by Ruth Brandon
[2]It is perhaps worth noting that in 2007 the L’Oréal subsidiary Garnier was fined €30,000 for racial discrimination, when it stipulated (presumably for similar reasons) that hostesses recruited to hand out shampoo samples and discuss styling with customers should all be white.
Coda
Two Old Ladies
Work has been my best beauty treatment! It keeps the wrinkles out of the mind and the spirit. It helps to keep a woman young. It certainly keeps a woman alive!
—HELENA RUBINSTEIN, 1956
Helena Rubinstein died at ninety-two, in full command of her empire. At the time of this writing, Eugène Schueller’s daughter, Liliane Bettencourt, is eighty-seven years old and still an active member of the L’Oréal board. Madame Rubinstein personified her own views of what a woman’s life might be; Madame Bettencourt was raised in accordance with her father’s quite opposite views. Which is the more successful life model? Or, to put it another way, which, if either, leads to contentment?
If money is the key, then these must have been the happiest of lives. Helena Rubinstein died before rich lists, but would certainly have figured on them had they existed in her day. And in 2007 Liliane Bettencourt, with a fortune of $20.7 billion, was, according to Forbes, the wealthiest woman in the world, and its twelfth-richest person. By 2009, both her ranking and her fortune had slipped, to twenty-first place and $13.4 billion, respectively (she was rumored to have lost “an undisclosed amount of money” in a fund overseen by René-Thierry Magnon de la Villehuchet, whose judgment was less impressive than his name and who committed suicide after losing $1.4 billion in Bernie Madoff’s infamous Ponzi scam).1 Her place as wealthiest woman had been claimed by a Walmart heiress. But although comparable losses would devastate public finances in the city-sized economies, sums like these more usually represent, at the level of individual lives they can make no conceivable difference. For a Bettencourt, the only real difficulty is in disposal. How can one spend even a fraction of that money? Solving that problem has been one of her life’s chief occupations. “Fortune is an opportunity,” she told Le Figaro in 2008. “You only need to look around—there are actions that impose themselves—and then go for it. Simply, without ulterior motives, without calculation, without waiting for a ‘return on investment.’ ”
But money, however plentiful, cannot immunize its possessors against misfortune. And poverty, though always an inconvenience, is not always a fatal drawback. Helena Rubinstein was raised in poverty, but her subsequent instinct always to include her sisters in her good fortune attests to a strong sense of family solidarity. By contrast, Liliane Schueller, born to parents who had already become rich, suffered a cold and lonely childhood. When she was five, the rich little girl’s mother died of an abscess on the liver. And this calamity would shape Liliane’s life.
She has only once spoken publicly about this, in an interview with Egoïste magazine in 1987. “They came to fetch me in the middle of the night and I saw my father on his knees at the foot of my mother’s bed. . . . When she died there was no more music in the house. She was a musician. A very beautiful woman, very tall, who got on easily with other people. . . . It meant my father was left to raise me as he wanted. When he had time, that is. . . . It isn’t easy being raised by your father when your mother’s gone. There’s an absence of tenderness.”2
Liliane’s upbringing certainly presented her father with a problem. His wife’s death occurred at a moment when he was diversifying in numerous directions—celluloid, photographic film, Russia, paint. There could be no question of looking after Liliane himself even had he wanted to (which he surely did not, being a man for whom child-rearing was doctrinally a woman’s job). So he sent her to a Dominican convent school, where she remained for ten years. But the mother superior, though kind, was no substitute for the mother who had died. Nor did the holidays bring any respite from austerity. Home, Liliane remembered, was “all about the business, the economic climate, working hard.”
This did not imply grimness—on the contrary, Schueller enjoyed luxury. He filled his houses with specially commissioned furniture, owned a yacht and a Rolls-Royce. But he was a particularly unsuitable lone parent for an only daughter. Business was his sole interest: “Work was how he communicated with me, and vice-versa. When he talked to me about a book or some other thing, he was still talking about work. . . . Psychology, action, ideas, that’s still all business.” Yet this fascinating world was one into which, on principle, Liliane could never be admitted. Although she was sent to work in her father’s factory during the last three weeks of every vacation from the age of fifteen, starting by sticking labels on bottles, her father’s writings made it clear that there was never any possibility she might succeed him. Admittedly his wife had kept the business going while he was away during World War I, but that was out of necessity. For Liliane there was no such necessity. Nor, despite her obvious intellectual capacities, did she attend university. It was her husband who became L’Oréal’s vice president, her husband who, cushioned by his wife’s money, became a senator and a minister. Her job was to support, partner, entertain, do charity work. That was what women did.
Of course it was not what Helena Rubinstein did—and her father disapproved of her quite as heartily as Schueller would have done in similar circumstances. But although Herzl Rubinstein hated what his daughter had become, the home he provided, and the Jewish tradition of strong women that underlay its culture, gave her (albeit unwittingly, and to his horror) the self-confidence to break away. And the consequence was a life defined not by money but by the business success that produced it. Like Eugène Schueller, of whom this was also true, Rubinstein enjoyed her money—the more so since, like him, she had once been poor—but it was their work, not their bank balance, that mattered most to them. This was something of which Rubinstein, to the end of her long span, was acutely conscious, and which she profoundly valued. Work was, as she said, the best beauty treatment.
