Helena Rubinstein: The Woman Who Invented Beauty

As a blogger, I receive books in the mail from publishers and publicists all the time, to review.  Unfortunately, I don't have time to review them all, not if I want to have time to pursue my own writing! However, I received a book last week that made sit up and take notice.  Helena Rubinstein: The Woman who Invented Beauty by French author Michele Fitoussi. The book was published by a new publisher in the UK called Gallic Books who are dedicated to publishing the best of French in English.  I've long been fascinated by women entrepreneurs in the beauty biz, women such as Elizabeth Arden, Mary Kay, Madame C.J. Walker, Harriet Hubbard Ayers, Estee Lauder, and the grande dame of them all Helena Rubinstein. These women essentially created the beauty business, their success proved to men that there was money to be made in lipsticks, nail polish, and facial cream.

Helena was born Chaya Rubinstein in Krakow in Poland on December 25, 1872. Like most women, before the advent of Wikipedia, she fudged her birth date as the years went by. Rubinstein was the oldest of 8 daughters born to a Jewish couple, her father Horace was a not very successful shopkeeper in Krakow.  From the very beginning, Helena dreamed of being rich and successful. She had no interest in learning the housewifely arts from her mother, instead she spent time with her father in his shop, dealing with the customers and doing the bookkeeping. When  she came of age, she infuriated her parents by refusing every suitor who offered marriage. Not that her father had managed to save any money for dowries for her and her siblings! Helena had no intention of spending her life stuck in Krakow. Fortunately for her she had sympathetic relatives who lived in Vienna and Australia where she eventually ended up at the age of 24.

It was her mother who introduced her to the beauty regiment that Helena would use to make her fortune. A local chemist had created a skin cream that her mother applied to her daughter's skin every night from childhood. Every few months she would buy a jar which she would then parcel out into little jars to make the cream last as long as possible. She impressed upon her daughters the value of washing ones skin thoroughly and giving ones hair a hundred strokes with a brush every night. In Australia, Helena discovered that the women suffered terribly from the hot Australian sun. She wrote to her mother to send her jars of the face cream which Helena then sold. When that ran out, and because it took months to get the cream from Poland, she tried to recreate for herself. Luckily there were plenty of sheep around to provide the lanolin that she needed for the cream!

Helena was also lucky because she had made some valuable contacts on the boat out to Australia, including the wife of the Premier. After working as a governess, Helena moved to Melbourne where she worked in a tearoom. There she met an admirer who was willing to put up the funds for her first beauty cream that she called Valaze (Hungarian for 'gift from heaven'). Even though the cream was inexpensive to make, Helena realized instinctively that she needed to sell the cream at a pretty price, because women would buy it if they thought it was expensive and exclusive. As she put it, "Women won't buy anything cheap. They need to have the impression they're treating themselves to something exceptional." Even the ingredients were considered exotic.  Helena claimed that they were made from rare plants from the 'Carpathian mountains.' Before long the small jars were flying off the shelves.  From the beginning, Rubinstein seemed to have a sixth sense about what would sell and how to market it. She had put a great deal of thought into the packaging and the decor of her salon.

While Rubinstein wasn't beautiful, she knew how to make the most of what she was given. Her personal mantra was 'There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.' She dressed extremely well, even when she had very little money. Although she was under five feet tall, she made up for it with her personality. Men were always drawn to her, but Helena had little interest in getting married.  Her business was her life, expanding it from Melbourne to Sydney and then eventually to London. She was now in her thirties and had never been kissed by a man. Eventually she met Edward Titus, a Polish-American journalist who she had met in Australia. He was worldly, witty, charming and sophisticated, but they also shared similar background.  In her After a long courtship, he finally convinced her to marry him in 1908. Edward was a huge help in her business, he had a knack for advertising.

Edward wanted children, so Helena dutifully provided two sons, Roy (born in 1909) and Horace (in 1912). Helena was ecstatic to have boys, after growing up with 7 other women, and she'd always gotten along better with men. But Helena was not particularly maternal, the boys were raised mainly by nannies and tutors. And the marriage was not happy, Edward was a womanizer.  The couple fought constantly, breaking up and making up. Each infidelity increased her jewelry collection, as she would buy a new piece to assuage her unhappiness. Edward also hated that he was dependent upon her for money. He dreamed of being a publisher (he eventually published D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover). Helena belittled his dreams, she would withhold money from on a whim before finally giving in.  Her business was her life, before long she'd expanded the business to Paris, and then during WWI to New York.

