Nellie: Nellie Melba. The buxom opera singer had also come home for a triumphant tour. Wearing a long embroidered coat and an extravagant hat covered in ostrich plumes, she sang the great aria from Aida by way of introduction. Then she turned her enormous body towards Helena, who was transfixed.
‘Since you restored a peaches and cream complexion to my little Nellie, I’m sure you can come up with a cream that can improve my voice …’
‘Dear lady, please be seated.’
The fragile wicker chairs looked as if they might collapse under the diva’s weight so, wisely, she insisted on standing. Helena, who later said she felt ‘like a dwarf’ next to Melba’s imposing frame, had to climb onto a chair to reach her height.
There were days when the queue of customers went all the way down the stairs and out into the street. The salon was getting too small and she could hardly push back the walls. Helena had spotted a new building at 274 Collins Street. She rented an apartment of seven small rooms that she was able to transform into three big ones by knocking down the walls.
The layout stayed the same: an office, the salon, a ‘kitchen’. The walls were redone in a lovely pale green and the furniture was upgraded. Everything was decorated with the same ‘artistic’ good taste, as one of the Sydney dailies put it. It was still just as modern, carefully conceived for women’s well-being. New items were added to the range of products, the team was expanded, and the money kept coming in.
In 1905, nine years after her arrival in Australia, Helena was thirty-three years old and had £100,000 in the bank. She owed her fortune to her phenomenal capacity for hard work – she never wasted a moment, nor did she skimp on the work required to manufacture her little jars by the thousands.
She earned twelve pence on each jar after she’d deducted various expenses, taxes, salaries, rent, and advertising, which, no matter how costly, always multiplied her income a hundredfold, as Mr Thompson had said it would. She still lived above the shop, spent very little on herself, other than what she thought was required to get people to talk about her brand, and saved every penny to put back into her company.
There were a few simple rules she learned during this period. Sixty years later she would still apply them. Never leave any correspondence unanswered. Listen attentively to everyone. Sleep on any important decisions. When in doubt, ask for advice and listen to it, before saying anything. She also learned, with experience, how to run a team and delegate tasks. She kept each branch of the business separate – the making of the cream, packaging, sales and advertising – but she always made sure that everything ran smoothly as a whole. ‘I was passionate about every detail in those days, and have remained so.’5
She was aware that the situation was a fragile one: everything was going her way, but her luck could still turn. She could take pride in her success in Australia, and consolidate that success by opening a few additional salons in Sydney and Brisbane, as well as in Wellington in New Zealand, and that would be more than enough to ensure a good standard of living. But her success was driving her ever harder, and she wanted more and more from life. She had an entrepreneur’s ambitious nature. And since she had succeeded just when everything had been conspiring to make her fail, she owed it to herself to continue to surpass her own expectations.
Convinced that the only true path to beauty was through science, she regretted more than ever that she had not been able to study medicine. Now that she had the means, she decided to fill in the gaps in her knowledge. She would use the knowledge to enhance her practical skills. She would return to the old continent, where she would find the best scientists, experts, universities, and libraries. She could assuage her thirst for learning, and refresh her knowledge.
In June 1905, she set sail once again. This time she was heading back to Europe.
NOTES
1 Fabe, Maxene, Beauty Millionaire: The Life of Helena Rubinstein, Crowell, 1972.
2 Helena cited Eugenia Stone as a journalist from Sydney in My Life for Beauty, and the Sydney Morning Herald was one of the only papers to have a women’s supplement, so I have deduced that that was the publication she was writing for. She also worked for Table Talk in Melbourne.
3 O’Higgins, Madame, op. cit.
4 Vigarello, Georges, Histoire de la beauté: le corps et l’art d’embellir de la Renaissance à nos jours, Points Seuil, 2007.
5 Rubinstein, Helena, The Art of Feminine Beauty, op. cit.
Kazimierz was the mandatory first stop of her trip, and it seemed poor, dirty, and cramped. Helena had grown accustomed to a comfortable life in Australia. She had travelled, and met people from all walks of life – settlers, ladies, businessmen, bankers. She had learned a great deal in their company, and her horizons had expanded. In Melbourne, perpetual movement seemed to be the norm, and the city never slept. Here, in Kazimierz, everything was the opposite. A heavy immobility reigned over everything and everyone. Nothing had changed since her departure: not the ageless rabbis, with their beards and worn black frock coats, nor the housewives gossiping on their doorsteps, nor the students with their skin grown pale from studying and standing outside the yeshivot debating a commentary on the Torah.
Even the streets seemed to have shrunk in her absence. The smell of greasy food wafting from the open windows made her feel nauseous. She noticed the peeling facades, the walls black with smoke, the garbage scattered along the grimy sidewalks as if she had never seen any of it before. In the carriage that took her from the station to her house – no mud-covered pavements for her on this trip – her childhood came back to her in flashes. She could never live here again, among people who now felt like foreigners to her.
Everything about Kraków disappointed her. It was all so provincial, even the shops around the Rynek. Helena’s tastes had become more refined, and she had begun to wear clothing made by renowned dressmakers who copied the latest Paris fashions. The nostalgia she had felt from afar was preferable to such a disappointing reality.
But it was the reception her family gave her that upset her the most.
‘Why are you wearing such a tight chignon?’ asked Gitel in that reproachful voice Helena so disliked. ‘You are ruining your hair. And if you continue dressing yourself up like that you’ll never find a husband, my girl. Your sisters Pauline, Rosa and Regina are already married. As for you …!’
Gitel had aged. Her hands trembled, her face seemed set in a sneer, and too much hardship had accentuated her bitterness. Perhaps there was a touch of pique or envy in her reproaches as well. Her eldest daughter had succeeded, despite all their predictions. Helena was on the verge of raising her voice the way she used to, but then she merely shook her head. Her mother would never change. She was still obsessed with the marriage of her offspring, making lists of hoped-for or potential prospects like a miser counting his gold. Meanwhile, although three of Helena’s sisters had found a husband, the others continued to mope about the house.
Hertzel was off in his corner, studying in silence. He, too, seemed to have shrunk: he was stooped and his beard completely white. With his velvet skullcap and shiny jacket, he looked more and more like his grandfather, the rabbi Salomon Rubinstein, whose stern face looked down from a painting