Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  The prospect of working for himself with a definite end in view, and of financial independence should he succeed, suited Eugène far better than dreary academic security. He decided to continue his research on his own account, and resigned from the Pharmacie Centrale. His boss was disbelieving. He was still only twenty-six and was already being paid a special salary, 250 francs a month. How could he give it up, just like that?

  It was indeed an excellent salary—so much so that during his three years at the Pharmacie he had managed to save 3,000 francs, enough to support him while he perfected his formulas. The only snag was, he’d lent most of the money to a friend who was not just then in a position to pay it back. He resigned anyway, on 800 francs, the capital remaining to him. The two-room apartment on rue d’Alger cost 400 francs a year, which since he had also to eat and buy materials gave him a little less than two years. The dining room became his office, the bedroom his lab. He lived alone, cooked for himself, and slept in a little camp bed until it was crowded out by laboratory equipment, when he took it up to a vacant storage room. “When I think back to those days, I can’t imagine how I got through them,” he reflected forty years later.

  His first product worked well on dead hair in the lab, but proved useless in the salon, on live hair still attached to a sensitive human scalp. He had therefore to begin all over again. But by 1907 he had his formula; all that remained was to sell it.

  How he summoned up the courage to go out and find clients he could never afterwards imagine. He was by nature rather shy, and a very bad salesman. But the product was excellent, and he soon got to know Paris’s fifty top hairdressers, who formed a respectable core of clients. He made his products at night, took orders in the morning, and delivered in the afternoons. By 1909, he had the satisfaction, “which I think I deserved,” of making a small profit. There were no margins. If he didn’t sell, he didn’t eat. Every bill, whether for raw materials or household necessities, was a nightmare. Nevertheless, L’Oréal was a going concern. On the strength of it he allowed himself to get married, and Mlle. Berthe Doncieux, whom everyone called Betsy, and of whom we know little save that she was musical and liked to play the piano and sing,11 came to share his storage-room bed.

  III

  In every town, there will be shops where the scalp will simply be massaged with lotions, each more wonderful than the last—liquids that will prevent hair from turning white in the first place.

  —EUGÈNE SCHUELLER, Coiffure de Paris, 1909

  Although Eugène Schueller’s public career is amply documented, the private man remains elusive. He makes a few cameo appearances in other people’s memoirs. He gave two short accounts of his life, one in 1948, when he was tried for collaborating with the Germans, another in 1954, to Merry Bromberger. He produced a few treatises on politics and economics, and a good many articles and speeches. But in most of these writings he had one if not both eyes on his own or his country’s future. He always remained committed to L’Oréal, but as the 1930s progressed it became more and more the means to an end—an inexhaustible source of money that would allow him to influence the economic and political scene.

  There was little time for private life. The marital bed crowded out by laboratory and office requirements was as much metaphor as reality. And although later he surrounded himself with the trappings of luxury—big houses, a Rolls-Royce, specially commissioned furniture—his lifestyle remained ascetic. If you work, as he did, from five in the morning until nine at night, there is little time left for anything else.

  We can glimpse his progress in a magazine called Coiffure de Paris, whose first issue, in October 1909, declared that it was “distributed free to Wholesale Buyers and to principal Practitioners in the Five Corners of the World.” A double-page photo-spread of founders’ portraits showed a cluster of well-set-up gentlemen of a certain age, with neat gray beards. In this portly and expansive company, E. Schueller, listed as one of the magazine’s “independent corporate publicists,” was noticeable for his youth and his abundant black, curly locks. Confined to the bottom right-hand corner of the page, he was seemingly a sort of afterthought. But this placement was deceptive. He was one of the magazine’s moving spirits. A hairdresser of his acquaintance had started it at the suggestion of a journalist, and co-opted Schueller because of his experience editing the Grande Revue Scientifique. Always publicity-hungry, he saw in it an excellent potential vehicle for his advertisements: L’Oréal occupied the whole of the back page, the space purchased at a cheap contributor’s rate. Before long, in a foretaste of events to come, he had taken the magazine over entirely and become its proprietor, editor, manager, and publicist.

  Coiffure de Paris, when it began, was largely about the now lost world of the postiche, the false hair piece every fashionable woman needed to achieve the bouffant hairstyles then in vogue (such as the one called “L’Auréole,” the original inspiration for the new hair dye’s name), necessary to support the vast hats of the period. Much of this hair came from Asia, though some was also harvested in the depths of la France profonde. A tragic photo in the magazine’s first issue, “Cutting Hair in the Corrèze,” showed one of the avuncular gents from the frontispiece, a large pair of scissors in one hand, triumphantly holding on high a thick mane of locks. Its erstwhile owner, shown in back view, sat crudely shorn on a bench, while to the right of the picture a second girl, still in possession of her hair, but about to lose it, and on the verge of tears, was being pushed forward by a grim-faced maman, intent on driving a hard bargain. But these were mere peasants, whose hair was wasted upon the Corrèze. Paris was its true home, where in studios such as “Postiches d’Art” “a buzzing hive of posticheuses” washed, colored, and otherwise prepared the raw material.

