Ugly Beauty (12 page)

What all this meant varied according to one’s point
of view. When the young engineer Georges Soulès (later to become known as
Raymond Abellio, a writer on the occult) visited MSR headquarters for the first
time, he noticed with some amusement that Deloncle, “so warm, voluble, full of
charm and Gascon verve,” and who spoke so spontaneously and enthusiastically
when he was discussing his militias and their doings, only mentioned
Schueller—whom he referred to as “our future minister of the national economy,
the most important man in the movement”—at the end of their conversation, as an
afterthought.
27

The truth, of course, was that what mattered to
Deloncle was Schueller’s money. Indulgence of his economic ideas was the price
that had to be paid for it. But if Schueller recognized this (later he said, “No
doubt Deloncle knew how passionate I felt, and how easy it would be to use me as
a front man in certain industrial circles if he flattered me”
28
), it was of little importance. All that
mattered was that his ideas be propagated and, eventually, implemented. And why
not through the charismatic and energetic Deloncle?

Other right-wing politicians could see plenty of
reasons why not. The prospect of Schueller’s money being made available to this
crazed fanatic terrified them—so much so that in 1940, General de La Laurencie,
Pétain’s then representative in the Occupied Zone, sent his nephew to try to
persuade Schueller to moderate his support for the MSR.
29
But Schueller stuck with Deloncle. Part of the attraction, Soulès
said, was that Deloncle was an engineer, not a professional politician. Like
Schueller himself, he was a new and energetic force amid the professors,
lawyers, and old soldiers who generally cluttered the political scene.

Schueller’s defense, when he later had to try to
justify his actions, was that he had been misunderstood and misled—that, in the
words of his daughter, Liliane, “He was a pathological optimist who hadn’t the
first idea about politics, and who always managed to be in the wrong
place.”
30
That, though, was not convincing.
It was hard to believe that a person who had made such a huge success in the
cutthroat world of business could be quite such an innocent. On the other hand,
his decision to associate himself with a murderous fantasist like Deloncle threw
serious doubts on his political judgment. No one familiar with Deloncle’s
cagoulard past, with its melodramatic plots and bloody assassinations, could
have imagined the MSR would ever form a government.

Perhaps the explanation is that the past, even the
recent past, had no interest for Schueller. A true Fordist in this respect, his
sole concern was to select the most efficient route to the desired future.
Having picked the MSR as his route, and with his blind faith in the power of his
economic ideas, perhaps he truly thought he could promote a coherent political
program within it—that, in Soulès’ words, it “would take on new colors, and an
intelligent game would become possible, Deloncle’s personal game reduced,
channeled, made wise, by the application of systems and ideas.”
31
If he did think this way, however, he had
misread his man. Deloncle was happy to tolerate intellectuals, but only so long
as they confined themselves strictly to cultural activities.
32
He, and only he, would dictate the action.

I
n
February 1941, Otto Abetz, the German ambassador to Paris, pressed the MSR to
combine with Marcel Déat’s far larger Rassemblement Nationale Populaire (RNP) to
maximize their power and influence. As Abetz perhaps foresaw, it was not a
natural meeting of minds. Déat was an old pacifist and socialist who had been
part of the Front Populaire. He had bitterly opposed France’s entry into this
war, which he saw as a British plot to further its imperial interests, and had
worked his way across the political spectrum to become a pro-German
national-socialist. He thus embodied everything that the anti-German,
right-wing, bellicose Deloncle most loathed. At the RNP, Soulès noted, “one was
received in a quiet, discreetly elegant salon that might have belonged to a
studious professor who had suddenly become famous; at the MSR the anteroom was a
closed guardroom, entirely military, with no trace of politics.”
33
Indeed, the MSR had acquired smart new
paramilitary uniforms, with khaki shirts, cross-belts, breeches, and black boots
and gloves, in which they continued to stalk their enemies just as in the glory
days of La Cagoule.