The upbringing Schueller gave his daughter, however, meant that this satisfying life could never be hers. That would have necessitated rebellion, which for her was unthinkable. Her love and respect for her father were “visceral,” a friend observed, her admiration for him, limitless. When he died, and she found herself owner of the business, she became, above all, the keeper of his flame—which included his values.3 Yet that same upbringing, with its constant emphasis on achievement, also ensured that, paradoxically, she could never be satisfied by the life for which it destined her. “As far as people are concerned, if a woman’s rich, she can’t be intelligent,” Madame Bettencourt told Egoïste defensively. “People park you in a corner and leave you there. Rich—it’s not an agreeable word. In fact it’s an ugly word. I prefer fortune. That implies luck.”
The sense conveyed in that interview is of a life pervaded by an undefined frustration. Raised to consume, able to possess anything she might desire, consumption holds no glamor for Schueller’s daughter. When an art critic cattily observed that Helena Rubinstein possessed “unimportant paintings by every important painter of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” Madame retorted, “I may not have quality but I have quantity. Quality’s nice but quantity makes a show.” 4 “Making a show,” though, is the last thing Bettencourt has ever wanted. “I like emptiness more than clutter,” she told Egoïste. “Even if I fall in love with a painting, I’m quite happy to see it on someone else’s wall.” Rubinstein kept her jewels in a filing cabinet, sorted alphabetically, A for
amethysts, B for beryls, D for diamonds, ready to hand for instant use. Liliane Bettencourt owns an equally astonishing collection of gems—bags of cut but unset stones, diamond necklaces, shelves of emeralds, rubies, sapphires—but they are kept in a bank vault whose contents rarely see the light of day,5 while no photograph shows her wearing anything more extravagant than a pair of stud earrings. Rubinstein’s New York living room, like everything else about her, was tasteless but full of gusto. It sported an acid-green carpet designed by Miró, twenty Victorian carved chairs covered in purple and magenta velvets, Chinese pearl-inlaid coffee tables, gold Turkish floor lamps, life-sized Easter Island sculptures, six-foot-tall blue opaline vases, African masks around the fireplace, and paintings covering every inch of wall space. But in Liliane Bettencourt’s tasteful salon, gusto is conspicuous by its absence, the dead hand of the interior decorator everywhere apparent.
These contrasting styles are partly a function of milieu. Slender and terrifically elegant—in 2009 she was elected a permanent member of Vanity Fair’s best-dressed Hall of Fame—Liliane Bettencourt is a supreme exemplar of “bcbg,” bon chic, bon genre, a style to which all Frenchwomen aspire and whose standards, of both chic and genre, are set by the couture-clad haute bourgeoisie of which Madame Bettencourt is a leading member. In bcbg, taste is all, excess is suspect, and a rather uniform, perfectly executed, expensive understatement rules. The whole point is not to draw attention to oneself. The Bettencourts’ dislike of the public eye was legendary: for them, one of the privileges riches bought was total privacy. When Bruno Abescat, a financial journalist at L’Express, set out to write a book about “France’s wealthiest couple,” it was a year before he was able to get near them in the flesh—and then only at a public distribution of prizes financed by the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation.6
For Helena Rubinstein, by contrast, the whole point of spending money was to show you had money to spend. If nobody knew, half the pleasure was lost. In her milieu, wealth validated every eccentricity, and such was her status within it that even her ignorance was accepted as part of her personality. During a lunch in New York the conversation turned to the sad fate of Joan of Arc, burned as a heretic by an ancestor of Edith Sitwell, who was one of the guests. “Somebody had to do it!” cried Madame—an observation so stunningly crass that it would have barred her forever from bcbg circles. But the New Yorkers simply turned the conversation elsewhere.
The essentials of personal life, however, are unaffected by such details. And in that department Bettencourt, happily married for fifty-seven years, with a happily married daughter and grandchildren living just down the road in Neuilly, would seem to have beaten Rubinstein hands down. In 1987, after thirty-seven years of marriage, Liliane described her husband as “someone quite out of the ordinary”7; after his death in 2007 she remained in love with his memory. He was “charming, alive, intelligent. We were together fifty years, there was something indescribable between us, and then business and politics—it was so exciting.”8
By contrast, Rubinstein’s intimate life was a disaster. Her first husband, whom she married for love, constantly ran after other women. Her elder son bored her; her younger son, Horace, whom she adored, quarreled with her incessantly, made nothing of his life, and died in his forties. Artchil, whom she married for companionship, predeceased her by twelve years. So she blotted out the unbearable (Horace’s death, Titus’s infidelity) and compensated for the absence of real personal attachments with compulsive hyperactivity. And yet—despite this catalog of emotional catastrophes—her life was fulfilled in a way that Bettencourt’s never has been.
