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.

The First Georgians The German Kings Who Made Britain Episode 1 BBC do...

As any one who reads this blog knows, I have a bit of a girl crush on Lucy Worsley,Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, in London (the best job ever in my opinion!  I've been lucky enough, thanks to YouTube, to watch several of the programmes that she's presented including A Very British Murder, Harlots Housewives and Heroines, and my personal favorite Elegance and Decadence.  Since 2014 marks the 300th anniversary of the Hanoverian ascension to the British throne, all sorts of exhibitions are going on at all the royal palaces.  And Lucy is presenting a 3 part series on the First Georgians for BB4.  You can watch the first episode below, and catch the rest of the episodes at YouTube.  I would also suggest picking up a copy of her book The Courtiers which gives a great overview of life at the court of the Georges.

Review: Belle (2014)

I’ve long been fascinated with the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle ever since I read a blog post by author Janet Mullany at the History Hoydens blog several years ago.  For a while I even contemplated trying to fictionalize the story.  So I was very excited when I heard that she was going to be the subject of a major motion picture.  This film opened in the US in limited release last Friday, and since delayed gratification isn’t really my thing, I went to see the film on Sunday at one of the only two movie theatres showing it in the city.

However, before seeing the film, I picked up a copy of Paula Byrne’s new book entitled Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice.  Although Belle’s name is in the title, the book is more about her great uncle Lord Mansfield and the era in which she lived than it is an actual biography.  The reason being that very little is known about Belle.  

The simple facts are these:  She was born sometime in 1761 to Sir John Lindsay, nephew of Lord Mansfield and a slave named Maria.  At some point, her father brought her to Kenwood to be raised alongside her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray.  The assumption is made that Belle’s mother died at some point, we don’t know when.  We do know that it was highly unusual for a man of Sir John Lindsay’s standing to want his illegitimate daughter (white or black) to be brought up by his family.   The book details the Zong case which is a key plot point in the film, a brief history of the abolitionist movement in England, as well as information about what life was like for London’s black residents.  Apparently at the time that Belle lived, there were 15,000 blacks living in the UK.  Some were slaves, but most were free.  Interracial marriage was unusual but not unheard and not illegal as long as the couple was of equal status.  So for example, a black footman could marry a maid, but not a cook, because the cook would have been of higher status.

The film opens in 1769.  John Lindsay (Matthew Goode), who is in the Royal Navy, comes to a port city after learning of the death of Belle’s mother.  Since he spends so much time at sea, he decides to drop her off at Kenwood, the home of his uncle, William Murray, 1^st Earl of Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson), and his wife Elizabeth (Emily Watson).  The couple is initially reluctant to take her in, given that she is black. They worry about how it might look. However, they realize that she might make a good companion for their other great niece Elizabeth, who has been dropped off by her father after her mother’s death.  So Dido has a new home.

Years pass although we are not told how many have gone by.  Dido (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Elizabeth grow up to be besties, sharing a room, and studying together.  However, Dido is beginning to be aware that things are different for her because of the color of her skin.  When company comes, Dido has to eat in the lady’s parlor not with the guests, although she is allowed to have coffee in the drawing room.  Even the news that her father has died and left her £2,000 a year (a substantial sum) doesn’t change her status all that much.  

The film does an excellent job of portraying how few choices women had back in the 18^th century.  Marriage was still a transaction, although there were couples who did marry for love, but that wasn’t the overriding concern. Dido’s cousin, Elizabeth, has to marry well because she has no dowry but she also hopes to marry for love.  Their aunt Mary (Penelope Wilton) tells them about her own thwarted love affair with a man who had no fortune. For Lord and Lady Mansfield, Dido’s inheritance means that they don’t have to worry about what will happen to her after they are dead.  They are aware that Lord Stormont, the heir, will not be as open-minded about Dido living at Kenwood.  One of the saddest moments in the film is a scene where Lady Murray tells Elizabeth that she is to have a London season, while Dido is told by her uncle that upon their return from London she is to take over the role of housekeeper from her Aunt Mary.  There will be no London season for Dido despite her wealth.

