were hesitant at first, but soon reinvented themselves as hairdressing salons, and flourished as never before. “Before the bob became the accepted style, there were less than 11,000 beauty shops in America. . . . Today there are more than 40,000 beauty shops in operation in America alone,” wrote hairdresser George E. Darling in 1928.19 And more hairdressers meant more hair-dyeing outlets.
Short hair did, however, present some difficulties when it came to coloring. The bob was about modernity, and hence youth: a gray bob looked anomalous. But a large proportion of short hair consists of roots, so that any coloring must be frequently retouched. And this meant frequent dyeing sessions, which were bad both for the hair and the pocket.
One easy answer was to bleach. Schueller set to work and produced L’Oréal Blanc. It quickly became the rage. Advertisements throughout Europe and America were overtaken by a blond invasion. He soon occupied the whole building in rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and opened, too, his first proper factory, in rue Clavel, out in Paris’s 19th arrondissement. In 1929, for the first time, L’Oréal achieved revenues of more than a million francs a month.
Almost at once another problem presented itself: the permanent wave, or as it was more usually known, the “perm.” The difficulty this time was that perms do not take on dyed hair if the dye forms an impermeable colored film on the outside of the hairs, as L’Oréal’s existing dyes did. Permed hair needed a dye that would penetrate the hairs and color them from the inside. Some new British and American dyes did this, and threatened to sweep the market.
Schueller had in fact discovered and patented just such a dye during his early researches, in 1907. But he had never used it. As with the penetrating dyes his competitors were selling, its active ingredient was paraphenylenediamine. “Para” had a fatal flaw: as Skin Deep would reveal, some people were allergic to it. If they used it they would suffer from an itchy, flaky scalp, or in the worst cases a facial rash and swelling of the eyelids, face, and neck. Urged now by his colleagues to resuscitate this dye, Schueller hesitated. L’Oréal’s reputation was built on its not provoking allergic reactions. “If one client starts to scratch, there go twenty years of confidence!” he objected. But without the new formula, sales would continue to fall.
Schueller decided the only remedy—and the only way to outflank his competitors—was to be frank. The new dye, called “Imédia,” was launched with a warning: it might be dangerous. New users were advised to dab a drop behind an ear and wait forty-eight hours. If an inflammation appeared, the dye should not be used. At the same time he advised that should an allergic reaction declare itself, there was an antidote: a rinse of brine mixed with oxygenated water, which would remove the offending substance. The policy worked, and sales jumped.
By the mid-1930s, L’Oréal employed three hundred salesmen where once it had employed ten, and the company decamped once again, to the imposing building in rue Royale that remains its headquarters to this day. Like all L’Oréal’s successive headquarters, as it outgrew one building after another, this building, too, was just a few steps from rue d’Alger. But by this time both L’Oréal and its founder had moved, definitively, into the other, brilliant world—the world of rue Saint-Honoré that in 1908, though physically close, had been at the same time so immeasurably distant.
IV
What I always tried to do, in dealing with people, was to provide them with something they seemed cruelly to lack: a goal in life.
—EUGÈNE SCHUELLER, 1957 20
Like Helena Rubinstein’s endless scurryings from one side of the world to the other, Eugène Schueller’s zigzag path from industry to industry bore the mark of compulsion. They had to keep moving or they were lost. But these compulsions had diametrically opposite roots.
