Sometimes beauty is just business. Helena Rubinstein was born in 1872 in Krakow's Jewish ghetto, the eldest of eight daughters of a kerosene dealer. By her late teens, she had abandoned Poland for Australia, where she began cooking up vats of face cream. She called it Valaze, and claimed that it was the creation of an eminent European skin specialist named Dr Lykuski and had been "compounded from rare herbs which only grow in the Carpathian mountains." She rented a storefront in downtown Melbourne, and peddled her concoction at a staggering markup. In just over a decade, she had become a millionaire. She expanded to London, then to Paris, then to New York-and from there to almost every other major city in the world. She added one product after another, until Helena Rubinstein Inc comprised 62 creams; 78 powders; 46 perfumes, colognes, and eaux de toilette; 69 lotions; and a 115 lipsticks, plus soaps, rouges, and eyeshadows.
In December of 1928, she sold her business to Lehman Brothers for the equivalent of US$84 million in today's money-and, when Lehman's mismanagement and the Depression brought the stock price down from US$60 to US$3, she bought her firm back for a pittance and took it to even greater success. She was four feet, ten inches tall, and spoke an odd combination of Polish, Yiddish, French and English. She insisted on being referred to as 'madame." At the time of her death in 1965, she was one of the richest women in the world. The biographer Ruth Brandon spends the first part of Ugly Beauty (Harper; US$26.99) describing Rubinstein's rise, and the picture she paints of her subject is extraordinary. Rubinstein bought art by the truckload; a critic once said that she had "unimportant paintings by every important painter of the 19th and 20th centuries."
In just one room in her Park Avenue triplex, she had seven Renoirs hung above a fireplace. Her legendary collection of jewels was kept in a filing cabinet, sorted alphabetically: "A" for amethysts, "B" for beryls, "D" for diamonds. "Rubinstein's New York living-room, like everything else about her, was tasteless, but full of gusto," Brandon writes. "It sported an acid-green carpet designed by Miró, 20 Victorian carved chairs covered in purple and magenta velvets, Chinese pearl-inlaid coffee tables, gold Turkish floor lamps, life-sized Easter Island sculptures, six-foot-tall blue opaline vases, African masks around the fireplace, and paintings covering every inch of wall space." She once invited Edith Sitwell over for lunch and, upon hearing that Sitwell's ancestors had burned Joan of Arc at the stake, exclaimed, "Somebody had to do it!" In the 1950s, she took as a companion a young man a half-century her junior, wooing him on a date that began with an enormous lunch ("I need to keep up my energy!") and a showing of "Ben-Hur" ("Most interesting! I'm glad the Jewish boy won!").
From then on, Rubinstein took the young man everywhere, even to a state dinner with the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who asked her, "Who's your goy?" Rubinstein replied, "That's Patrick! And . . . and, yes, he is my goy." In the second part of Ugly Beauty, Brandon tells a parallel story, about one of Rubinstein's contemporaries, a man named Eugène Schueller. He was born nine years after Rubinstein, in Paris. His parents ran a small pâtisserie on the Rue du Cherche-Midi in Montparnasse. He was an only child-his four brothers died in infancy-and his parents sacrificed to send him to a private school, subsidising his tuition in cakes. After a successful academic career, he ended up teaching chemistry at the Sorbonne.
Bored to bits
But the leisurely pace of academic life bored him. "He would climb in and out though the window before and after hours, sometimes starting work at six am, sometimes staying on late into the evening-hours his colleagues inexplicably preferred to spend with their friends and family," Brandon writes. One day, a hairdresser approached him, looking for an improvement over the unreliable dyes then in use. Schueller quit his job, and converted his apartment into a laboratory. By 1907, he had perfected his formula, and began selling it to local hairdressers. In 1909, he recorded his first profit. By the 1930s, he was one of the wealthiest industrialists in France, and had moved his headquarters to a stately building on the Rue Royale. He would rise at 4 am, attend to company business for two hours, take an hour's walk, and then later be driven, by Rolls Royce, to each of his various chemical plants, ending his day at midnight. He called his company L'Oréal.
Brandon's aim in relating the histories of these two pioneers of the beauty business is to tease out their many connections and parallels-to explore what the development of cosmetics at L'Oréal and at Helena Rubinstein tells us about the social constructions of beauty. The juxtaposition of Rubinstein and Schueller, though, is most interesting as a kind of natural experiment in entrepreneurial style. After all, here were two people, born into the same class and era and charged with the same passion: making cosmetics respectable. Yet, they could scarcely have been more different. Rubinstein was selling an illusion-the promise of eternal youth.
What Schueller sold was real. "In the beauty industry, whose claims routinely bore little if any relation to reality, his product was unique in that both he and his customers knew it would always do precisely what the package promised," Brandon writes. "L'Oréal worked: it would dye your hair any colour you wished-and safely. . . . The foundation of her business was folk wisdom; Schueller's business rested on science."
Contrasting personalities
Brandon calls Rubinstein's career "chaotic, a progression of brilliantly executed extempore sallies." She was a yeller and a worrier. She lurched from crisis to crisis. She peopled her sprawling empire with every relative she could get her hands on. "The essence of Madame was that business and emotion were not separable," Brandon says, and she goes on:
She ran on adrenaline: her chaotic, compulsive letters to [her friend] Rosa Hollay, in which the worry of the moment was scribbled down whenever it might occur on whatever scrap of paper lay to hand, reveal the constant, jumbled panic beneath her assured exterior: "I haven't paid any bills the last three weeks, let me know again what must and should be paid now. I am frightfully short of money, it seems worse and worse. . . . I often don't know if I am on my feet or my head."
Schueller, by contrast, was the picture of reason and calculation. If he worried, he left no trace of it. He methodically applied the same principles and scientific techniques to one business after another, until he had expanded into soap and paint and photographic film and plastics. He hired professional managers and left behind a company that today is a colossus.
Rubinstein was the 19th century entrepreneur; her style was personal and idiosyncratic. Schueller was the modern entrepreneur. The business builders we venerate today, who bring technical innovation and discipline to primitive marketplaces, are cut in his image. Schueller is Steve Jobs. He is Mark Zuckerberg. And there the story of Schueller and Rubinstein would end, were it not for the small matter of the Second World War.
Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business
Balraj Kistow
b.kistow@gsb.tt
Malcolm Gladwell will be the keynote speaker at the Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business' Distinguished Leadership and Innovation Conference (DLIC) 2012 on March 29.
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