Ugly Beauty Read online

  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

  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

  In 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