The divide between the two girls is further illustrated when Lady Ashford (Miranda Richardson) and her two sons come for dinner.  The elder James (played by Tom Felton) is not only a snob but also a racist who is disgusted that his brother Simon finds Dido attractive.  Lady Ashford is prepared to overlook Dido’s color and her illegitimacy because of the money.  Dido, flattered by the attention, initially agrees to engagement with James but her growing interest in the Zong case and her attraction to a young law student John Davinier open her eyes to the world outside of Kenwood House.  There is an awkward moment when the family travels to London for the season.  One of the maids, Mabel, is black. Dido questions her uncle as to whether Mabel is a slave or a free woman.  Dido also feels uncomfortable around her because of the difference in their stations.

The film is sumptuously shot, the acting is impeccable and I admit that I teared up on more than one occasion during the film. It’s not often that I forgive a film for taking historical liberties but Belle was so moving in depicting the story of this young black woman stuck between two worlds, not really part of either one, that I’m giving it a pass.  Some critics have compared the film to Sense and Sensibility and the director admits that is feeling that she intended to invoke, particularly in the friendship between Elizabeth and Dido.  Dido is the more practical of the two, much more careful with her emotions, no doubt because of her status.  While Elizabeth, on the other hand, is all feeling.  She barely knows James Ashford yet she falls head over heels for him, and is devastated when she discovers that he is engaged to another woman.  An argument between Dido and Elizabeth echoes the argument that Eleanor and Marianne have in S&S about Eleanor hiding her feelings toward Edward Ferrers.  In Belle, Dido and Elizabeth argue about James Ashford.  Dido tries to warn Elizabeth that James is an asshole (he assaults Dido at a garden party) but Elizabeth refuses to hear her.

In the 21st century, it's rare to have a historical film about a black woman, written by a black woman (Misan Sagay) and directed by a black woman (Amma Asante). I highly recommend this film for anyone interested in seeing a different side of 18^th century England. 

Now for a little Fact vs. Fiction:

1      1) Dido was known as Dido Elizabeth Lindsay – Fiction.  Although in the film she uses her father’s last name Lindsay, in real life Dido was known as Dido Elizabeth Belle.  Since she was illegitimate, she would have had no right to use Lindsay.

 2)      Dido was left an inheritance by her father that made her an heiress-  Fiction - Dido’s father died when she was 27 years old.  When Dido's father died without legitimate heirs in 1788, he left £1000 to a son and £1000 to his other illegitimate daughter, Elizabeth Lindsay or Palmer (born c. 1765) who lived in Scotland, asking his wife Mary to take care of her.  Lord Mansfield did leave Dido a significant sum in his will £500 as an outright sum and a £100 annuity in his will, and officially confirmed her freedom. During her lifetime, she received an allowance of £30 a year, a considerable sum. 

      3) Dido married a lawyer named John Davinier – Fiction – While Dido did marry John Davinier, it was after her uncle’s death when she was in her thirties.  Davinier was a Frenchman, probably one of many who fled the revolution in France.  Historians don’t know what kind of servant he was. It is possible that he worked for Lord Mansfield’s nephew and heir, Lord Stormont.  What we do know is that they had two sons, and lived in Pimlico.  Dido died in 1804 when she was in her early forties.  Unfortunately her grave has been lost to us.

4     4)  The Zong massacre, which occurred in 1781, is a major plot point in the film.  The owners of the Zong claimed that they forced to kill several of the slaves because of inadequate water supplies. Dido tells John Davinier that the ship had plenty of chances to stop and replenish their water supply but didn’t.  However, that is not precisely what happened.  The reality is that the ships water supply was replenished because it had rained for several days, before the killing was finished.  Not all of the slaves on board were massacred.  Over two hundred slaves were still on board the ship when it finally arrived in Jamaica. People were worried that Lord Mansfield’s judgment might have been affected by his relationship with Dido, although as he makes clear in the film, he was always able to separate the personal from the professional.  For example, as a youth Mansfield had supported the Old Pretender James III.  This did not keep him from prosecuting the leaders of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745.