Ugly Beauty (24 page)

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.

Chapter
Six

Consumers or
Consumed?

I

F
or
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 phenomenal 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.