Authors: Ruth Brandon
“Nothing ever happens at L’Oréal—it’s really
boring, nothing but bigger and bigger profits,” a financial analyst told
Le Monde
in June 1988.
10
It would not stay boring long.
II
I
n February
of 1988, eight months before the purchase of Helena Rubinstein was completed,
L’Oréal learned, to its “utter astonishment,”
11
that it had been placed on the blacklist of the Arab League’s anti-Israel
boycott committee. The committee, whose offices were located in Damascus, had
been set up in 1948, when the State of Israel was established, in an attempt to
strangle the new state by cutting off all Arab trade with companies linked to
Israel, or doing business with it. This proved rather an empty threat at first,
but took on new force after oil prices quadrupled in 1973, leaving oil-producing
countries with huge surpluses of petrodollars that made them highly desirable
trading partners.
L’Oréal had for many years maintained subsidiaries
in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. But although no company likes to face the
prospect of losing an entire segment of the world market, it might in principle
have ignored the boycott committee. Indeed, in principle it had no option but to
do so, since complying with the boycott had been outlawed in France in 1981, at
the start of President Mitterrand’s first term. L’Oréal, however, was not the
only company involved. In 1974, Liliane Bettencourt had exchanged a large block
of her L’Oréal shares for shares in the Swiss food conglomerate Nestlé—a company
of which Dalle, when he retired in 1984, had become vice president. All these
shares were now owned by a holding company, Gesparal, of which Liliane
Bettencourt owned 51 percent and Nestlé 49 percent, and which itself owned 53.65
percent of L’Oréal. And if Nestlé, as part owner of L’Oréal, were to become
involved in the boycott, that would be serious indeed: Arab markets accounted
for 15 percent of its milk products exports.
12
On the face of it, L’Oréal’s astonishment at being
singled out by the boycott committee was logical. Helena Rubinstein did have an
Israeli subsidiary—but L’Oréal had, as yet, no official ties with HR. In
reality, however, the committee’s announcement came as no surprise at all, nor
had the boycott committee suddenly acquired the gift of prophecy. This affair
had been rumbling on ever since L’Oréal’s 1983 acquisition, through a
subsidiary, of Helena Rubinstein’s Japanese and South American businesses. The
boycott committee had told L’Oréal then that it was taking a risk, since the
Rubinstein parent company had strong Zionist ties, but L’Oréal had set its
sights on Helena Rubinstein and refused to be put off. On the contrary, the
following year, 1984, they discreetly, and via another subsidiary, bought 45
percent of Helena Rubinstein, Inc., from Albi; and that same year, they sold off
HR Inc.’s Israeli subsidiary to Israeli nationals in an attempt to head off the
boycott threat. In 1985, however, the boycott committee announced that it was
still not satisfied. L’Oréal indignantly riposted that it was not the owner of
Helena Rubinstein—which indeed it was not. And there matters rested—until
1988.
L’Oréal had two problems. The first was that French
law forbade it to deal with the Arab boycott committee. The second was that its
ties to Israel, far from being cut, had recently been strengthened.
The first problem was annoying but not
insurmountable. L’Oréal had for years been conducting discreet negotiations with
the boycott committee. Now it dispatched France’s one-time ambassador to the
United Nations, Claude de Kémoularia, to represent it in Damascus. M. de
Kémoularia was a particularly apt choice, as he knew the people concerned: when
President Mitterrand first outlawed all dealings with the boycott, it was
Kémoularia who had been deputed to convince the Arab leaders that they would
have to accept this new stance. Now he returned with a (to them) much more
acceptable message, and was soon back in Paris with the boycott committee’s
conditions. Among them was a stipulation that L’Oréal must either buy the whole
of Helena Rubinstein or drop all links with the company; that all Israeli
manufacture of Helena Rubinstein products must be stopped, along with all Helena
Rubinstein activity in that country; and that all existing directors of Helena
Rubinstein be removed and replaced (it was understood, by non-Jews: this was
when Jacques Corrèze became HR’s chairman).
Since L’Oréal was anyway about to finalize the
total purchase of Helena Rubinstein, Inc., Corrèze, who was in charge of the
Israeli end of these negotiations, was dispatched to offer the Israeli buyer of
the business in that country a manufacturing deal in Germany that would be far
cheaper than maintaining an Israeli factory. The Israelis were happy to accept
this offer, and were also persuaded to drop the name “Helena Rubinstein” for the
preposterous reason that if the firm was to be L’Oréal’s Israeli agent, there
was no reason to use this particular brand name. It was agreed that HR Israel
would henceforth be known as Interbeauty. Only the paperwork remained to be
finalized.
