Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  Schueller’s épuration hearing for personal offenses took place in 1948. He was acquitted with little trouble. In the end what seems to have weighed with the judge was less the evidence, which could be read so many different ways, than the character references given by two witnesses. One was his old friend Jacques Sadoul, who was still a Communist—an important recommendation, since the Communists had been the only political party to support the Resistance officially—and had now also become mayor of Ste. Maxime in the Var. And the other, whose evidence tipped the scales in Schueller’s favor, was Pierre de Bénouville, a garlanded Resistance hero, founder in 1942 of the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance, organizer of the Free French forces in Algeria, and who had been named a general on the Italian front—one of only three résistants to end the war with this rank.

  Bénouville’s testimony concerned one of those incidents that now reads like something out of an action movie, but which were quite commonplace during the dark and dramatic days of the Occupation. One of Schueller’s Resistance contacts, a man named Max Brusset, notified him that a delegate of the Provisional Government in Algiers wanted to meet him. The meeting was to take place at Brusset’s apartment at 28, boulevard Raspail. It was agreed that Schueller would prepare a report concerning certain questions, and deliver it Saturday morning. Needing a little longer, he asked to delay the delivery until Monday morning at eleven. But at nine o’clock Monday, there was a phone call from Brusset: he had the flu, Schueller shouldn’t come. In fact, at seven that morning the Gestapo had arrived at the apartment. Brusset’s sixth-floor bedroom gave onto a terrace, from which he had been able to jump onto another terrace on the fifth floor and enter the apartment from which he was now phoning. He was able to contact all save one of the people who had been due to meet that morning; that one arrived as arranged, carrying incriminating papers, was arrested, and almost certainly shot. Bénouville knew Brusset, and had promised him that he would provide an authenticating certificate for this story when he returned to Paris.55 The panel accepted Benouville’s evidence and recommended a relaxe.

  The hearings for industrial collaboration, however, which began in 1946 and were not resolved until two years later, had been more problematic. The panel found that Schueller’s Resistance activities were not enough to outweigh the evidence that he had collaborated with the Germans. He had organized lectures in his factories, promised help to men who volunteered to fight alongside the Germans, funded the MSR, published La Révolution de l’économie with its anti-union tirades, devised the economic policy of the RNP and encouraged the Relève. The panel did not feel that the various Resistance activities he had brought to their notice counterbalanced this, and found him guilty. In addition to disqualifying him from business, the panel also threatened to forward the evidence to the Court of Justice, which might have confiscated his assets, sentenced him to national disgrace, to a prison term, or even to death.

  And if Schueller was not guilty of collaboration, who was? Not only did his name appear in RNP and MSR literature alongside those of Marcel Déat, who was sentenced to death, and Eugène Deloncle, whom only assassination saved from a comparable fate, but he had left an indelible trail in numerous articles, pamphlets, and broadcasts, all urging collaboration; his book La Révolution de l’économie had been published on the same list as the works of Hitler himself. Acts or motives might remain cloudy, but the published word was one thing that could not be denied.

  Once again, however, Bénouville saved him. Twice—at the first hearing, and again after the guilty verdict—he sent urgent letters, stressing his desire to testify on behalf of the accused, visiting the judge and the Préfet, apologizing when business took him away from Paris at the crucial moment. Schueller, he insisted, was a victim of his fixation on proportional salaries, which had led him into various imprudent actions. But he had been of inestimable help to Bénouville.56 Bénouville got his way, and Schueller was let off.

  Such solidarity between resisters and collaborators was not unusual during the épuration. As Schueller’s own activities demonstrated, channels of communication between the two sides had always remained open. During the Occupation, collaborators often put in a word for a Resistance figure in trouble. Now those who had been helped, helped in their turn. Bénouville testified in this way on behalf of many old friends. What was interesting about his efforts for Schueller, however, was that the two had met only once, and then briefly (when Schueller, anxious to buy himself onto the winning side, had promised financial aid when Bénouville needed it). Indeed, Bénouville insisted that Schueller had never approached him personally for help. What he had done, he had done for Max Brusset. Even so, it seems surprising that he should have put quite so much effort into getting Schueller cleared. Why had he done so?

  The answer, like everything else about Schueller, could be traced back to the life rules he had evolved. The way both Schueller and Rubinstein conducted their family affairs would be decisive in the intermingling of their stories. And Bénouville, for Schueller, was family—albeit that family was a surrogate one, and Bénouville only a tangential member.

  [1] This may well have been true. At least in Britain, people ate more healthfully in wartime, when food was rationed, than they have ever done since.

  [2] The person who selected Oradour as a suitable site for German reprisals was none other than Jean Filliol, Schueller’s colleague in MSR. In 1943 he joined the Milice, the dreaded Vichy paramilitary police, and in 1944 was put in charge of the Limoges region, in which Oradour is situated.

