HELENA
RUBINSTEIN
THE WOMAN WHO INVENTED BEAUTY
Michèle Fitoussi
Translated from the French by Kate Bignold
and Lakshmi Ramakrishnan Iyer
CONTENTS
Title Page
Preface
1 Exile
2 Kazimierz
3 The Rubinstein Family
4 A Merciless New World
5 A Tough Apprenticeship
6 243 Collins Street
7 Beauty is Power
8 Back to Her Roots
9 Edward William Titus
10 Mayfair Lady
11 24 Grafton Street
12 Rich and Famous
13 Paris, Here I Come!
14 Beauty Enlightening the World
15 The Great Rubinstein Road Tour
16 Paris is a Moveable Feast
17 Friend to Artists
18 Beauty Becomes Big Business
19 The Little Lady Takes on Wall Street
20 Mourning for Happiness
21 Family Life
22 Stay Young!
23 Who is the Fairest of Them All?
24 Princess Gourielli
25 Watching the War from New York
26 Rebuilding Once Again
27 The Pink Jungle
28 The Last Man in Her Life
29 The Show Must Go On
30 Nobody Lives Forever
31 The Empire without Its Empress
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Plates
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
‘My life seems to have contained enough events, great and small, enough stress and strain to fill a half-dozen normal lives.’1
Helena Rubinstein
People often ask me why I became interested in Helena Rubinstein. There is something mysterious about first encounters. So while we can never say exactly how things happen – most of the time, it is a question of chance – we do know the ways in which a person’s story has marked us.
In this case, I knew nothing about her other than her name on beauty products that I didn’t use, but the opening lines of her life story were enough: she was born in 1872 in Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Kraków; she had seven younger sisters – Pauline, Rosa, Regina, Stella, Ceska, Manka and Erna; and at the age of twenty-four she set off on a journey to Australia, armed with a parasol, twelve jars of cream, and an inexhaustible supply of chutzpah.
My imagination immediately began to run away with me. I saw her taking the train, her forehead pressed thoughtfully against the window, reciting her sisters’ names like a mantra. I saw her four-foot-ten frame walking up the gangplank to board the ship that would sail halfway round the globe, taking two months to reach Australia. I saw this tiny pioneer disembarking in Melbourne, in this foreign land; I saw how she struggled, how she nearly gave up, then triumphed.
Even though I didn’t know a great deal about her, Helena Rubinstein became for me a romantic heroine, a sort of Polish Scarlett O’Hara, a conqueror with a character forged of steel. As she stood there in her high heels, her motto – for she was someone who despised the past – could have been ‘Onwards!’ As the saying goes, ‘Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.’
A quick look at her tumultuous life confirmed my suspicions. She was little known and has been virtually forgotten, but her extraordinary life spanned nearly a century (she died in 1965 at the age of ninety-three) and four continents.
Driven by courage, intelligence and a will to succeed that would make her neglect her husbands, children and family, she built an empire that was both industrial and financial. More impressive still, she as good as invented modern cosmetics and ways to make them accessible to all. This was no easy task for a woman in those days – and it still isn’t, whatever one might think; a woman who was poor, foreign and Jewish, to boot. But she loftily disregarded all four of these disadvantages – and it’s anyone’s guess which one was the greatest – and often turned them into strengths. She opened her first beauty institute in Melbourne in 1902, the same year Australian women were among the first in the world to obtain the right to vote. Helena would always be a firm supporter of women in their movement for equality, which throughout the twentieth century, meant not only fighting for their most basic rights, but also for the liberation of their bodies – first by freeing them from the shackles of the corset, then from the taboo of wearing make-up (until the early 1920s cosmetics were only worn by prostitutes and actresses).
As Helena would like to say, beauty is anything but frivolous. For her it was a ‘new power’, a means through which women could assert their independence. To want to charm or look your best are not signs of subservience if you know how to use them to your advantage. Helena believed that women must use the assets placed at their disposal if they are to conquer the world, or at least to make their place in it.
Cosmetics existed before Helena Rubinstein – they have existed since antiquity! – but she was the visionary who created modern beauty: scientific, rigorous and demanding, with an emphasis on moisturising, protecting against the harmful rays of the sun, massage, electricity,