Helena wasn't prepared to rest on her laurels and just coast.  She worked tirelessly with chemists to create new products, kept abreast of new skin treatments, traveling widely to Europe to meet with doctors. She had her own factory in both Paris and New York to create her products. Helena was one of the first to come up with waterproof mascara and sunscreen. Ahead of the crowd, Helena also introduced the concept of 'problem' skin types, dry, oily and combination. Realizing the value of celebrity endorsements, she persuaded Margot Asquith, wife of the Prime Minister, to allow Helena to show her how to highlight her features with cosmetics. When Asquith when out in public wearing cosmetics, society ladies flocked to copy her. Like a ripple effect, soon ordinary women wanted to look like their betters, and they were soon wearing make-up!

Soon Helena Rubinstein had a rival in Elizabeth Arden.  Although the two women never met, they were fierce rivals, keeping a close eye on what the other one was doing and then trying to outdo the other one. They cultivated the same beauty editors, went to the same gala events in New York. By 1923, Rubinstein had over 70 products on the market. There were also business setbacks.  Just before the Great Depression, Helena sold her American business to Lehman Brothers for $7.3 million dollars (the equivalent of over $80 million dollars in today's money) but it was clear that they had no idea what to do with her company. When the stock market crashed, Helena bought the company back for less than $1 million dollars, making her a profit of $6 million!

Michele Fitoussi's book is a gold-mine of information about the early days of the cosmetic industry and the remarkable rise of this self-made millionaire.  You can't help but admire Helena's chutzpah even as you cringe at the mistakes that she made in her personal life.  On the one hand, she gave employment to many of her sisters and relatives, which gave them a life that would have been impossible otherwise.  On the other hand, she also treated them like dirt sometimes, playing them off against each other. She favored her youngest son Horace over her eldest Roy but undermined them both at work.  Her sons spent years in therapy trying to deal with their 'mommy' issues. While Roy became an alcoholic, Horace became a reckless driver, eventually dying in a car crash at the age of 47. Having divorced her first husband in 1938 after 30 years of marriage, she married Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia.  He was 23 years younger than his bride. Helena adored being a princess, plus it meant that she had one-upped Elizabeth Arden!

 Rubinstein was also a compulsive shopper.  Having grown up poor, Helena bought art, clothes, jewelry, real estate like it was going out of style. She had a good eye, however, and bought many artists before they became famous.  She was particularly fascinated with African and fine art. Self-educated, Helena was fascinated with what was new and interesting. Only later in life, when she got older, did her enormous energy flag and the business began to suffer. After years of being at the forefront of the beauty business, she seemed content to let men like Charles Revson and companies like Maybelline take the lion's share of the market. Anyway, Madame had always been about luxury, selling her products at her salons and at upscale department stores.  She had no interest in having her products in Woolworth's and drugstores.

Rubinstein died in 1965 at the age of 95.  Her heirs sold the company first to Colgate-Palmolive in 1973. The company is now owned by L'Oreal who still sell Helena Rubinstein products mainly in Europe and the Far East.

I highly recommend Michele Fitoussi's book if you are interested in either the early days of the cosmetics business or in reading about a woman who wasn't content to settle for the status quo or what was expected of her but had ambition to burn.  There were a few typos or things that were just not checked properly. For example, Fitoussi writes that Rubinstein found a space on 49th Avenue for her salon in New York which is somewhere in Queens.  I'm pretty sure that Rubinstein probably never set foot in Queens until she was buried there. At another point, she states that Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow were huge movie stars during the war. Garbo stopped making movies in 1941 and Jean Harlow died in 1937.  People might have still liked their old movies but they certainly weren't top box office!