  [3] Raymond Berr was managing director of the chemicals firm Kuhlmann, and was killed in Auschwitz. Hélène died in Bergen-Belsen five days before it was liberated. She was twenty-three.

  Photo Insert

  HR aged sixteen, before she left Krakow.

  Photo: Helena Rubinstein Foundation

  Helena Rubinstein milling parsley in her Saint Cloud “kitchen,” 1932. Here was where she always felt happiest. Fresh flowers and herbs were favorite ingredients for beauty creams.

  Photo: Helena Rubinstein Foundation

  Madame Rubinstein the scientist: as she liked to see herself and project herself to the world.

  Photo: Helena Rubinstein Foundation

  Helena Rubinstein by Marie Laurencin, 1934. She was sixty-two years old, but you would never guess it from this portrait, which showed her as an “Indian Maharanee.”

  Photo: Helena Rubinstein Foundation

  Helena Rubinstein with her surviving sisters, l to r: Manka, Helena, Stella, and Ceska, 1963.

  Photo: Jean-Paul Cadé/Helena Rubinstein Foundation

  Edward Titus, the first Mr. Helena Rubinstein.

  Photo: Helena Rubinstein Foundation

  Helena Rubinstein at eighty-six, by Graham Sutherland. When she first saw this picture, Rubinstein hated it, commenting, “I never imagined I looked like this.” But after the painting was exhibited and admired in the Tate Gallery, she changed her opinion: “I had to admit, it’s a masterpiece.”

  Photo: Helena Rubinstein Foundation

  Prince Artchil Gourielli, Rubinstein’s second husband, on holiday in St. Moritz, 1949. Pleasures like this were one of the many advantages of being Mr. Helena Rubinstein.

  Photo: Helena Rubinstein Foundation

  Patrick O’Higgins, Helena Rubinstein’s goy, leaving Australia at the end of his and Rubinstein’s 1958 visit.

&nbs
p; Eugène Schueller in 1909, the young chemist making his way in the world. From an insert in the first issue of Coiffure de Paris.

  L’Auréole–the 1905 hairstyle that gave its name to L’Oréal.

  Coiffure de Paris: October 1909

  Eugène Schueller giving a lecture, Paris, 1941.

  Archive, Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris

  Schueller’s design for an ideal home, gothically arched for maximum light, and complete with an ideal family, including a dog, a car, and three children. Note that it is the wife who holds the baby. From Le Deuxième salaire, popular illustrated edition, 1940.

  Eugène Deloncle, founder of La Cagoule and Schueller’s colleague in the Mouvement Sociale Révolutionnaire, 1940.

  Jacques Corrèze aged thirty-three, at the time of the Cagoule trial, 1945.

  “The young are life’s favorites. . . . And youth lasts longer for those who use L’Oréal.”

  L’Oréal ad, 1923

  Jean Frydman in 1944, at the time of the Liberation.

  The stolen Rosenfelder house in Karlsruhe.

  Courtesy Monica Waitzfelder

  André Bettencourt in 1973 when he was acting Minister for Foreign Affairs.

  Official photo, Archives Diplomatiques

  Helena Rubinstein’s New York drawing room, 1950s. “Quality is nice, but quantity makes a show.”

  Photo: Helena Rubinstein Foundation

  Liliane Bettencourt’s salon in her Neuilly mansion, a model of tastefulness.

  Photo: Architectural Digest/Condé Nast

  Chapter Four

  Family Affairs

  I

  The sons and grandsons of an industry’s creators won’t take risks. Sons should inherit money, but not management. If a son wants to work, he should take a job elsewhere and work his way up.

  —EUGÈNE SCHUELLER, La Révolution de l’économie

  Among the most strongly held of Eugène Schueller’s many strongly held beliefs was the conviction that businesses (as opposed to money) should not be passed on as a family inheritance. When Helena Rubinstein’s first grandchildren were born, she declared, “Now the business will last for three hundred years!”1 But such a thought would have been anathema to Schueller. On the contrary, he thought entrepreneurship required very particular skills, and that “being a general’s son doesn’t automatically make you a good general.” (This was a pet expression of Schueller’s, and he used these same words in article after article, lecture after lecture.)

  Of course, it was easy for him to say this. His only child was a daughter, which (given his view of woman’s place in the world) ruled her out as a possible candidate. And since he had no siblings, he had no aspiring nephews. But it also left him with a problem. Building up L’Oréal had been his life’s work. It would have been less than human, not to say irresponsible, to give no thought to his eventual successor. Schueller, of all people, knew that his day-to-day decisions affected the lives of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people. Since he was not immortal, perhaps the most important decision of all concerned the man who would take his place when he died or retired. But who would that be? And how would Schueller identify him? As the thirties drew on and he moved into his middle fifties, he began, consciously or subconsciously, to look around for the young man who would become, in effect, his surrogate son.

