The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Young Roth did not see much of Mr. Kiss during the ocean crossing, since Roth discovered that he had been placed in steerage, while Mr. Kiss luxuriated above decks in cabin class. He did, however, see Kiss again briefly in New York. Kiss directed him to an immigrant shelter on the Battery, handed him seven dollars and change, and a ticket on an immigrant train to Chicago, worth an additional dollar. Then Kiss scribbled an address on a piece of paper, told Roth to look him up when he got to Chicago and he would find him a job.

  The trip on the immigrant train to Chicago, at that time, took two days and two nights, since the train was constantly being shunted off onto sidings to make way for more important carriers. During the course of this journey, living on a diet of overripe bananas—a fruit he had never seen before, but which cost only five cents a dozen—Roth discovered that he had somehow lost Mr. Kiss’s address. No matter, he thought. Surely everyone in Chicago would know the whereabouts of someone as important as Aladar V. Kiss. Imagine his dismay, therefore, upon detraining at Union Station, when no one he spoke to had ever heard of the great Mr. Kiss. No one, furthermore, seemed to speak any of Roth’s four languages. “I was rather surprised how few people understood me,” he wrote. “I assumed, knowing what a horde of Europeans had emigrated, that most people in America would understand some one of the languages I knew, but it seemed that they were all what I called English.”

  He spent the next few hours wandering disconsolately about Union Station, with a little more than four dollars left, wondering what to do next. With him in the station was a group of soldiers from Company C of the Grand Army of the Republic who had a few hours to kill while waiting for a train that would take them back to their detachment at Fairplains, Illinois. Most were killing the time bibulously, and it was inevitable that a few of them should notice the plight of the luckless youth, and take pity on him. At the height of their jollity, one cheery soldier announced that he had a splendid idea. Why not take young Roth back to camp with them as Company C’s mascot? That was how Roth found himself on another train, heading for an American military base, where, he discovered the next day, a mascot’s job was polishing the boots of servicemen.

  Still, he did learn one important lesson early on. He began making sketches of his new protectors. The men who posed for him offered to pay him for their likenesses, and at first Roth refused to accept money from them. But he was taken aside by one soldier, and it was carefully explained to him through gestures and Pidgin English: This was America. In America, one should expect to be paid for services rendered. He could not allow himself to produce these clever sketches for nothing; if he did, he would be thought a fool. He must charge, furthermore, whatever he thought the market would bear.

  And America, as we know, is the land of miracles. Was it possible that this luckless youth would in not too many years’ time become the founder and president of one of New York City’s great architectural firms, Emery Roth and Sons? It was. If there is one street corner in New York that is perhaps the most prestigious, it is the corner of Park Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street—a great commercial-residential nexus, where the commerce of lower Manhattan meets the residential grandeur of upper Park Avenue. The building on the northeast corner of this intersection, the Ritz Tower Hotel, was designed by Emery Roth himself. The skyscraper on the northwest corner was designed by his son Richard. The tower on the southwest corner is by his grandson, Richard Roth, Jr. A fourth-generation Roth, waiting in the wings, has already stated his intention of designing a building for the fourth, and only remaining non-Roth, corner.

  In the larger cities of Eastern Europe—Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Krakow, Warsaw—it was also easier for the Jew to survive the pogroms that savaged the smaller settlements of the Pale. For one thing, in an urban milieu, the Jew was less conspicuous. In manner and dress and language he did not stand out as different from the rest of the city’s population as he did in the shtetl. The Jew was also in a better position in a city environment if he had made himself needed—as a merchant, banker, hotelier, or impresario, say, of a metropolitan opera or ballet company. The urban Jew might hate and dread the czar as much as his more rural brethren, but if he kept his politics to himself, kept a low profile, conformed with regulations and didn’t break any laws, he was tolerated. Czars and revolutions could come and go, and the Jew could get by.

  If one was a clever young Jewish woman, too, there was not much to worry about. Young women, after all, were not conscripted into the czarist armies, and if a young woman did not immediately marry but had other plans, there were avenues out of obscurity to great success. By 1920, one such clever young woman had begun to make her presence felt in New York. Her name was Helena Rubinstein.

