Rouge

by Richard Kirshenbaum

  They walked out of the holding area to whistles and catcalls.

  “I think you’re the next Sarah Bernhardt.”

  “As long as you’re out of that place.” She patted his hand in the taxi. “James, I will have our lawyer handle getting this dismissed, but can we agree you will be more discreet moving forward? I am dating Van Wyke now, you know. I can’t imagine what he and his set would say if they knew.”

  “I’m sorry, Connie, I’ll try to be better. I never thought I would be arrested for being me.” He looked forlorn.

  “Perhaps it would be best if you can find a nice young man like yourself and have him visit our apartment after dark. That might be safer,” she advised.

  “Yes, I agree. I’m sorry.”

  “No need to say you are sorry.” Constance looked directly ahead at the traffic and held her brother’s hand. And she thought about what would happen if she herself were arrested for her own proclivities.

  12

  A WILL AND A WAY

  Melbourne, 1929

  Josiah wasn’t satisfied with domesticity or abundant profits. It all got plowed back into inventory anyway. She had no desire to be barefoot and pregnant so soon after getting married, and she had made it very clear to Jon Blake she was not going to be a stay-at-home wife and mother. He certainly did not want that for her either. After several years in business and an impressive track record, Josiah made an appointment at the local bank, seeking a loan to expand her operation. While she was making money hand over fist, selling her miracle creams and her new array of moisturizing lipsticks, she wanted a line of credit to open her second store. Unfortunately, she was summarily denied, as women rarely received bank loans at this time; it was uncommon enough that they owned their own property. Jon tried to calm her down by explaining that it was most likely due to news of the stock market crash in the United States. He assuaged her with a eulogy read from the column of the famous newspaperman Will Rogers.

  “Rogers was in New York on Black Thursday,” Jon said, smoking his cigar. “He writes, ‘You had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of.…’ I am telling you, Josie. It’s not because you are a woman. No banks are lending now. I told you, I’ll give you the money.” His generous tone belied his lack of real funds.

  “No. I vill not take any money from a man. This is my business.” She sliced the air with a dramatic hand motion.

  “And I’m your husband.” He gathered her in her arms.

  “You’re still a man and the answer is no.”

  “Fine. Then don’t complain.”

  “I don’t explain and I don’t complain.” She stood, looking at him forcefully. “I vill find a way.” She demurred his advances.

  Jon was right: the news of the Wall Street crash, which followed the London crash in September, had reverberated around the globe and made even the bravest businessmen fearful. So Josiah did what any self-respecting businesswoman would have done: she pawned her engagement ring and sold the ruby ring from Katz’s and added it to Jon’s allowance. She had skimmed money each month from the food budget to create capital for her business—and this ended up a boon to her, as she had slowly achieved her financial goals and would always be the sole owner of her company.

  Using her profits from Melbourne and the proceeds from her jewelry, Josiah set her sights on greener pastures. She opened the Sydney shop in just three months, and upon her return to Melbourne, after just one weekend of sleep, she agreed to accompany Jon on a business trip to London. That night, in a dream, she had an epiphany. In it, she stayed in London and achieved great success. English pounds were the leaves on trees. Josiah was not one to disregard the unconscious. She had welcomed and believed in signs her entire life. And so she decided she would accompany Jon to London, but she would not tell him she would not be returning to Australia. London, she now knew, was where money grew on trees. It was as simple as that. She devised a simple plan to install her younger sister Shayna, now called Sybil, whom she had brought over from Poland the previous spring, to oversee the Melbourne and Sydney stores. She would bring over her middle sister, Raisel, a year later. Their youngest sister, Chana, who was only six years old, would be too young to travel. Sybil, who had neither Josiah’s sensuality nor her sauciness, had a photographic memory and an accountant’s head for business. She had helped Josiah pack her trunks with astute efficiency. Everything to Sybil was numbers and Josiah knew her ledgers were in safe and capable hands.