In the end, while I admired Helena Rubinstein, I'm not sure that I liked her very much as a person.  As a business woman though, she was phenomenal. Without her or Elizabeth Arden, people like Bobbi Brown, Estee Lauder or Laura Mercier wouldn't exist. She showed the world that beauty was big business, and brought cosmetics into the mainstream, when previously only worn by prostitutes or actresses.  She made make-up respectable.

Becoming Jane

Recently on a Saturday night, I watched Jane Fonda receive the AFI Life Achievement on TNT.  She’d been off the grid for a few years, but recently in the past seven or eight years, she’s slowly been making a comeback in not only film but theater as well ( I had the chance to see her in 33 Variations on Broadway a few years back).  Not bad for a woman who will celebrate her 77^th birthday this coming December.  I had forgotten how much I've enjoyed her performances over the years. There is a direct link between the tough but tender women portrayed by Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford to Jane Fonda.  Gloria In They Shoot Horses Don’t They, Bree Daniels in Klute, Lillian Hellman in Julia. There would be no Angelina Jolie if Jane Fonda hadn't paved the way.  What other actress could go from Barbarella to winning an Academy Award in just a few short years? It was heartwarming to hear actress such as Sally Field and Meryl Streep acknowledge the debt that they owe her.

Watching the clips of her movies and hearing her story once again, it brought home to me just how many times she has reinvented herself over the years.  There was ingénue Jane, Barbarella Jane, serious actress Jane, the infamous Hanoi Jane, workout Jane, and trophy wife Jane.  Now she’s in her third or maybe fifth act? A born again Christian, an activist for women and children, and once again a serious actress.  She’s shed personas the way a snake sheds skins, all the while searching for the real Jane Fonda. There are more than three faces of Jane Fonda.

I haven’t read Fonda’s biography but I did recently finish reading Patricia Bosworth’s excellent biography.  Friends since their Actor’s Studio days, Bosworth seems to have been the ideal person to write Fonda’s biography. What I mean by that is that she has no ax to grind, no agenda, other than telling Fonda’s story as honestly as possible.  It’s kind of refreshing no?  Back in my acting days, I used to devour biographies and autobiographies of actors, as if they had some secret that I could divine between their pages.  So Jane Fonda’s story was somewhat familiar to me before I started reading the biography. 

So many people focus on her political activism during the 1970’s, in particular her infamous trip to North Vietnam.  Recently, I think it was Michelle Obama, said that they admired Jane Fonda and the vitriol that was spewed on Facebook was unbelievable.  People still haven’t forgiven her for visiting ‘the enemy’ and taking a photo sitting on stop of a gun.  No many how many times, she’s apologized and blamed her actions of being politically naïve, there are people who still believe that she’s some kind of communist plant.  They believe that she betrayed the POW’s that she met, despite the fact that those men claimed it never happened. For me that was the most fascinating aspect of her story.  We’re so used to actors being political nowadays, that it’s hard to remember a time when it was still a new thing for actors to express a political opinion.  It was one thing to march for civil rights, but the opposition to the Vietnam War is a whole other animal.

And it wasn't just her anti-war stance; she was also a big supporter of the Black Panther party, and fought for Native American rights, not very popular causes in the 1970’s.  She faced endless harassment by the FBI for over a decade, was accused of smuggling drugs when in reality she was just carrying bottles of vitamins, and arrested repeatedly.  Not many actors were so committed to their causes that they spent all their money bankrolling them!

I used to be really hard on Fonda for being willing to change herself so completely for the men in her life.  Her decisions took an incredible toll on her kids.  At one point in the book, Fonda asks her daughter Vanessa for help putting together a video of her life for her 60^thbirthday.  Her daughter told her ‘why don’t you just get a chameleon and let him crawl across the screen.” Harsh but true.  I now have more sympathy for Fonda.  It can’t have been easy not only growing up as the daughter of a screen legend, but Jane also had to deal with a mother who was mentally ill.  