  Her personal hegira had been an unusual one. She had been born in Krakow, Poland, around 1878, but it may have been 1873, since Madame Rubinstein was always purposely vague about dates, particularly those dates that would pinpoint her age. In 1898, when she was either twenty or twenty-five, she emigrated from Poland, but not for any of the usual reasons; in fact, the rest of her large family remained behind, without undue difficulties, for a number of years. Her reason for leaving—and here again, we have only her word to go on—was an unhappy romance. She had fallen in love with a young medical student of whom her father disapproved. She was sent to Australia to forget the young man. Why Australia—on the other side of the globe? Because the family had relatives there, she would reply. How had she made the journey? “By boat.…” How had her family, who she admitted had been poor, been able to afford the price of the ticket? “Mother sold a trinket!” In her ghostwritten autobiography, My Life for Beauty, she typically glossed over all these details, leaving perplexing questions unanswered, but Patrick O’Higgins, who worked for me and with her for fourteen years, and wrote an engaging memoir, Madame, about the experience, was able to sift out a few of the facts from the fictional version Madame Rubinstein preferred.

  She first landed at Melbourne, and then traveled to a sheep-ranching community some eighty miles distant called Coleraine, where she had an uncle. The uncle’s name was Louis Silberfeld, or Silberfield, as he preferred to spell it, and in her own book Madame Rubinstein describes him variously as a “sheepfarmer,” a “merchant,” and a “landowner.” In fact, O’Higgins discovered, Mr. Silberfield was an oculist, but, assuming that there was not much business for an oculist in a community as small as Coleraine, O’Higgins concludes that he probably ran a general store where he also ground glasses, and, on the side, maintained a flock of sheep, just as most others in the area did. What had brought Mr. Silberfield to Australia is unknown, but it is known that the young Helena Rubinstein disliked him intensely. He, as she put it, “took liberties.”

  She disliked Coleraine even more, and in her own book described it: “the sun was strong, the wind violent. The never-ending sweep of pasture, broken here and there by a blue gum tree, presented a very different picture from the one I had imagined.” She terribly missed big-city life. But, in Coleraine, she did spend a few months in an elementary school and learned rudimentary English. She also, it would seem, made an immediate impression on the local populace, just as the local populace made a strong first impression on her.

  She remarked that the Australian women—being from a nation of outdoorspeople and sun worshipers—looked decidedly weatherbeaten. Their skin was cracked, wrinkled, dry, and sunburned. (Throughout her days Helena Rubinstein would be outspokenly opposed to exposure to the sun.) By contrast, the beauty of her own skin drew comment. Of her first Australian days, she wrote, “My new friends could not get over the milky texture of my skin. It was, in fact, no better than the average girl’s in my home town in Poland, but to the ladies of Victoria, with their sun-scorched, wind-burned cheeks, its city-bred alabaster quality seemed remarkable.” Indeed, early photographs of Miss Rubinstein bear her out. She was tiny, only a shade over five feet tall, and her skin, in contrast to her jet-black hair and eyes, did seem to be unusually pale and smooth. Though not technically be
autiful, she was certainly a handsome young woman.

  The secret of her complexion, she explained, was what she called “Mother’s cream,” implying that it was a facial cream her mother had concocted from an ancient family recipe. It was called “Crème Valaze,” and she had foresightedly packed twelve jars of this splendid lotion in her luggage before leaving Poland. Where did the name “Valaze” come from? The word means nothing in Polish, nor does it—though it sounds as if it might—in French. But admittedly Valaze has a velvety, soothing sound, and any clever copywriter might be proud to have thought it up. Helena shared her miraculous cream with certain friends, and they were immediately pleased with the results. There followed a final quarrel with lecherous Uncle Louis, and, more or less simultaneously, as she told it, she had “a vision!” She would leave the sunbaked reaches of Coleraine, head for the big city of Melbourne, and market her Crème Valaze to the women of Australia. Overnight success!

