by Ruth Brandon
It was also indirectly because of Artchil that she had to acknowledge something that had not concerned her since she left Kazimierz: the fact of her Jewishness.
Helena’s idea of relaxation had hitherto been limited to bridge or the theater. But Artchil wanted to give parties, so she found a suitable apartment: a twenty-six-room triplex on Park Avenue at Sixty-fifth Street. When she tried to buy it, however, her offer was turned down: the building had a no-Jews policy. Enraged, Madame bought the building. The apartment was hers. But for the first time in her life, anti-Semitism had become something she could not ignore.
Since leaving Krakow she had not lived among Jews; neither, until the problem with the Park Avenue apartment building, had discrimination brought her Jewishness home to her. It was true that her Jewishness enforced certain business imperatives. When she set up her first American branches they were in cities where Jews were accepted, such as San Francisco, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Atlantic City; she left strongholds of anti-Semitism such as Boston, Washington, Palm Beach, and Newport to her goyishe rival Elizabeth Arden, whose business was distinctly WASP-oriented. But she felt no personal affinity with Jews—rather the contrary. She had refused to live on New York’s Upper West Side because it was “too Jewish,” and disliked the French Riviera, the preferred playground of her rival Estée Lauder, for the same reason.
It looked, for a while, as though this distancing would survive even World War II. When, toward the end of the thirties, Marc Chagall asked her for some money to help relatives escape from Germany, she told him to try elsewhere. And when war broke out she followed her usual practice and left for distant parts, taking an extended cruise with Artchil to Central and South America. Everything, including real estate, was wonderfully cheap there, and she took the opportunity to establish branches in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Panama. She was soon, she happily told the New York Times, doing “astounding” business.22 Over the following four years she went back twice, eventually, as always, placing relatives in charge of the new offices.
But as the war dragged on, even Madame had to recognize that being Jewish enforced perspectives and priorities rather different from those she had hitherto preferred. She urged all those members of her family who still remained within Hitler’s reach to leave while they could, with the promise of jobs wherever they might choose to settle. Her sister Stella went to Argentina, and a great-niece named Regina was sent to Australia. But the sister after whom that Regina had been named, the only one of Helena’s generation not to have left Krakow, refused to budge and was killed in the death camps.
Regina’s death was a turning point for Helena. She threw herself wholeheartedly into the war effort, becoming a booster for War Bonds and organizing concerts on behalf of the Polish Red Cross. She had always been unenthusiastic about the Germans, furious during World War I when her German-sounding name had led people to accuse her of being pro-German herself. “Poles hated always the Germans. . . . I am really upset. I got a letter . . . which mentioned that some letters were received from England re my pro-German feelings and so on. Fancy I wish them going to hell, excuse the expression, I hate the sight of them. . . .”23 Returning now from one of her trips to South America, where so many Nazi war criminals would soon find shelter, she assured the New York Times that among all the people she met, the Germans were universally unpopular, “and even when it was hard to get servants many people would not engage a German cook.’’ She “estimated that 90 percent of the Argentine people were ‘really our allies.’ ”24
When the war ended, she became a keen supporter of the new State of Israel (which she always called Palestine). “I’m going to build a museum and a factory in . . . in? Not Jerusalem but the other town,” she told Patrick O’Higgins in 1958.
“Tel Aviv?”
“Yes, that’s the place.”
Feted as a big donor, she sat through any number of tedious receptions, and finally met Israel’s then foreign minister, Golda Meir. Surveying Mrs. Meir’s craggy features, she remarked disapprovingly on the minister’s lack of makeup. Then the two formidable ladies got down to business—in English, although Yiddish was in both cases their mother tongue.
“Madame Rubinstein, what do you think of our country?” Mrs. Meir asked.
“If I plan to build a factory and a museum, I must think highly of it.”
“Which do you think is the more important?”
“The factory!”
“I agree!”25
And with that simple exchange, the stage was set for the drama to come.
[1] It is ironic to note that after the war Bénouville became a director of Dassault-Breguet, the aircraft company run by Marcel Dassault, né Marcel Bloch, who had been deported to Buchenwald in 1944 with his wife and children.
[2] She outlived him and is buried at Ploubazlanec, near L’Arcouest.
Chapter Five
A Takeover and Three Scandals
I regret having done . . . for a noble cause, things that may have inconvenienced other human beings.
—JACQUES CORRÈZE, JUNE 20, 1991
It is true that I hired Jacques Corrèze although he had been condemned twice . . . but he had just been released from jail. I don’t regret having hired him, he was everything I hoped he might be. And I’m not going to take lessons in patriotism from anybody!
—FRANÇOIS DALLE, JUNE 19, 1991
A weak man will always be more of a coward than a man in his prime; a Jew will always be more avaricious than a Christian.
—ANDRÉ BETTENCOURT, L’Élan, DECEMBER 13, 1941
I’ve led a useful life, after all.
—ANDRÉ BETTENCOURT, MARCH 9, 1995
I
On April 1, 1965, Helena Rubinstein relinquished her avid grip on life. In a memoir published the previous year she had for the first time admitted her real birthdate. She was ninety-two years old.
