“Is it always this wonderful?” she whispered.
He looked around and shrugged.
She raised her glass and toasted her brother. “To life.” She giggled. “My new life.”
He smiled. Her excitement was contagious. And then, with a brotherly pat, he whispered, “You’re going to need some new clothes.”
“What?” she said.
“The professional girls dress up for work,” he said.
She inhaled, looked down, appraising her long skirt, its belted waist, fitted bodice, and the buttons nearest her neck. It was appropriate but hardly daring. “Guess I’m going to have to go shopping.”
“I’ll help you,” he said. “I heard there are some darling things at Lord and Taylor.”
4
THE ART OF LISTENING
Melbourne, 1923
Being a counter girl was not the worst fate, given that it combined two of Josiah’s favorite pastimes: watching people and talking to them. And best of all, listening. She could work on her English while distracting herself from the home in Poland she dearly missed. That it gave her a break from the back of the store where her cousins and uncle spent most of the day, stacking and stocking the overstuffed shelves, was also a perk. She could pass the hours advising customers on the thing they claimed to have come in for, while, in fact, talking to them about the thing they really wanted to talk about. Themselves. She made a game of it, predicting what was weighing on their minds while upholding a semblance of small talk. Intuition availed her with special insight into their worries and woes.
Josiah’s uncle and aunt were no substitute for the warmth of her own family. Her uncle Solomon was stern and anxious, and his wife, Masha, was critical and small-minded. Somehow, in spite of her uncle’s demeanor, the store was a cheerful place, two places really: in front, a de facto community center for Melbourne’s hardworking men; in back, a stockroom for medicines and salves. Each had their own healing power. Talking was perhaps the best cure of all.
The Australian summers and winters were basically indistinguishable, and both required a certain set of provisions to deal with the harsh climate. This year, there were floods of biblical proportions and then, after the water receded, a sweltering and lengthy heat wave that put everyone on edge and gave women a bit more permission to wear less restrictive clothing and strip to their lace undergarments. Extreme conditions were the norm in Melbourne, and they created a cycle of their own.
A steady influx of foreigners and a thriving farming community made Melbourne a busy city, causing many of its residents to refer to it fondly as “the Paris of the Southeast.” The store offered Josiah two disparate habitats: one, a busy workplace with a constant stream of tasks that needed her attention at all hours; and the other, at the counter, an endless stream of customers and their diversions. Other people’s problems. Both were surprisingly intriguing, with the back room sating the curiosity of her probing mind and the counter offering a more mindless pastime. She learned the basics of retail in the back—stocking, pricing, ordering inventory—while honing and flexing her knack for soothing people’s woes out front. It was here that she learned the art of customer service, understanding how to decipher her customers’ actual needs, as opposed to their professed ones.
The lady customers all had a version of the same gripe: their husbands had wandering eyes, and too many women to wander to, many of them clad scantily in the latest bathing fashions and permitted to dress in much less clothing because of the oppressive heat. The wives were thus doubly embattled, their skin slowly blistering under the Australian sun—and their souls withering because of the atrophy and the competition. Working at the counter of her uncle’s store afforded Josiah a bird’s-eye view. She was privy to the ways of this new world and, in her small way, able to make her mark. She learned to both soothe and sell.
A lady entered the store, sighing heavily, her greying hair pulled into a messy nest of a bun. She approached the counter and busied herself at a console for eyewear. Within moments, it was clear to Josiah that the lady was not staring at the eyewear, but rather staring at Josiah’s bare arms and flushed face.
“You’re very lucky,” the lady said. “Your skin glows naturally. And it’s so perfect and pale.”
“Nonsense,” said Josiah, fanning herself. “This damned heat is what’s making me glow.” She tried to smile.
The lady sighed and nodded her head in agreement.
“Truly, though,” said Josiah, “nothing good comes without hard work.”
The lady studied Josiah and set her bags down.
“I have something for you,” said Josiah.
She reached into a lower drawer where she kept one jar of the cream she had brought from home, almost as a souvenir, a token that sparked memories of her mother. Its milky-white fluid glistened like a pearl. She filled an empty sky-blue glass medicine jar with a few dollops. “Apply this after the bath. Make tiny, gentle circles.” She demonstrated the motion. “Not too hard. You don’t want to stress the skin. It’s important to moisturize and stimulate.”
The lady looked on, mouth agape.
Josiah might as well have been selling opium, so precious was the promise her potion offered.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Give it a week or two.”
The lady smiled and took Josiah’s gift with a somber look. A look of profound gratitude.
She was back for a refill in less than a week, at which time Josiah accepted a small fee at the lady’s insistence.
“You must let me pay you,” said the lady. “This cream could save my marriage.” She stuffed a pound into Josiah’s hand.
Josiah smiled, warmed by the woman’s relief. She put the money into her pocket and resolved to mention the transaction to her uncle. When the time was right.