  “You have eight brassieres, five dresses, five pairs of shoes, fifteen pairs of underwear,” she said, and they shared the unspoken knowledge that she would be changing her life forever.

  Yet the sisters were not nostalgic or emotional. They had the genetic makeup of the ambitious and practical and were willing to do what it took to succeed.

  The trip to London was very different from her first trip from Poland. First class versus steerage. Afternoon tea versus rationed water and biscuits. It was less a voyage than a well-deserved honeymoon with the luxury of sleep. The boat was a glorious ocean liner with seventy cabins and two dining rooms, one for the more well-heeled guests and another for everyone else. Within days, Jon was enjoying smoking cigars in the men’s lounge and Josiah found herself bored and anxious on the ship. But everything changed in London.

  “This has been divine,” Jon said, stretching out on the bed, reading the Times in their hotel suite. Their three weeks had been a merry-go-round, some sightseeing and much time spent with Josiah visiting factories and storefronts, taking in the London competition, or lack thereof, while Jon met with the editorial staff and his American publishers, who had come for a global summit.

  “I have to get back to Melbourne for the big conference next month. I’ll book passage for us next week.” He gazed at her lovingly. “But let me take you to see the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum before we depart.”

  “Jon, I want to talk.” She turned down the gramophone in their suite.

  “Talk?” he said. He slipped his arm out of his suspender.

  “I am not going back, liebchen,” Josiah said. “I am staying in London. I found a manufacturer.”

  “A manufacturer is more important than us?”

  “I am pregnant,” she said. “I want to have the baby here. Better medical care. Best to have English passport.” She shrugged.

  “This is how you tell me?” He looked at her with wild eyes.

  “You married Josie. Don’t be surprised. I just signed a lease in Mayfair. Best area. I will have the best store in London. And I had a new idea, Jon. It won’t be just a store but … How can I explain it…”

  She struggled to find the words, as she often did. “Not a maison, sounds like a brothel. But a salon, that is it. A salon with treatments for vomen’s beauty.” She laid out her case. “Not just lotions and potions but hairstyling and treatments.”

  “But what about me? It’s my baby too. And you signed a lease without telling me?” He stared at her, in shock.

  “You go back and oversee the operation with Sybil until baby is born. Ask for a transfer to London. You tell them your family is here now. London is the key to Europe and then America. We will make a fortune. The vomen are so ugly here. Bad skin and teeth.”

  “You’re kidding me,” he said.

  “You think I kid. Ever?” The mad look on her face made her look more alluring. And worst of all, her plan made sense. He liked the salon idea.

  “No,” he said, looking down.

  “Listen.” She approached him and caressed his cheek. “I am not like the other vomen. You married for better or worse. Better is money. Worse is we spend a few months apart.” She softened only about 1 percent as she saw how downcast he was at the news. It only made her more determined.

  “You are cold-blooded, you know.” He shook his head. “I really don’t matter to you.”

  “Yes. You are the father. You give them the looks. I give them the money. Lucky kid. Pfssht.” Josiah blew air out of the side of her mouth and put her hands o
n her hips. “Now I make love with you and you book your ticket and all is good.” As usual, Jon Blake obeyed orders.

  The next day Josiah gave Jon $1,000 in cash to mollify him. All in $50 bills for effect, so it was a big stack. Once he left for Australia, she spent her days and nights opening her first salon in London. She had rented a floor in a town house in elite Mayfair and began to cultivate London society for handpicked clients and friendships. She decorated the salons in vivid colors, inspired by her travels. She extolled the virtues of her new idea: makeup that made you more beautiful, without looking as if you were wearing makeup! It was the ultimate magic trick, selling something invisible to make you look visibly better.

  While in London, she had some difficulty getting reservations in the best restaurants and clubs. She noticed that if she shortened her last name to “Herz,” she had better results. She tried to make a reservation at the Savoy as Josiah Herzenstein and they were full. Ten minutes later, she requested a reservation under Madame Josephine Herz and was given a table. Unfair? Yes. Stubborn and inflexible? No. Thus she became Josephine Herz. Whatever it took to get it done. Nothing and no one stood in the way of the newly christened Josephine Herz.

