Ugly Beauty (9 page)

Not the workers, that was for sure. Schueller did
not believe in consultation. To run an enterprise jointly was, he felt, “humanly
impossible.”
33
He saw egalitarianism, “the
determination not to recognize any superiority, and never to admit the truth,”
as a sort of social gangrene. Trade unions and work councils were destructive
rather than constructive; the noisiest propagandists always got elected, and
then had to justify their election by making unreasonable demands. Concerned
only with their short-term interests, they were part of the company, but not for
it.
34
Everything about workers’ lives
precluded the visionary detachment essential if those lives were to be
improved.

Schueller, on the other hand, felt himself uniquely
well placed in this respect. France in the first half of the twentieth century
was a very static society, and his rise from poverty to wealth and power had
given him an unusually broad view of it. His scientific training and industrial
experience meant that he had a wide personal experience of design, production,
and publicity. Through his factories, he remained intimately acquainted with how
the poor lived, and he devoted much of his business life to teaching them better
habits, in the form of cleanliness. For him, advertising was not just a way to
raise sales but a tool for improving people’s living standards. “People are
lazy,” he told business journalist Merry Bromberger. “You have to push them to
spend, to consume—to move on. When I advertise . . . I feel I’m
working in the public interest, not just for myself.”
35

This evangelistic inclination was also evident in
Votre Beauté
, the magazine he published monthly.
His original magazine,
Coiffure de Paris
, had
become, by the 1920s,
Le Coiffure et la mode
. But
despite carrying its articles in English, Spanish, and German, presumably to
increase international sales, this was still of very limited interest compared
to the general-interest women’s magazines he saw on visits to England. So in
1933
Le Coiffure et la mode
became
Votre Beauté
, complete with readers’ letters seeking
help for confidential problems (one of its most important sources of copy), as
well as the latest from the couturiers, interviews with prominent society women
and actresses, and assorted beauty hints. The result was a much wider readership
and advertising base.

Although Schueller’s name did not appear above any
of the articles, he wrote a great deal of
Votre
Beauté
himself. And this gave it a particular flavor. In similar
American and British magazines, beauty hints meant discussions of cosmetics,
creams, and the best ways to apply them. But such things had little place in
Schueller’s world: he neither made nor used them. Instead, French women were
exhorted to make themselves beautiful through strict routines of diet and
exercise. From thinness and fitness, all else followed. “Do marrons glacés put
on weight?” enquired “Rose d’Orléans” in the first selection of readers’
letters. “Yes!” came the uncompromising answer—followed by a calorie breakdown
showing that a single marron put you 100 calories to the bad (the recommended
daily intake being no more than a meager 1,500 calories all told
3
).
36
Many readers wanted to grow
taller: they were advised to stand up straight—and, above all, to exercise.
“
It is a crime
,” thundered an editorial in
January 1934, “
not to make the most of such an easy and
pleasant way of improving your physique, keeping young, and prolonging your
life!
” Pages of detailed drawings and photographs introduced readers
to winter sports (their skins protected, of course, by L’Oréal’s
Ambre Solaire
), and every issue contained a new,
health-giving diet. When Colette, whose love of good food was legendary and who
in later life had become very plump, wrote a piece in her journal saying fat
women were happier than thin ones,
Votre Beauté
’s
disapproval was almost hysterical. “Colette, dear, wonderful Colette, we all
know you’re too fond of food. . . . But, for heaven’s sake, don’t try
and make converts. . . . Go to all the banquets in the world, but
don’t put your genius at the service of big bottoms and fat thighs!”
37

In particular (a clue, here, as to the editor’s
particular predilection?) women were exhorted to take care of their breasts. How
to stop them sagging? (Exercises.) How to prevent them getting too large?
(Stimulate ovarian activity as soon as puberty sets in, as sluggish ovaries lead
to oversize breasts.) How to make them bigger? (Exercise.) Every issue contained
a page of before and after photographs, in which nipples, following the
recommended treatment, migrated upwards as if by magic; every month Dr. Magnus
Hirschfeld, a well-known pundit and “the uncontested master of sexology,”
recommended his special hormone treatment (also with before and after
photographs). A despairing reader, writing in to ask if she should undergo
breast reduction surgery, was, however, recommended not to do so immediately.
Big breasts weren’t necessarily a complete barrier to attraction; she shouldn’t
give up hope, and she should remember that surgery left scars.