Rubinstein’s career was chaotic, a progression of brilliantly executed extempore sallies. Just as her business was an extension of herself, peopled by the sisters, cousins, nephews, and nieces who were her pale imitations, so her constant journeyings reflected her emotional life. They might go under the name of business necessity, but the essence of Madame was that business and emotion were not separable. Every crisis—the row with her father when she turned down his choice of husband and left his house forever, Edward Titus’s insistent desire that she marry him, the arrival of children, the outbreak of World War I, the sale of her American business to Lehman Brothers, the outbreak of World War II—was marked by physical flight, to another country, another continent, another beginning. Stuff happened, and she dealt with it somehow, and because she was clever and thought nothing of the world’s opinion, simply following her instincts, which rarely led her astray, things turned out all right. And then there was more stuff, and she dealt with that. She ran on adrenaline: her chaotic, compulsive letters to Rosa Hollay, in which the worry of the moment was scribbled down whenever it might occur on whatever scrap of paper lay to hand, reveal the constant, jumbled panic beneath her assured exterior. “I haven’t paid any bills the last three weeks, let me know again what must and should be paid now. I am frightfully short of money, it seems worse and worse. . . . I often don’t know if I am on my feet or my head.” “I am in such chaos, I am most thankful to have good constitution all
the same I feel at times I will go mad, the worry and the responsibility is just eating me up. . . .” “I do actually nothing and work all the time.”21 However successful, however mountainously rich, hers was life as crisis management. “I have too much on my shoulders. I’m surrounded with people, but I can’t get to them. . . . People . . . people . . . and I’m alone! With burdens . . . such burdens!” she told Patrick O’Higgins the day she offered him the indeterminate job that would keep him by her side for the rest of her life.22
Schueller, by contrast, was in control. In the world, as in the laboratory, he knew what he wanted to achieve and methodically set about achieving it. He was a scientist, and therefore saw the universe as a place of logic and patterns. Human life was no exception: without a pattern, all was chaos. Having abandoned the Catholic faith of his childhood, he spent the rest of his life constructing a substitute for it, a framework within which a modern industrial state might function fairly and efficiently for the benefit of its citizens.
This fascination with possible worlds surfaced in some unexpected places. The opening paragraphs of his earliest contribution to Coiffure de Paris, the October 1909 essay on “Technical and Practical Hints on Hair Dyes,” plunged its readers into a world of scientific fantasy.
In four or five years from now, our bicycles will have become monoplanes weighing a hundred kilos, which will carry one or two people, and on which it will be possible to travel from here [Schueller evidently assumed all his readers lived in Paris] to Orléans in an hour.
When that happens, there will probably be no more hair dyers. That delicate, difficult, and sometimes even dangerous profession will exist only in a few lost villages in Morocco or Calabria. Nor will there be any more dyeing of white hair. Instead, in every town, there will be shops where the scalp will simply be massaged with lotions, each more wonderful than the last—liquids that will prevent hair from turning white in the first place.
Eagerly, Schueller outlined the chemistry by which this future would be achieved. The magic liquids would be “dilute solutions, in alcohol, tafia, or rum, of some di- or tri-ethylaminoparoxybenzene which will recolor any hair, whatever its original color, that will be harmless and that everyone will use each morning, like powder or toothpaste, but”—a bow here to the readers of Coiffure de Paris—“which many will prefer to have applied by a hair artist—the successor of today’s hairdressers.” Another miraculous invention would abolish the barbershop: men would simply rub their faces with an oil that stopped the hairs from growing.23
Here is the authentic voice of the times, of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Like them, Schueller was enraptured by the new worlds science was opening up, convinced that it would transform the future in unimaginable ways, and eager to share this vision with a wondering public. There was, of course, an important difference between them and him. Where Verne, Lang, and Wells expressed themselves through stories, Schueller aimed to work his transformations in reality. But whatever its medium, one significant corollary of Schueller’s visionary mind-set, with its scientifically argued blueprints for ideal worlds, was a deep impatience with the retrogressive dullards who refused to act on these excellent ideas. And this impatience would point the way to dark places.
Schueller was always conscious that had he not received the kind of education rarely available to bakers’ sons, he would probably, despite all his abilities, have remained poor. He was aware, too, that that education had been largely a question of luck. Despite his parents’ desire to give their son the best possible start in life, he would have had to make do with whatever the state could then provide had not the Collège Sainte-Croix, in an unusual access of imagination, accepted part payment of his school fees in pastries. He therefore directed his first social efforts towards education. He felt it was time to end the self-perpetuating mandarinate of the supercompetitive and expensive grandes écoles that excluded so much talent even when—as in his own case—a poor boy had demonstrated unusual intellectual potential. Intelligent working-class men seemed to him particularly disabled by their lack of math and science education,24 and he wanted to remedy this personally, so far as he could. Before they were even twenty, he and his friend Jacques Sadoul, who shared his concerns, had founded a modest people’s university at La Chapelle, a poor area to the north of Paris, where they taught in their free time.25
Soon enough, of course, there was no more free time, at least for Schueller, and the teaching lapsed. But despite his increasingly frenetic level of activity, first with L’Oréal, then in the army during World War I, then during his headlong progress through assorted chemical industries during the 1920s and thirties, his concern with the unsatisfactory state of the world, like Sadoul’s, continued. Sadoul turned to communism and took refuge in the nascent Soviet Union; Schueller, the self-made man, set about designing a new, improved capitalism.
