Ugly Beauty (18 page)

But as the war dragged on, even Madame had to
recognize that being Jewish enforced perspectives and priorities rather
different from those she had hitherto preferred. She urged all those members of
her family who still remained within Hitler’s reach to leave while they could,
with the promise of jobs wherever they might choose to settle. Her sister Stella
went to Argentina, and a great-niece named Regina was sent to Australia. But the
sister after whom that Regina had been named, the only one of Helena’s
generation not to have left Krakow, refused to budge and was killed in the death
camps.

Regina’s death was a turning point for Helena. She
threw herself wholeheartedly into the war effort, becoming a booster for War
Bonds and organizing concerts on behalf of the Polish Red Cross. She had always
been unenthusiastic about the Germans, furious during World War I when her
German-sounding name had led people to accuse her of being pro-German herself.
“Poles hated always the Germans. . . . I am really upset. I got a
letter . . . which mentioned that some letters were received from
England re my pro-German feelings and so on. Fancy I wish them going to hell,
excuse the expression, I hate the sight of them. . . .”
23
Returning now from one of her trips to South
America, where so many Nazi war criminals would soon find shelter, she assured
the
New York Times
that among all the people she
met, the Germans were universally unpopular, “and even when it was hard to get
servants many people would not engage a German cook.’’ She “estimated that 90
percent of the Argentine people were ‘really our allies.’ ”
24

When the war ended, she became a keen supporter of
the new State of Israel (which she always called Palestine). “I’m going to build
a museum and a factory in . . . in? Not Jerusalem but the other town,”
she told Patrick O’Higgins in 1958.

“Tel Aviv?”

“Yes, that’s the place.”

Feted as a big donor, she sat through any number of
tedious receptions, and finally met Israel’s then foreign minister, Golda Meir.
Surveying Mrs. Meir’s craggy features, she remarked disapprovingly on the
minister’s lack of makeup. Then the two formidable ladies got down to
business—in English, although Yiddish was in both cases their mother tongue.

“Madame Rubinstein, what do you think of our
country?” Mrs. Meir asked.

“If I plan to build a factory
and
a museum, I must think highly of it.”

“Which do you think is the more important?”

“The factory!”

“I agree!”
25

And with that simple exchange, the stage was set
for the drama to come.

Chapter
Five

A Takeover and Three Scandals

I regret having done . . . for a noble
cause, things that may have inconvenienced other human beings.

—J
ACQUES
C
ORRÈZE
, J
UNE 20,
1991

It is true that I hired Jacques Corrèze although
he had been condemned twice . . . but he had just been released from
jail. I don’t regret having hired him, he was everything I hoped he might be.
And I’m not going to take lessons in patriotism from anybody!

—F
RANÇOIS
D
ALLE
, J
UNE 19,
1991

A weak man will always be more of a coward than a
man in his prime; a Jew will always be more avaricious than a Christian.

—A
NDRÉ
B
ETTENCOURT
,
L’Élan
,
D
ECEMBER 13, 1941

I’ve led a useful life, after all.

—A
NDRÉ
B
ETTENCOURT
, M
ARCH 9,
1995

I

O
n April 1,
1965, Helena Rubinstein relinquished her avid grip on life. In a memoir
published the previous year she had for the first time admitted her real
birthdate. She was ninety-two years old.

Until a year before her death, Madame had remained
in active, some thought hyperactive, charge of her business. But on the morning
of May 21, 1964, she was surprised by thieves in her New York triplex. They
gained entry by pretending to deliver a flower arrangement, then tied up the
butler at gunpoint and made for the main bedroom, which they expected to find
empty. Madame, however, was no longer an early riser. On the contrary, she liked
to conduct much of her business from her bed. At eight thirty a.m. she was
eating her breakfast toast, prior to conferring with her secretary and publicity
adviser.

Presented with the traditional choice—her money or
her life—she retorted that at her age she didn’t care if they killed her, but
she was damned if they were going to rob her. At which point she realized that
her keys—including the keys to her safe and the filing cabinet in which she kept
her jewels—were in her purse on the bed, under the intruders’ noses.

