Authors: Ruth Brandon
She opened more salons, and devised a range of
wonderful new products: Novena Poudre, a face powder for dry and normal skin;
Valaze Herbal Powder for oily skins; Dr. Lykusky’s Valaze Blackhead and
Open-Pore Paste; Valaze Red Nose Ointment and Powder; Valaze Liquidine
. . . “Money flowed in, in a continuous stream,” she recalled in her
first memoir,
The Art of Feminine Beauty
. “It seemed
the whole Australian continent—or, at least, its feminine half—was bent on
beautification.”
23
But her visit to Europe had expanded her ambitions.
If Krakow had been a backwater, neither was Australia the center of the
universe. Europe called, and only one thing held her back: a new acquaintance,
Edward Titus.
Titus was a Polish Jew who had known Helena’s
sisters in Krakow. He had emigrated to America, become a journalist there, and
acquired American nationality; now he was traveling around Australia. Arriving
in Melbourne, he called in at the salon. For the first and last time in her
life, Helena fell in love. “Until then,” she said, “most of the people I had
known had led rather narrow, humdrum lives; they were afraid of change and
suspicious of new ideas. Edward Titus excited my imagination; he was an
intellectual, interested in everything, and he had many friends in the literary
and artistic world.” He took her to theaters and concerts; soon they were seeing
a great deal of each other; and one day—to her surprise, she said—he
proposed.
“Marriage had never entered into my scheme of
things,” she wrote at the end of her life.
24
She loved Titus, but she loved her business more; if she married now, would she
ever fulfil her ambitions? So she followed her invariable habit when faced with
a difficult decision, and fled the country. She packed her bags, withdrew
£100,000 from the bank (the equivalent of about $11.7 million today
5
), and, leaving the Australian business in the safe hands of her
sister and cousin, took ship for London.
Until now, moneyed women had been heiresses, rich
widows, queens, sometimes even empresses. Helena Rubinstein had become the
world’s first self-made female tycoon.
II
We cannot all be ladies de Milo, but we can all be
the best possible in our individual cases.
Little blots of
blemish
In a visage
glad
Make the lover
thoughtful
And the husband
mad.
—E
ARLY
R
UBINSTEIN
ADVERTISEMENT
H
elena had
decided to go to London because it was “the world center of thought, taste,
money and beauty.”
25
But she knew nobody there,
and her first few weeks were lonely. She shared a small flat in Arlington Street
with an Australian girl she met on the boat, and spent her days trudging round
the West End in search of suitable premises. Eventually she heard that a
Georgian house in Grafton Street belonging to Lord Salisbury was for rent. It
cost more than she wanted to pay but she took it nonetheless. It was in the
right position, and the attic could be converted into a flat for her to live
above the shop. Then she returned to Australia, where Titus awaited her, and got
married. They at once reembarked for Europe, and a honeymoon on the French
Riviera. Madame’s pattern for the coming decades was set: constant journeys, and
an uneasy juggling of her personal and business lives.
Helena Rubinstein’s marriage to Edward Titus might
have been designed to provide ammunition for those who—like L’Oréal’s founder,
Eugène Schueller—felt nothing but bad could come of women entering the world of
work. Of course it was no new thing for wives to be richer than their husbands.
But until now those wives, and their bank balances, had bolstered, rather than
challenged, their fortunate husbands’ position in society. High-
earning
wives were something else—a novelty, and not
necessarily an agreeable one psychologically.
What was the role of such a person’s husband?
Whether consort or housekeeper, it was quite evidently subordinate—even now not
easy for many, and particularly hard in a culture where men had always been in
charge. When Titus proposed, he talked about the business he and Helena would
build together.
26
But the business was entirely
hers, and always would be. “He claims partnership in everything but everybody
knows he has no claim to anything,” she complained in 1915.
27
Put like that, her attitude sounded selfish. But
had the situation been the more usual one where the business belonged to the
husband, there would not have been—and probably still would not be—any question
of the wife claiming partnership as of right. It was only because Titus was a
man that he felt it his due. Nor did the situation improve when Helena
officially put him on the payroll. He earned his salary—he had a way with words,
never her forte, and was good at advertising. But he hated the work, and the
lack of independence affronted his self-esteem.