His sense that the old model was failing crystallized during the 1920s. In 1923, at the height of the great inflation, he made a trip to Germany, where L’Oréal had opened an agency, and “felt, for the first time, that the world had veered off-track.” Three years later, in France, it veered off again, almost as catastrophically, though in the opposite direction, as the franc was revalued. “Factories full of orders were going day and night . . . and suddenly, customers stopped ordering. A month later they wouldn’t even take delivery of stuff that was already in the pipeline, and I had to close two out of three factories.”26
One day he realized that with modern machines he could double production using only half his existing workforce. But if only half the previous number of workers were earning salaries, who would be there to buy the goods? Then he had a revelation. If salaries were doubled along with production, there would still be buyers. “Capitalists had to realize that they should stop lowering prices while trying to maintain their profits by cutting salaries too. On the contrary, what they needed to do was not lower prices but raise salaries—not in an unplanned way, as when workers demanded and threatened [and employers gave in]—but mathematically, raising them as production increased. The trick was to raise buying power, not lower prices. Lowering prices would never absorb overproduction, because it was impossible ever to lower them enough.”27
Over the next few years Schueller worked out his economic theories. He first expounded them in a speech to old Sainte-Croix pupils in 1934, later published as an article in the Sainte-Croix de Neuilly magazine. The article created such a stir that he was encouraged to spread the word wider, which he did at two meetings of industrialists. Later, in 1936, he published a journal, L’Action patronale, in which employers were exhorted to social reform. Finally he set out his programs in two books, Le Deuxième salaire (The Second Salary), written in 1938 and published in 1939, and La Révolution de l’économie, published in 1941.
What was needed, he was convinced, was a new formula for paying workers. They would receive their salaries as usual at the end of each month—but this basic pay would not be their only pay. In his own industry, he reckoned that salaries should amount to 30 percent of the product’s factory-gate selling price. If, at the end of the month, 30 percent of total receipts amounted to more than the total of the workers’ agreed-upon basic salaries, the difference would be paid out to the workers, apportioned according to their individual work records. Thus: the “second salary.”28
This system would have several advantages, of which the first and most important was that workers, in
stead of spending the day watching the clock, would work hard because they would benefit personally if the business flourished. He himself, Schueller said, had spent a good deal of his youth performing boring manual tasks, and recognized that the reason this had never bothered him was because, unlike most workers, he had always, even when he was very young, been working for his own benefit rather than an employer’s. Of course, few young men were as driven as he had been. Nevertheless, the second salary would make every worker a stakeholder in his own factory.
It would also, Schueller thought, solve the problem of impersonality, which inevitably increased as the business grew larger. While his own business had still been small, he had worked alongside his employees and transmitted his own enthusiasm to them. But when it grew larger, and personal contacts became rarer, he saw that most workers had no real interest in their job. It was then, he wrote, “that the problem of restoring some sense to the life of the men who worked in my businesses began to obsess me.”29
These theories, dismissed by contemporaries as “Schueller’s dada” (Schueller’s hobbyhorse) were in fact extremely forward-looking. As he realized, in a recession nothing is more fatal than the deflationary spiral of ever-reduced prices, jobs, and wages. It was this problem he sought to tackle.
Schueller knew the second salary worked: he used the system in his own factories, and they, as everyone could see, flourished.2 Others of his ideas—social security for the unemployed paid for through an automatically deducted national insurance (revolutionary, he admitted, “but we live in revolutionary times”30); a united Europe in which the mark and the franc would be one monetary unity in a European economy31—are now part of everyday life. In economics he was a visionary, and a benign one.