Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  Meanwhile, L’Oréal had not given up its ambitions regarding Helena Rubinstein, which was becoming weaker by the day. In 1983, following a Rubinstein family quarrel, a L’Oréal subsidiary had quietly acquired Helena Rubinstein’s Japanese and South American branches. And in October 1988, HR’s U.S. employees discovered, when they read the papers, that they had a new owner. Cosmair had bought Helena Rubinstein, Inc., including the European branches, for “several hundred million francs” (the franc was then valued at about ten to the pound sterling, and about seven to the dollar) in what the business press described as “a shrouded deal.”9 It made L’Oréal the biggest cosmetics business in the world, and put Jacques Corrèze where he had long wanted to be—in the chair of Helena Rubinstein.

  “Nothing ever happens at L’Oréal—it’s really boring, nothing but bigger and bigger profits,” a financial analyst told Le Monde in June 1988.10

  It would not stay boring long.

  II

  In February of 1988, eight months before the purchase of Helena Rubinstein was completed, L’Oréal learned, to its “utter astonishment,”11 that it had been placed on the blacklist of the Arab League’s anti-Israel boycott committee. The committee, whose offices were located in Damascus, had been set up in 1948, when the State of Israel was established, in an attempt to strangle the new state by cutting off all Arab trade with companies linked to Israel, or doing business with it. This proved rather an empty threat at first, but took on new force after oil prices quadrupled in 1973, leaving oil-producing countries with huge surpluses of petrodollars that made them highly desirable trading partners.

  L’Oréal had for many years maintained subsidiaries in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. But although no company likes to face the prospect of losing an entire segment of the world market, it might in principle have ignored the boycott committee. Indeed, in principle it had no option but to do so, since complying with the boycott had been outlawed in France in 1981, at the start of President Mitterrand’s first term. L’Oréal, however, was not the only company involved. In 1974, Liliane Bettencourt had exchanged a large block of her L’Oréal shares for shares in the Swiss food conglomerate Nestlé—a company of which Dalle, when he retired in 1984, had become vice president. All these shares were now owned by a holding company, Gesparal, of which Liliane Bettencourt owned 51 percent and Nestlé 49 percent, and which itself owned 53.65 percent of L’Oréal. And if Nestlé, as part owner of L’Oréal, were to become involved in the boycott, that would be serious indeed: Arab markets accounted for 15 percent of its milk products exports.12

  On the face of it, L’Oréal’s astonishment at being singled out by the boycott committee was logical. Helena Rubinstein did have an Israeli subsidiary—but L’Oréal had, as yet, no official ties with HR. In reality, however, the committee’s announcement came as no surprise at all, nor had the boycott committee suddenly acquired the gift of prophecy. This affair had been rumbling on ever since L’Oréal’s 1983 acquisition, through a subsidiary, of Helena Rubinstein’s Japanese and South American businesses. The boycott committee had told L’Oréal then that it was taking a risk, since the Rubinstein parent company had strong Zionist ties, but L’Oréal had set its sights on Helena Rubinstein and refused to be put off. On the contrary, the following year, 1984, they discreetly, and via another subsidiary, bought 45 percent of Helena Rubinstein, Inc., from Albi; and that same year, they sold off HR Inc.’s Israeli subsidiary to Israeli nationals in an attempt to head off the boycott threat. In 1985, however, the boycott committee announced that it was still not satisfied. L’Oréal indignantly riposted that it was not the owner of Helena Rubinstein—which indeed it was not. And there matters rested—until 1988.

  L’Oréal had two problems. The first was that French law forbade it to deal with the Arab boycott committee. The second was that its ties to Israel, far from being cut, had recently been strengthened.

