Ugly Beauty (4 page)

Parisians, unlike Londoners, had no qualms about
being seen visiting a beauty salon. Particularly popular was Madame’s Swedish
masseuse, Ulla. “You know, it wasn’t just an ordinary massage, they did little
extra things,” Madame told Patrick O’Higgins; a hint of what those “extra
things” might have been is perhaps to be found in her 1915 request to her London
manageress, Rosa Hollay, for some small massage vibrators to be sent to New
York, where she had then just opened her first salon.
39
Colette, who had created a scandal when it emerged that she, not
her husband Willy, had written the sexy Claudine books, and who received free
treatments because of her publicity value, was particularly keen on Ulla’s
massages. “Massage is a woman’s sacred duty,” Colette announced after her first
visit. “The women of France owe it to themselves—without it, how can they
hope
to keep a lover!”
40
Ulla was soon fully booked, while Colette was so taken with the
idea of beauty salons that years later she opened one of her own. (It was not a
success. Her clients did not emerge noticeably beautified and did not
return.)

In August of 1914 Madame’s European progress was
interrupted. War was declared—and who knew how it would affect business, or what
it would leave in its wake? Fortunately for her, however, one huge potential
market remained unaffected. America was booming, and quite remote from the
carnage. Titus held American nationality—and so, as his wife, did Helena.
Everything pointed westward. She made a quick swoop on her London bank,
appointed a new manageress, Rosa Hollay, to look after Grafton Street (where she
would soon be joined by Ceska), and in October 1914 sailed with Manka for New
York, leaving Titus and the two little boys in Paris to pack up the artworks and
follow in her wake.

III

I
n
Australia and Europe, Madame had been a pioneer; in America she was pushing at
an open door. A touch of lipstick made a girl feel good. Above all, it made her
feel liberated. Participants in the big women’s suffrage marches held in New
York in 1912 and 1913 were told to wear white shirtwaists—and red lipstick, the
badge of independence. Domestic production of manufactured toiletries was
nudging $17,000,000.
41
Influential women’s
magazines such as
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
were eager to accept beauticians’ advertisements and to
fill their columns with copy about fashionable persons and doings. And a galaxy
of potent new role models was about to enter the public consciousness, as the
budding film industry created a goddesshood of idealized beauties for whom heavy
makeup was a working necessity. Helena Rubinstein liked to claim that she had
taught Theda Bara, the notorious femme fatale who became known as “The Vamp,”
how to apply her eye makeup. That was dubious, to say the least. What was
incontestable was the effect Theda Bara’s makeup had on public ideas of what was
acceptable and desirable. By the time Helena Rubinstein arrived in New York,
every restaurant, hotel, and store of any importance kept a supply of cosmetics
in their dressing rooms or bathrooms.

The results of this enthusiasm were not subtle. In
1910, a
New York World
reporter sitting in a café
window on Forty-second Street and Broadway noted, “Eyelids can’t be painted too
blue nor lashes too heavily beaded.”
42
Madame
was not impressed. “When I first came to America about ten years ago, I was
shocked . . . by the number of young girls who were excessively made
up,” she confided to the
American Magazine
.
43
By contrast she offered a more subtle European
exclusiveness. Madame Helena Rubinstein, “the accepted adviser in beauty matters
to Royalty, Aristocracy and the great Artistes of Europe,” was ready, for a
price, to show them how it should really be done. And everyone wanted to learn.
Not just rich ladies but “Stenographers, clerks, and even little office girls”
would be interested in what she had to offer.
44

