Maniac Eyeball (32 page)

Helena Rubinstein had just gotten this new apartment on 65th Street in Manhattan – the thirty-six rooms on three floors – when she ordered three frescoes from me for the dining room. As Princess Gourielli, privately often referred to as the Sarah Bernhardt of the beauty world, but Madame to her intimates, she was a Dalínian personage. Her love of jewels and money, her caprices, her demands were deserving of my full attention.

The dazzling jewelry was intended to make her age go un noticed. Each of our encounters was an occasion for me to see more crystalline bottle-stoppers around her neck, hanging from her ears, or ringing her fingers. She was a shrine, a totem, a Javanese goddess...

That was how she went about the world – carrying Ali Baba’s treasure in her hatbox. I, at least, never saw her with less than eight strings of pearls, but she traveled only by taxi.

“Chauffeurs are all robbers,” she said. “The last one stole my Rolls-Royce.”

Her husband, Georgian Prince Gourielli, never opened his mouth except to blow smoke rings; her son by her first marriage, Horace Titus, somber as a character out of a Racine tragedy, seemed always to be reciting the verse reply to some speech of Athaliah’s; Oscar Kolin, her nephew, nodded his head like a metronome set to say only yes. Her niece Mala was a shadow. But her left hand – who knew everything that her right hand did – was a Miss Fox, her secretary, who kept her totally informed like the number one eunuch of a harem reporting to the sultan. Madame was supposed even to have taken Miss Fox along on her honeymoon in 1938 – at any rate, she was there when Helena emerged from her tub in the morning and at night before she got into bed.

She was to hang my three paintings not far from seven Re noirs, two Modiglianis, and a Toulouse-Lautrec that decorated her salon. I was not too happy being in such a neighborhood, but what was much worse was the presence of works by the sculptor Nadelman. In 1930, she had met this Pole in Paris; wanting to do her
landsman
a favor, Helena, who could sometimes be stupidly sentimental, had set up a New York show for him that was a flop. So she bought the thirty-six pieces that were now in the apartment. Walking along on a Miró tapestry, I glanced about at the Braques, Chagalls, Derains, Juan Grises, Matisses, Picassos, Rouaults, and commented mentally that apart from mine she had only minor works by the most important artists of her period.

In the same way she had bought an icon in Moscow, where at the same time she had married Gourielli, and a carload lot of African sculpture acquired from a German Jew who had had to flee from Hitler.

“But you haven’t seen anything yet,” she told me. “The finest things are in Paris. I hope the Germans are looking out for them. Come see my wardrobe.” There were a hundred dresses in her closet, and as many coats, pairs of shoes in a row, hats on papier-mâché heads that Folies Bergère showgirls would have turned their noses up at, furs that seemed sleeping animals. She ticked them off: Molyneux sable, Somalian leopard, tourmaline mink. In a special small closet there was a mini collection of Poiret, Doucet, and Lanvin creations, draped and beaded, reminiscent of the fashions of 1914.

“Those must be your grandmother’s gowns,” I said. “What a wonderful sense of family loyalty!” The laser she shot out went right through me. My mustache bristled with delight.

“Vertès designed my hat molds for me,” she said. “You know, I never wear them. I just buy them to look at.” Helena Rubinstein slid back the glass panels that protected her millinery display. “I often entertain myself by imagining what I would look like if I wore them. Then I take my little topper,” she added, pointing to the simple cloche she wore all the year around, “and go back to work.” It seemed to me indeed that the difference between the Madwoman of Chaillot and Helena Rubinstein might well be just a hat. Both were weavers of illusions who could easily engulf us in their worlds if we were not careful.

Conversation with Helena Rubinstein was a Napoleonic monologue. She announced her victories, dictated her decisions, and always came back to money.

“I came to London in 1907. In Australia, I had earned half a million dollars. I opened a shop in Paris two years later. That was the time of the great couturier collections. I created tubes of lipstick, tinted powders. I was asked to make up their models. It was a triumph. Poiret created his loose gowns and threw corsets to the dogs. My beauty institute was the ideal solution for superfluous fat.”