  The first problem was annoying but not insurmountable. L’Oréal had for years been conducting discreet negotiations with the boycott committee. Now it dispatched France’s one-time ambassador to the United Nations, Claude de Kémoularia, to represent it in Damascus. M. de Kémoularia was a particularly apt choice, as he knew the people concerned: when President Mitterrand first outlawed all dealings with the boycott, it was Kémoularia who had been deputed to convince the Arab leaders that they would have to accept this new stance. Now he returned with a (to them) much more acceptable message, and was soon back in Paris with the boycott committee’s conditions. Among them was a stipulation that L’Oréal must either buy the whole of Helena Rubinstein or drop all links with the company; that all Israeli manufacture of Helena Rubinstein products must be stopped, along with all Helena Rubinstein activity in that country; and that all existing directors of Helena Rubinstein be removed and replaced (it was understood, by non-Jews: this was when Jacques Corrèze became HR’s chairman).

  Since L’Oréal was anyway about to finalize the total purchase of Helena Rubinstein, Inc., Corrèze, who was in charge of the Israeli end of these negotiations, was dispatched to offer the Israeli buyer of the business in that country a manufacturing deal in Germany that would be far cheaper than maintaining an Israeli factory. The Israelis were happy to accept this offer, and were also persuaded to drop the name “Helena Rubinstein” for the preposterous reason that if the firm was to be L’Oréal’s Israeli agent, there was no reason to use this particular brand name. It was agreed that HR Israel would henceforth be known as Interbeauty. Only the paperwork remained to be finalized.

  But just as the Helena Rubinstein problem seemed to have been settled, a new one arose. Although François Dalle was no longer CEO of L’Oréal, he still maintained ties with the firm, heading its strategy committee. L’Oréal had money to invest—in 1987 its net profits had for the first time topped the billion-franc mark—and in 1988 Dalle, looking for profitable ways to invest it, had done a deal with an old friend, Jean Frydman. Frydman, the son of Polish-Jewish parents who had emigrated to Paris when he was five, had known Dalle for thirty years. They had met soon after the war, in which Frydman had been a daring résistant, and had been good friends ever since. One of Frydman’s enterprises, CDG, owned a valuable catalogue of film rights, including the non-U.S. rights to High Noon, Citizen Kane, and other movie classics. It was agreed that L’Oréal would form a joint venture with CDG called Paravision, and that Frydman would sit on its board.

  The Paravision deal was only a few weeks old when Dalle realized that it might raise problems for L’Oréal. Dalle had thought Frydman lived in Canada, where he owned a ranch, but in fact he now spent most of his time in Israel, and was domiciled in that country. And although the boycott committee’s conditions regarding Helena Rubinstein had been met, the final removal of L’Oréal from the blacklist had not yet been signed and sealed. That would not happen until the end of 1989. Meanwhile, in Damascus and Paris, multiple copies of questionnaires and affidavits languished on bureaucrats’ desks or got lost in embassies awaiting signature, and more and more generous sub rosa sweeteners to intermediaries were required, and envoys expensively shuttled back and forth, and nothing was settled. In the spring of 1989, therefore, Dalle suggested to Frydman that it might be a good thing if he temporarily stepped down from the joint venture’s board.

  Thus far, both Dalle and Frydman agreed that this was the way things were. As to what happened next, however, they disagreed bitterly.

  Dalle said Frydman had not objected to resigning temporarily from the Pa
ravision board, and had even had a letter of resignation prepared by one of his aides. Frydman, on the contrary, insisted that he had objected, and strongly: he had no wish whatever to accommodate the Arab boycott committee. Despite this, however, his resignation was offered and accepted—without his knowledge—at a board meeting held, also without his knowledge, in April of 1989.

  That he had known nothing about the meeting was not surprising, since investigations revealed that it had never taken place. L’Oréal at first tried to deny any such maneuver, then admitted that that was indeed what had happened. But such proceedings were apparently not unusual. Notional board meetings, fleshed out later on paper, were, Dalle insisted, quite normal in France.

