Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  From its very inception, however, Owen-Jones’s tenure as L’Oréal’s CEO had been marked by rumblings from the Nazi past. When he took charge, in 1988, the Frydman affair was just about to explode. He spent seven years negotiating his way through that minefield, and succeeded in extricating his company without ever once actually admitting the various allegations. Perhaps the Waitzfelder case was simply one too many for him. To settle would be to acknowledge that L’Oréal really was tainted; and that, perhaps, was more than he could bring himself to do.

  Whatever his motivation, the result has been hard on the Rosenfelder family. Edith Rosenfelder still lives, in difficult circumstances, in Brazil. Monica Waitzfelder has told her lawyers not to contact her unless they have good news to offer, as she otherwise finds the whole affair too upsetting. At the time of writing, she had not heard from them. The case is still unresolved, and it is before the European Court of Human Rights.

  [1] For some of these, L’Oréal remained a family firm. In 2005, a questioner on a website was asking for news of “Mr. Patrice Servant Deloncle who when I knew him worked for L’Oréal in Chile” (elsassexpat.blogs.com/weblog/2005/10/loreal_le_vautil.html). The full name indicates that this was the son of Claude Deloncle and Guy Servant.

  [2] This horrible and violent language was common currency. It occurs, for example, in the anthem of the Vichy Milice:

  Faisons la France pure:

  Bolcheviks, francs-maçons ennemis,

  Israël, ignoble pourriture

  Ecoeurée, la France vous vomit.

  [3] There are 55 million letters of denunciation in French and German archives: an astonishing statistic. (Lucy Wadham, The Secret Life of France, p. 153.)

  [4] Similarly (though perhaps coincidentally), the otherwise uninterrupted run of Votre Beauté in the Bibliothèque Nationale contains no numbers for 1945, the year it was edited, to his extreme embarrassment, by François Mitterrand.

  [5] Though even this turned out to be cloudy: a telegram exists sent by Bettencourt from Berne in mid-August, saying that “Because of the insurrection in Paris, I’ve been completely cut off from all contact. . . . I expect to leave here [Berne] in a fortnight, as my mission is now accomplished and I shall leave others to follow it up.” (A.N. 72AJ47, quoted in Frydman, L’Affaire Bettencourt, p. 25.) And another source, Jacques Benet, also one of the 104 group, says that André Bettencourt “returned to Paris with him at the end of August. . . .” (A.N. 72AJ2174.)

  [6] Arthur Koestler, who also experienced these camps, said that fellow prisoners who had experienced both found the conditions in them worse than those at German concentration camps such as Dachau. The only difference, he thought, was that whereas in Dachau the intention was to kill, in the French camps death occurred by default. Conditions for Nazi prisoners of war in France were rumored to be—and were—far superior. (Koestler, Scum of the Earth, pp. 92, 114.)

  Chapter Six

  Consumers or Consumed?

  I

  For Owen-Jones, it is easy to see how these political scandals must have seemed like a never-ending, irritating diversion from his main job. These years saw the transformation of L’Oréal from a national treasure into a multinational giant. And from that point of view, the acquisition of Helena Rubinstein did what it had been intended to do. Corrèze and all he stood for represented a regrettable past. But the Helena Rubinstein deal represented the future. In 1988, when O-J assumed the chief executive’s chair, the company was still a French hair-care group; when he stepped down in 2006, it was the biggest cosmetics business in the world, and readying itself to expand still further, into India, China, Brazil, and Russia. In such a context, recollections of ancient misdeeds receded into insignificance. “Not that old story,” the family would sigh wearily whenever the old scandals resurfaced. The years, they implied, should have drawn the sting from that tale—and this hope, clearly, was shared by Owen-Jones.

  But, on the contrary, the scandals remain relevant precisely because L’Oréal has become so large and powerful. The bigger the enterprise, after all, the bigger its capacity to bully. Huge multinational enterprises, with their enormous budgets and their ability to bestow or remove patronage, in the form of jobs or investment, hold more real clout than many nation-states. Their acts, therefore, take on a moral and political significance over and above the commercial. And L’Oréal is among them—number 346 in Fortune’s list of the world’s 500 largest companies, with revenues in 2008 of nearly $26 billion. It is true that L’Oréal does not operate in such obviously edgy areas as power generation or banking. But the company’s huge advertising outlay gives it immense influence over what we read in newspapers and magazines and watch on television. That advertising not only molds our sense of what we want to look like and who we want to be—in a very real sense, our perception of who we are—but also, as an essential source of revenue, enables the company to discourage unwelcome content in the media where it buys space.1 Yet at the same time, as the Rosenfelder case shows, the company remains—as a commercial and not a political entity—politically unaccountable.