5
LESSONS IN BUSINESS
New York City, 1923
The office was not quite the center of commerce Constance envisioned when she applied for the job. Her first day of work she was given a seat on a spindly wooden chair in a small back office, equidistant from the lobby and the lab. She shared this office with a dowdy and weathered receptionist who wheezed when she spoke and a typewriter that rattled with every letter she pressed. The defects were hard to ignore. But she forced herself to think of all the perks. This job offered the most important things: a steady paycheck and a stronghold in New York. Perhaps she could make headway at the company once she gained Dr. Osborne’s trust.
At lunch, she conducted a subtle interrogation of her office-mate.
“Do they ever let the secretaries into the lab?” Constance asked.
“Oh, no, we’re not allowed back there.” She did not look up from her reading material, Ladies’ Home Journal.
“Why not?” Constance asked.
Her office-mate shrugged.
“Who gets to go in there?” asked Constance.
“Strictly approved personnel.”
Constance nodded. The laboratory door opened briefly and she caught a tantalizing glimpse. She resolved in that moment to obtain a tour by whatever means necessary. It would take her only a month.
The lab may as well have been a candy shop. It was crammed with a colorful spectrum of tubes and jars, each bubbling with a different concoction. On one wall, a set of connecting tubes conveyed a river of red. Nearby, a vat of brown liquid simmered under a lid. In the next room, a potent smell accosted her at the door. And along the back wall, jars of powders, stacked floor to ceiling, brought her back to a Persian spice store she had wandered into as a child in Montreal. Fine powder—red, white, and black—teetered from the floor to the ceiling in jars, jars packed so tightly as to make the wall a checkerboard.
There are moments in life when dreams crystallize, when disparate ideas—hopes and plans—merge into one. This was that moment for Constance. Her senses flooded with possibility.
“This is the aspirin. Biggest seller.” Dr. Osborne gestured carelessly at one wall. “This is the cold remedy. Ver
y popular. Does well for us.” He stopped at a vat of bubbling lard, brownish with a golden tint. “This is the beauty cream.”
“Beauty cream?” Constance repeated, trying to dim her excitement.
She leaned over and inhaled the putrid smell of lemon and lard. This was the fount of beauty for Dr. Osborne’s dutiful customers? “And these?” She pointed at the powders.
“Oh, those,” he said. “We’re not exactly sure what to do with those.”
“Why not?” asked Constance.
“We’re experimenting with different scents for the Ladies’ Beauty Cream, but, at the moment, I’m a little stumped.”
“Why’s that?” Constance asked.
“I don’t know,” said Dr. Osborne. “Maybe because I don’t know any beautiful women.”
“I see,” said Constance. She was leaning against a counter and realized that Dr. Osborne was getting closer.
“Maybe you could teach me something about that.”
“About what?” asked Constance.
“Beauty.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, instinctively taking a step back.
“You’re awfully beautiful,” he said, taking a step closer.
She took another step back, but he reached for her and gripped her by the arm.
“Are you willing to teach me about beauty?” he asked.
“Hmm,” said Constance. She looked him in the eye. “That depends. On what you’re willing to teach me about business.”
Just like that, Constance completed her first business transaction, trading time in the lab for input on Dr. Osborne’s Ladies’ Beauty Cream and other sundry favors. It was not the first time she had used her looks to advance her career. At twenty-two, Constance was no stranger to the unwanted advances of young men. But she had learned to tune out the effects. Certain sacrifices were necessary to achieve one’s goals. Even for a buffoon like this. Not least of all, a man.
6
WORKING THE COUNTER
Melbourne, 1923
Josiah stared down the mirror, focusing on her eyes. A woman instinctively knows certain universal truths. Draw attention to the good. Downplay the defects. Josiah had long employed this strategy in regard to her own looks. She was not the type of woman who would be called a natural beauty, but she had the commanding presence of an empress. In truth, she didn’t have time for the beauty regimen she extolled. She was petite but strangely imposing. Her eyes were large, oval, black, Slavic, and penetrating, consuming much of her pale, round face. Yet over time she proved the axiom that beauty comes from the inside, that beauty begins with confidence. Her greatest challenge was the fatigue of long hours and too little sleep. Even with Josiah’s creams and potions, this was hard to conceal.
The girls she grew up with in Poland fell into two distinct categories: Raphaelite beauties with long, mournful faces, light eyes, and pink skin like the angels on Italian church ceilings; and darker, more angular women with black hair and eyebrows who looked like the old Russian czars as they aged. Josiah fell into the latter category. All of them were Jewish. Within her tribe, some were overly inbred, with the palest skin and a slight overbite, looking as if they could disappear at a moment’s notice or succumb to a slight case of influenza. Yet a few were truly beautiful due to a unique alchemy of their Sephardic past and Eastern European highlights. Even so, Josiah did not always love the face she saw in the mirror. She saw the extremes, the very large eyes, the absurdly high cheekbones with a near razor’s edge. She saw the excessively pale skin that caused her mother to call her Zwłoki, Polish for “corpse.” She saw the way, over the years, her looks afforded her power—how her face changed, from unique as a child, to striking as a teenager, and eventually to beautiful as a woman. Her face drew others to look. In an era of silent movies, her face was that of an engaging vamp, a Theda Bara type. The actress was already a favorite of Josiah’s, and even more so when she found out she was born Theodosia Goodman and that she was also the daughter of a Polish-born Jewish tailor.
