Ugly Beauty (8 page)

Schueller decided the only remedy—and the only way
to outflank his competitors—was to be frank. The new dye, called “Imédia,” was
launched with a warning: it might be dangerous. New users were advised to dab a
drop behind an ear and wait forty-eight hours. If an inflammation appeared, the
dye should not be used. At the same time he advised that should an allergic
reaction declare itself, there was an antidote: a rinse of brine mixed with
oxygenated water, which would remove the offending substance. The policy worked,
and sales jumped.

By the mid-1930s, L’Oréal employed three hundred
salesmen where once it had employed ten, and the company decamped once again, to
the imposing building in rue Royale that remains its headquarters to this day.
Like all L’Oréal’s successive headquarters, as it outgrew one building after
another, this building, too, was just a few steps from rue d’Alger. But by this
time both L’Oréal and its founder had moved, definitively, into the other,
brilliant world—the world of rue Saint-Honoré that in 1908, though physically
close, had been at the same time so immeasurably distant.

IV

What I always tried to do, in dealing with people,
was to provide them with something they seemed cruelly to lack: a goal in
life.

—E
UGÈNE
S
CHUELLER
,
1957
20

L
ike Helena
Rubinstein’s endless scurryings from one side of the world to the other, Eugène
Schueller’s zigzag path from industry to industry bore the mark of compulsion.
They had to keep moving or they were lost. But these compulsions had
diametrically opposite roots.

Rubinstein’s career was chaotic, a progression of
brilliantly executed extempore sallies. Just as her business was an extension of
herself, peopled by the sisters, cousins, nephews, and nieces who were her pale
imitations, so her constant journeyings reflected her emotional life. They might
go under the name of business necessity, but the essence of Madame was that
business and emotion were not separable. Every crisis—the row with her father
when she turned down his choice of husband and left his house forever, Edward
Titus’s insistent desire that she marry him, the arrival of children, the
outbreak of World War I, the sale of her American business to Lehman Brothers,
the outbreak of World War II—was marked by physical flight, to another country,
another continent, another beginning. Stuff happened, and she dealt with it
somehow, and because she was clever and thought nothing of the world’s opinion,
simply following her instincts, which rarely led her astray, things turned out
all right. And then there was more stuff, and she dealt with that. She ran on
adrenaline: her chaotic, compulsive letters to Rosa Hollay, in which the worry
of the moment was scribbled down whenever it might occur on whatever scrap of
paper lay to hand, reveal the constant, jumbled panic beneath her assured
exterior. “I haven’t paid any bills the last three weeks, let me know again what
must and should be paid now. I am frightfully short of money, it seems worse and
worse. . . . I often don’t know if I am on my feet or my head.” “I am
in such chaos, I am most thankful to have good constitution all the same I feel
at times I will go mad, the worry and the responsibility is just eating me up.
. . .” “I do actually nothing and work all the time.”
21
However successful, however mountainously
rich, hers was life as crisis management. “I have too much on my shoulders. I’m
surrounded with people, but I can’t get to them. . . . People
. . . people . . . and I’m alone! With burdens
. . . such burdens!” she told Patrick O’Higgins the day she offered
him the indeterminate job that would keep him by her side for the rest of her
life.
22

Schueller, by contrast, was in control. In the
world, as in the laboratory, he knew what he wanted to achieve and methodically
set about achieving it. He was a scientist, and therefore saw the universe as a
place of logic and patterns. Human life was no exception: without a pattern, all
was chaos. Having abandoned the Catholic faith of his childhood, he spent the
rest of his life constructing a substitute for it, a framework within which a
modern industrial state might function fairly and efficiently for the benefit of
its citizens.

This fascination with possible worlds surfaced in
some unexpected places. The opening paragraphs of his earliest contribution to
Coiffure de Paris
, the October 1909 essay on
“Technical and Practical Hints on Hair Dyes,” plunged its readers into a world
of scientific fantasy.

In four or five years
from now, our bicycles will have become monoplanes weighing a hundred kilos,
which will carry one or two people, and on which it will be possible to
travel from here [Schueller evidently assumed all his readers lived in
Paris] to Orléans in an hour.

When that happens, there
will probably be no more hair dyers. That delicate, difficult, and sometimes
even dangerous profession will exist only in a few lost villages in Morocco
or Calabria. Nor will there be any more dyeing of white hair. Instead, in
every town, there will be shops where the scalp will simply be massaged with
lotions, each more wonderful than the last—liquids that will prevent hair
from turning white in the first place.