  Josephine Herz Beauty was the world’s first global cosmetic company, with its unforgettable slogan: Yours for beauty, Herz for Beauty. Years later, when asked why she didn’t take her husband’s name, she tartly replied, “No one would believe I looked like a Mrs. Blake. But when Madame Herz showed up, they knew I meant business.”

  Not only did she sell an excellent product, her newly christened salon would teach women how to be beautiful and confident, educating them about the application of her products and selling a variety of creams, powders, lipsticks, and, most important, dreams. London was a test drive, of course, for Paris and then for New York. Her salon idea was a new retail concept. Her temple of beauty would woo customers. The products were jewels to be displayed, discovered as though they had been buried within an Egyptian tomb and carted away like booty. Throughout, they displayed and “taught,” “preached” the necessity of their products, presented like candies and chocolates in appealing clear bottles and jars.

  Josephine brilliantly merged the basic allure of gloss and color with marketing designed to create a craving, then sell the fix du jour. Within the year her London salon would be profitable and she would open in Paris, in a limestone former embassy on the fashionable avenue Montaigne. Les Salons de Josephine were impressive, yet clean and clinical beyond the ornate façade. Not unlike the laboratories of Constance’s pharmaceutical company, they were modern enough to exude an atmosphere of “health” and “science.” But most of all, Josephine captured women’s exploding interest in their place in society, both as objects to be admired and as forces in their own lives. It was a global phenomenon that would eventually become the new American workforce. And while Jon Blake returned to Australia without his wife, Herz Beauty was born.

  13

  MICKEY

  Lower East Side, New York City, 1929

  Across the sea and much farther downtown, an unlikely competitor was honing his game, a vendor-cum-boxer from a long line of Jewish fruit sellers and lotharios. He liked them in every shape and color, Mickey Heronsky liked to say, “and not just the fruit!” A tough, exceptionally handsome Jew from the Lower East Side, he was often compared to the actor John Garfield later in life. Mickey was indiscriminate in his love for women. He was discriminatory only about their beauty.

  His critical eye was honed first on the mean streets of the Lower East Side, where his father and his grandfather sold produce, first out of carts and then at a freestanding and well-known fruit stand and store. Fruit vendors went back two generations in Mickey’s family, his grandfather founding the best of the crop on Norfolk Street. Carefully stacked rows of dewy, plump fruit had long provided the staples for the wives and babushkas of the Lower East Side. Mickey had worked for his grandfather and later his father and had learned the ropes of the business. But he had learned a more valuable skill than sales: the art of picking perfectly ripe, fresh fruit and selling it to women of all shapes and sizes.

  Over the years, he had learned how to pick the cream of the crop, drawing on his naturally handsome face—square jaw, thick black hair, wide-set sleepy eyes, and rippling biceps. He enjoyed a similarly burgeoning cadre of women. Though he grew up with the traditional Jewish accent—mouths that formed aws to sound more like ew and struggled to make a perfect r—he had done his best to polish the accent over time, although ill-pronounced words would come tumbling out to produce a somewhat comic effect. Yet he perfected the clothes. And the hair. And the physique, with frequent trips to a boxing club. The success of the family business and a keen eye for the fashions and styles of the times had helped to amass a peerless image and the wardrobe to match. He was known as the Valentino of Norfolk Street.

  Though he was reared on the fruit trade, this was not to be his life’s work. He preferred a more glamorous clientele than old women in scarfs doing their daily shopping rounds. Two things would influence Mickey more than anything else: the Depression and the silver screen. The recent stock market crash had created fear, causing his business to drop off dramatically. Cinema had introduced him to something more tantalizing than any customer, more valuable than the stacks of coins his family amassed over the last forty years, more perfect and delicious than any ripe tomato or plum. Mickey, like many of his customers, could escape the drudgery and cruelty of the Lower East Side and revel in the platinum blondes and dinner parties of the Park Avenue set he could only dream about. The smell of rotting fruit and herring from the fish store across the street was masked by the madcap Clara Bow and the soon-to-be-famous platinum-blond Jean Harlow. This style and glamour would influence every move and every decision over the course of his life. And he, like others, was entranced by the celluloid: silk-sheathed blondes answering glittering telephones in the bubble bath or descending a curved Park Avenue staircase with élan. Not the cold-water walk-ups of his youth.