But just as the Helena Rubinstein problem seemed to
have been settled, a new one arose. Although François Dalle was no longer CEO of
L’Oréal, he still maintained ties with the firm, heading its strategy committee.
L’Oréal had money to invest—in 1987 its net profits had for the first time
topped the billion-franc mark—and in 1988 Dalle, looking for profitable ways to
invest it, had done a deal with an old friend, Jean Frydman. Frydman, the son of
Polish-Jewish parents who had emigrated to Paris when he was five, had known
Dalle for thirty years. They had met soon after the war, in which Frydman had
been a daring
résistant
, and had been good friends
ever since. One of Frydman’s enterprises, CDG, owned a valuable catalogue of
film rights, including the non-U.S. rights to
High
Noon
,
Citizen Kane
, and other movie
classics. It was agreed that L’Oréal would form a joint venture with CDG called
Paravision, and that Frydman would sit on its board.
The Paravision deal was only a few weeks old when
Dalle realized that it might raise problems for L’Oréal. Dalle had thought
Frydman lived in Canada, where he owned a ranch, but in fact he now spent most
of his time in Israel, and was domiciled in that country. And although the
boycott committee’s conditions regarding Helena Rubinstein had been met, the
final removal of L’Oréal from the blacklist had not yet been signed and sealed.
That would not happen until the end of 1989. Meanwhile, in Damascus and Paris,
multiple copies of questionnaires and affidavits languished on bureaucrats’
desks or got lost in embassies awaiting signature, and more and more generous
sub rosa sweeteners to intermediaries were required, and envoys expensively
shuttled back and forth, and nothing was settled. In the spring of 1989,
therefore, Dalle suggested to Frydman that it might be a good thing if he
temporarily stepped down from the joint venture’s board.
Thus far, both Dalle and Frydman agreed that this
was the way things were. As to what happened next, however, they disagreed
bitterly.
Dalle said Frydman had not objected to resigning
temporarily from the Paravision board, and had even had a letter of resignation
prepared by one of his aides. Frydman, on the contrary, insisted that he had
objected, and strongly: he had no wish whatever to accommodate the Arab boycott
committee. Despite this, however, his resignation was offered and
accepted—without his knowledge—at a board meeting held, also without his
knowledge, in April of 1989.
That he had known nothing about the meeting was not
surprising, since investigations revealed that it had never taken place. L’Oréal
at first tried to deny any such maneuver, then admitted that that was indeed
what had happened. But such proceedings were apparently not unusual. Notional
board meetings, fleshed out later on paper, were, Dalle insisted, quite normal
in France.
However, Frydman was in no mood to listen to feeble
excuses. For he had made another disturbing discovery. It concerned Cosmair’s
Jacques Corrèze, who as the original instigator of the Helena Rubinstein deal
was deeply involved in the boycott negotiations. Frydman knew Jacques Corrèze—or
a
Jacques Corrèze—only too well. While the
fifteen-year-old Frydman had been escaping deportation and risking his life with
the Resistance, Jacques Corrèze had been Eugène Deloncle’s loyal lieutenant in
MSR—not merely propagating its hateful doctrines but actually leading the gangs
who took possession of properties once owned by Jewish families like the
Frydmans. After the war he had been disgraced and condemned to ten years’ hard
labor. Could this Corrèze be the same person?
He could, and he was. This one-time Jew-baiter not
only held an important position in a leading French company but was now engaged
in the ethnic cleansing of an American Jewish firm whose takeover he had
engineered. He had even had the chutzpah to visit Israel, several times, to
negotiate the sale of Helena Rubinstein’s Israeli branch and the closure of its
manufacturing operation there. It was Corrèze, Frydman declared, who had wanted
him removed from the Paravision board. He was determined to expose L’Oréal’s
fascist and racist connections, and show the world how it conducted its
affairs.
Dalle was apoplectic. He insisted that not only had
he never been an anti-Semite, but that Frydman’s real aim in raising these
irrelevant, if embarrassing, matters, was financial: to blackmail L’Oréal into
conceding a better settlement regarding Paravision than they were prepared to
offer. “Frydman’s using the Shoah to make himself some money, and that’s the
beginning and end of it,” Dalle declared,
13
a
remark he later regretted, but did not retract. At L’Oréal’s 1991 annual general
meeting, its new CEO, Lindsay Owen-Jones, gave shareholders a long explanation
of its antiracist principles. His speech was met with “ringing applause,”
14
and the company’s unions, including one that
was Communist-led, issued a statement confirming that in all their dealings with
L’Oréal and Dalle they had never been aware of any racism.
