Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  Schueller, who always took a personal interest in trainees, met Dalle, agreed to hire him, and asked where he came from. The Nord, Dalle replied. “That’s good,” Schueller said. “In this country there are only two sets of people who really work, the ones from Alsace, and the ones from the Nord.” A few days later, Dalle presented himself for work at the Monsavon factory in Clichy, a dank place in what he described as “the miserabilist style of the Paris suburbs.” He was twenty-four. His job was to help the sales director’s secretary—“a radical change of direction,” as he observed, “for someone who had always dreamed of teaching law.”9

  His first job, which he hated, consisted of multiplying the number of soaps sold by their price, to calculate turnover. But at the end of 1943 the sales director fell ill, and the managing director mysteriously vanished: suddenly, at the age of twenty-five, Dalle found himself the de facto boss of a large factory. Schueller liked to divide his colleagues into two categories: people men and things men. Dalle certainly wasn’t a “things man,” though there were two in the factory: they had just devised an innovative continuous soap-making process that would prove valuable in the immediate postwar years. However, they couldn’t try it out on Monsavon’s wartime product, which consisted almost wholly of bentonite and kaolin and contained virtually no fat. It could hardly be called soap at all. And there were problems with morale. Keeping Monsavon’s little community going in those desperate days, when food of any kind was short, good food almost unobtainable, and nobody trusted anyone else, was an invaluable experience for the “people man” François Dalle would become.

  Monsavon survived the war. But it then faced the problem of surviving the peace, which had its own difficulties. In wartime the buying public had grabbed anything put before it, including Monsavon’s ersatz soap; but now the presence of American troops and American products reminded battered Europeans of a long-forgotten abundance. American competition meant hard times for indigenous companies facing huge shortages of raw materials. Dalle thought for a while about returning to the law, but he had lost the habit of study, and soon realized that the subject no longer interested him. So he returned joyfully to Monsavon and the entrepreneurial life he found so exhilarating, and was put in charge.

  During these years, Schueller let Dalle get on with the job without interference. One summer Sunday in 1948, however, an indication came that Schueller had plans for him. Summoned to the Franconville house, Dalle was informed that, starting the next day, he was to work at L’Oréal as well as Monsavon. He had done well with Monsavon and, hopefully, would continue to do so. But now it was time to find his place within the company as a whole. “I was flattered, but terribly embarrassed,” Dalle remembered. “It hadn’t ever crossed my mind that women’s hair grew white as they got older, let alone that they might dye it—the notion that one might want to change the natural order of things would have seemed odd to me, actually almost shocking. Where I came from women didn’t use cosmetics.”10

  This uncertainty was soon buried, however, beneath the whirlwind of his new life. He was given an office at rue Royale and began the long task of getting to know a new business and gaining the trust of longstanding lieutenants over whose heads he was all too evidently being promoted. He soon became Schueller’s chief confidant, which meant adopting his chief’s frenetic pace. From six till eight a.m. he read notes dictated by Schueller the previous evening, then walked for an hour around the park at Bagatelle, near where he lived, before dictating his responses. He spent the morning at Monsavon and the afternoon at L’Oréal, staying there until nine—the hour when Schueller left the office.

  After a few months of this pace he became tired, and Schueller offered him and his family the L’Arcouest house for a couple of weeks of relaxation and enjoyment. It rained solidly; when the offer was renewed the following year, Dalle’s wife and children refused to accompany him. It rained again; cooped up all alone in the big house, Dalle thought longingly of Paris and all the work awaiting his return. He called for his secretary and resumed his Parisian work schedule, wondering later if this had not been a deliberate ploy on the part of Schueller, who did the same thing during his vacations.

  It was soon clear to them both that Dalle would be L’Oréal’s next chief executive. But it was not until 1957, when Schueller’s health began to fail, that this was said in so many words. That July, Dalle was summoned to L’Arcouest. He found Schueller tanned and apparently well, but appearances were deceptive: he was dying. He was L’Oréal’s present, the old man said, but Dalle would be its future. The speech left both of them in tears. Not long after it, Schueller died, and Dalle became managing director of L’Oréal. Where, politically and commercially, Schueller had remained essentially a man of the 1930s, Dalle would move L’Oréal into the postwar world.11

  While Dalle was taking his place as Schueller’s industrial heir, André Bettencourt had maintained their friendship on a more personal level: in 1950, he would marry Schueller’s daughter, Liliane. The file of papers concerning Schueller’s épuration trial contains two letters from Bettencourt, one written in January 1944, the other in September of the same year. They make it clear that the two had become close enough for Schueller to trust the younger man with both money and personal confidences.

  By 1944, the course of the war had turned in the Allies’ favor, and those who had positioned themselves three years earlier in expectation of a German victory now found themselves somewhat awkwardly placed. Bettencourt had spent the first years of the war as a journalist, writing for collaborationist and Pétainist publications, and had later spent some time at Vichy, working for the Pétain administration there. It is clear from his January letter to Schueller that both of them anticipated difficulties if, as seemed increasingly likely, the Germans were defeated.

