Beauty's Handmaiden

The queen of the U.S. beauty business' billion-dollar-a-year empire is a short (4 ft. 10 in.), plump woman of 71 with a youthful complexion. When she is at work in her eight-story Fifth Avenue salon, she is Helena Rubinstein. At home, in her 26-room, three-floor Park Avenue apartment, crammed with about $1,000,000 worth of paintings (Matisse, Picasso, Dufy, etc.) and art treasures, she likes to be called Princess Gourielli (her husband is a Georgian nobleman turned businessman).

Last year, Helena Rubinstein Inc. sold $18 million worth of creams, lotions and perfumes in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Rubinstein salons and outlets abroad sold $12 million more. That was not enough for Helena Rubinstein. Last week, in Roslyn, N.Y., she opened a new $4,000,000 plant to put her beauty business on an assembly-line basis and triple her production. Made mostly of glass, it has dustproof floors, a sealed, odorproof room for testing perfumes, huge, stainless-steel mixing vats to churn up tons of cream and cologne, and machines to fill 1,000,000 bottles and jars a day.

While boosting her quantity, Helena Rubinstein still keeps a sharp eye on the quality trade. In her salons, women who can afford to pay $25 for a "Day of Beauty" are stretched, exercised, rubbed, scrubbed, wrapped in hot blankets, bathed in infra-red rays, massaged, fed a lunch of 21 raw vegetables, then given a face treatment, pedicure, manicure, scalp treatment, shampoo and hairdo. But she candidly admits that most women can take care of their complexions with a couple of creams and ten minutes' daily attention. For her own skin she mainly uses a simple lotion, containing nothing but oils and herbs. It is the original cream which started her in business 50 years ago.

The Girl from Cracow. The cream was made by a Hungarian doctor and sold in Cracow, Poland, where Helena Rubinstein was born, the eldest of eight daughters. At 18, she went to Australia to visit relatives, carrying some of the cream with her; she soon saw that windburned Australian ranch wives provided a market. She rented a Melbourne shop, sold $100,000 worth of the cream her first year, and bought the Hungarian's formula. She moved to London, opened a second salon, soon opened shops in Paris and New York.

By 1928, her business was so big that Wall Street's Lehman Bros, paid her about $7,000,000 for two-thirds of the firm, in, corporated it, put its stock on the Curb, and went after mass markets. But, says Helena Rubinstein, "they thought they could do better selling everything for a dollar. They sold $50,000 worth more than I had and still made less profits. Some women won't buy anything unless they can pay a lot. They were ruining the business." Since the market crash had meanwhile driven the company's stock from $70 to $3, Mme. Rubinstein was able to grab back control and make her company "more or less elegant again."

A good promoter, she provided something new every year. She put out a new Heaven-Sent line of colognes (with bottles shaped like angels), dropped 500 basketed samples on pink and blue balloons from Bonwit Teller's roof. She developed a friction face wash (Beauty Grains) for clogged pores, found that "homogenized" raw silk was a good base for makeup, and made a Contour-Lift Film designed to firm up the jowls (at $5 a jar). Now & then, the FTC cracked down on her, ordered her to stop claiming that her Eye Lash Grower had any effect on growth, or that the egg content of her Egg Complexion Soap had any beneficial effect on the skin. She altered her titles to conform, but feared the FTC less than her archrival Elizabeth Arden, who paid $50,000 a year to hire away Rubinstein's general manaager. Rubinstein got revenge by hiring Arden's ex-husband to take his place.

The Glass Bed. Despite her years, Helena Rubinstein usually rises at 6 a.m. from her transparent lucite bed (which lights up like a neon tube at the flip of a switch), is always in such a hurry that she breaks into a trot in darting about her salon. Although she has made an estimated $30 million as beauty's handmaiden, she still feels her selling needs constant rejuvenating. She noticed that the woman customer frequently bought two jars of cream--one for her husband. So she began a line of men's cosmetics and toilet goods named after her husband. With her new plant, she plans to expand Gourielli production (which now includes some items for women), is certain that men cannot get along without such products as her brushless shaving cream. It contains "amazing active ozone [releasing] vital oxygen . . . beneficial to tender skin . . ."

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