  As it turned out there would be two such people, each playing a different filial role.

  The first, André Bettencourt, was introduced to Schueller in 1938 by a journalist friend, who invited Bettencourt to lunch with “a man you really ought to meet, he’s extraordinary.”2 Bettencourt was then nineteen, Schueller fifty-seven. The meeting took place in Schueller’s boulevard Suchet apartment, where Bettencourt also met Schueller’s daughter, Liliane. The friendship flourished. In December 1941, Bettencourt referred in an article to “a remarkable book by a friend, M. E. Schueller, called ‘La Révolution de l’Economie’ . . . that all businessmen ought to read.”3

  In that same year, 1941, Bettencourt drew Schueller’s attention to another promising young man: his friend François Dalle. The two had met as students in 1936, when both lived at a university residence for young men such as themselves—Catholic, provincial, well-connected—run by the Marist Fathers at 104, rue de Vaugirard. In 1941, Dalle needed a job, and Bettencourt thought Schueller might have one for him.

  Although Bettencourt and Dalle were both members of the Catholic bourgeoisie, they had grown up in very disparate milieux. The Bettencourts were traditional Normandy landowners, conservative and rooted in their village, St. Maurice d’Ételan, of which André’s father was the mayor, of which he would in time become mayor himself, and where they were intricately intermarried with the surrounding seigneurial families. They were pious, and M. Bettencourt père went on frequent religious retreats, although meditation did not prevent him writing home to remind his gardeners, when planting new apple trees, to “if possible put some fresh soil in the holes.”4 These two preoccupations—religious and agricultural—were passed on to André, and were reflected in his wartime activities.

  By contrast, the Dalles were industrialists from France’s gritty Nord. François’s father was a brewer in Wervicq-Sud, near the Belgian border. The family lived beside the brewery, and their neighbors were mostly working families. François grew up in an austere and socially conscious household, aware from his earliest youth of industrial conflict and the ravages of war. He realized, too, that the main source of unrest in the local textile industry—the workers’ continuing and justified complaints about their low level of pay, the factory owners’ riposte that as their profits were so low, they could not afford to pay more—arose because of outdated attitudes and machinery. Capitalism, he concluded, could be justified only insofar as it brought material abundance. 5

  By the time the two young men arrived in Paris, toward the end of 1936, it was clear that Europe was sliding toward another general conflict, and that France, if involved, would almost certainly be defeated. In 1937 and again in 1938, Dalle, Bettencourt, and some other friends from the old university lodgings at 104, rue de Vaugirard, including France’s future president François Mitterrand, whose family was in the vinegar business in the Charente, visited Luxembourg, Belgium, and Germany during their vacations. They saw tanks rolling at full speed through villages while the villagers cheered and girls threw flowers. On one memorable day, on a riverbank near the German-Luxembourg border, they watched as a thousand soldiers in swimming-gear stood at attention while a hundred-piece orchestra played Beethoven, and then, at the sound of a bugle, threw themselves, as one man, into the river. It was an impressive show of fitness and discipline, and the young Frenchmen were left wondering how their ragtag conscript army could ever stand up to a force composed of men such as that.6

  In this charged and uncertain atmosphere, the young men from 104 inclined to the right. The left seemed to offer only chaos. Fascism—not as practiced by Hitler, but of the Mussolini and Salazar Catholic variety—at least held out the possibility of order. “We didn’t think Mussolini would go in with Hitler,” Dalle said. “We were bourgeois students, Catholics. . . . We knew the war was lost before it began, because our arms were as hopeless as our high command. We were just cannon fodder. . . .”7 They were mostly studying law, and preferred to use the faculty library, which was recognized as the province of the far-right Camelots du Roi, rather than the Sorbonne library, where, Dalle said, �
�less than 5 percent were non-Marxists, and not a single girl ever caught your eye.”8

  When the war came, Dalle, Mitterrand, and Bettencourt, like all young Frenchmen, were called up. Following the debacle of France’s capitulation, Mitterrand was captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp inside Germany, an experience that would shape his future political career, while Bettencourt and Dalle returned to Paris, and looked around for something to do. Bettencourt found a job in journalism, writing a youth-interest column under the heading Ohé les jeunes! for a magazine called La Terre Française, directed at agriculturists. Dalle thought of resuming his studies. But his preferred professors were no longer teaching their courses, and besides, having just married, he needed to earn some money. Going through the want ads one day he noticed that the Society of French Soapmakers, working through Monsavon, was looking for trainees. He knew that Schueller owned Monsavon, and knew and liked his economic theories. He knew, too, that his friend André was acquainted with the Schuellers. Bettencourt encouraged him to apply for the job.