Until a year before her death, Madame had remained in active, some thought hyperactive, charge of her business. But on the morning of May 21, 1964, she was surprised by thieves in her New York triplex. They gained entry by pretending to deliver a flower arrangement, then tied up the butler at gunpoint and made for the main bedroom, which they expected to find empty. Madame, however, was no longer an early riser. On the contrary, she liked to conduct much of her business from her bed. At eight thirty a.m. she was eating her breakfast toast, prior to conferring with her secretary and publicity adviser.
Presented with the traditional choice—her money or her life—she retorted that at her age she didn’t care if they killed her, but she was damned if they were going to rob her. At which point she realized that her keys—including the keys to her safe and the filing cabinet in which she kept her jewels—were in her purse on the bed, under the intruders’ noses.
Fortunately the purse was buried deep in papers, and the thieves were by then busy emptying drawers and disconnecting phones. Madame silently extracted the keys and with characteristic presence of mind dropped them in the one place she could be sure no one would ever look: down her ample bosom. By the time the thieves noticed the purse it contained only some handfuls of paper, a powder compact, five twenty-dollar bills, and a pair of diamond earrings worth around forty thousand dollars. The earrings rolled away as they upended it, and Madame covered them with a Kleenex. One of the thieves grabbed the money. “Your friend took a hundred dollars out of my purse. See that you get your share,” she admon
ished his friends. Furious and frustrated, aware that time was passing and that other household members would soon arrive, they ripped off her bedcovers, tore the sheets in strips and tied her to a chair, before fleeing with their negligible loot. And there, screaming at the top of her still-considerable lungs, she was found by the butler, who had managed to break free of his own bonds. After he freed her, Madame instructed him to put the thieves’ roses in the icebox, in case there should be company for lunch. She calculated that after paying $40 for the roses, they had made just $60 profit on their morning.1
Madame was justifiably proud of her sangfroid. But the shock drained her, and she never recovered either her confidence or her health. As always when faced with a crisis, she took refuge in motion, traveling from New York to Paris, on to Tangiers and evenings of bridge with such of the ancient International Set as still survived (“If you add up the combined ages round this table we’re back in the sixteenth century,” quipped one of the players, at which Madame snapped “Don’t—until you’ve paid the ten francs you owe me!”), back to Paris, on to Normandy, which held sentimental memories of her romance with Edward Titus, a stop at Saint-Cloud, where she had established her first French factory (“It’s where I was always happiest,” she sighed, “in my kitchen, my laboratory”). Then she returned to New York, suffered a stroke, and died.2
Helena Rubinstein’s death liberated a small mountain of possessions. Her estate was variously estimated at between $1 million and $100 million, depending on what was counted in. The American business alone grossed over $22 million a year.3 Officially, it was publicly owned, but in fact Madame personally held 52 percent of the shares—worth around $30 million—as she had done ever since the Lehman Brothers maneuver. The Park Avenue triplex was rented, in a move that would surely have appalled her, to Charles Revson of Revlon, an upstart whose name she had always refused to utter, referring to him only as “the nail man.” Her will, when it was read, contained 121 individual bequests.4 But that was just the property: gowns, jewels, pictures, real estate. The business was not so easily disposed of. The industry that she had founded in one room and a “kitchen” was by the time of her death the tenth-most important in the United States, just behind rubber. Helena Rubinstein, Inc., had become an empire. Where would it end up?
For her American competitors, the problem was easily solved. The business would be sold, and one of them would buy. Particularly keen was a firm called Cosmair. Set up in 1953, Cosmair, although nominally independent, was part-owned and effectively controlled by L’Oréal, and was L’Oréal’s sole U.S. licensee. The person appointed to run it by Schueller, John Seemuller, was half-American—he was the person who had performed those risky missions for the firm in France during the war, using his American passport to run forbidden items across the border between the occupied and nonoccupied zones. The Cosmair job may have been Schueller’s way of showing his appreciation. But Seemuller did not appreciate how tricky it might be to penetrate the American market, and made little headway.
Seemuller’s incompetence frustrated François Dalle, who was keen to extend L’Oréal’s reach into the huge market of the United States. He was also anxious to broaden L’Oréal’s range to include cosmetics, whose sales, as women cast off housewifery and flooded into the workplace during the 1960s and early seventies, were rising at an average of 10 percent a year. One of Dalle’s first acts on taking over as CEO was therefore to appoint his own man to head Cosmair: the suave and charming Jacques Corrèze, who had been vice president of L’Oréal’s Spanish subsidiary, Procasa. Corrèze was good at both administration and business, and was particularly good with money. Seemuller had quickly run through all the cash Paris allowed him, to little effect; Corrèze, Dalle remembered, was “close with his—which was to say, our—pennies.”5
In 1965, when Helena Rubinstein died, Cosmair was still small. It had only twenty employees, producing and distributing L’Oréal’s hair-care preparations to beauty parlors. But Corrèze had made a point of getting to know Madame—he was just the sort of man she liked, smooth, cultivated, and full of Old World charm—and when she died, he was determined that if anyone took over Helena Rubinstein, Inc., it would be Cosmair. At the end of the war, French manufacturers, who since 1940 had enjoyed a market in which anything they produced was snatched from the shelves, had been rocked by the sudden influx of unaccustomed competition from America. Now it was L’Oréal’s turn to extend its reach into America.
