Ugly Beauty (5 page)

Decided, imperturbable, astute,
elegant
—such was the public Madame Rubinstein. Her
most potent product, as she well knew, was herself. Eagerly scanning Helena
Rubinstein’s advertisements, emblazoned as they invariably were with pictures of
the eponymous founder—ageless, elegant, beholden to no man—women hoped that if
they did as she advised, they might become as successful as she was. Salon
patrons would often plead for some extra-special beauty cream not available to
the general public. If the customer insisted, she would be sold an unlabeled jar
for $50, with the whispered assurance that it was “Madame’s own cream.”
56

But beneath the visible surface seethed a quite
different person, assailed by anxieties, doubts, fury, and hypochondria. She had
created this vast sprawling empire (“There are remote cities which have
Rubinstein agencies where there are not even Ford agencies,”
Vanity Fair
marveled); everyone depended upon her for
instructions, for policy, above all for money; and yet she felt, at every
moment, as though the whole laboriously constructed edifice might come tumbling
down and she would find herself in poverty once more. Her favorite photographs
showed her in her white coat in a laboratory, one of the great women scientists
of the world engaged in a ceaseless search for more potent ingredients. But she
knew, even if she did not choose to remember, that her vaunted medical studies
amounted to a two-month tour of visits to selected practitioners. At any moment
some prying journalist might find her out and expose her for a quack.

One solution to these constant worries—the solution
favored by Titus—was to bow out, sell her business, and live on the proceeds.
Eventually the temptation was too much, and on December 11, 1928, Lehman
Brothers acquired the American arm of Helena Rubinstein. It netted Madame, who
retained the European and Australian interests, a cool $7,300,000—over $84
million today. All her worries should have been at an end.

On the contrary, they got worse. Deprived of the
work that had taken up the greater part of her time, she was bored and
frustrated. Impotent to intervene, she had to watch as Leh-man’s sales strategy,
which she had endorsed—to expand into a more mid-range market—came unstuck in
the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash. The upmarket end of the trade was
unaffected. In fact, sales rose: the first example of the now well-documented
“lipstick effect,” in which, during hard times, women who otherwise would have
bought an expensive outfit buy a nice lipstick instead.
8
But
lower-priced items did less well, and the new range of mass-market goods tainted
Helena Rubinstein’s upmarket outlets by association. “I knew that they would
make a mess of it,” she told Patrick O’Higgins. “What do bankers know about the
beauty business? Except that it can make money for them. After they bought me
out they tried to go mass; to sell my products in every grocery store. Pfft! The
idea wasn’t bad. But the timing was all wrong.”
57

In October 1930, she became ill—struck with
appendicitis in Vienna, Titus said. But this was no mere appendicitis. The
following May found her still confined to bed at her sister Ceska’s London flat,
and boiling with frustration. Ironically, Titus, for the first time in his life,
was enjoying considerable professional success. In the spring of 1929 his Black
Manikin Press published D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s
Lover
, which went into three printings within a year. And in 1930 he
published another smash hit, the English translation of
Kiki’s Memoirs
. Kiki was Man Ray’s mistress, and her racy tale came
with embellishments by the Montparnasse Americans—saucy photos by Man Ray, and
an introduction by Ernest Hemingway. Admittedly, Helena was fabulously wealthy
and Titus still relied on her subventions, but for the first time in their
married life, with Helena on a low and Titus doing well, the balance tilted his
way.

When she fell ill, Titus was kind and attentive,
frequently coming over to visit her in London. After all the years of quarrels
and separations, was it possible that their marriage might yet be salvaged? They
were both over sixty, he pointed out—retirement age, when people think of
drawing a pension and putting their feet up. The Lehman deal had given Helena
more money than even she could ever spend. Wasn’t it time to relax a little?

Depressed by this prospect, she hatched a new plan.
The combination of the financial downturn and Lehman’s mishandling meant that
shares in Helena Rubinstein, Inc., had sunk from $60 to $3. Why not try to buy
back control? She could set the business on its feet again, and still be left
with a healthy profit. Some of her old board members still remained in place.
One of them slipped her a list of shareholders—mostly women—and she wrote to
every one, explaining how the business’s only chance of survival lay in
restoring it to the hands of its creator and convincing them to let her use
their proxy votes. Meanwhile she bought whatever shares came on the market,
building up a considerable holding.

The whole process had to be conducted discreetly,
and for a while it was uncertain whether or not it would succeed. A letter from
Titus during this edgy period shows that he, for one, hoped it would not. “Look
here, outside of your wounded pride, which is not a wound that can be healed, if
you do not win, you will gain something more valuable,” he wrote.