  The art of the postiche consisted in blending it undetectably with the wearer’s own hair—a complex and time-consuming business almost impossible to achieve at home. It had largely contributed to the spread of commercial hairdressing salons, as need overcame the traditional distrust of that immoral figure, the male hairdresser. And of course satisfactory matching necessitated a wide range of hair dyes.

  Amid the magazine’s fashionable hyperbole—“This season, big hats mean big hair”—the title of E. Schueller’s article, “Practical Techniques for Dyeing Hair,” struck a strictly down-to-earth note. Every month he supplied a piece on dyeing techniques and dangers, as well as answering readers’ questions. How, for example, should one deal with accidents that left hair green or purple? “This happens because you don’t know about hair dye, as you prove when you say ‘I tried in vain to dye it again.’ That’s just what you mustn’t do. When hair turns green, you don’t dye it again, you remove the dye that’s already there. What you’re doing isn’t colouring, it’s interior decorating—applying coats of plaster.”

  Schueller’s dynamism soon put him in charge of Coiffure de Paris. And that same year, 1909, L’Oréal, too, was financially transformed. One of Eugène’s cousins gave him an introduction to an accountant by the name of Sperry who worked for the liqueur firm Cusenier in Epernay. Sperry had just come into a small inheritance of 25,000 francs which he was looking to invest. Impressed by Schueller’s evident intelligence and excited certainty, he agreed to set up a joint venture, Schueller et Sperry. He insisted, however, on a special safety clause. At the end of each year Sperry was entitled to withdraw if he chose, and if he did, Schueller would repay his 25,000 francs. The clause was never invoked. On the contrary, when Sperry became ill some y
ears later and had to retire, Schueller, grateful for the the help Sperry had given him when he needed it, suspended it and paid Sperry’s full share of the annual profits (by then exceeding 25,000 francs) every year until he died.

  This injection of funds allowed Schueller to set himself up more sustainably. He hired a delivery boy and splurged on some advertising. His first account books showed expenditures of 49 francs on salaries, 28 fr. 25c on publicity.12 And he and his wife, Berthe, moved from their cramped quarters in rue d’Alger to a four-room apartment at 7bis rue du Louvre, at the eastern end of rue Saint-Honoré. As at rue d’Alger, this apartment housed not only living quarters but the firm’s office, laboratory, and showroom. And as at rue d’Alger, the business expanded and expanded, until the Schuellers found themselves sleeping, as before, in a vacant maid’s room at the top of the house.

  For many years they remained childless. Perhaps this is hardly surprising. At first there was literally no room for children. And then war broke out, and Schueller enlisted. Whether by accident or design, it was not until 1922 that their only child, a daughter, Liliane, was born. Schueller was by then forty-one, and Berthe cannot have been a great deal younger. They had been married fourteen years; she did not become pregnant again. There are hints that this was not for want of trying. In the plan for an ideal world he set out in 1939, he insisted that women should marry young and conceive early, since after the age of twenty-five “children are conceived and born only with the greatest difficulty.”13

  The war interrupted the hair-dye business, along with everything else. Schueller was overage, and at first the army refused to take him. Later it agreed to admit him as a chemist, but he turned that down and was eventually inducted into the 31st Artillery at Le Mans, leaving L’Oréal in the hands of his wife. At the front he acted as a liaison officer, with spectacular success. The citations for his various decorations describe him as careless of personal danger, quick to grasp what was relevant, and precise in conveying necessary detail.14 He was mentioned in dispatches at Verdun, the Aisne, the Chemin des Dames; in all, there were five citations. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in the trenches, and by the time he was demobilized, in 1919, he was a lieutenant of artillery and had been awarded the Croix de Guerre with several palms. He enjoyed the army’s adventurous life, and its lessons in organization were useful to him later in business.

  He returned to find that Berthe had done an excellent job of managing the business. L’Oréal was flourishing, and the rue du Louvre apartment was now far too small. They moved once again, just around the corner, to rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, taking an entire floor at an annual rental of 16,000 francs—four times what they had previously been paying—and soon needed an additional floor for offices. Before long, revenue was running at 300,000 francs a month, and a large proportion of that was profit.

  It all seemed too easy, and Schueller began to get bored. He diverted himself by embarking upon a voyage of industrial exploration, progressing from industry to industry as one led to another.