  However, Frydman was in no mood to listen to feeble excuses. For he had made another disturbing discovery. It concerned Cosmair’s Jacques Corrèze, who as the original instigator of the Helena Rubinstein deal was deeply involved in the boycott negotiations. Frydman knew Jacques Corrèze—or a Jacques Corrèze—only too well. While the fifteen-year-old Frydman had been escaping deportation and risking his life with the Resistance, Jacques Corrèze had been Eugène Deloncle’s loyal lieutenant in MSR—not merely propagating its hateful doctrines but actually leading the gangs who took possession of properties once owned by Jewish families like the Frydmans. After the war he had been disgraced and condemned to ten years’ hard labor. Could this Corrèze be the same person?

  He could, and he was. This one-time Jew-baiter not only held an important position in a leading French company but was now engaged in the ethnic cleansing of an American Jewish firm whose takeover he had engineered. He had even had the chutzpah to visit Israel, several times, to negotiate the sale of Helena Rubinstein’s Israeli branch and the closure of its manufacturing operation there. It was Corrèze, Frydman declared, who had wanted him removed from the Paravision board. He was determined to expose L’Oréal’s fascist and racist connections, and show the world how it conducted its affairs.

  Dalle was apoplectic. He insisted that not only had he never been an anti-Semite, but that Frydman’s real aim in raising these irrelevant, if embarrassing, matters, was financial: to blackmail L’Oréal into conceding a better settlement regarding Paravision than they were prepared to offer. “Frydman’s using the Shoah to make himself some money, and that’s the beginning and end of it,” Dalle declared,13 a remark he later regretted, but did not retract. At L’Oréal’s 1991 annual general meeting, its new CEO, Lindsay Owen-Jones, gave shareholders a long explanation of its antiracist principles. His speech was met with “ringing applause,”14 and the company’s unions, including one that was Communist-led, issued a statement confirming that in all their dealings with L’Oréal and Dalle they had never been aware of any racism.

  Frydman admitted that the Paravision affair had done him no harm financially. On the contrary, he emerged 200 million francs to the good—by no means negligible, though far less than he had asked and less than he had hoped for.15 But he was infuriated by Dalle’s insinuations (repeated by L’Oréal’s vice president, André Bettencourt) that money was his real concern in this affair. “There are three things he regards as sacred,” his brother, David, said, “his family, Israel, and the Resistance.”16 And L’Oréal, by employing Jacques Corrèze, had insulted two of them.

  III

  Just as the boycott committee’s interest in L’Oréal had not exactly been a total surprise, so Jean Frydman’s revelations regarding Jacques Corrèze’s previous life were not news to L’Oréal’s senior management.

  Corrèze’s last public appearance in France had been in October 1948, when he had been chief defendant in the Cagoule trial, which had been postponed when war broke out but not canceled. For a while it had seemed as though the trial would be postponed indefinitely, for the enormous dossier of relevant papers—more than two tons of them—had vanished. There was a rumor that just before the Germans arrived in Paris in 1940 the papers had been sent for safekeeping to Lesparre in the Gironde, the constituency of Georges Mandel, then minister of the interior. But after the Liberation, when the examining magistrate traveled there from Paris to find them so that the prosecution could proceed, no one at the Lesparre Palais de Justice could help him.

  The magistrate was about to return to Paris empty-handed when someone suggested that the concierge, who had been there throughout the war, might know something. As it turned out, she did. One night in June 1940, a party of men had arrived with a load of boxes which they hid in the washrooms. The boxes had been stacked up at one end, a wooden partition erected to conceal them, and the concierge sworn to silence. Then the men left. She had never said a word, but as far as she knew, everything was still where they had put it. Sure enough, there, behind a heap of assorted odds and ends, was the partition—and there, behind it, were the Cagoule papers: damp and stained, but still legible. In October 1945, those of the seventy-one accused who could be located were politely requested to present themselves at police stations. Fifteen obliged, and forty were eventually tried: amongst them, Jacques Corrèze.