  You told me about your fears, and various conversations I had before I left Paris seem unfortunately to justify them. Do be very careful. You’re so terribly impulsive about everything, but I think you should be very cautious about revealing too much regarding the way you’ve helped some of us, and some friendships should also be kept quiet; if you’re publicly compromised, those who have been close to you might find themselves in a delicate position.

  I think, and I hope you’ll agree, that the essential thing for you is to get social matters organized. . . .

  This prophecy of trouble ahead was soon fulfilled. When the war ended, Schueller was hauled in front of the courts on a charge of collaboration, where, as we have seen, he was liberated largely because of the efforts of Pierre de Bénouville, whom he had barely met. And here, at last, is the explanation for this surprising intervention: Bénouville had been a contemporary of Dalle and Bettencourt at 104 rue de Vaugirard, and it was largely to oblige these friends that he agreed to testify for Schueller. Bettencourt, if not Schueller, had social matters highly organized, and Schueller now benefited from his excellent connections.

  Bénouville was not in any way put out by Schueller’s links with the cagoulards and MSR—rather the opposite: he had himself been an enthusiastic cagoulard. His name appears in the Corre list of members, and although when questioned in old age he refused to admit directly that he had belonged to La Cagoule, he reaffirmed that he thought Filliol and Deloncle had been “good chaps who refused to give in” (Des gens très sympas qui ne voulaient pas céder). On the same occasion he said that he quite understood why it had been necessary to assassinate the Soviet diplomat Dmitri Navachine—he had been tryi
ng to infiltrate the royalist journal Le Courrier Royal, something Bénouville seems to have felt merited a death sentence.12 His nationalism was so extreme that it was impossible for him to countenance any form of collaboration with the German occupation. But his gut loathing of the left remained undimmed, even when they were his fellow résistants. As Pierre Péan’s Vie et morts de Jean Moulin shows, he was almost certainly part of the complex machinations that betrayed the Communist Resistance leader Jean Moulin to the Germans. Moulin, a man Bénouville saw as standing “on the very left of the left,” was an associate of Pierre Cot, who had been interior minister at the time of the great demonstration of February 6, 1934, and who had ordered the police to fire on the crowd: “That was something about Moulin that I didn’t like at all.”13 Bénouville preferred to deal with characters like Georges Soulès, who had belonged to MSR but who in 1943 switched over to the Resistance, and who was close enough to Bénouville to have a special postbox arrangement to communicate with him.14 Indeed, Bénouville was, if anything, to the right of Schueller politically—certainly in his anti-Semitism. In 1937 he had been a regular contributor to Le Pays Libre, a violently anti-Semitic publication.1

  It was the 104 network, too, that steered Bettencourt clear of the anticipated post-Liberation hazards. By the summer of 1944 it was obvious that anyone who wanted to enter public life after the war would need to show they had been a résistant, and Mitterrand and Bénouville, who both had starry Resistance credentials, had worked together to ensure, while there was still time, that their old friend Bettencourt would come out of the war with the correct reputation. They did so by arranging to send him to Geneva on Resistance business.

  I’m just back from Geneva [Bettencourt wrote Schueller that September]. I can’t come to rue Royale immediately, but I can tell you that your Swiss affairs are in good shape. . . . As it turned out I didn’t need the money you so kindly made available to me there. There was enough credit available from the Resistance delegation. . . .15

  The Geneva trip did what it was intended to do, and in the years following the war, Bettencourt swiftly climbed the political ladder. Meanwhile, his intimacy with the Schuellers grew. Liliane Schueller was tubercular, and spent the winter of 1947–48 in the Swiss resort of Leysin; André joined her there, at the chic Hotel Belvedere. Soon the two were engaged, and on January 9, 1950, André Bettencourt and Liliane Schueller were married. The ceremony took place at Vallauris, the home of a family friend, rather than at Franconville or L’Arcouest. Evidently Liliane did not regard the second Madame Schueller as part of the family—or not enough to host her wedding reception. Nor, it seemed, did Schueller himself. Interviewed in 1954, he told journalist Merry Bromberger that he had “lost his wife, who had been such a support to him [and that] his daughter, Madame Bettencourt, the wife of a young deputy for Seine-Infèrieure, looks after the house at Franconville.”16 Of the former Miss Burrows there was no mention.2

  By this time the 104-L’Oréal connection had widened to include François Mitterrand. Mitterrand had had a busy and productive war. After escaping from his prisoner-of-war camp he had become caught up in Vichy politics, receiving the Francisque medal from Pétain himself, at the same time using his position at the head of the prisoners-of-war organization to run an important Resistance network. He had also fallen in love and got married. It was a varied, thrilling, and risky double and treble life, and one he hugely enjoyed. When the Liberation brought it to an end, he felt restless and dissatisfied. He wanted to enter politics, but was unable to locate a suitable political niche. Meanwhile his wife was pregnant, and he urgently needed to earn some money. So he turned to his friends for help—and, as always, 104 did not disappoint. Dalle, supported by André Bettencourt, used his influence with Schueller, and for a while, before returning to politics and getting elected as deputy for the Nièvre, Mitterrand edited Votre Beauté.