  L’Oréal’s founder would have been very much at home in this world where business and politics are inseparably twinned. Not that Eugène Schueller saw his company as a source of political power in itself. Rather it was a guinea pig upon which to test out his theories and a provider of funds with which, subsequently, to buy the power to implement them. But in practice—and especially in France, where there has long existed a seamless interface between commerce and politics—such separations are almost meaningless. In Britain, where political power has traditionally been a perquisite of land ownership, the time-honored muckraking format is Who Owns Britain? with three books of (more or less) that title, by different authors, published between 1944 and 2001.1 The same is true in America, where wealth has always ruled, and where four Who Owns America? books have been published since 1936.2 But in France, the equivalent books—Les 200 familles, Le Retour des 200 familles, Les Nouvelles 200 familles, Les Bonnes fréquentations—are all about social networks. President Pompidou worked at the Rothschild bank and had numerous connections in the social and business worlds; Marcel Dassault, the aeronautical industrialist, was a member of the Assemblée Nationale; André Bettencourt was a senator and a member of successive governments, as well as being vice president of one of France’s biggest companies.

  By comparison with these far-reaching tentacles, Helena Rubinstein’s concerns seem quaintly parochial. Never interested in political power, her extracommercial interests were solely personal and familial. And although she and Schueller were of the same generation, and set up shop within a few years of each other, this comparatively limited worldview meant that by the time of the takeover, his company represented the future, hers, the past.

  Although the conjunction of the barber’s hair-dye commission and Schueller’s particular talents was undoubtedly fortuitous, it is clear that his combination of intellectual ability, obsession, and business acumen would have taken him to the top in whatever field he chose. For him, the vital factor was education. Once educated, he became unstoppable, able both to produce new products at the laboratory bench and to evolve a management philosophy that, like its inventor, could succeed in any industry.

  Helena Rubinstein’s success was far narrower, and was based almost wholly on her p
henomenal talent for trading. Patrick O’Higgins once accompanied her on an afternoon’s shopping in Paris. They started by visiting the painter Kees van Dongen, where she bought a canvas for $2,000 less than the price quoted by the artist, distracting Madame Kees van Dongen (who did the selling) at the crucial moment by observing that her skin was dry and promising to send her some products. They then continued on to Cartier’s, who had developed a new double lipstick container that interested her, and which she acquired, after playing the manager like a hooked fish, for 700,000 francs ($14,000) rather than the official price of 800,000. The painting was sold, after her death, for three times what she paid; the lipstick case was “adapted” with great success, and as “Nite ’n Day” sold more than a million, at three dollars each. Nor was her interest limited to large sums. As a business associate observed, “If someone offered Helena Rubinstein a package of gum for a nickel she would say ‘too much’ in the hope that it was the only package of gum in the world that could be bought for four cents.”3

  Rubinstein’s drive and marketing ability were so far above the ordinary that they enabled her to overcome both her lack of education and the social and commercial obstacles that confronted all would-be businesswomen. But even with all her business talents, she made it big only because her face cream hit at a crucial moment in social history.

  Quite how fundamental this was may be seen in the very different fate of an equally determined Jewish entrepreneuse who tried to open a beauty salon in London’s Bond Street forty years before Helena Rubinstein, and whose business, despite its great commercial success, crashed in humiliation and bankruptcy.

  Mrs. Rachel Leverson, trading as Madame Rachel under the banner “Beautiful For Ever!” opened her salon in 1865. She sold the usual range of lotions, creams, powders, and paints, and did well. Within a few months of her salon’s opening, she and her many daughters moved from the distant suburb of Blackheath to a fine house in Maddox Street, just around the corner from her shop, filled it with expensive furniture, and rented a pit-tier box at the opera, at £400 a season.

  In the summer of 1868, Madame Rachel was sued for fraud and conspiracy by a middle-aged widow, a Mrs. Borradaile. Madame Rachel had sold Mrs. Borradaile a number of pricey products—cosmetics, a course of bran baths—promising that they would make her beautiful again and would enable her to catch a new husband in the person of Lord Ranelagh (whose role in all this remained unclear: he was a well-known and notoriously disreputable man-about-town). Mrs. Borradaile spent all she had on these treatments, and the results were not as promised. So she sued.

  The case against Madame Rachel held little legal water. Admittedly, Mrs. Borradaile, stringy, middle-aged, with dyed yellow hair, had not become beautiful. Lord Ranelagh had not married her. And the sums charged by Madame Rachel—it was rumored £1,000 for the bran baths (around £62,000, or over $100,000, in current value)—were large. But nobody had forced the plaintiff to buy these products, and Madame Rachel had delivered what she had promised: namely, a course of baths. When the jury, after hearing much strange and muddled evidence, failed to agree on a verdict, the Times found its failure to acquit “only comprehensible on the supposition that they failed to see on which side the burden of proof lay.”4 Under English law Madame Rachel did not have to prove herself innocent. Mrs. Borradaile had to prove her guilty beyond all reasonable doubt, which she had failed to do.