But I was no longer listening as she enumerated the three mammaries of her fortune: massages, showers, and colonics. No one could resist her free “consultations.” The famous novelist Colette was the first butterfly caught in her net. Helena Rubinstein got her to make a statement that carried tremendous weight: no woman, she said, could hope to keep her lover unless she knew the magic of massage. This, it seems, created much merriment in stag circles.

Helena Rubinstein spoke of love as I did of the press: “I have always treated men the way they deserved.” Then, dreamily, “I used to have suitors in the old days, in Australia, who wooed me very ardently. When the fellow was really on the hook, I let him come home with me – to spend part of the night helping me fill the jars of cream, and packaging them, and in the morning I would send him out to make the deliveries.”

A multi-millionairess, Helena Rubinstein had a Dalínian sense of money. Her favorite statement (to others) was: “Keep the expenses down; little pennies saved add up to great sums.”

Beyond that, she liked to tell of how she had sold her business to the Lehman Brothers, then patiently, writing privately to hundreds of women who were small stockholders, accumulated proxies – so that, after the 1929 market crash, she was able to buy 50 percent of the stock back from the Lehmans for two million dollars – four million less than she had sold it to them for a year before.

Making money was a religion to her; no profit was too small. One of her secretaries told how when they traveled together, she paid all their joint expenses out of an advance taken from one of her companies, then filed the vouchers with another of the companies, so as to collect twice for the same outlays.

Money to her was the only criterion of success and I could readily have made her my vestal virgin. At the time of one of our first meetings in 1942, she had just launched a new scent with thousands of blue balloons released over Fifth Avenue, carrying samples of the perfume and her card with simply the name of the new product, “Heaven Sent.” Was it a good idea? she wondered aloud, and asked my opinion.

Later, she told me, “It was a good idea: a million-dollar good idea.”

Does Dalí Consider Helena Rubinstein Dalínian?

I think that except for me and Picasso, whom she referred to as “the devil,” she was continually picking everybody’s brains.

She loved to tell how she pirated her best ideas after a good meal, and how Colette, Marie-Louise de Noailles, and Louise de Vilmorin, “over their dead heads,” so to speak, had given her some of the ideas that had made their way as Rubinsteinian slogans. While I kept my mouth tight shut, lest she swipe some Dalínian idea, she evaluated just about everybody, commercially speaking: Modigliani, whom she had known, was “nice but not clean”; Matisse “a rug peddler,” because he bargained too sharply; Hemingway “a big mouth with filed teeth”; Joyce “nearsighted and smelling bad”; D. H. Lawrence “timid, and dominated by women”; while she remembered Proust as a “little Jew in a fur coat smelling of mothballs.”

The value of a work depended on the difference between what she had paid for it and what it seemed she might sell it for now. “I’m a businesswoman,” she constantly repeated. Max Ernst she saw as a twenty-thousand-dollar profit. So she liked him. But when she tried to buy another of his paintings, and now was asked the going price, she balked: that would not be getting a bargain.

One of the subjects of real pride with her was her title of Princess, but she was deeply hurt when one day she overheard one of her lady guests saying: “In Georgia you’re a prince if you just own some sheep.” While the Prince’s title might have been suspect, the Princess’ bank account was coat-of-arms enough. But as patron and collector of art she did not reach the caliber she had as business woman. She needed the paranoiac-critical method to round her out. The jewels that she ornamented herself with as with holy turds satisfied her pride and her thirst for living. But she tried to be “different”. Misia Sert had wanted to help her toward this end. They had met at the turn of the century, when Misia was one of the queens of Paris and Helena was just getting started.

Both being Polish, the language was a link between them. Misia had just married Thadée Natanson, son of the publisher of the intellectually and socially prestigious
La Revue
Blanche,
and was well suited to be her cicerone: in her salon, one met Stéphane Mallarmé, Renoir, Vuillard, Dufy, Helleu, princes, kings, and Marcel Proust who grilled Helena about “how she thought a duchess would make herself up.”