  He hated it. Editing a women’s magazine for a beauty-products company was not the future the ambitious François had envisaged. Every evening when he came home he grumbled to his wife about how he was wasting his life. For Schueller, L’Oréal represented first a scientific challenge, and then a bottomless fountain of cash. For Dalle, it would be a fascinating and lucrative career following in the footsteps of a man he revered. But although Mitterrand was grateful for the comfortable salary, he felt his association with Votre Beauté made him look ridiculous. Although his actual name never appeared, his alter ego Frédérique Marnais was much in evidence, writing articles and responding to readers’ letters. Why was François Mitterrand, of all people, advising women on their emotional problems and beauty routines? He made a few feeble attempts to turn Votre Beauté into a literary magazine, but met with no encouragement—there were, Danielle Mitterrand remembered, “constant battles with the editorial board.”17 And at home, things were also not going well. The Mitterrands’ first baby died at the age of three months, an event from which both he and his wife struggled to recover.

  Frédérique Marnais welcomed in the new year of 1946 with a touching and heartfelt piece entitled “A Woman’s Most Beautiful Necklace: The Arms of a Little Child.”18 But by then the association was clearly doomed. “I don’t exactly see this job as a religious calling,”19 he wrote irritably to his L’Oréal superiors—a fatal admission in a company where this was precisely the kind of dedication required from senior staff. As was inevitable, Mitterrand left L’Oréal soon after, and spent the summer of 1946 looking for a winnable seat in the Chamber of Deputies. In November he found it, in the department of the Nièvre, and by 1947 he was minister for war veterans.

  It was Mitterrand who brought Pierre de Bénouville onto the Schueller scene. Hauled up before the courts in 1946 on a charge of industrial collaboration, Schueller was in real danger of being convicted. And he knew—none better—the damning evidence that might be brought against him, even though a lot of what had been most compromising had not been recorded. In the end it was the quality of the witnesses that mattered—who testified against you, and who supported you. He needed to find people who would testify in his favor and whom the court could not dismiss—in other words, people with good Resistance credentials and political connections. The obvious person was Mitterrand, but he was taken up by political campaigning. So Pierre de Bénouville was called in—Mitterrand being an even older friend of his than Bettencourt, since the two of them had not only been students together, but had attended the same school in Angoulême.

  Bénouville did not disappoint. It was thanks to him that Eugène Schueller survived. He, who for the whole of his life had stood quite outside the family, business, and educational networks whose members controlled France, became caught up, through the boys from 104, at the very center of one such network. From this moment on, Schueller, his family, friends, and associates, would be part of the establishment—with all the potential for scandal and embarrassment that entailed.

  II

  For Helena Rubinstein, too, the war changed everything.

  The buyback from Lehman Brothers had marked, as Titus feared, the end of their marriage. They divorced in 1937, and by 1938 Madame had married again.

  She met her new husband, the Georgian prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, at a bridge party given by her old friend Marie-Blanche de Polignac (the daughter of her even older friend, Jeanne Lanvin). His title was a little dubious—gossip had it that when he presented his intended bride with a copy of the Almanach de Gotha, the page detailing his herita
ge had been specially printed and inserted. But no one was about to travel to Georgia to check it out. And in the meantime he was handsome, charming, and he made her laugh. They met again, several times, before she left Paris for New York. “Where do you like to dine in New York?” Artchil artlessly enquired. At the Colony, Helena replied. “Two weeks later he telephoned me, in New York. He had just arrived and meant to hold me to my promise, he said. Within an hour he called for me at my home, and that evening we dined at the Colony. How could I resist such a man? Our courtship was brief. In his usual direct way he said, ‘We are neither of us children, Helena, and you need me.’ ”20 He was forty-three, she, sixty-six. They understood each other perfectly.

  It was an excellent marriage. Unlike Titus, Artchil was only too happy to be Mr. Helena Rubinstein. He appreciated the opulent living and material peace of mind this title bestowed, and the price was not excessive: “I only had to sleep with her once,” he is reported to have said.21 After that he looked, with tactful discretion, elsewhere—an arrangement which suited them both perfectly. At sixty-six, an ardent sex life was not one of Helena’s requirements, if indeed it ever had been. She had married Artchil for other reasons. He was presentable, sweet-tempered, funny, and affectionate; her family, who mostly regarded each other with suspicion and dislike, all loved Artchil. And—he made his wife a princess! That little Chaja Rubinstein would become Princess Gourielli was a fate even her most extravagant imaginings could not have anticipated.