  That should have been that: case dismissed. But the prosecution appealed for a retrial, the judge allowed it, and this time the jury duly convicted. Madame Rachel, who had been denied bail while waiting for the retrial, was sentenced to an unusually harsh five years’ hard labor; and the Times, despite its earlier pronouncement, applauded. “Whatever may be the differences of opinion about the prisoner’s legal guilt, about her moral guilt we take it there can be no doubt whatever,” it thundered—thus dismissing, in one sentence, the entire basis of the British legal system.

  What was it about Madame Rachel that so rattled the British establishment? The prosecution made much of her Jewishness—but it was no crime to be Jewish in Victorian England: the prime minister in 1868 was the not-very-Protestant Benjamin Disraeli. There were hints of various unsavory doings: that the baths were taken in a room fitted up for voyeurs, that Mrs. Leverson’s promise to “cleanse the system from many of its impurities” was code for performing abortions, whose providers often called themselves “Madame.” But none of this hearsay was under scrutiny. That the real problem was the beauty salon was made clear by the prosecutor’s declaration that he “wished all the ladies who had heard or read this case would learn that if once they crossed the threshold of such places they would come out with a taint upon them.”5 That was an extraordinary phrase. Men in nineteenth-century Britain clearly found the use of cosmetics highly threatening.

  If asked to justify this attitude, the Times editorial writer would doubtless have taken his stand, as Victorian gentlemen did, on the Bible, where Saint Paul recommended that women should cover their hair—their “crowning glory”—while a man should not cover his, because “he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man.”6 In Victorian Britain as in Pauline Judea, women were second-class beings, inferior in the sight of God, and as soon as they married, the property of their husbands, who alone were entitled to enjoy their good looks. And Victorian men, like Saint Paul, further assumed that the only reason a woman might want to look good in public—and thus the only point of cosmetics—was to seem more attractive to the opposite sex: if unmarried, to catch a husband (in the words of a 1770 British law banning it, makeup was for “seducing men into matrimony by cosmetic means”); if married, to carry on adulterous flirtations.

  This (invariably male) assumption still persists, as does the misogyny that informs it. In 2005, Zoo Weekly, a British men’s magazine, ran a “Win a boob job for your partner” competition, offering all-expenses-paid breast implant surgery as a prize to the girl “who deserves it most.” The magazine called for men, or their girlfriends, to send in shots of the woman’s cleavage, to be voted on by readers. When BBC Radio 1 asked its listeners what they thought about this, some women objected that they found the idea of such a competition degrading. But this elicited aggressive replies from competition entrants. “Woah! Woah! Woah! Too much ‘Girl Power’ in here,” ranted one. “Calm down, girls! I entered the competition not because I wanted to give my girlfriend a gift, if she wants bigger boobs she can pay for them herself. . . . Its [sic] not always about you girls. High horse . . . climb down off of.”

  Victorian England, Pauline Judea, and the readers of Zoo could hardly be more different. But they are all disturbed by the same idea: that women might choose to be something more than a support system for men. For them, the worrying thing about cosmetics is the inescapable sense that women do not wear them with men in mind, but on the contrary, for their own benefit. Just as on a bad hair day nothing will go right, so looking good is always a confidence booster. And self-confidence leads to self-assertion.

  This was certainly Helena Rubinstein’s view. One of her nieces once asked her what use cosmetics were in meeting people’s real needs. Rubinstein replied: “If my products help one young worker feel better about herself that day, then I feel I have accomplished something worthwhile.”7 And making people feel better about themselves still remains the primary function of cosmetics and (more recently) cosmetic surgery. In a survey of 1,000 British women conducted in 2005 by the women’s magazine Grazia, only 13 percent of
those considering cosmetic surgery said they were doing so because they wanted to look more attractive to men, while 64 percent thought it would give them more confidence.8 That confidence would of course help should they wish to attract a man. But it would also help them function without one.

  Powder and paint, when worn by respectable women, were thus intolerable to the Victorians on two fronts. First, they bolstered the self-esteem of a class of persons supposed to be meek and subordinate; second, they represented a highly visible form of rebellion, an incontrovertible and unmissable statement that the wearer valued her personal satisfaction above the wishes of her husband. One might turn a blind eye to the receipt of a discreet parcel of beauty aids, or the digging-out of Grandma’s recipe for rosy cheeks (though such activities were always noticed and remarked on: Mrs. X powders, Mrs. Y rouges.) But visiting a beauty salon too openly defied social taboos. As for running one, that was too much. It had to be stopped, and stopped it was.