She was born Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda in 1937. Her mother Frances Seymour Brokaw always claimed that they were related to Edward Seymour and his family.  While her mother could claim aristocratic roots, Fonda’s family originally came to this country from Italy.  From the beginning, Jane was a daddy’s girl, she wanted to be like him, dress like him, talk like him.  Her father, however, was uncomfortable with expressing emotion. He had that Midwestern stoicism that was great for characters like Tom Joad in Grapes of Wrath, not so much at home.  Her mother on the hand favored Jane’s little brother Peter.  She’d had a daughter from her first marriage, and was less keen on having a second. A great deal of Jane’s subsequent actions can be seen as trying to get her father’s attention.  If being good didn't work, then she’d do the exact opposite to gain his attention.  Still despite their tortured relationship, Jane found On Golden Pond and produced it, believing that this film would finally garner her father the Academy Award that she felt that he so richly deserved. And it did!  I wept reading the parts of the book where both Jane and her brother Peter went out of their way towards the end of his life to repeatedly tell him that they loved him, even if he couldn't quite say it back.

Her mother had also been diagnosed as suffering from manic depression, what we now call bipolar disease.  The preferred treatment in the 1940’s was electroshock therapy.  When Jane was 11, her mother committed suicide while an in-patient at a sanatorium.  She and her brother were told that her mother had actually died of a heart attack.  Jane didn’t find out the truth until she saw it in a movie magazine that a friend was reading while at boarding school. She was not only devastated but there was also the worry that perhaps she had inherited her mother’s mental instability. To the outside world, Jane and her brother Peter lived a life of privilege, boarding schools (Emma Willard for Jane) and elite colleges (Jane went to Vassar for two years).  The reality was far different.

Even before her mother committed suicide, her father had fallen in love with a much younger woman whom he eventually married.  Two other marriages would eventually follow.  Jane suffered from bulimia; she would gorge herself with food and then purge it.  Instead of eating, she would take tons of vitamins to replace the nutrients she was throwing up. When she wasn’t bingeing and purging, she was exercising compulsively. Her work-out empire can be seen as a direct result of her bulimia, although by the time she opened the first Jane Fonda Work-Out studio, she had gone cold-turkey with her bulimia.

Jane has admitted that the men she fell in love with were all variations of her father, cold, remote, and dismissive.  Ted Turner even shared the same illness that her mother did, and his father had committed suicide like her mother.  It was nice to see that even she had reservations about dating him, although he put on the full court press.  I imagine even I would find it hard to turn down a man who not only has a private jet but 27 different ranches! Out of all her husbands Ted Turner was the only one who was as famous as she was, and even he had to deal with being treated like ‘Mr. Fonda’ at times during their relationship. It’s to Fonda’s credit that she managed to have cordial relationships with all her exes (Apparently Ted Turner’s 3 mistresses call her up for her advice on how to deal with the Mouth from the South).

While reading this book I lamented the roles that Jane Fonda didn’t play, either because she turned them down or in the case of The Music Box the director thought she was too old.  You guys, she didn’t make a movie for like 15 years and when she finally did, it was Monster-in-Law with Jennifer Lopez, all because freaking Ted Turner hated to be alone, and if she’d left him to make a movie, he’d have moved like 8 mistresses into his various houses.  She even admitted that she did Monster-in-Law on purpose because she hoped people would see the movie because of JLo but come out of it thinking about Jane Fonda. Which I totally did by the way. That ain't no lie.

I hurt for this one woman who had such low self-esteem that she agreed to threesomes with her husband Roger Vadim just to keep him. The woman who poured bazillions of dollars into her second husband Tom Hayden’s political campaigns and projects, even though he basically treated her like dirt. The woman who decorated all of Ted Turner’s 27 ranches, treated his kids like they were her own, and drank heavily to deal with his infidelities.  I have to give her credit because each time, she thought the relationship was going to last forever, and she certainly gave it the old college try.  These weren't fly-by-night relationships (6 years married to Vadim, 15 to Tom Hayden and 9 to Ted Turner which is like 81 years for normal people).

I was gratified to read at the end of the book that she had finally learned to stop compromising herself for a man, that she’s made family a priority (she’s even still close to Turner’s kids), as well as her career.  I loved seeing her on stage in 33 Variations. It made me realize that life doesn't stop until you are well into the ground.  That it’s important to keep engaged, informed, connected to not just places but people as well. And to have a sense of humor about yourself and your past mistakes and to forgive yourself for them.