You have two fine boys,
whom you do not enjoy possessing, you have a husband if you would only once
begin to really believe in him, who loves you truly and sincerely, whatever
his faults are, you finally have yourself, to whom you have never, never
given a real chance. These are the only things that substantially matter.
The children’s life, your life and mine, the combined life of the four of
us. Everything else are only things, just things.
. . .
58

Vain hopes!
Things
, as
he should have known, were all that mattered to Helena. An expenditure of $1.5
million, combined with the proxies, netted majority control. Madame was in the
saddle once more, with a net profit of $6 million after the sale and buyback.
Lehman’s furiously issued a communiqué denouncing this brilliant maneuver as
“financially illiterate,” but she had trounced them handsomely, and recovered
her health and happiness in the process. “Ahead of me once more was the lonely
treadmill of work,” she sighed in her memoir.
59
And with that, miraculously restored, she sailed for New York.

Chapter
Two

The
Authoritarian

I

When people say at a dinner-party, “You’re so
lucky to be in cosmetics!” I say, “Yes, but you had to realize that in
1907.”

—L
ILIANE
B
ETTENCOURT
-S
CHUELLER
,
1987

R
ue
Saint-Honoré, where Helena Rubinstein opened her first Paris salon in 1908, is
one of Paris’s most glamorous thoroughfares. But the backstreets that surround
it are dark and dingy. Among the least prepossessing is a little corridor,
called rue d’Alger, that links rue Saint-Honoré with rue de Rivoli. It was here,
however, while Madame bustled about installing her stock and arranging couches
and curtains in her new boutique, that the true revolution in cosmetics was
taking shape. At the back of number 4’s dim courtyard a young chemist named
Eugène Schueller had rented a two-room mezzanine to serve as a combination of
laboratory, bedroom, and kitchen. He was working to isolate the world’s first
safe artificial hair dye, and by the time Rubinstein opened her salon, he was
almost there. For more than two years he had worked night and day, watching his
savings diminish, cooking his food on the Bunsen burner he used for his chemical
experiments. Finally he established his formula. He gave it the provisional name
L’Auréole, after a hairstyle popular in 1905, the year he had begun his
researches. Soon he would change this name to L’Oréal. Eighty years later, his
company would swallow Madame’s.

Like Helena Rubinstein, Eugène Schueller entered
the beauty business at the optimum moment, when the market was ready but still
untapped. Like her, it would make him rich. Like her, he spoke to the universal
fear of aging, to every woman’s dread of wrinkles and grey hairs. But in every
other respect, they, like their products, were utterly different.

If you believed Helena Rubinstein’s advertising,
her various creams and lotions were miracle balms that banished blemishes and
left the user’s skin blissfully free of wrinkles. And since that was what her
customers ached to believe, they convinced themselves that it was true—or, at
the very least, that the creams prevented deterioration. There was never any
proof, however, that this was actually so. By the 1930s a large number of firms
were marketing beauty products of various kinds, and in 1934 the pressure group
Consumer Research organized a survey of them, the first attempt at any
systematic analysis of what beauty creams did. It showed that most beauty
products did not live up to their claims, while some were even dangerous. None
of the creams marketed by Helena Rubinstein or her competitors had, Consumer
Research reported, any measurable effect on wrinkles, while the notion that skin
needed three or four different types of cream—cold cream, cleansing cream,
vanishing cream, and skin food—was a myth invented to increase sales. Worse, the
glycerine frequently used in vanishing cream was a common allergen that often
caused rashes.

Beauticians like Rubinstein and her peers thus trod
a wobbly psychological tightrope. On the one hand they shared their customers’
profound desire to believe the propaganda. On the other, they knew—none
better!—that what went into their products was really nothing but the same old
less-than-magical stuff women had always used, repackaged and skillfully sold.
The Consumer Research survey therefore filled them with dread. On the day its
results were published, in a book called
Skin Deep
,
the cosmetics industry threw a party for magazine editors at the Pierre Hotel in
Manhattan. The captive audience was harangued for an hour and a half on the
wickedness of reformers and consumers’ research organizations and the
irresponsible anticosmetic prejudice of the American Medical Association. It was
magazines’ duty, the speaker perorated, to help preserve a million-dollar
industry, now irresponsibly imperiled. Meanwhile the worst offenders hastened to
change their more offensive products—Max Factor removing barium sulphate colors,
which caused rashes, from its lipstick lines, Pond’s discontinuing the use of
rice starch, which clogged the pores, in its face powder. But there was little
they could do to make products such as face creams perform the wonders promised
in the advertising copy—and they knew it.