Frydman admitted that the Paravision affair had
done him no harm financially. On the contrary, he emerged 200 million francs to
the good—by no means negligible, though far less than he had asked and less than
he had hoped for.
15
But he was infuriated by
Dalle’s insinuations (repeated by L’Oréal’s vice president, André Bettencourt)
that money was his real concern in this affair. “There are three things he
regards as sacred,” his brother, David, said, “his family, Israel, and the
Resistance.”
16
And L’Oréal, by employing
Jacques Corrèze, had insulted two of them.
III
J
ust as the
boycott committee’s interest in L’Oréal had not exactly been a total surprise,
so Jean Frydman’s revelations regarding Jacques Corrèze’s previous life were not
news to L’Oréal’s senior management.
Corrèze’s last public appearance in France had been
in October 1948, when he had been chief defendant in the Cagoule trial, which
had been postponed when war broke out but not canceled. For a while it had
seemed as though the trial would be postponed indefinitely, for the enormous
dossier of relevant papers—more than two tons of them—had vanished. There was a
rumor that just before the Germans arrived in Paris in 1940 the papers had been
sent for safekeeping to Lesparre in the Gironde, the constituency of Georges
Mandel, then minister of the interior. But after the Liberation, when the
examining magistrate traveled there from Paris to find them so that the
prosecution could proceed, no one at the Lesparre Palais de Justice could help
him.
The magistrate was about to return to Paris
empty-handed when someone suggested that the concierge, who had been there
throughout the war, might know something. As it turned out, she did. One night
in June 1940, a party of men had arrived with a load of boxes which they hid in
the washrooms. The boxes had been stacked up at one end, a wooden partition
erected to conceal them, and the concierge sworn to silence. Then the men left.
She had never said a word, but as far as she knew, everything was still where
they had put it. Sure enough, there, behind a heap of assorted odds and ends,
was the partition—and there, behind it, were the Cagoule papers: damp and
stained, but still legible. In October 1945, those of the seventy-one accused
who could be located were politely requested to present themselves at police
stations. Fifteen obliged, and forty were eventually tried: amongst them,
Jacques Corrèze.
C
orrèze’s story, as he told it to the court, was a bizarre mix of
thuggery, courtly love, and melodrama. He was, a reporter noted, “dark and
romantic-looking, extremely courteous and remarkably intelligent”; he affected
“a hand-on-heart frankness”
17
—but did not, in
the end, reveal much. He told the court that before the war his father had been
an interior decorator in Auxerre, where the Deloncles had a country house. In
1932 they decided to do the place up: Jacques went to look it over—and fell
under their spell. “I was nineteen, and I fell deeply in love with Mme.
Deloncle,” he testified. He insisted, however, that their relations had remained
platonic. He joined the household as a sort of additional son, and lived with
them from then on. But although Deloncle inducted him into La Cagoule, and later
the MSR, he insisted that he had played little part in their policymaking. “I
was just a soldier, they weren’t going to share the secrets of the gods with a
boy like me!”
18
The truth, as it emerged from the documents, was
rather different. Corrèze had been no minor figure in “Monsieur Marie’s”
clandestine universe, but had been his chief aide and confidant in both La
Cagoule and MSR. His dossier contained an envelope with all the keys of the
Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, and maps of how to get to the
minister’s private office, for use during the planned coup d’état of 1937.
During the Occupation, “Colonel” Corrèze, whose group marched the streets of
Paris in high boots, tunics, and cross-belts, oversaw expropriation operations,
received reports from concierges and neighbors when the buildings were taken
over, and made inventories of their contents. Among these was the building in
the rue du Paradis that had housed the Ligue Contre Antisémitisme, where,
subsequent to Corrèze’s “liberation” of it, the fascist Charbonneau so enjoyed
returning to his cozy office after MSR meetings chez L’Oréal in rue Royale. Its
filing cabinets, desks, chairs, safes, stepladders, were all carefully
listed.
19
And alongside the highly
profitable expropriation business, rumors held that Deloncle had set up a
“parallel” police to extort money from Jewish entrepreneurs, with Corrèze as its
chief enforcer.
20