Deloncle agreed to Abetz’s arrangement—he could
hardly have done otherwise. But, as always, there was a plot. He would take over
the RNP from within,
à la Cagoule
, beginning, in the
classic manner, by assassinating several Déatists. When these assassinations
happened, Déat himself was in the hospital. A former secretary of Deloncle’s, a
Mme. Massé, went to visit him there. A few days later, she too was killed and
her body found in the Seine. She may have shown Déat some documents proving that
Deloncle, his supposed ally, had been behind the assassinations, or perhaps
simply wanted to warn him that Deloncle planned to use his absence in the
hospital to take over the RNP. Either way, the visit proved fatal. An attempt
was made, some time later, on Déat himself. It failed. But Marx Dormoy, who had
once been Déat’s colleague in the Front Populaire, and who was now under house
arrest in Montélimar, was blown up in his bed that July. Dormoy had been
minister of the interior at the time of the Arc de Triomphe bombs and had
overseen the arrest and imprisonment of the cagoulards. They had not
forgotten—“
nous sommes méchants”
’—and this was
their revenge.

Not surprisingly, morale in the wider RNP
plummeted. Its membership had expanded during the early weeks of the enforced
cohabitation, but soon fell into an irreversible decline. For Schueller, so
accustomed to success, this was his first real experience of failure. “I’ve
never known a man able to inspire so much confidence in a movement, so long as
he was in charge,” Soulès observed.
34
But now
he was not in charge, and MSR no longer inspired confidence. Was it a good idea
to associate so closely with a man as shady as Deloncle, and to throw good money
after bad into a product as unsatisfactory as the RNP’s dreadful magazine, the
Révolution Nationale
? It was clearly time to
distance himself. In late 1941, Schueller severed his connection with Deloncle
and the MSR. This prompt dissociation was one of the main planks of his defense
during his postwar trials for collaboration. Whatever his dealings with MSR, it
was to his credit, the judges decided, that he had quit it in good time.

II

It is the opinion of German men and women that
women who pluck their eyebrows, use cosmetics, color their hair, and try to draw
attention to themselves through eccentric behavior (for example smoking, face
powder, etc.) belong to an older generation whose time has passed. The younger
generation is against all these things, and youth has to be counted not by years
but by strength of feeling. The women who are doing such things should be
ashamed. . . . To be young means to be natural, and to understand the
admonitions and demands of a great era.

—D
R.
K
RUMMACHER
,
LEADER
OF THE
N
ATIONAL
S
OCIALIST
W
OMEN’S
O
RGANIZATION
,
WRITING IN
Koralle
(
A
G
ERMAN
G
ENERAL-INTEREST
MAGAZINE
),
1936

S
chueller
could not deny that throughout the war years he had been one of the voices of
the Occupation. The radio broadcasts and newspaper articles, the public lectures
and the pep talks to his workforce spoke for themselves. But politics, he
assured the court, had played no part in those talks: they had been concerned
purely with economics. “If, like me, you’re convinced that you’ve found the
answers to the world’s economic and social problems, you obviously can’t stop
talking about them just because the wrong people listen.”
35

The burden of his broadcasts, speeches, and
articles was indeed economic, the same ideas—about the proportional salary and
bosses’ responsibilities—that he had been preaching for years. Thus, a radio
talk on May 8, 1941, entitled “How Not to Die of Hunger This Winter,” was about
the efficiency, or otherwise, of workers’ allotments and the importance of
making the most of small parcels of land. And a public lecture titled “The
Revolution of the Economy Is the Economy of a Revolution” (given at the Salle
Pleyel, the concert hall on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré) was about the
proportional salary and new ways to calculate taxes. But there were other ideas,
too. In June 1941, he promised, to a standing ovation, that “We are going to
become the first state of a new Community. We shall issue twenty decrees in
twenty days, one a day following the Rassemblement Nationale Populaire’s
assumption of power. Then, in spite of her defeat—because of that defeat—France
will once again take her rightful place in the world.”
36
A talk on taxes was more problematic, culminating as it did with
the phrase: “There can be no patriotism without a mystique of blood and soil.”
Since ignorance of that mystique’s associations was unlikely for one so well
acquainted with Hitler’s writings, this implies extreme innocence, Nazi
leanings, or amoral opportunism. After the war he pleaded ignorance and
innocence; and since that was what people preferred to believe, they did not
question it, or him, too closely.