Hers, meanwhile, was dented by his irrepressibly
roving eye. Helena was now approaching forty, and her short frame, full of the
copious meals she required to keep her energy up, was getting squarer by the
year—
brayder vi lenger
(wider than she’s long),
as her Yiddish-speaking family would have phrased it. Sex appeal had never
figured high on the list of her attractions, and her constant hope that Titus
might desire her sexually, as she desired him, was always disappointed. During
the honeymoon itself, Helena walked into the hotel lobby one morning in “a haze
of happiness” and caught him in rapt conversation with a pretty young girl.
Humiliated and smarting, she rushed to the nearest jewelers and bought herself a
pick-me-up in the shape of a string of fine pearls.
She had found, as a lone woman in the man’s world
of business, that wearing fine stones gave her confidence,
28
announcing her as a woman of substance. Her
self-respect momentarily buoyed, she caught the next train to Paris. By the time
Titus caught up with her, however, she regretted her foolish behavior. She still
kept the pearls, though, and added to them whenever there was a quarrel. Soon
she possessed a good many pearls. “Buying ‘quarrel-jewellery’ is one of my
weaknesses,” she would write, still, at ninety-two, using the present
tense.
29
By then, gems had become a
personal statement, as habitual as the unchanging chignon whose severity they
set off.
When the honeymoon was over, Mr. and Mrs. Titus
returned to London, where they installed themselves in the Grafton Street attic
flat. Then Helena opened her doors and, once again, waited for customers.
It was a nerve-racking moment. Opening a beauty
salon in London was a far more complicated affair than opening one in Melbourne.
London had no equivalent of the “bachelor girls” who had constituted her
Australian clientele. In London, that clientele would have to be drawn from a
quite different social stratum—that of well-to-do married ladies with generous
dress allowances: a conservative social group, and one that for the past century
had been accustomed to consider paint and powder a badge of whoredom. In 1894,
the young Max Beerbohm contributed a satirical “Defence of Cosmetics” to the
first number of the decadent magazine
The
Yellow Book
. The article—which contended,
improbably, that “enamelling” would confine women to the home, because the
slightest movement would crack the painstakingly applied paint surface—outraged
his readers, most of whom, like Max himself, hated cosmetics and would have been
mortified had their womenfolk used them.
In fact the piece was a spoof. Max’s real view was
that “only women of the street resorted to rouge.”
30
But the fury he unleashed among the supposedly unshockable
readership of
The Yellow Book
showed that this
remained a delicate area. And in 1908 the stigma still persisted. Customers
came, but only after taking careful precautions. They found the prospect of
beautification too tempting to resist, but still worried about the social
consequences. “Many a time I watched from an upstairs window as [a customer]
arrived, alone, in a covered carriage which dropped her discreetly at the corner
of Grafton street,” Rubinstein remembered. “There, with her veil lowered, she
would wait for a few moments, out of sight, she thought, until the street was
free of passers-by. Then came the last few steps to the salon. . . .
More than once I wondered what would have happened if any two of my furtive
visitors had stepped simultaneously from their carriages and recognized each
other.”
31
The new salon did not yet offer eye paint, rouge,
or lipstick, though in her attic “kitchen” Helena had begun to experiment with
tinted and perfumed powder to supplant the chalky rice powder then in vogue,
which gave faces a peculiar whitewashed look. Although Queen Alexandra was
rumored to wear cosmetics in the evening, only actresses really knew the art of
makeup as it would later develop. They passed on useful tips to the stagestruck
Helena, whose memoirs record many London evenings spent at the theater, at that
time perhaps the only place where makeup was habitually and openly used. After
trying out the new techniques herself, she would pass them on, in turn, to her
bolder clients. In her correspondence with Rosa Hollay, who would become her
London manageress in 1914, she mentions a “prep . . . called stage
white for arms and neck, it positively does not come off.”
32
She also offered skin analysis and facial
treatments, including facial peels for bad cases of acne, the province of Frau
Doktor List from Vienna.