How Dalí Remembers Misia Sert

Misia’s third husband was the Spanish painter José Maria Sert, who lived on the Ile Saint-Louis in a dilapidated eighteenth century townhouse. Misia later sold it to Helena “for a song”, but “it cost me a whole opera to fix it up”, she said. Adding, “Fortunately, I had made those four millions from the Lehmans in the meantime.” All of Misia’s painter friends did portraits of Helena. “It’s excellent publicity and a good investment,” she told me, looking me cynically in the eye. I did not blink. But somewhere fate was preparing a revenge for Misia, her friends, and a few others – a fate signed Picasso.

One of the pleasures I was looking forward to in going back to Paris was seeing Coco Chanel again; Misia was her best friend and a true sorceress of charm and intelligence. Misia was a natural born musician. Liszt had taught her her scales, Fauré had been her professor, Debussy later sang
Pelléas et Mélisande
to her and Grieg
Peer Gynt.
She was almost the perdition of old Renoir, who was in love with her breasts and did eight portraits of her that are today in either the Barnes Collection or the Leningrad Hermitage. She set them alongside those done by Vuillard, Bonnard, Vallotton and Lautrec.

The Symbolist poet Mallarmé had been her neighbor at Valvins, on the banks of the Seine, and used to drop in on her in his wooden country shoes. He wrote a tricky quatrain for her, on her fan. Paul Morand, in his
Venice,
described her as “a genius of perfidy, refined in her cruelty.”[1]

Her second husband, Alfred Edwards, owner of the mass-circulation newspaper
Le Matin,
gave her the other part of the social world after her divorce from Thadée. The third was a Catalan. Sert was a giant with huge appetites who mainly taught her how to go through a fortune with nonchalance. His painting was monumental, too, “but shrinking,” people said at the time.

The big event in Misia’s life was her meeting with Coco Chanel. The war had smashed all corsets, both the actual, physical ones, and the comparable symbolic taboos.

“In 1919, I woke up famous,” Coco Chanel said, “and with a new friend who was to give its full meaning to my success.”

Did Dalí Feel Friendship for Coco Chanel?

I look like all the characters I paint and my pictures all hang from my mustache. In the same way, Coco was bobbed hair, costume jewelry, black tailored suits, sweaters, suntan, white pajamas. Her existence too was an uninterrupted monologue in which she told everything, and the disorder of her existence became a magical stability. To go into her salon was to discover the Surrealist Golconda. The first time she invited me, I immediately recognized who she was. In the midst of her mother-of-pearls, the ebonies, golds, crystals, masks, mirrors, perfumes, in which lions, does, and a charging wild boar were her mythological flock, Coco Chanel, never without a hat on her head, smoking incessantly, talked, talked, talked – imperious, innocent, terrifying.

She would say, “Celebrity is loneliness, isn’t it, Dalí?”

“People like us don’t need advice; we need approval.”

“My friends, there’s no such thing as friends.” In which she was not mistaken, since to me being incapable of friendship is my pet luxury!

She would say, “People with a legend end up being like their legend, so as to reinforce their own celebrity.”

And that was how she had manufactured everything she had: family, childhood, age, and even her given name.

My paranoiac-critical mind in its genius perfectly understood Coco Chanel, who had suffered from being ill-loved. Her father had betrayed her after her mother’s death, allowing her to believe he was preparing a new home for her in the South, when he was leaving the same day for the Americas, never to return.

From that day forward, she was never again to trust a man. She read cheap romances from which she could borrow a different family and imagine herself a heroine. At twenty, she was swept off her feet by a rich, titled lieutenant of the hussars, who took her to Paris. She made an entry at Maxim’s and made friends with Emilienne d’Alençon, one of her handsome horseman’s official mistresses. Humiliated, she looked daggers at those corseted, proud-busted beauties of the night who ruled over bodies and hearts, sweeping the dust with their long-trained gowns and dancing with wide wiggling of their arses, on their high heels. It was
against
them
that she first invented the men’s felt hat with split crown, one rim down and the other up;
against them
and their sexy plumed hats that she created this new fashion that was launched by the actress Gabrielle Dorziat.
Against them,
too, like a bomb she exploded her fashions of the tailored suit, the knit frock, reducing them to
nothing. 
She had known how to turn every event of her existence to her advantage so as to grow ever more important.

“I was able to open a high fashion shop,” she said, “because two gentlemen were out-bidding each other for my hot little body.” In the paranoiac Parthenon, she deserves a special mention.