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May 4, 2003
Syndicated Reviews: Lipstick wars
“BLACK paint around the eyes is such a familiar convention it seems natural,” Angela Carter wrote in 1975, “so does red paint on the mouth. We are so used to the bright-red mouth we no longer see it as the wound it mimics...” The two women responsible for that convention were arch rivals, who took America and Europe by storm at the beginning of the twentieth century, floating into capital cities on the wings of glamorous self-invention.
Florence Nightingale Graham arrived in New York from Canada in 1907. She was 26 years old and had considered a career in nursing, but could not stand the sight of blood, so she got a job as a cashier at a beauty parlour instead. Within three years, she had changed her name to Elizabeth Arden (in honour of Elizabeth I, famed for her penchant for cosmetics) and launched a range of beauty products. Chaja Rubinstein had left her large orthodox Jewish family in Poland by then and, armed with a recipe for a beauty treatment she called “Krakow Cream”, had set up beauty salons in Australia and Paris. She was 38 then.
Both women went on to found and run companies with multi-million dollar turnovers, which rested on the notion that youth could be preserved, and beauty might materialize from nowhere. The title of Rubinstein’s posthumously published autobiography was My Life for Beauty, but she herself apparently had not enough to make her happy. Both women had first husbands who slept around, both hired private detectives to investigate them and both subsequently married men who claimed, falsely, to be Russian princes.
Both were sexually unfulfilled, both workaholics. Rubinstein so hated physical contact — she often flinched when kissed — that she rarely indulged in beauty treatments herself. Even as she was earning a fortune making other women feel desirable, her first husband told people he had never desired her. Every time he had an affair she would go out and buy herself some jewellery.
They remained married for 25 years, and Rubinstein went on to become famous for her extensive collection of gems. Arden’s first husband eventually ran off with one of the prettiest members of her female staff. Her sublimatory hobby was racehorses; Rubinstein’s was shopping.
Much as they might have had in common, however, it was always lipsticks at dawn between the beauty queens. Their rivalry led them to steal each other’s staff and even woo each other’s relatives. They bitched about each other with a vengeance, yet they never met.
Helena Rubinstein died at the age of 94, on April Fools’ Day in 1965. As Arden walked past Rubinstein’s salon three weeks later, she sighed dramatically: “Poor Helena!” Her companion recalled that “her voice was sad, but her eyes were triumphant”. Arden died after a stroke 18 months later, and was buried dressed in a pink chiffon dress designed by Oscar de la Renta. Perhaps she felt the colour made her immortal. “When people think pink,” she had once said, “they think Arden.”
Woodhead makes great claims for these tycoons, arguing that what they invented “helped give women a freedom of expression analogous to women gaining the right to vote”. She has done exhaustive research into Rubinstein’s and Arden’s backgrounds, and provides very detailed information on the financial progress of their businesses. I’m not sure I think fake tan and lipstick cartridges are on a par with civil rights — though I like the idea — and there were times when I wished Woodhead would stop taking her subjects so seriously and concentrate on the kitschy drama.
Nevertheless, if it weren’t for Woodhead’s accumulation of detail, would we know, for example, of Rubinstein’s words when trying to remember the name of Marcel Proust? “That Jewish writer,” she called him, “who slept in a room lined with cork and wrote the famous book I could never read... nebbishy looking... smelt of mothballs, wore a fur coat down to the ground, asked heaps about make-up.”
“That Jewish writer” was funny when it came from Rubinstein’s mouth. If they had been Arden’s words, it might have been different. In 1925 Arden opened a salon at the Ritz Carlton in Atlantic City, which was restricted. This was OK by Arden, who counted among her pet hates smoking eyeglasses, body hair and Jews — and anyway, the Ritz Carlton admitted dogs, which was the main thing. Eleven years later and with inimitable timing she opened a salon in Berlin. Hermann Goering was a devotee, particularly after Arden had dinner with him and spent the meal poking Goering in the stomach, jovially urging him to lose some weight.
Anyone who met Rubinstein was evidently captivated by the eccentricities of her character. Cecil Beaton once described her as “an old Polish frog... with a huge casket of jewels”, but the best description in the book comes from Graham Sutherland, who painted Rubinstein’s portrait and reported that she was “magnificent — minute and monosyllabic, with the force of an Egyptian ruler. She had a good many self-doubts and half-yearnings for some other life, half-glimpsed”.
That day, Rubinstein had been so anxious not to look fat in her portrait that she had taken half a bottle of castor oil, several laxatives, hot grapefruit juice and litres of black coffee. This had the unfortunate effect of causing her to keel over in a faint, so that she appeared at her sitting with bruises all over her face.
Eventually, Arden and Rubinstein became so embroiled in their own battles they failed to see that times were changing. They faced stiff competition from an emulator named Estee Lauder, and were shocked to find the lipstick market taken over by a manufacturer of nail varnish named Charles Revson. Revson hired Richard Avedon to photograph the advertisements for his Revlon products, and appealed to the mass market with rhetorical sentiments every woman would apparently understand.
“Have you ever danced with your shoes off?” read one of his ad campaigns. “Do you blush when you find yourself flirting? Do you,” it asked, “secretly hope the next man you meet will be a psychiatrist?” No? Well, perhaps that was where Arden and Rubinstein were going wrong.— Dawn/Observer News Service
War Paint: Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden — Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry
By Lindy Woodhead
Virago Press
ISBN 1860499740
512pp. £20
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