After a continental railroad tour, to pick out the
cities they would target, Helena and Manka returned to New York, where Madame
began the now familiar business of locating a suitable site for a salon—her
first in the New World. “We haven’t found a place yet, it seems to be very very
difficult. Indeed there are thousands of places empty as things are not good in
general. But as soon as I want one it costs £2500 a year,” she grumbled in her
first letter to Rosa Hollay (adding: “See that you are economical with
everything, even electric light”
45
). She
settled upon a house at 15 East Forty-ninth Street, and in February 1915 a
half-page advertisement appeared in
Vogue
announcing
that “A Famous European ‘House of Beauty’ ” had opened its doors in New York.
“At Madame Rubinstein’s Maison de Beauté Valaze treatments are administered for
the removal of wrinkles, crowsfeet, coarseness of skin, puffiness under the
eyes, blackheads, and other complexion defects. The New York salon radiates the
same elegance, the same Spirit of Beauty, as her famous salons in London and
Paris.” Helleu’s 1908 etching of Madame looking fey in an aigrette adorned the
advertisement. It was the first of what would eventually total twenty-seven
portraits by the day’s leading artists, from Marie Laurencin to Pavel
Tchelitchew, Raoul Dufy to Salvador Dalí, that reflected both Rubinstein’s
bottomless narcissism and the central role her image played in her business
until the very end. In 1955 Picasso sketched her, but never worked up the
portrait. “How old are you, Helena?” he asked her, to which she replied, evasive
as ever, “Older than you, Pablo.”
46
Three years
later the British artist Graham Sutherland portrayed her as a
monstre sacré
, a craggy, baton-wielding field marshal
weirdly attired in embroidered satin by Balenciaga, with kohl-rimmed eyes and
thinning, boot-blacked hair, the whole topped off by a six-strand pearl necklace
and Ping-Pong–ball diamond drop earrings. She was then eighty-six. (Sutherland
was especially impressed by her makeup skills. He had made a number of
preliminary drawings, but the day he began the actual painting, Madame had a
fall. Left with two black eyes, she disguised them by applying copious rouge
below them and green eyeshadow above. Sutherland was ecstatic, and at once
abandoned all his earlier drawings. “She’s a completely different person. It’s
amazing what really dramatic eye make-up can do!”
47
)

Vogue
ran two long
articles in the months following the New York salon’s opening. They extolled the
facial treatments of “a certain skin-specialist who has a small and smart
establishment on 5th Avenue and gives her personal attention to each and every
patron,” describing at length the wonders of the new salon and its “moving
spirit . . . obviously a continental, and as chic as her charming
individuality and Poiret costumes can make her.”
48
Then they got down to the real business: all the various balms,
lotions, rouges, powders, skin foods, and “beauty grains,” together with their
prices, which were considerable. The smallest box of powder cost $1 (just over
$21 today), while a large pot of cream rouge cost $6.50. In a city where most
handbags were sold with specially fitted sets of cosmetic accessories—a powder
puff, a rouge box, an eyebrow pencil—how could women possibly be persuaded to
spend extra money on Helena Rubinstein’s pricey offerings?

The answer was that the high price was an essential
part of the treatment. Even if a woman could not afford costly facials and
massages, she could still buy indulgence in the form of the same expensive
cosmetics rich women used, and vicariously join the wealthy. When a woman paid
$6 for a pot of Water Lily Cleansing Cream, “a rejuvenating cream de luxe for
the ultra fastidious woman, containing the youthifying essence of Water Lily
buds,” the mere possession of such a luxury helped her feel both youthified and
richer.
6

Success, however, created its own problems. Buyers
at stores all over the country clamored for her lines, but if Helena Rubinstein
products became available in every corner drugstore rather than through her
salons, then half the selling value—the half that derived from their
exclusivity—would be lost. If the customer paid top prices, she expected the
personal attention that went with them. As the advertisements put it, “A visit
to [Madame Rubinstein’s] sanctum or an inquiry by letter solves many a little
heartache that may be due to some shortcoming in appearance. . . .”
But Madame could not be everywhere at once, nor could she open a salon in every
city in America. How, then, was her special brand of personal service to be
maintained?

The solution, she decided, was to set up
mini-salons in leading department stores, staffed by specially trained and
uniformed women and made worthwhile because the condition of being allowed to
stock Helena Rubinstein products was that her whole range had to be carried.
When a suitably substantial order was received, Helena or Manka or both would
travel to the store to train the sales staff—the famous “Rubinstein ladies”—in
the appropriate introduction, promotion, and sales techniques.

“I did not realise what I was letting myself in
for!” Madame wrote later. “At night we trained the assistants to be beauty
consultants and teachers, giving them a sound knowledge of my preparations and
their use, to be imparted to their assistants, and to customers. For eighteen
out of the twenty-four hours we were either travelling between one city and
another or actively working. We lived out of our suitcases like actresses in a
theatrical touring company.”
49
It was hard
work, but she loved it. What better way to spend one’s life? As she put it, “My
only recreation is work.”
50
Then and always, it
was the literal truth.