These treatments were expensive—ten guineas (nearly
$1,600 in today’s money) for a course of twelve, or £200 ($32,000) for regular
weekly visits the year round. But despite the expense, and their initial
nervousness, the customers kept coming. Within a year there were over a thousand
regular clients on the books, and in London, as in Australia, the money poured
in. Later, when life had become less easy, she wistfully looked back to those
early days. “We took in before the war about £30,000 a year and expenses were
about 7 [thousand],”
33
she told Rosa Hollay in
1923.
In 1909, Helena became pregnant. “I had not
consciously longed for motherhood,” was how she put it in her memoirs; in fact,
her first reaction was fury.
34
Titus, though,
was pleased, and in 1912 their first child, a son, Roy, was joined by another,
Horace (an anglicization of Helena’s father’s name, Herzl). “The nursery teas
with the boys, the evenings of gaiety with Edward [Titus] and our friends—all of
these memories fill me even today with nostalgia,” she wrote fifty years
later,
35
exhausting the joys of motherhood
in three lines before going on to devote several pages to her preferred topic,
interior decoration. She was fond enough of her boys in the abstract—various
somewhat stilted photographs show them together. But as many career women since
have found, not only do the prosaic realities of child care tend to pall beside
the constant excitement of a successful professional life, it is famously hard
to combine the two. Helena’s great rival Elizabeth Arden had no children. Nor,
for that matter, did her friend Coco Chanel, the most successful career woman in
Paris. Her own summation in 1930 was, “Maternity, I believe, gives a richness to
a woman’s life which no other satisfaction can replace, yet most women, during
this generation at least, are finding that the home and the nursery are not
enough.”
36
Thirty years later Betty Friedan
came to the same conclusion; her book on the subject,
The
Feminine Mystique
, would become the catalyst for women’s liberation.
It is doubtful, however, whether Friedan or anyone else would have recommended
subordinating family life to business in quite the single-minded way Helena
did.
Despite her domestic ties—or perhaps because of
them—this was a period of frenetic traveling for Helena. She visited Australia
to keep Ceska up to the mark, and shuttled, when in Europe, between London and
Paris. Helped by Titus, a cultured man who knew many writers and artists, she
began to buy paintings and sculptures, and developed what would become a
lifelong addiction to the Paris couture houses. In Paris, too, she acquired the
severe and elegant hairstyle that would henceforth be her trademark, an
uncompromising black chignon (later, she had it rinsed blue-black every six
weeks) that set her where she would henceforth remain: outside time.
It soon became clear that Paris could use its own
Salon de Beauté Valaze. The couture business was becoming an important industry,
with houses such as Worth and Lanvin beginning to show collections instead of
simply making clothes for individual women, and Helena realized that the couture
clients were also, potentially, hers. They needed to know how to make themselves
up in a way that would set off their new gowns to maximum effect, and she could
show them the way. In 1908 a herbal skin-products business came up for sale on
the rue Saint-Honoré. Helena snapped it up, together with its stock, and set
about its transformation. In 1911, she established her first factory, just
outside Paris at Saint-Cloud, and in 1912, she relocated to France. Her sister
Manka took over the London salon, while Helena, Titus, and the boys moved to
Montparnasse. Madame had had enough of London and nursery teas.
In Paris, although aristocratic society was every
bit as closed and snobbish as in London, the raffish, the artistic, and the
talented constituted a glittering
haute bohème
. If
you were gifted enough—like Diaghilev, like Picasso, like Chanel—you were
lionized even though (like Diaghilev) you were perpetually broke, or (like
Chanel) notoriously a
femme entretenue
. And since
artists must sell their work in order to live, rich patrons in search of art to
buy could also become members of this charmed circle. Madame met everyone,
including Marcel Proust—“Nebbishy looking . . . He smelt of
moth-balls, wore a fur-lined coat to the ground—How could I have known that he
was going to be so famous?” He quizzed her about makeup. “Would a duchess use
rouge? Did demimondaines put kohl on their eyes? How should I know?”
37
She preferred Chanel, that rarity of
rarities—a self-made woman like herself. Why, Madame once asked the great
designer, had she never married the Duke of Westminster, who had been her lover
for so many years? “What, and become his third duchess? No,” returned Coco, “I
am Mademoiselle Chanel and I shall remain so, just as you will always be Madame
Rubinstein. These are our rightful titles.”
38