Fortunately the purse was buried deep in papers,
and the thieves were by then busy emptying drawers and disconnecting phones.
Madame silently extracted the keys and with characteristic presence of mind
dropped them in the one place she could be sure no one would ever look: down her
ample bosom. By the time the thieves noticed the purse it contained only some
handfuls of paper, a powder compact, five twenty-dollar bills, and a pair of
diamond earrings worth around forty thousand dollars. The earrings rolled away
as they upended it, and Madame covered them with a Kleenex. One of the thieves
grabbed the money. “Your friend took a hundred dollars out of my purse. See that
you get your share,” she admonished his friends. Furious and frustrated, aware
that time was passing and that other household members would soon arrive, they
ripped off her bedcovers, tore the sheets in strips and tied her to a chair,
before fleeing with their negligible loot. And there, screaming at the top of
her still-considerable lungs, she was found by the butler, who had managed to
break free of his own bonds. After he freed her, Madame instructed him to put
the thieves’ roses in the icebox, in case there should be company for lunch. She
calculated that after paying $40 for the roses, they had made just $60 profit on
their morning.
1

Madame was justifiably proud of her sangfroid. But
the shock drained her, and she never recovered either her confidence or her
health. As always when faced with a crisis, she took refuge in motion, traveling
from New York to Paris, on to Tangiers and evenings of bridge with such of the
ancient International Set as still survived (“If you add up the combined ages
round this table we’re back in the sixteenth century,” quipped one of the
players, at which Madame snapped “Don’t—until you’ve paid the ten francs you owe
me!”), back to Paris, on to Normandy, which held sentimental memories of her
romance with Edward Titus, a stop at Saint-Cloud, where she had established her
first French factory (“It’s where I was always happiest,” she sighed, “in my
kitchen, my laboratory”). Then she returned to New York, suffered a stroke, and
died.
2

Helena Rubinstein’s death liberated a small
mountain of possessions. Her estate was variously estimated at between $1
million and $100 million, depending on what was counted in. The American
business alone grossed over $22 million a year.
3
Officially, it was publicly owned, but in fact Madame personally
held 52 percent of the shares—worth around $30 million—as she had done ever
since the Lehman Brothers maneuver. The Park Avenue triplex was rented, in a
move that would surely have appalled her, to Charles Revson of Revlon, an
upstart whose name she had always refused to utter, referring to him only as
“the nail man.” Her will, when it was read, contained 121 individual
bequests.
4
But that was just the property:
gowns, jewels, pictures, real estate. The business was not so easily disposed
of. The industry that she had founded in one room and a “kitchen” was by the
time of her death the tenth-most important in the United States, just behind
rubber. Helena Rubinstein, Inc., had become an empire. Where would it end
up?

For her American competitors, the problem was
easily solved. The business would be sold, and one of them would buy.
Particularly keen was a firm called Cosmair. Set up in 1953, Cosmair, although
nominally independent, was part-owned and effectively controlled by L’Oréal, and
was L’Oréal’s sole U.S. licensee. The person appointed to run it by Schueller,
John Seemuller, was half-American—he was the person who had performed those
risky missions for the firm in France during the war, using his American
passport to run forbidden items across the border between the occupied and
nonoccupied zones. The Cosmair job may have been Schueller’s way of showing his
appreciation. But Seemuller did not appreciate how tricky it might be to
penetrate the American market, and made little headway.

Seemuller’s incompetence frustrated François Dalle,
who was keen to extend L’Oréal’s reach into the huge market of the United
States. He was also anxious to broaden L’Oréal’s range to include cosmetics,
whose sales, as women cast off housewifery and flooded into the workplace during
the 1960s and early seventies, were rising at an average of 10 percent a year.
One of Dalle’s first acts on taking over as CEO was therefore to appoint his own
man to head Cosmair: the suave and charming Jacques Corrèze, who had been vice
president of L’Oréal’s Spanish subsidiary, Procasa. Corrèze was good at both
administration and business, and was particularly good with money. Seemuller had
quickly run through all the cash Paris allowed him, to little effect; Corrèze,
Dalle remembered, was “close with his—which was to say, our—pennies.”
5

In 1965, when Helena Rubinstein died, Cosmair was
still small. It had only twenty employees, producing and distributing L’Oréal’s
hair-care preparations to beauty parlors. But Corrèze had made a point of
getting to know Madame—he was just the sort of man she liked, smooth,
cultivated, and full of Old World charm—and when she died, he was determined
that if anyone took over Helena Rubinstein, Inc., it would be Cosmair. At the
end of the war, French manufacturers, who since 1940 had enjoyed a market in
which anything they produced was snatched from the shelves, had been rocked by
the sudden influx of unaccustomed competition from America. Now it was L’Oréal’s
turn to extend its reach into America.