Now, as she stood alone at the mirror, she struggled to understand why: what was it about this unusual face that drew others’ attention? She worked hard. That was true. And she cared about people. She was genuinely interested in the ladies who stopped by her uncle’s store, who stood at the counter like grazing cows, pretending to search for products while actually probing her for advice. She cared about these people and they cared about her. She knew what they were really asking and what they wanted to hear. And it cost her nothing to offer this. And her interpretation turned a nice profit.
“Do you have anything for an upset stomach?” meant “Do you think my husband is cheating on me?”
“Do you have anything for chapped skin?” meant “Am I still beautiful?”
“Do you have anything for the nerves?” was code for “My husband has left me.”
“What can I do for dry hands?” meant “I’m worried sick.”
She had a special knack, not only for decoding the clues of her customers, but also for soothing their nerves, for saying just the thing to send them off with a brighter outlook. She knew that her words were enhanced by her image, so she began to provide two things, a product and a service, face cream for their skin and advice for their souls. She had come to think of the face cream as something more than a beauty salve, as a talisman for the comfort and counsel she offered.
And so it seemed a natural progression to offer these women a product that was both a promise and a good-luck charm. She had secreted a small cache of precious items on her voyage across the Pacific Ocean from Poland: the agate cameo from her sister, the twenty marks her father gave her the night before she left, and a couple of rubles collected over the years, all tied in her mother’s faded cotton handkerchief like a scented potpourri. Beside this pouch was another small stash of precious cargo, eighteen pots of face cream, sequestered under her two pairs of silk stockings and her trusty woolen bras. It was this cream that her mother had insisted she apply every night, after her bath and before dressing for bed, the bathroom still hot and moist from her cleanse. The cream must be applied in tight, gentle circles while the skin was very clean and the pores were open.
That first winter in Melbourne, Josiah began to share this cream in tiny glass jars “borrowed” from her uncle’s stockroom. Though their needs were not as urgent as those of the girls who had fled Poland on her ship, the good ladies of Melbourne had their own concerns. They needed encouragement, affirmation, and friendship. Josiah could provide all of the above from her post at the counter of her uncle’s dry goods store. And best of all, she could do so for ten pence a pop.
7
THE GARDINER GIRLS
New York City, 1925
It was a novel idea, if not a new one, and Constance was determined to prove the concept. Put simply: Women would buy cosmetics—and buy in abundance—when the product was recommended by a friend. What better way to stimulate sales than by re-creating the most intimate exchange, a conversation between neighbors at the door of a woman’s home. The trick was for the salesman to seem inviting as opposed to menacing, alluring as opposed to demanding. The trick was for the salesman to seem like the homeowner’s friend. But not just any friend—like that friend or neighbor in her own community whom that homeowner admired most. The trick was for the salesman to be a woman, not a man. These saleswomen needed to be pretty, polished, and poised. “The three Ps.” And after two years of developing a basic product line of color cosmetics with a local lab and creating a simple botanical label she affixed that proclaimed “Constance Gardiner Beauty,” Constance was ready. Her brother would sell the line from pharmacy to pharmacy, and she would invent the first female army of door-to-door saleswomen, known simply as the “Gardiner Girls.”
Constance stood at the door of an ample colonial home in Bronxville at eleven o’clock on a Monday morning. The house, all yellow clapboard and white trim, was one of the most impressive on the block. It looked, in early May, with cherry blossom petals flutteri
ng, as though it were offering a personal invitation. Constance smoothed her dress, with its tidy collar, fitted bodice, and playful but still serious skirt, rang the doorbell, and cleared her throat as the woman of the house opened her door. The size of the house was somewhat intimidating, but today Constance was abiding by her father’s advice: “Start at the top.”
“May I help you?” said the woman. She was a handsome woman, clearly proud of her sizable manse.
“My name is Constance Gardiner,” Constance said, launching into her presentation and placing her foot in a position that would block a closing door. “I’m happy to share the most wonderful news for every woman in this community. Such a glorious day today, isn’t it?”
The woman nodded.
“I couldn’t help but notice that the cherry blossoms, such a delicate pink, would make the most gorgeous shade of lipstick. And the pink of this orchid.” She handed the woman a small stem that matched the one affixed to her lapel.
“Why, thank you.” The woman relaxed, realizing no criminal would come bearing flowers. Constance had discovered this trick one day after too many slammed doors.
The homeowner looked Constance up and down, assessing her lovely clothes unapologetically and her shoes. She caressed her orchid and smiled.
“I happen to be selling cosmetics from the Constance Gardiner Beauty Collection and I’d be happy to tell you more about our products if you have a moment this morning.” Constance shook her head, highlighting her blond locks, and straightened her knee, blocking the door. “You have the most gorgeous complexion,” she said. “Like peaches and cream in a bowl.” Constance smiled. Compliments always worked. Compliments and flowers. Women were such easy targets.
“That’s very kind of you.” The woman blushed and smiled in spite of herself.
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