  Actually, there are at least six Australian years left unaccounted for in her memoir, between the time she left Uncle Louis and when her first Maison de Beauté Valaze appeared in Melbourne’s Collins Street. There is evidence that, during some of this time, she worked as a waitress in a Melbourne boardinghouse. But she did send home for more jars of Crème Valaze, which, it turned out, was not her mother’s recipe at all but was based on a formula developed by a certain Dr. Lykusky in Poland. And she was also able somehow, between 1898 and 1904, to borrow two hundred pounds, from a woman named Helen Macdonald whom she had met on shipboard, to open her first shop. Her first advertisement, published in Australia in 1904, read, “Mile. Helena Rubinstein of 274 Collins Street announces the launching of Valaze Russian Skin Food by Doctor Lykusky, the celebrated skin specialist.” Within a few months, over nine thousand pounds’ worth of orders poured in. Dr. Lykusky was summoned from Poland, along with two of Helena Rubinstein’s younger sisters, Manka and Ceska, to help her handle the business. She was on her way, and it was not long before stories headlined POLISH GIRL MAKES GOOD IN AUSTRALIA were hitting the newspapers.

  Within two years, her advertising copy had changed somewhat. Dr. Lykusky was no longer credited as the inventor of the skin cream, nor was there any mention of its being Russian. Instead, the implication was that Crème Valaze had been created by Mlle Rubinstein. (Dr. Lykusky had either died or been sufficiently paid off.) An advertisement from this period was headlined, WHAT WOMEN WANT! A FEW REMARKS BY HELENA RUBINSTEIN. The copy went on to say, in part, “The healthy woman with an unhealthy or ill-nourished skin is not doing her duty to herself or those nearest her.… We cannot all be ladies of Milo, but we can all be the best possible in our individual cases.” The advertisement also included a bit of uplifting doggerel:

  Little blots of blemish

  In a visage glad

  Make the lover thoughtful

  And the husband mad.

  Meanwhile, her Maison de Beauté Valaze had become Maison de Beauté Helena Rubinstein.

  This would be her method of operation as her business expanded its marketing from a single cream to a long line of creams, cosmetics, and other beauty products. Though she liked to be photographed in a long white laboratory technician’s gown, mixing together unguents with a mortar and pestle in what she called her “kitchen,” she had a genius for creating cosmetic collages. Instead, the “First Lady of Beauty Science,” as she later liked to bill herself, often took the creations of others—offering, if they insisted, a small royalty—and marketed them under her own label. As Patrick O’Higgins points out, she was “a masterful adapter”—and merchant—of other people’s ideas.

  Which is not to say that she was not responsible for some masterful merchandising innovations. She was the first to decide, for example, that skins could be divided into “types”—“dry,” “oily,” “combination,” and “normal.” That meant four different kinds of cream right there. She also decided that each skin type required at least three different kinds of creams—one for morning, one for daytime (and as a base for makeup), and one for wearing at night. (Crème Valaze became her morning, or “Wakeup,” cream.) She also began to see her “vision” expanding on a worldwide scale.

  By 1905, she was ready to extend her operations to London, dogged by a man named Edward Titus, who had fallen in love with her, but whom she had not decided to marry. A year later, another Maison de Beauté Helena Rubinstein opened in Paris, was an immediate success, and the bright young businesswoman was swept into the glittering prewar world of Misia Sert, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, André Gide, James Joyce, and the painters Pierre Bonnard, Jean Edouard Vuillard, Raoul Dufy, Paul Helleu, and Pablo Picasso, while Poiret and Chanel made dresses for her.

  By 1914, worried about the approaching war in Europe—and by now married to Titus, who was an American citizen, and also having somehow managed to give birth to two sons—she was ready to move on to New York, where she was advised that some of the city’s best apartment houses had been built along Central Park West, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive. She sized up these neighborhoods immediately—“too Jewish”—and settled instead for a brownstone on West Forty-ninth Street. Her family took the top floor, and on the lower two floors she established the first Maison de Beauté Helena Rubinstein in the United States.