Helena Rubinstein, however, was not for sale.
Although the American branch was publicly quoted, all its other branches (except
the English business and its South African and Far East subsidiaries, which were
the property of a foundation set up to avoid inheritance taxes) remained
privately owned. The company was now managed by Madame’s son, Roy Titus, and her
nephew and niece, Regina’s son and daughter Oskar Kolin and Mala Rubinstein, who
were reported to have metamorphosed “from depression to a vibrant
pragmatism.”
6
Released from Madame’s beady
eye and unsettling tendency to descend unannounced and bawl out all those
present, they were enjoying the unaccustomed pleasures of self-rule.

But those pleasures did not last, for they did not
get on. Indeed, the experience of Helena Rubinstein, Inc., as it declined after
its founder’s death (in marked contrast to L’Oréal, which continued from
strength to strength under Dalle) might have been designed to prove Eugène
Schueller’s theory that business and family were best kept separate. Although
Madame had always assumed that “the family” would carry on the business after
her death, she had never trained a successor. That would not only have meant
admitting her own mortality, but would have run the risk of transferring too
much of her own power to someone else, something quite alien to her autocratic
character.

Instead, she had encouraged rivalries. Although Roy
was her firstborn, she had never taken him seriously, preferring his younger
brother, Horace, whose only real interest in the firm while he was alive (he
predeceased his mother, much to her anguish) had been as a source of cash. Her
real business partners had been Oskar, a sharp accountant who did any necessary
dirty work and was known to all as the Lord High Executioner, and his sister
Mala, of whom she had been fond, and whom Roy bitterly resented. “She enjoys
it,” her long-time secretary, Ruth Hopkins, said, she “plays one against the
other.”
7
But all this was secondary—for
Madame, and nobody else, made the decisions: as she had liked to say, “I
am
the business.” The inevitable upshot was that her
death left an unfillable void at the business’s center. Once the firm’s living
trademark and main motive power had vanished, all that remained was a disunited
boardroom with no clear strategy.

By 1972, the family had had enough and decided to
sell. The buyer, Colgate-Palmolive, paid $146 million: more than twenty times
earnings. But Colgate soon regretted its purchase. The overseas businesses,
which continued to operate much as before, remained profitable. But the American
arm soon began to lose money. Colgate’s idea had been to integrate the
Rubinstein product range into its existing marketing operation. But as Madame
could have told them had she still been around to do so, high-end beauty
products require special sales techniques, different from those that sell
everyday necessities like soap and toothpaste. By 1978, Helena Rubinstein’s
losses were estimated at $22 million, and its debts at $50 million. Colgate had
had enough, and Helena Rubinstein was once more for sale.

In early 1979, KAO, a Japanese toothpaste business,
was reported to have offered $75 million for it. Later that same year, L’Oréal
was again in the picture, the price now having dropped to $35 million. But
neither sale materialized. In 1980, however, Colgate finally offloaded its
unwise acquisition. The buyer was a privately owned concern, Albi Enterprises,
the price $20 million, plus a Colgate guarantee for up to $43 million in bank
loans.
8
Albi quickly recouped its outlay by
selling off Helena Rubinstein’s mass-market lines and its American headquarters.
By 1985 the company’s only American employees were a dozen people in a New York
office. They spent their days consolidating international financial statements,
and no longer had any idea who they worked for.

Cosmair, by contrast, was doing very well. During
the 1970s, Dalle had pushed L’Oréal’s U.S. subsidiary into high gear, investing
heavily in research and identifying profitable niches in what the industry
jargon called a “maturing” market. Some of this success was down to deep
pockets: L’Oréal, and hence Cosmair, was now part-owned by the Swiss foods giant
Nestlé. But Cosmair also had a dynamic new managing director of its own. Dalle,
like Schueller before him, was looking out for a suitable successor, and had
recently identified him in the person of Lindsay Owen-Jones. In 1985, Dalle
planned to retire. There would follow a short interregnum, when the firm would
be run by its head of research, Charles Zviak, after which, in the autumn of
1988, “O-J” would become L’Oréal’s CEO. In the meantime he was put in charge of
Cosmair.

Arriving in New York in 1981, Owen-Jones won a
reputation as a ruthless and aggressive player in an increasingly tough market.
In 1983, Cosmair staged a brilliant coup, buying up the entire European stock of
aerosol cans in preparation for the introduction of its Free Hold hair-styling
mousse. The mousse became terrifically popular, and since Cosmair owned all the
aerosol cans, no one could compete until they had found another source, which
did not happen for several crucial months. Magazines that failed to place
Cosmair’s ads in what O-J considered the best spots had the company’s
advertising withdrawn. And the company ferociously, and successfully, jockeyed
for counter space in department stores and other outlets. By 1984, Cosmair’s
sales had tripled, to $600 million.

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.