'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, hydrotherapy, hygiene, diet, nutrition, physical exercise and surgery.
Her passion for art and aesthetics of every kind - painting, sculpture, architecture, furniture, decoration, haute couture, jewellery - drove her to become an obsessive collector (she was nicknamed 'a female Hearst') and inspired the colours of her make-up collections.
It was her innate sense of marketing that led her not only to promote her products successfully, but also to constantly invent sales techniques at her salons and retail outlets, to set professional standards for beauticians, and to use advertising as early as 1904.
She worked tirelessly and claimed that work was the best beauty treatment: 'Work has been indeed my best beauty treatment. I believe in hard work. It keeps the wrinkles out of the mind and the spirit. It helps to keep a woman young.'2 She amassed a fortune almost single-handedly. She was known to be one of the richest women in the world: only a handful of peers had succeeded as well as her in the domain of beauty and fashion. Coco Chanel, Elizabeth Arden, and Estée Lauder were the few women who shared Helena Rubinstein's gift for putting themselves on stage and promoting their image.
She started out as Helena (or 'He-LAY-na', as she would pronounce it in America with her Yiddish-tinged Polish accent) then, as she became more successful, she would be known as Madame. That was what everyone called her, even members of her own family. Indeed, inside her there were two people: Helena the rebel, adventurer, lover; and Madame the businesswoman, billionaire and princess late in life.
My preference lies towards the younger woman, with her rebellious, reckless streak; but the older one continues to fascinate me. The portraits of her at this time tell us a great deal about her. Despite her expensive clothes and jewellery and lavish surroundings, she has the face of a Jewish grandmother, hard and frail at the same time. And that is what she was despite appearances, that is who she had never stopped being: the 'little lady from Kraków'3 who all her life had struggled to master the proper etiquette.
During the long months I spent in the company of this visionary woman, I learned something new every day about her anticipation of trends and fashions, her gift for coming up with new ideas, her incredible ability to live through different eras, countries, wars, fashions, mores, always in the thick of things: the emancipation of Australian women; the belle époque in Europe; London of the 1910s as it shook off Victorian puritanism; the artistic and literary Montparnasse of the roaring twenties; the pre-war years in Paris and New York; the reconstruction of the 1950s and the democratisation of beauty; the 1960s and the advent of consumerism. And through it all lies the recurrent theme of women on their long march towards freedom.
Her life, which was stranger than fiction, reads like a historical and geographical compendium - she couldn't sit still, so she travelled by boat, train or plane, from one continent to the next, the way other people take the bus. It also featured, as does any saga, its share of drama, heartbreak, personal tragedy and great solitude.
She had her faults, and they were countless: she could be authoritarian, demanding, tyrannical, despotic, cruel, miserly, selfish, deceitful and even downright insensitive, but by the same token she could be generous, kind, attentive, charming, shy, open, tolerant, and wickedly funny. Like many people of her ilk, she was a living paradox, excessive, larger-than-life, even 'over the top', as Suzanne Slesin, her son Roy's daughter-in-law titled a book about her a few years ago.4
Her principal vanity, when late in life she took only a few minutes to do her hair and make-up, ever mindful not to waste time, was mendacity. She lied about everything, starting with her own age - she felt this was the best way to stay young and was more effective than any anti-wrinkle cream.
Like other celebrities eager to forge their own legend, she was constantly rewriting her own life, transforming it to suit her - hiding, veiling, misrepresenting, embellishing, exaggerating, preparing a dream for posterity. Rumours abound, as do inventions, contradictions, fables. Unto those that have shall more be given, and Helena was no exception to the rule. But at the same time, grey areas remain, although the documents, autobiographies, biographies, newspaper articles, administrative documents and testimonies of both the dead and living who knew her - and there are not many of this last category left - can shed some light on her life as a whole.
'She won't hold it against you if you re-create the legend yet again,' exclaimed her cousin Litka Goldberg-Fasse, during our first interview. 'Madame always lied about her life.' She added, after a moment of silence, 'What mattered most to her was to be talked about.'
Madame often said, 'If I hadn't done it, someone else would have.'
Perhaps true. But she came first.
Michèle Fitoussi
June 2010
NOTES
1 Rubinstein, Helena, The Art of Feminine Beauty, Horace Liveright, 1930.
2 Rubinstein, Helena, My Life for Beauty, Simon & Schuster, 1965.
3 Brown Keifer, Elaine, 'Madame Rubinstein: The Little Lady from Kraków Has Made a Fabulous Success of Selling Beauty', Life, 21 July 1941.
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