  Later, when Mickey founded his own cosmetics company, Heron Cosmetics, he would embrace the ways and fashions of the English, like many of his successful friends in Hollywood. Suits from Savile Row. Huntsman & Sons and English brogues. He favored an English secretary to answer his phone. He said it “classed up the joint.” And he was most often found in a double-breasted pin-striped suit. His gold monogrammed lighter was Asprey. He smoked a Cuban cigar, and when he grew successful enough to have a car, his chauffeur drove a Rolls because “Bentleys are for queers and broads.” If it ever felt odd or arbitrary to Mickey that he had more of an affinity to the British culture than his own, he reminded himself of the common ground. The Brits, like Mickey, understood the importance of a caste system, and the Brits also understood the concept of projecting a royal image. He would often joke to his employees and lackeys, “Dress British and think Yiddish.” And much later, he would wisely make the long, elegant white-blue heron the symbol of his company.

  When Mickey was sixteen and his father passed away, he dutifully took over his family’s fruit business, borrowing the tricks he had learned from years in sales: the importance of a beautiful display, the magnetic power of charm, the value of loyalty, and, of course, the actual names and numbers of his customers—and their daughters. Each of these women was, first and foremost, a customer. Second, she was a guide to the needs of the younger, changing generation. Third, when treated right, she was an electric force of marketing, waiting with implicit potential to sing his praises to her friends. Finally, and most important, she was a product herself, an object of beauty and desire for him to covet, consume, enjoy, and, when the stars aligned, share a drink and, ideally, his bed.

  The affair between Mickey and CeeCee started as most affairs do—with ardent glances and unspoken tension simmering for weeks before reaching the boiling point. Appraising glances roamed from mouth to blouse to hips. Appreciative smiles turned to flattering comments. Flattering comments turned to the occasional
brush of the hand. And then, in the usual fashion, the request of a phone number and then the inevitable.

  Despite a lifetime of appreciation of women, Mickey was most beguiled by Miss CeeCee Lopez. He had always considered himself a card-carrying member of the Women’s Party, and his devotion to CeeCee was no different. But his infatuation with CeeCee grew quickly from admiration to obsession. Never before had Mickey found so many virtues in one woman: a beautiful supple body, a perfect face, and the most incredibly delicious smooth skin. She was intelligent, quick, and funny to boot. It was safe to say that Mickey, an experienced boxer, was down for the count.

  * * *

  Mickey’s interest in CeeCee started as it did with most women, as simple curiosity. He surveyed her as he did every other woman who stopped to peruse his fruit at the stand. He observed how she handled the plump peaches, checking for blemishes on the surface and their firmness. As she did, Mickey assessed CeeCee’s own curves. She looked perfectly irresistible to him in a fitted short-sleeved cotton blouse and an A-line cotton skirt that hugged a robust rear. He noticed the craving, the coveting, the must-have desire that accosted him every time he faced an intriguing prospect. But in CeeCee, Mickey found a quality that he had not known he prized, a sense of humor.

  “May I help you?” he asked.

  She did not look up. She did not, in fact, need his help. “I’m fine.” She didn’t take the bait.

  “Those peaches are perfect right now,” he said. “Freshest I’ve ever had.”

  “They’re not quite ripe,” she said, more to herself than to Mickey. She was familiar with the tricks of the salesman and had no need for enticements. As a housekeeper in a bustling home, she had long been tasked with the shopping and management of the home’s weekly inventory. She knew what she needed and preferred not to dally.