There is one striking similarity in the lives of Helena Rubinstein and Liliane Bettencourt. Each, in old age, established a friendship with a much younger man. As the years passed, these friendships became the women’s most important emotional focus. But the two relationships, apparently so similar, were quite different in emphasis. And those differences reveal, perhaps more than anything else in the lives of these two formidable women, their true vulnerabilities.
Helena Rubinstein’s young man, Patrick O’Higgins, was the impecunious playboy son of Irish diplomats. He first noticed her in 1950, a tiny nexus of palpitating impatience barreling down the New York street ahead of him, furiously tapping her foot when lights forced her to wait before crossing the road. He had no idea who this vision might be, but soon afterwards ran into her at a cocktail party and was introduced. She was then seventy-eight, at the height of her power in the social and fashionable worlds. He was fifty years her junior, handsome, charming, and disorganized. She at once took a fancy to him, but although their conversation was noted by Rubinstein-watchers, nothing came of it until a year or so later, when out of the blue she asked him to lunch. After a copious meal (“I need to keep up my energy!”) they went on to see Ben-Hur (“Most interesting! I’m glad the Jewish boy won!”) then returned to her apartment, where, over a glass of whiskey, she asked him, “What do you really want to do with your life?” When he hesitated, she at once took over: “Let Me tell you!”9 And tell him she did, from then on until the day she died, fifteen years later.
O’Higgins’ role in Madame’s life was to do and be whatever she required at the time. He accompanied her everywhere, as secretary, nurse, escort, interpreter, PR man, social director, and majordomo. Her strange and compelling personality mesmerized him. A floating bachelor (he may well have been gay, though he never openly admitted it—in the 1950s and sixties, when he knew Madame, homosexuality was still unmentionable), he received from her a focus his life had hitherto lacked. After first Artchil and then Horace died, they became increasingly close, until toward the end of her life he described their relationship as that of “a devoted son and a demanding mother.”10 “Who’s your goy?” the Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion once asked her during a long and tedious dinner. “That’s Patrick!” Madame beamed. “And . . . and, yes, he is my goy.”11
Significantly, money played a relatively small part in their relationship. When she first employed him they agreed on a salary of $7,000 a year. To him, at the time, it seemed a fortune, though as the years went on he realized that others who did considerably less than he were paid considerably more. But although he often remarked on Madame’s habitual tightness with money, O’Higgins never contemplated leaving her—or not on that account. Their one serious contretemps was emotional, when she refused to admit he might need to mourn the death of his mother. Her refusal was partly a jealous reaction—she hated the thought of sharing him, even with the dead. And partly, too, it reflected her horror of death and refusal to admit its existence. Her invariable response to bereavement was to pretend it hadn’t happened, drowning grief in perpetual motion. But O’Higgins was made of less stern (one might say, more human) stuff, and her callousness brought on a nervous breakdown.
They were reunited in the end. Distraught at his absence, she wrote him letters: “I want to forget our differences. I hope you know that I love you as a mother. The mother you lost!” For a while he was unmoved—particularly since those letters somehow never enclosed promised checks. But eventually “I . . . realized that it was impossible for me to leave Madame. I couldn’t escape from her. . . . Her letters had touched me and I longed to be by her side.”12 From then until the day she died, he was with her.
Rubinstein spent her last year putting finishing touches to her will. She left O’Higgins $5,000 in cash plus a yearly income of $2,000 “so he won’t starve.” He calculated that, should he survive twenty years
(in fact he died thirteen years later, in 1980), this amount must represent a capital outlay of between sixty and eighty thousand dollars. Might she not have left him a larger sum outright? But then he recalled a conversation in which she’d said, “If I was to leave you twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, what would you do with it?” He’d replied, “Spend it! Have a lovely holiday!” at which she’d nodded sagely—and acted accordingly, in what she saw as his best interests.13 Given his devotion and her great wealth, the bequest was far from generous. But that did not affect the love and respect he felt for her. They shine through the funny, affectionate memoir he left of their life together, a testament to the humanity that lay behind Rubinstein’s overbearing and egotistical façade.
Liliane Bettencourt’s young man was (and is) a different matter. François-Marie Banier is a well-known photographer, novelist, and all-round man-about-town twenty-five years her junior. As with O’Higgins and Rubinstein, the relationship is quasi-filial, with no hint of sex. Banier, unlike O’Higgins, is openly gay. “I see him with his partner, who is charming, cultivated, and intelligent,” Bettencourt told the Journal du Dimanche in 2008.14
As with Rubinstein, too, the friendship is the more significant in that Madame Bettencourt has evidently found close personal relationships difficult. “I like to keep a distance between myself and other people,” she told Egoïste. She had to be persuaded into marriage, and does not seem to have felt wholly at ease even with her own daughter, Françoise. “She was always rather an inscrutable child,” Bettencourt told an interviewer in 2008, a year after her friendship with Banier had sparked a public fight between the two. “She got on better with my husband. Mother-daughter relations are very different from father-daughter relations.”15