  Corrèze’s story, as he told it to the court, was a bizarre mix of thuggery, courtly love, and melodrama. He was, a reporter noted, “dark and romantic-looking, extremely courteous and remarkably intelligent”; he affected “a hand-on-heart frankness”17—but did not, in the end, reveal much. He told the court that before the war his father had been an interior decorator in Auxerre, where the Deloncles had a country house. In 1932 they decided to do the place up: Jacques went to look it over—and fell under their spell. “I was nineteen, and I fell deeply in love with Mme. Deloncle,” he testified. He insisted, however, that their relations had remained platonic. He joined the household as a sort of additional son, and lived with them from then on. But although Deloncle inducted him into La Cagoule, and later the MSR, he insisted that he had played little part in their policymaking. “I was just a soldier, they weren’t going to share the secrets of the gods with a boy like me!”18

  The truth, as it emerged from the documents, was rather different. Corrèze had been no minor figure in “Monsieur Marie’s” clandestine universe, but had been his chief aide and confidant in both La Cagoule and MSR. His dossier contained an envelope with all the keys of the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, and maps of how to get to the minister’s private office, for use during the planned coup d’état of 1937. During the Occupation, “Colonel” Corrèze, whose group marched the streets of Paris in high boots, tunics, and cross-belts, oversaw expropriation operations, received reports from concierges and neighbors when the buildings were taken over, and made inventories of their contents. Among these was the building in the rue du Paradis that had housed the Ligue Contre Antisémitisme, where, subsequent to Corrèze’s “liberation” of it, the fascist Charbonneau so enjoyed returning to his cozy office after MSR meetings chez L’Oréal in rue Royale. Its filing cabinets, desks, chairs, safes, stepladders, were all carefully listed.19 And alongside the highly profitable expropriation business, rumors held that Deloncle had set up a “parallel” police to extort money from Jewish entrepreneurs, with Corrèze as its chief enforcer.20

  However, in the middle of 1941, when the Germans abandoned the Nazi-Soviet pact and marched on Moscow, Deloncle lost interest in expropriations. The most important task as he now saw it was to join the fight against the Bolsheviks. He therefore set about raising a French volunteer force to fight in Russia alongside the Germans. The Légion de Volontaires Françaises (or LVF) was perhaps the extreme point
of the collaboration. Of little consequence militarily (only 3,205 volunteers signed up), it had considerable psychological importance, allowing French fascists to feel that the Germans really valued them as partners. Corrèze, Deloncle’s loyal protégé, was one of the first to sign up. He spent the hellish winter of 1941–42 on the Russian front, failing to take Moscow, and returned in April 1942.

  By then, however, the MSR was in disarray. For now that German victory seemed less certain, Deloncle was rethinking his position vis-à-vis collaboration. Unseated in a putsch by the assassin Jean Filliol, he opened contacts with the Americans, hinting that he was working with the résistant (and ex-cagoulard) General Giraud. The German army was already less than enthusiastic about him on account of a mini-Kristallnacht he organized in October 1941, when his men blew up seven Paris synagogues using explosives supplied by the Gestapo—a gesture that may have pleased the Berlin high command but appalled the Wehrmacht because it needlessly antagonized the French, without whose cooperation, or at least indifference, the Occupation would become much harder to sustain. Deloncle was becoming a liability.

  On January 7, 1944, he was dealt with. At seven thirty that morning, the concierge of his apartment building in the fashionable 16th arrondissement was awakened by repeated knocking on the door. She opened it to find fifteen civilians armed with machine guns, some speaking perfect French, others with heavy German accents. They ordered her to go up to Deloncle’s apartment via the service stairs. They would follow. She was to ring Deloncle’s bell and say it was the gas meter reader. On the stairs, however, the party met Lucienne, the Deloncles’ maid. She opened their door with her key, and the armed men found themselves face-to-face with the Deloncles’ son Louis and a manservant holding a breakfast tray. Louis shouted, “Papa! Papa! Des terroristes!” and Deloncle appeared, wearing only his pyjama jacket. He left the room to get his pistol; the armed men followed. There were a number of shots. When the men left, Deloncle was dead, and Louis had a bullet in his head, leaving him permanently disabled.