These broadcasts and lectures were often published
as articles, in propaganda newspapers such as
L’Oeuvre
or
La Gerbe
, or periodicals
such as
Révolution Nationale
(which Schueller
financed himself). But there was also another, and much more popular, vehicle
for his ideas—his beauty magazine,
Votre Beauté
. For
cosmetics were still, as they had always been, acutely political.

In Britain and America, where women worked
alongside men as a vital part of the war effort, glamor was recognized as being
of the greatest psychological importance. When Helena Rubinstein asked President
Roosevelt what she could do to help the war effort, FDR told her the story of a
woman in London being stretchered out of a blitzed building. Offered a sedative,
she insisted, first, on touching up her lipstick. “It just does something for
me,” she said.

It certainly did something for Helena Rubinstein,
Inc. The company’s range that year included 629 items: 62 creams, 78 powders, 46
perfumes, colognes, and eaux de toilette, 69 lotions, 115 lipsticks, plus soaps,
rouges, and eye shadows. In 1941, its profits were $484,575; by 1942 they had
almost doubled, to $823,529. That year every woman in the United States spent an
average of twelve dollars on cosmetics.
37
“You
have got to look right down into their pocketbook and
get
that last nickel
,” Madame remarked.

The war was good for business in other ways, too.
In a development that she could never, at her most optimistic, have imagined—and
one that would transform the postwar beauty industry—Helena Rubinstein became an
official supplier to the U.S. Army. A few years earlier, Madame had tried to
introduce a line of men’s toiletries, House of Gourielli, opening a lavish salon
on Fifth Avenue she hoped would induce a new habit of male pampering. It failed
to take off, however. The salon closed, and the men’s toiletries line faded
away. But the war succeeded where all her efforts and advertising had failed,
and moved men’s toiletries into the mainstream. When the Allies invaded North
Africa in 1942, every GI was issued a kitbox containing sunburn cream,
camouflage makeup, and cleanser, discreetly lettered on the inside “Helena
Rubinstein Inc” and including instructions on how to apply cosmetics in desert
conditions. Army PX stores routinely stocked a range of aftershave lotions, skin
creams, deodorants, talcum powder, sunburn lotions, lip cream, and cut-price
cologne, for use where no bathing facilities were available.
38
A lucrative new market beckoned. “Men could be
a lot more beautiful,” Madame observed hopefully in 1943,
39
and if she had anything to do with it, they
would be.

In Britain, too, glamor was taken seriously. It was
becoming increasingly hard to source raw materials for the manufacture of
cosmetics, which were classed as a nonessential industry. Even so, recruitment
posters for Britain’s all-women Auxiliary Territorial Service, which provided
drivers and ran army camps—a laborious and often drab life of catering,
cleaning, and general maintenance—emphasized the importance of looking good. The
most famous of these posters, Abram Games’s profile of a beautiful, poutingly
lipsticked girl, her ATS cap set becomingly amid blond curls, caused something
of a furor—for a poster, the ultimate compliment. People complained it was too
sexy—and indeed, the girl might have stepped straight off a film set, perhaps
one of those Powell and Pressburger wartime fables in which immaculately coiffed
telephonists with cut-glass vowels inspire crashed airmen to cling to life.
Games, however, stuck by his poster. It was, he insisted, drawn from life—a
genuine ATS girl he had met in a train. British
Vogue
set out a detailed regime by which its readers might achieve
comparable perfection, setting out a timetable for rising, washing, dressing,
breakfasting, and making-up in one hour. Twenty of those sixty minutes were
devoted to makeup. Lipstick, properly applied—color, blot, powder; color, blot,
powder—would last all day without retouching. Helena Rubinstein had begun her
career turning evening dresses into curtains. Now
Vogue
urged its readers to defeat rationing by turning their
curtains into dresses—“Toile de Jouy curtains are ideal for pretty
housecoats.”