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supplant the chalky rice powder then in vogue,
which gave faces a peculiar whitewashed look. Although Queen Alexandra was
rumored to wear cosmetics in the evening, only actresses really knew the art of
makeup as it would later develop. They passed on useful tips to the stagestruck
Helena, whose memoirs record many London evenings spent at the theater, at that
time perhaps the only place where makeup was habitually and openly used. After
trying out the new techniques herself, she would pass them on, in turn, to her
bolder clients. In her correspondence with Rosa Hollay, who would become her
London manageress in 1914, she mentions a “prep . . . called stage
white for arms and neck, it positively does not come off.” 32 She also offered skin analysis and facial
treatments, including facial peels for bad cases of acne, the province of Frau
Doktor List from Vienna.
    These treatments were expensive—ten guineas (nearly
$1,600 in today’s money) for a course of twelve, or £200 ($32,000) for regular
weekly visits the year round. But despite the expense, and their initial
nervousness, the customers kept coming. Within a year there were over a thousand
regular clients on the books, and in London, as in Australia, the money poured
in. Later, when life had become less easy, she wistfully looked back to those
early days. “We took in before the war about £30,000 a year and expenses were
about 7 [thousand],” 33 she told Rosa Hollay in
1923.
    In 1909, Helena became pregnant. “I had not
consciously longed for motherhood,” was how she put it in her memoirs; in fact,
her first reaction was fury. 34 Titus, though,
was pleased, and in 1912 their first child, a son, Roy, was joined by another,
Horace (an anglicization of Helena’s father’s name, Herzl). “The nursery teas
with the boys, the evenings of gaiety with Edward [Titus] and our friends—all of
these memories fill me even today with nostalgia,” she wrote fifty years
later, 35 exhausting the joys of motherhood
in three lines before going on to devote several pages to her preferred topic,
interior decoration. She was fond enough of her boys in the abstract—various
somewhat stilted photographs show them together. But as many career women since
have found, not only do the prosaic realities of child care tend to pall beside
the constant excitement of a successful professional life, it is famously hard
to combine the two. Helena’s great rival Elizabeth Arden had no children. Nor,
for that matter, did her friend Coco Chanel, the most successful career woman in
Paris. Her own summation in 1930 was, “Maternity, I believe, gives a richness to
a woman’s life which no other satisfaction can replace, yet most women, during
this generation at least, are finding that the home and the nursery are not
enough.” 36 Thirty years later Betty Friedan
came to the same conclusion; her book on the subject, The
Feminine Mystique , would become the catalyst for women’s liberation.
It is doubtful, however, whether Friedan or anyone else would have recommended
subordinating family life to business in quite the single-minded way Helena
did.
    Despite her domestic ties—or perhaps because of
them—this was a period of frenetic traveling for Helena. She visited Australia
to keep Ceska up to the mark, and shuttled, when in Europe, between London and
Paris. Helped by Titus, a cultured man who knew many writers and artists, she
began to buy paintings and sculptures, and developed what would become a
lifelong addiction to the Paris couture houses. In Paris, too, she acquired the
severe and elegant hairstyle that would henceforth be her trademark, an
uncompromising black chignon (later, she had it rinsed blue-black every six
weeks) that set her where she would henceforth remain: outside time.
    It soon became clear that Paris could use its own
Salon de Beauté Valaze. The couture business was becoming an important industry,
with houses such as Worth and Lanvin beginning to show collections