  Following America’s brief experience in World War I, the country was certainly ready for someone with the entrepreneurial skills of a Helena Rubinstein. Prohibition had sparked the country with a sense of gaiety and mischief. Women who would never have dreamed of doing so five years earlier were now sipping cocktails in public. They were also screwing cigarettes into long lacquered holders and lighting up. Everyone was talking about Sigmund Freud, and sex had come out of the bedroom into the drawing room and speakeasy bar. The dizzy decade of the 1920s, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense, was about to begin, and hemlines were shooting up while necklines were plunging down. Before the war, only “fast” women wore cosmetics, but now every woman under the age of fifty wanted to be thought of as a little fast, and women were painting their lips and eyebrows, rouging their cheeks as well as their knees, glossing their fingernails and toenails, and thanks to Seventh Avenue a woman no longer needed to be rich to be a la mode.

  Helena Rubinstein’s first appraisal of American women had been every bit as harsh as that of the Australians. “The first thing I noticed,” she wrote, “was the whiteness of the women’s faces and the oddly grayish color of their lips. Only their noses, mauve with cold, seemed to stand out.” That, of course, was on a January day in 1915 when no New Yorker could have been looking her best, but by the war’s end Helena Rubinstein was ready with a full line of lipsticks, rouges, and powders to relieve the whiteness and the grayness, and the rest of the fashion industry—indeed, the whole entertainment industry, from Broadway to Hollywood—was ready to go along with her.

  From the beginning, too—though Helena Rubinstein didn’t care to admit it—her American clientele consisted largely of Jewish women who had made it out of the cocoon of East Side poverty into a new world of fun, freedom, and affluence. Here she was, after all, one of them—a successful Jewish woman proudly waving her unmistakably Jewish name like a banner. Helena Rubinstein had made it out of the ghetto, too. She remembered what it was like. She cared. In her very personal style of advertising—“I, Helena Rubinstein …”—she told women so. Beauty-conscious Christian women, who shopped at Best’s, De Pinna, and Lord and Taylor, might remain loyal to Elizabeth Arden, who would become Helena Rubinstein’s chief competitor, and whose Blue Grass line suggested horsiness and tweeds. But upscale Jewish women, who shopped at Saks and Bergdorf-Goodman, would for the next generation become devotees of Helena Rubinstein and her mysterious Crème Valaze.* It was because her products sounded so—well, so wonderfully European.

  Many of the signposts along the avenue leading out of the ghetto of the Lower East Side into American middle-class prosperity were, of course, addresses. But by the early 1920s, addresses had been codified to the exte
nt that, from one’s address, you could almost pinpoint his station in life. In New York, for example, the Upper East Side, from the East Sixties through the low Seventies, was pretty much the domain of Christian rich. Farther north belonged to wealthy German-Jewish bankers: Felix Warburg’s Renaissance castle stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-second Street, Otto Kahn’s mansion was a block farther down, a few more blocks down lived Adolf Lewisohn and Jacob Schiff, and so on.

  The West Side had become heavily Russian Jewish, but of a rather special sort. The big apartments along Central Park West and West End Avenue were expensive and luxurious, but they attracted a somewhat ostentatious group of families—new-rich kings of the garment industry, for example, and a number of underworld kingpins, including Meyer Lansky. These neighborhoods were also favored by show-business people—Broadway producers, agents, theater owners; Jewish performers, composers, writers, set designers, musicians, singers (including Sophie Tucker), and comedians (including Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, and Al Jolson). These were all successful people, but they were high rollers, and led the upside-down lives of theater folk. For solid, middle-class respectability and probity, meanwhile, there was no place quite like the Bronx.

  It is hard today to imagine that the Bronx was once considered a very proper Jewish address. But, for a Russian-Jewish family in 1920 to have made it all the way to the Bronx—with, perhaps, a way stop in between of a few years in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, which was more working class—was a symbol of having arrived in more ways than one. As early as 1903, a Yiddish writer visiting the Bronx had described it as “a beautiful area … a suburb that could have sun and air and cheaper rents.… Go take a look,” he urged his readers; “the Bronx is becoming our new ghetto.” A few years later, in 1912, the British novelist Arnold Bennett visited both the East Side and the Bronx, and caught the difference: “In certain strata and streaks of society on the East Side things artistic and intellectual are comprehended with an intensity of emotion impossible to Anglo Saxons.… The Bronx is different. The Bronx is beginning again, at a stage earlier than art, and beginning better. It is a place for those who have learnt that physical righteousness has got to be the basis for all future progress. It is a place to which the fit will be attracted, and where the fit will survive.”