As it happened, they need not have worried. The
public bought the book, which swiftly rose up the bestseller charts—and went on
with their usual cosmetic routines. No exposé, however painstaking, could
outweigh the magical allure of hope. A reader from California spoke for many.
Skin Deep
had “quite shattered my illusions as
to the efficacy of cosmetics,” she wrote. But despite being “a college graduate
and a schoolteacher, I don’t really so much believe what saleswomen tell me as I
hope that what they tell me will come true.”
1
This blind and unquenchable desire—a desire that she herself shared—was the
foundation of Madame’s fortune.

L’Oréal was a different matter entirely. Like
Helena Rubinstein, Eugène Schueller owed his success to both luck and talent.
But his talent was for science, and his luck to have been presented with an
opening that, left to himself, he would never have espied. In the beauty
industry, whose claims routinely bore little if any relation to reality, his
product was unique in that both he and his customers knew it would always do
precisely what the package promised. L’Oréal worked: it would dye your hair any
color you wished—and safely. And this was possible because of perhaps the
greatest of all the differences between Eugène Schueller and Helena Rubinstein:
he was educated, where she was not. The foundation of her business was folk
wisdom; Schueller’s business rested on science. What was applicable to hair dye
was applicable elsewhere, too. He could make other products, in other
industries, and realize
their
possibilities as he
had realized L’Oréal’s. It was simply a matter of time.

II

E
ugène
Schueller, born in 1881, was nine years younger than Helena Rubinstein. He, too,
came from a poor background. His grandfather was a shoemaker, his father a
pastry cook, his mother a baker’s assistant. The Schueller family originated in
Alsace, the much-disputed Rhineland province on the borders of France and
Germany. Eugène’s father, Charles, who considered himself French and did not
wish to be a German subject, had come to Paris with his wife, Amélie, after the
1870 Franco-Prussian War, when Germany occupied Alsace.

They bought a little patisserie at 124 rue du
Cherche-Midi, in Montparnasse, where five sons would be born.
1
Only one, Eugène, made it past infancy.
2
And for this one surviving child the Schuellers would make any
sacrifice. He was bright, and they determined to give him a good education,
whatever it might cost. That way he might escape the hand-to-mouth poverty that
constrained their own lives, forcing them to work from six every morning (five
on Sundays) until ten at night (on Sundays till eleven) 365 days a year.

Young Eugène was expected to take his share of the
work. From the age of four he buttered tart tins and shelled almonds before
leaving for school in the morning. The habit he then acquired, of early rising
in order to lead two or more parallel existences, would remain with him. Later,
when he gave lectures or interviews, he often described himself as “Monsieur
6,000 hours” (2,000 hours a year being a normal conscientious working life). “Do
you know what a 6,000 hours man is?” he demanded during a 1954 lecture at the
Paris École de Commerce. “It’s someone who will work more than sixteen hours a
day, 365 days a year, without Saturdays, Sundays or holidays.”
3

His daily routine showed what this work involved.
He rose at four, and for two hours, in his dressing gown, addressed all the
questions raised by colleagues the previous day. Then came an hour’s walk in the
company of a physical-training instructor, followed by breakfast, when he read
the papers. By the time his secretary arrived at eight a pile of notes and
letters awaited her, each with the reply indicated in the margin. This secretary
was the object of his pride and admiration: Schueller, possibly because he was
rather deaf, could never believe anything was real unless it was written down,
and she could take dictation at the speed of light.
4
Another pile had penciled reminders of the replies he would
dictate; a third had been read and thought about. Other replies were decided
upon while the first batch were dictated. This went on until midday, when his
Rolls arrived to take him to the Valentine paint factory at Gennevilliers—one of
four businesses he was running in 1954, the year he gave the interview setting
out this routine. (The others were L’Oréal, Monsavon soap, and a magazine called
Votre Beauté
.) Office work continued during the
drive. At Valentine, he conferred with divisional heads until three p.m.,
lunching during these discussions on a grapefruit and a cup of tea. Then he left
for Monsavon, taking with him a briefcase full of notes, and leaving at five
with a second briefcase full. Then it was on to
Votre
Beauté
and a third briefcase, and thence to the offices of L’Oréal,
where he stayed until nine p.m. He went to bed at midnight, and slept four
hours. But even then his work continued: “My best working-time is when I’m
asleep,” he told business journalist Merry Bromberger. “During the afternoon I
often listen to people without knowing how to respond. And then during the night
I dream I’m in a meeting at L’Oréal, or in the lab with my chemists, and when I
get up in the morning most of the necessary decisions have been made.” And so
another day began.

