Ugly Beauty Read Online Free PDF Page B

big women’s suffrage marches held in New
York in 1912 and 1913 were told to wear white shirtwaists—and red lipstick, the
badge of independence. Domestic production of manufactured toiletries was
nudging $17,000,000. 41 Influential women’s
magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair were eager to accept beauticians’ advertisements and to
fill their columns with copy about fashionable persons and doings. And a galaxy
of potent new role models was about to enter the public consciousness, as the
budding film industry created a goddesshood of idealized beauties for whom heavy
makeup was a working necessity. Helena Rubinstein liked to claim that she had
taught Theda Bara, the notorious femme fatale who became known as “The Vamp,”
how to apply her eye makeup. That was dubious, to say the least. What was
incontestable was the effect Theda Bara’s makeup had on public ideas of what was
acceptable and desirable. By the time Helena Rubinstein arrived in New York,
every restaurant, hotel, and store of any importance kept a supply of cosmetics
in their dressing rooms or bathrooms.
    The results of this enthusiasm were not subtle. In
1910, a New York World reporter sitting in a café
window on Forty-second Street and Broadway noted, “Eyelids can’t be painted too
blue nor lashes too heavily beaded.” 42 Madame
was not impressed. “When I first came to America about ten years ago, I was
shocked . . . by the number of young girls who were excessively made
up,” she confided to the American Magazine . 43 By contrast she offered a more subtle European
exclusiveness. Madame Helena Rubinstein, “the accepted adviser in beauty matters
to Royalty, Aristocracy and the great Artistes of Europe,” was ready, for a
price, to show them how it should really be done. And everyone wanted to learn.
Not just rich ladies but “Stenographers, clerks, and even little office girls”
would be interested in what she had to offer. 44
    After a continental railroad tour, to pick out the
cities they would target, Helena and Manka returned to New York, where Madame
began the now familiar business of locating a suitable site for a salon—her
first in the New World. “We haven’t found a place yet, it seems to be very very
difficult. Indeed there are thousands of places empty as things are not good in
general. But as soon as I want one it costs £2500 a year,” she grumbled in her
first letter to Rosa Hollay (adding: “See that you are economical with
everything, even electric light” 45 ). She
settled upon a house at 15 East Forty-ninth Street, and in February 1915 a
half-page advertisement appeared in Vogue announcing
that “A Famous European ‘House of Beauty’ ” had opened its doors in New York.
“At Madame Rubinstein’s Maison de Beauté Valaze treatments are administered for
the removal of wrinkles, crowsfeet, coarseness of skin, puffiness under the
eyes, blackheads, and other complexion defects. The New York salon radiates the
same elegance, the same Spirit of Beauty, as her famous salons in London and
Paris.” Helleu’s 1908 etching of Madame looking fey in an aigrette adorned the
advertisement. It was the first of what would eventually total twenty-seven
portraits by the day’s leading artists, from Marie Laurencin to Pavel
Tchelitchew, Raoul Dufy to Salvador Dalí, that reflected both Rubinstein’s
bottomless narcissism and the central role her image played in her business
until the very end. In 1955 Picasso sketched her, but never worked up the
portrait. “How old are you, Helena?” he asked her, to which she replied, evasive
as ever, “Older than you, Pablo.” 46 Three years
later the British artist Graham Sutherland portrayed her as a monstre sacré , a craggy, baton-wielding field marshal
weirdly attired in embroidered satin by Balenciaga, with kohl-rimmed eyes and
thinning, boot-blacked hair, the whole topped off by a six-strand pearl necklace
and Ping-Pong–ball diamond drop earrings. She was then eighty-six.