Economics, health, beauty—who better than such a
universally qualified man to propound the basic principles of utopia? The 1930s
in France was a time of intense theorizing on both the left and the right, and
everyone was eager to set out his own plan for national renewal. Schueller was
no exception. In his book
Le Deuxième salaire
,
published in 1939, he described his ideal world. To begin with, every family
would have a house, ideally one designed by Schueller himself. In 1929 the
American architect R. Buckminster Fuller had designed a house made of aluminum
with premolded pipework, kitchen, and bathroom, and intended for low-cost mass
production, that he called the Dymaxion House. Schueller made no mention of
Fuller in his writings, but his own design incorporated many Dymaxion-type
features—aluminum construction, industrial prefabrication, molded bathrooms. The
Schueller house was prefabricated along the lines of an aircraft hangar, its
triple-skinned aluminum frame providing heat and sound insulation, and its
ogival shape giving a lofty sense of space. It was built from modules 85
centimeters long, 6 meters wide, and 5 meters high: house sizes would vary
depending on the number of modules used. Large windows and skylights would make
for light, airy spaces. Modern domestic necessities would be built in: piped
water, washing machines, ironing machines, fridges, radios. The furniture would
be of the latest wonder material, Bakelite, and designed by the best designers
(Schueller was a connoisseur of fine furniture, commissioning his own from the
great Art Deco designer Ruhlmann, whose clients also included Baron Henri de
Rothschild, from whom he had bought Monsavon). Schueller’s suburbs would be
spacious and green, with widely spaced dwellings set among intensively
cultivated vegetable gardens, along the lines of William Morris’s 1890 utopian
News from Nowhere
, which advocated a bucolic
lifestyle in harmony with the natural world.
4
Transport
would consist of small family cars with an average ten-year life span. People
would wear modern fabrics, crease-resistant and stretchy. Only young, strong men
would work in industry, traveling to work in car pools. Women would stay home,
devoting their lives to their families. Every working man, in Schueller’s view,
needed a wife waiting for him at home. Especially when work was scarce, he
thought women had a duty not to compete with men: they should resign their jobs
and look after their many children. “A home, for a man, means a wife at home,
and if every member of the family over fourteen has to work for a living, it
isn’t a real home.”
38
Older men would cultivate
the gardens, and help the women with household tasks and crafts. Artists and
craftsmen were also accommodated in this worldview, their artifacts adding to
the pleasure of life.

Under Schueller’s system, poverty would be
eliminated. So, too, would enormous wealth. Schueller admitted that getting rich
was a not insignificant motivation in business, but in the end “we all have the
same pen, the same telephone, the same radio, we’ll all have more or less the
same fridge, the same car, the same mattress, the same sheets—and anyway,” he
grumbled, like Helena Rubinstein indignant that such a large proportion of his
rightful earnings should be confiscated by an ungrateful state, “there’s not
much left once you’ve paid your taxes.”
39
Running a business was, rather, about reinvestment and development, and he had
definite ideas about that.

First, it was important that employers personally
own their concerns. They must be allowed to take risks and go broke from time to
time—for Schueller, risk-taking was what being a successful industrialist was
all about—and shareholders would always vote for income over investment,
rejecting risk on the pretext that “it all works fine as it is.” (L’Oréal
remained a private company throughout its founder’s lifetime, going public only
in 1963, six years after Schueller’s death.) Banks’ money was especially to be
avoided, since banks were particularly risk-averse.
5
So were those
who owned a business through inheritance. Schueller thoroughly disapproved of
businesses being inherited. The fact that so many of France’s businesses were
dynastic was, he thought, a great weakness. Not only did it entrench social
immobility, it had left the country economically underdeveloped—to the point,
indeed, where even Schueller felt France’s most important resource was her
land;
6
her industries relied for survival on
tariffs and cartels.