He remembered his early life, which had instilled
this habit, as “very rough and hard on us.” But it produced enough money for his
parents to send him to a private school, where he got on well. In 1890, however,
the Panama Canal Company, in which his father had invested his small savings,
failed. The shop had to close, and there could be no more private school. M.
Schueller found a job in a big patisserie at Levallois-Perret, a working-class
district on Paris’s northwest outskirts, where Eugène attended the local state
school.

And here, unexpectedly, Eugène’s private education
resumed. Levallois abuts rich, leafy Neuilly, where the patisserie supplied a
fashionable school, the Collège Sainte-Croix de Neuilly. M. Schueller made a
deal with its head: if he made part payment in cakes, he could just afford a
place there for his clever son.

It was a life-changing moment—perhaps the most
important thing that ever happened to Eugène Schueller. The Collège Sainte-Croix
was a feeder school for the elite Lycée Condorcet, and after that the way was
open to the highly competitive
grandes écoles
—the
Polytechnique, the Centrale, the Ponts et Chaussées, the École Normale
Supérieure, whose graduates run France. He was all set to join the ruling
class.

He duly made it to Condorcet, where the family
scraped together enough to pay the fees. He discovered a bent for science, took
his baccalaureate, and was hoping for the École Polytechnique or the École
Centrale when his father was wiped out yet again. This time the family,
including the sixteen-year-old Eugène, had to return to Alsace, and the German
rule they had earlier rejected. His mother kept a market stall, helped by his
aunt, whom Eugène remembered watching as she walked to the market barefoot,
carrying baskets of goods weighing ten or fifteen kilos on her head. Eugène was
apprenticed to a patissier, and also had to help his mother in the market, which
he hated. A gifted publicist, he always loathed the business of face-to-face
selling.

He endured this life for a couple of years, and
then could bear it no longer. Returning to Paris, he entered the Institute for
Applied Chemistry, paying his fees by working nights as a patissier. This was
chemistry’s heyday: Mendeleyev had recently formulated the periodic table of the
elements, and Marie Curie would soon isolate radium. Eugène graduated top of his
class, and Victor Auger, one of his professors, who had become a friend, found
him an instructor’s post at the Sorbonne. The way ahead was clear. He would
become a research chemist, and, eventually, a professor. Had he continued on
this route, his friend Frédéric Joliot-Curie later remarked, he would
undoubtedly have made some significant discovery.
5

But he found academic life disappointing—“dusty,”
as he phrased it.
6
The place, he said, felt
like a cemetery. No one in France was much interested in science, there weren’t
enough materials at the lab—even the gas supply was unreliable. And no one
seemed to work. Accustomed from childhood to a punishing schedule, he felt
cheated by academe’s comparatively relaxed pace. Why could one not get into the
lab before it officially opened? Why did one have to leave when the bell rang?
He would climb in and out through the window before and after hours, sometimes
starting work at six a.m., sometimes staying on late into the evening—hours his
colleagues inexplicably preferred to spend with their friends and families, or
even in bed. He soon left for something less lackadaisical, a job at the
Pharmacie Centrale de France, the standard manufacturer of chemical products. He
remained there for three years, becoming head of the research laboratory and
eventually head of the chemical service and secretary to the editorial board of
its publication, the
Grande Revue Scientifique
.

Some of the people he met during this trajectory
would remain his friends for life. One was Jacques Sadoul, a friend from
Condorcet who later became a Communist, and with whom he would conduct an
experimental “free university” before World War I. Another was Fred Joliot, who
later became Marie Curie’s son-in-law (and who added the Curie name to his own).
Joliot and Schueller met at L’Arcouest, a tiny Breton village where the
distinguished Sorbonne historian Charles Seignobos kept a cottage. Around the
village, in a scatter of houses and rented rooms, a group of all ages known to
all as “Sorbonne-sur-mer”—consisting of professors, their families, and their
students—passed happy summers sailing, swimming, and living a quasi-communal
existence. “A reporter suddenly finding himself in the midst of the peaceful
group would have been overjoyed,” Marie Curie’s daughter, Eve, remembered. “He
would have had to take great care not to step on some member of the Institut de
France lazily stretched out on the ground, or not to kick a Nobel Prize winner.
. . . These customs of children or savages, living half-naked in the
water and the wind, were later to become the fashion and to intoxicate all
classes from the richest to the poorest. But in those days . . . they
aroused the shocked criticisms of the uninitiated. In advance of the fashion
. . . we discovered beach life, swimming races, sun-bathing, camping
out on deserted islands, the tranquil immodesty of sport.”
7