  The first move arose through his prewar activities at Coiffure de Paris. In search of advertising, he had met some manufacturers of celluloid combs. The war, with its demand for nitrocellulose explosives, meant a large development of their chemical division. They asked Schueller if he might be interested in helping them expand it, and how much money he would want for doing so. He explained that money was not his principal concern—he was already making plenty of that. What did interest him was how big they expected the business to become. They would be happy, they replied, with a million francs a year profits. By the end of the first year, the profits stood at 4 million francs, of which Schueller was entitled to one-quarter. Five years later, he had become the company’s principal shareholder.

  At the same time he started a new company, Plavic Film, which took control of the Lumière film-manufacturing company of Lyon (run by Auguste Lumière, one of the two brothers who in 1895 had made the first true motion picture). Plavic manufactured movie and still photographic film. He bought into another company that made Bakelite, and yet another making cellulose acetate and artificial silk.

  At this point, huge orders for celluloid began to arrive from Russia. Schueller had recently renewed acquaintance with Jacques Sadoul, his boyhood friend from the Lycée Condorcet. Capitaine Sadoul had been sent to Moscow in 1917 as part of a French military mission intended to make sure Russia remained on the Allied side. Excited by what he saw, he declared himself a Communist and declined to return to France. Having worked in various capacities for the Bolsheviks, he now returned to find that he had been accused of treason and sentenced to death in absentia, and took shelter with Schueller while gathering courage to give himself up. In the event, the charges were dropped. Sadoul returned to thank his old friend and, incidentally, put him in the Russian picture. The Russians, Sadoul said, were granting concessions to foreign businessmen to set up new industries in the U.S.S.R. Schueller, he insisted, should get himself in there.

  The upshot was a concession to make celluloid and also photographic film stock. In reality this boiled down to a comb factory. But in 1928, Lenin’s NEP (New Economic Policy), which had allowed small businesses to operate for private profit in an effort to rebuild Russian industry, was abandoned by Stalin in favor of a collectivization program of five-year plans, and the Russians bought Schueller out.

  Meanwhile, in 1927, he became interested in the manufacture of cellulose paints, which shared many laboratory processes with celluloid, and was soon managing director of a paint firm, Valentine. As he put it, however, “it wasn’t enough to manufacture paint—we also had to sell it”15; so he went to see André Citroën, whose company was the world’s fourth-largest automobile manufacturer. Citroën gave him a contract for 23 million francs; there were also valuable contracts with Renault and Peugeot. But this arrangement, though lucrative, left the company at the mercy of just a few clients. Schueller decided to branch out and sell his quick-drying paints to the public—by radio.

  Radio advertising was new. It had hit France courtesy of the young advertising genius Marcel Bleustein, who recognized its potential during a year’s stay in America. Returning to Paris in 1926 at the age of nineteen, he opened his own advertising agency, Publicis. By Christmas of 1927, he had his first client, and in 1935 bought a private station, Radio LL, which he rechristened Radio Cité. It was the first station in France to broadcast uninterrupted from six a.m. till midnight, with talent contests, news reporting, singing stars such as Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf—and commercials interspersed amid the programming. Schueller persuaded Bleustein to let him advertise with a sung jingle, in the style of Maurice Chevalier:

  Elle se vend en tout petits bidons,

  Valentine, Valentine,

  Elle se fait dans les plus jolis tons,

  Valentine, Valentine. . .

  (It’s sold in little cans, / Valentine, Valentine, / And in such pretty tones, / Valentine, Valentine . . .)

  At first Bleustein was reluctant—perhaps because he hadn’t thought of this idea himself. But Schueller won him over, and the advertising jingle hit France.

  After a while, Schueller decided to exchange his shares in plastic and celluloid for his partners’ shares in Valentine, leaving him with just two business interests—Valentine and L’Oréal. But this comparative calm did not last long.

  In 1928, following his Russian adventure, Schueller had got involved with yet another business: a brand of soap called Monsavon,
created just after World War I by a M. Wisner. The brothers Henri and Philippe de Rothschild were persuaded to put 18 and 20 million francs, respectively, into the business, lost the lot, and wanted out. They were prepared to sell cheaply. Schueller bought it from them for nothing, paying only for existing stocks and such money as remained in the bank.

  Monsavon went on losing money. It wasn’t a bad product, but brands like Palmolive and Cadum were much better known—so much so that shoppers, especially in rural areas, would request “a cadum of Monsavon.”16 Schueller was losing 300,000 francs a month. He sold his cars and mortgaged the two houses he now owned, at L’Arcouest and at Franconville, just outside Paris.

  With Valentine and L’Oréal both flourishing, the obvious answer was to cut his losses and close Monsavon down. But acknowledging defeat was something he could not bring himself to do. Business, for him, meant risk. “Difficult problems like Monsavon interest me more than easy successes,” he said at the end of his life. “It’s the way I’m made. . . . You can’t argue with the way you’re made.”17 He reduced production: the monthly loss fell to 30,000 francs, a level he could bear. He reformulated the product, reorganized the factory, publicized the improvements in the papers. Sales still did not rise.