Above all, Schueller felt that being an employer
was about social responsibility. He offered his own experience as an example of
the kind of management vision needed. In 1936, he had mechanized one of his
factories, and two years later production had risen 34 percent, using 11 percent
less in the way of manpower. Each sacked worker represented 12 francs a day
saved, but 15 percent of those let go were unable to find another job, and to
those he continued to pay 10 francs a day out of this saving. He also paid
monthly supplements to his workers’ families, 100 francs for the first child, 50
francs for the second, 200 francs to mothers who stayed home rather than going
out to work. Motherhood was a social service: big families were essential if
France was to be repopulated following the carnage of World War I.
40
He hoped such practices would become
widespread. All that was needed to achieve the revolution was a handful of
strong-minded men like himself. If they persevered, they would prevail.

To connoisseurs of twentieth-century self-made men,
all this will sound oddly familiar. A dynamic employer who rises from poverty to
create a new industry through his own outstanding technical and commercial
abilities, and who then uses part of his profits to create a kind of
self-contained mini-state in which to impose his idea of how things should
be—such a man already, and famously, existed. Schueller’s trajectory, so rare in
France, would have raised no eyebrows in America. And his hero was indeed
American—the automobile magnate Henry Ford. Ford, like Schueller, directed some
of his profits into social services—housing, schooling, hospitals—for the
families of his workers. Like Schueller, he was concerned that these subventions
should be used properly—that is, used as Ford thought best. Like Schueller he
was a political idealist, the idealism, in his case, taking the form of
pacifism. (In 1915, his Peace Ship initiative tried vainly to bring World War I
to an end.) And, like Schueller, he had an economic
dada
—in Ford’s case, the five-dollar day, his aim being to ensure
that every one of his workers could afford to buy one of his cars.

When Ford instituted the five-dollar day in 1914,
it seemed like an act of reckless generosity. In fact it paid for itself
handsomely as higher wages led to better health and morale, and hence increased
production. But it was not, in practice, as straightforward as it sounded. You
could
earn five dollars a day, if you worked
uncomplainingly on the production lines Ford had built and led the kind of life
he thought you should lead: not smoking or drinking (Ford did neither), and
putting some of your money into savings. Ford created a Sociological Department
to educate and inspect his workers, and decide how much each man should be
awarded. You didn’t have to be a respectably married nonsmoking teetotaller to
work at Ford’s. But you wouldn’t earn five dollars a day unless you were, any
more than Schueller’s workers would see their share of profits until their
families were certified as living “properly.”

Schueller was a great admirer of Ford, and his
economic and social theories were heavily influenced by Fordism.
41
And Fordism led to a particular kind of
politics. Unlike most businessmen, whose interest in their workers ceased once
they had left the plant, Ford and Schueller’s form of extended paternalism
effectively turned their businesses into mini–welfare states. And in the chaotic
world of the 1920s and thirties, it seemed logical that what worked for their
businesses might also work in the wider political arena.

Ford first dipped his toes into political waters in
1918. He ran for the United States Senate, as a Democrat, but was defeated in a
viciously corrupt campaign. In 1923 there was talk of drafting him to run for
president. But he hated public speaking so much, and was so bad at it, that
after his one and only failed attempt at a political rally, he determined never
again to risk a comparable humiliation. “I can hire someone to talk for me that
knows how,” he said. “That talking thing is a gift. I’m glad I never acquired
it, and I’ll never try again.”
42
Nor did he
need to. Why humiliate himself at the hustings when he could practice his
theories upon a captive audience and a captive population?