She started out as Helena (or ‘He-LAY-na’, as she would pronounce it in America with her Yiddish-tinged Polish accent) then, as she became more successful, she would be known as Madame. That was what everyone called her, even members of her own family. Indeed, inside her there were two people: Helena the rebel, adventurer, lover; and Madame the businesswoman, billionaire and princess late in life.
My preference lies towards the younger woman, with her rebellious, reckless streak; but the older one continues to fascinate me. The portraits of her at this time tell us a great deal about her. Despite her expensive clothes and jewellery and lavish surroundings, she has the face of a Jewish grandmother, hard and frail at the same time. And that is what she was despite appearances, that is who she had never stopped being: the ‘little lady from Kraków’3 who all her life had struggled to master the proper etiquette.
During the long months I spent in the company of this visionary woman, I learned something new every day about her anticipation of trends and fashions, her gift for coming up with new ideas, her incredible ability to live through different eras, countries, wars, fashions, mores, always in the thick of things: the emancipation of Australian women; the belle époque in Europe; London of the 1910s as it shook off Victorian puritanism; the artistic and literary Montparnasse of the roaring twenties; the pre-war years in Paris and New York; the reconstruction of the 1950s and the democratisation of beauty; the 1960s and the advent of consumerism. And through it all lies the recurrent theme of women on their long march towards freedom.
Her life, which was stranger than fiction, reads like a historical and geographical compendium – she couldn’t sit still, so she travelled by boat, train or plane, from one continent to the next, the way other people take the bus. It also featured, as does any saga, its share of drama, heartbreak, personal tragedy and great solitude.
She had her faults, and they were countless: she could be authoritarian, demanding, tyrannical, despotic, cruel, miserly, selfish, deceitful and even downright insensitive, but by the same token she could be generous, kind, attentive, charming, shy, open, tolerant, and wickedly funny. Like many people of her ilk, she was a living paradox, excessive, larger-than-life, even ‘over the top’, as Suzanne Slesin, her son Roy’s daughter-in-law titled a book about her a few years ago.4
Her principal vanity, when late in life she took only a few minutes to do her hair and make-up, ever mindful not to waste time, was mendacity. She lied about everything, starting with her own age – she felt this was the best way to stay young and was more effective than any anti-wrinkle cream.
Like other celebrities eager to forge their own legend, she was constantly rewriting her own life, transforming it to suit her – hiding, veiling, misrepresenting, embellishing, exaggerating, preparing a dream for posterity. Rumours abound, as do inventions, contradictions, fables. Unto those that have shall more be given, and Helena was no exception to the rule. But at the same time, grey areas remain, although the documents, autobiographies, biographies, newspaper articles, administrative documents and testimonies of both the dead and living who knew her – and there are not many of this last category left – can shed some light on her life as a whole.
‘She won’t hold it against you if you re-create the legend yet again,’ exclaimed her cousin Litka Goldberg-Fasse, during our first interview. ‘Madame always lied about her life.’ She added, after a moment of silence, ‘What mattered most to her was to be talked about.’
Madame often said, ‘If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have.’
Perhaps true. But she came first.
Michèle Fitoussi
June 2010
NOTES
1 Rubinstein, Helena, The Art of Feminine Beauty, Horace Liveright, 1930.
2 Rubinstein, Helena, My Life for Beauty, Simon & Schuster, 1965.
3 Brown Keifer, Elaine, ‘Madame Rubinstein: The Little Lady from Kraków Has Made a Fabulous Success of Selling Beauty’, Life, 21 July 1941.
4 Slesin, Suzanne, Over the Top: Helena Rubinstein, Extraordinary Style, Beauty, Art, Fashion and Design, Pointed Leaf Press, 2004.
From the moment she boarded the Prinz Regent Luitpold, a German liner that travelled back and forth between Europe and Australia, Helena Rubinstein felt as if she were in a state of weightlessness. She was free.
And while she might have sensed that a trying adventure lay ahead, she savoured every second of her miraculous journey, even if she didn’t really know what to expect at the other end. She had hardly had time to realise that by leaving her country, she would at last be able to change her life and be who she wanted to be. She had no idea how she would go about it. And yet she hadn’t hesitated when her family suggested emigration to her. In spite of all the real or imagined dangers that might lie ahead – shipwreck, accidents, and fatal diseases, not to mention encounters with the wrong crowd – she had agreed to set off on her own, to go thousands of miles from her native Poland to join three uncles she had never met before.
It was May 1896. Helena was twenty-four years old, with all her worldly belongings in an old trunk. There were days when her chest seemed to swell with all the desires she kept pent up inside until it felt like her heart might explode. She wanted to open her arms wide and embrace the world.
Despite the anxiety that had occasionally gripped her since she embarked in Genoa, she marvelled at what was going on around her. For the first time in her life, she actually felt something approaching happiness. When the weather was fine she went on deck and stared out at the ocean, fascinated by the changing light on the shifting waves: how she wished she could capture every nuance!
When it was too windy on deck, she would explore the gangways in cabin class, stopping at the music room or at the door to the smoking room, browsing through the books in the library. At the bar she would order a cup of tea and some fruitcake, savouring the pleasure of drinking out of china and using real silverware. Afterwards she would luxuriate in a plush sofa to read or embroider. Not once did she think about her family who had stayed behind in Kazimierz, the neighbourhood in Kraków where she grew up. She was not prone to nostalgia, at least not yet.
Fortunately she did not suffer from the seasickness that had consigned so many of her fellow passengers to their berths. In her thirst for discovery, she would even go down into steerage, evading the watchful eyes of the grumpy stewards who forbade passengers from going from one class to another. The sight of these scores of immigrants was wrenching: men and women all crowded together on the deck, lying next to each other moaning or shouting, vomiting their guts up on the floor. The stench of fuel, greasy food and unwashed bodies made her ill. She would hurry away again, fearful she might forfeit her spot on the upper deck were she to be discovered down below, as if she might somehow be forced to stay down there as punishment for trespassing. But that was the reaction of a poor person, and in a shot she was angry with herself for having felt that way.
One morning, leaning against the railing, with a parasol to protect her delicate skin (the sun, woman’s mortal enemy!) she looked out, fascinated by the port of Bombay where the steamer had just docked. In the foreign crowd swarming on the quay below her she saw poverty, even more stark there in the harsh