Titus, meanwhile, was left holding the babies. “We
were naturally very glad to hear from you and of your safe arrival. There is
practically a little kindergarten class here,” he wrote her in the summer of
1919. The war had ended, and Madame had left for Europe to survey the remnants
of her French and English businesses, leaving him in charge not just of Roy and
Horace, now aged nine and seven, but Manka’s son, Johnnie, and a young cousin,
Helena Silberfeld. “With a house so full of children it is difficult to have a
little time to oneself.”
51
As though she needed
telling! Writing at midnight from Paris, where she had occupied a spare hour
laying linoleum herself, she commented: “If Mr. Titus had been here I would not
have made any progress whatsoever as he wouldn’t have allowed me to work.”
52

By 1924 Titus had had enough of this life. When he
was unavailable, the boys were looked after by what their mother called “nice
women”—the kind of impecunious ladies who in a previous age would have become
governesses, and who, like governesses, were both better educated and cheaper
than housekeepers, nurses, or maids.
53
Leaving
his sons to their uncertain care, he returned to Paris, his favorite city, where
he would remain from then on. He had many old friends there, both from prewar
days and from New York, which during the war had become a sort of
Paris-in-exile.

Artists such as Francis Picabia and the then
little-known Marcel Duchamp, desperate to get away from war-torn Europe, had
crossed the Atlantic in 1916 to find themselves American celebrities as a result
of the great 1913 Armory Show of modern art. Lionized by wealthy collectors,
they took their places at the center of a decadent, nihilistic, and blackly
exhilarating whirl in which everyone desperately tried to block out what was
happening across the Atlantic. But when the war ended, Paris became once more
the center of art and excitement. The exiles returned, and Titus knew them all.
With a mortgage from Helena’s property company Franc-Am Ltd., he opened a
bookshop on rue Delambre. He sold rare books and manuscripts on the ground
floor, and ran a small avant-garde publishing house, Black Manikin Press,
catering to the anglophone colony, from the rooms above.

Meanwhile, Madame was expanding her repertoire. She
began to produce lipstick and other colored cosmetics and became interested,
too, in plastic surgery and the famous (and soon to become infamous)
monkey-gland extracts, both of which promised more tangible youthifying
possibilities than water lily buds. Monkey glands had originally been the
province of Dr. Serge Voronoff, who had observed that eunuchs aged faster than
men still in possession of their balls and had concluded that grafting pieces of
monkey testicle onto human testes might not only increase recipients’ potency
but might also slow the aging process.
7
By extension,
he was now touting the possibility that grafting monkey ovaries onto women might
produce similarly beneficial effects. A Dr. Kapp, whom Helena had met during her
initial whirlwind tour of European skin specialists in 1905, and who had since
been supplying her with creams and jellies, had become enthusiastic about this
idea, and she was anxious to keep him on board. “Put down all sorts of imaginary
things every month [i.e., as expenses] and I will take the money and pay Dr
Kapp,” she instructed Rosa Hollay from New York in 1920. Mrs. Hollay was also to
look out for potential surgery guinea pigs. “Do you know anyone who has a scab
or a crooked nose or something?”
54

IV

B
y 1928,
Helena Rubinstein had become a New York institution. The opening of her new
salon at 8 East Fifty-seventh Street, on the site of Collis P. Huntington’s old
mansion, was marked by an article in
The
New Yorker
, carefully orchestrated by Madame to
enhance her reputation for ice-cool acumen and elegant eccentricity. Her
original salon “ranked” (the article reported) “even then, as one of the finest
of all such ateliers in New York.” But she wanted a better place, and one she
owned rather than rented. The palace of the Southern Pacific Railway magnate
Collis P. Huntington, recently deceased, caught her eye: she took it instantly,
“without pausing to inquire just how many thousands, or hundreds of thousands,
of dollars the building could cost. She saw to it later that it wouldn’t be too
many. Madame is impulsive but canny. . . .” When the salon was
finished, she told the interviewer, she had to spend three days in a sanitarium
to recover. “Always after the opening of a new salon she has a nervous
breakdown; she expects it and looks forward to it. It is part of her
schedule.”
55