Helena Rubinstein, however, was not for sale. Although the American branch was publicly quoted, all its other branches (except the English business and its South African and Far East subsidiaries, which were the property of a foundation set up to avoid inheritance taxes) remained privately owned. The company was now managed by Madame’s son, Roy Titus, and her nephew and niece, Regina’s son and daughter Oskar Kolin and Mala Rubinstein, who were reported to have metamorphosed “from depression to a vibrant pragmatism.”6 Released from Madame’s beady eye and unsettling tendency to descend unannounced and bawl out all those present, they were enjoying the unaccustomed pleasures of self-rule.
But those pleasures did not last, for they did not get on. Indeed, the experience of Helena Rubinstein, Inc., as it declined after its founder’s death (in marked contrast to L’Oréal, which continued from strength to strength under Dalle) might have been designed to prove Eugène Schueller’s theory that business and family were best kept separate. Although Madame had always assumed that “the family” would carry on the business after her death, she had never trained a successor. That would not only have meant admitting her own mortality, but would have run the risk of transferring too much of her own power to someone else, something quite alien to her autocratic character.
Instead, she had encouraged rivalries. Although Roy was her firstborn, she had never taken him seriously, preferring his younger brother, Horace, whose only real interest in the firm while he was alive (he predeceased his mother, much to her anguish) had been as a source of cash. Her real business partners had been Oskar, a sharp accountant who did any necessary dirty work and was known to all as the Lord High Executioner, and his sister Mala, of whom she had been fond, and whom Roy bitterly resented. “She enjoys it,” her long-time secretary, Ruth Hopkins, said, she “plays one against the other.”7 But all this was secondary—for Madame, and nobody else, made the decisions: as she had liked to say, “I am the business.” The inevitable upshot was that her death left an unfillable void at the business’s center. Once the firm’s living trademark and main motive power had vanished, all that remained was a disunited boardroom with no clear strategy.
By 1972, the family had had enough and decided to sell. The buyer, Colgate-Palmolive, paid $146 million: more than twenty times earnings. But Colgate soon regretted its purchase. The overseas businesses, which continued to operate much as before, remained profitable. But the American arm soon began to lose money. Colgate’s idea had been to integrate the Rubinstein product range into its existing marketing operation. But as Madame could have told them had she still been around to do so, high-end beauty products require special sales techniques, different from those that sell everyday necessities like soap and toothpaste. By 1978, Helena Rubinstein’s losses were estimated at $22 million, and its debts at $50 million. Colgate had had enough, and Helena Rubinstein was once more for sale.
In early 1979, KAO, a Japanese toothpaste business, was reported to have offered $75 million for it. Later that same year, L’Oréal was again in the picture, the p
rice now having dropped to $35 million. But neither sale materialized. In 1980, however, Colgate finally offloaded its unwise acquisition. The buyer was a privately owned concern, Albi Enterprises, the price $20 million, plus a Colgate guarantee for up to $43 million in bank loans.8 Albi quickly recouped its outlay by selling off Helena Rubinstein’s mass-market lines and its American headquarters. By 1985 the company’s only American employees were a dozen people in a New York office. They spent their days consolidating international financial statements, and no longer had any idea who they worked for.
Cosmair, by contrast, was doing very well. During the 1970s, Dalle had pushed L’Oréal’s U.S. subsidiary into high gear, investing heavily in research and identifying profitable niches in what the industry jargon called a “maturing” market. Some of this success was down to deep pockets: L’Oréal, and hence Cosmair, was now part-owned by the Swiss foods giant Nestlé. But Cosmair also had a dynamic new managing director of its own. Dalle, like Schueller before him, was looking out for a suitable successor, and had recently identified him in the person of Lindsay Owen-Jones. In 1985, Dalle planned to retire. There would follow a short interregnum, when the firm would be run by its head of research, Charles Zviak, after which, in the autumn of 1988, “O-J” would become L’Oréal’s CEO. In the meantime he was put in charge of Cosmair.
Arriving in New York in 1981, Owen-Jones won a reputation as a ruthless and aggressive player in an increasingly tough market. In 1983, Cosmair staged a brilliant coup, buying up the entire European stock of aerosol cans in preparation for the introduction of its Free Hold hair-styling mousse. The mousse became terrifically popular, and since Cosmair owned all the aerosol cans, no one could compete until they had found another source, which did not happen for several crucial months. Magazines that failed to place Cosmair’s ads in what O-J considered the best spots had the company’s advertising withdrawn. And the company ferociously, and successfully, jockeyed for counter space in department stores and other outlets. By 1984, Cosmair’s sales had tripled, to $600 million.