Eagerly, Schueller outlined the chemistry by which
this future would be achieved. The magic liquids would be “dilute solutions, in
alcohol, tafia, or rum, of some di- or tri-ethylaminoparoxybenzene which will
recolor any hair, whatever its original color, that will be harmless and that
everyone will use each morning, like powder or toothpaste, but”—a bow here to
the readers of
Coiffure de Paris
—“which many will
prefer to have applied by a hair artist—the successor of today’s hairdressers.”
Another miraculous invention would abolish the barbershop: men would simply rub
their faces with an oil that stopped the hairs from growing.
23

Here is the authentic voice of the times, of Jules
Verne and H. G. Wells, of Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
.
Like them, Schueller was enraptured by the new worlds science was opening up,
convinced that it would transform the future in unimaginable ways, and eager to
share this vision with a wondering public. There was, of course, an important
difference between them and him. Where Verne, Lang, and Wells expressed
themselves through stories, Schueller aimed to work his transformations in
reality. But whatever its medium, one significant corollary of Schueller’s
visionary mind-set, with its scientifically argued blueprints for ideal worlds,
was a deep impatience with the retrogressive dullards who refused to act on
these excellent ideas. And this impatience would point the way to dark
places.

Schueller was always conscious that had he not
received the kind of education rarely available to bakers’ sons, he would
probably, despite all his abilities, have remained poor. He was aware, too, that
that education had been largely a question of luck. Despite his parents’ desire
to give their son the best possible start in life, he would have had to make do
with whatever the state could then provide had not the Collège Sainte-Croix, in
an unusual access of imagination, accepted part payment of his school fees in
pastries. He therefore directed his first social efforts towards education. He
felt it was time to end the self-perpetuating mandarinate of the
supercompetitive and expensive
grandes écoles
that
excluded so much talent even when—as in his own case—a poor boy had demonstrated
unusual intellectual potential. Intelligent working-class men seemed to him
particularly disabled by their lack of math and science education,
24
and he wanted to remedy this personally, so
far as he could. Before they were even twenty, he and his friend Jacques Sadoul,
who shared his concerns, had founded a modest people’s university at La
Chapelle, a poor area to the north of Paris, where they taught in their free
time.
25

Soon enough, of course, there was no more free
time, at least for Schueller, and the teaching lapsed. But despite his
increasingly frenetic level of activity, first with L’Oréal, then in the army
during World War I, then during his headlong progress through assorted chemical
industries during the 1920s and thirties, his concern with the unsatisfactory
state of the world, like Sadoul’s, continued. Sadoul turned to communism and
took refuge in the nascent Soviet Union; Schueller, the self-made man, set about
designing a new, improved capitalism.

His sense that the old model was failing
crystallized during the 1920s. In 1923, at the height of the great inflation, he
made a trip to Germany, where L’Oréal had opened an agency, and “felt, for the
first time, that the world had veered off-track.” Three years later, in France,
it veered off again, almost as catastrophically, though in the opposite
direction, as the franc was revalued. “Factories full of orders were going day
and night . . . and suddenly, customers stopped ordering. A month
later they wouldn’t even take delivery of stuff that was already in the
pipeline, and I had to close two out of three factories.”
26

One day he realized that with modern machines he
could double production using only half his existing workforce. But if only half
the previous number of workers were earning salaries, who would be there to buy
the goods? Then he had a revelation.
If salaries were
doubled along with production, there would still be buyers
.
“Capitalists had to realize that they should stop lowering prices while trying
to maintain their profits by cutting salaries too. On the contrary, what they
needed to do was not lower prices but raise salaries—not in an unplanned way, as
when workers demanded and threatened [and employers gave in]—but mathematically,
raising them as production increased. The trick was to raise buying power, not
lower prices. Lowering prices would never absorb overproduction, because it was
impossible ever to lower them enough.”
27

Over the next few years Schueller worked out his
economic theories. He first expounded them in a speech to old Sainte-Croix
pupils in 1934, later published as an article in the Sainte-Croix de Neuilly
magazine. The article created such a stir that he was encouraged to spread the
word wider, which he did at two meetings of industrialists. Later, in 1936, he
published a journal,
L’Action patronale
, in which
employers were exhorted to social reform. Finally he set out his programs in two
books,
Le Deuxième salaire
(The Second Salary),
written in 1938 and published in 1939, and
La Révolution de
l’économie
, published in 1941.

What was needed, he was convinced, was a new
formula for paying workers. They would receive their salaries as usual at the
end of each month—but this basic pay would not be their only pay. In his own
industry, he reckoned that salaries should amount to 30 percent of the product’s
factory-gate selling price. If, at the end of the month, 30 percent of total
receipts amounted to more than the total of the workers’ agreed-upon basic
salaries, the difference would be paid out to the workers, apportioned according
to their individual work records. Thus: the “second salary.”
28

This system would have several advantages, of which
the first and most important was that workers, instead of spending the day
watching the clock, would work hard because they would benefit personally if the
business flourished. He himself, Schueller said, had spent a good deal of his
youth performing boring manual tasks, and recognized that the reason this had
never bothered him was because, unlike most workers, he had always, even when he
was very young, been working for his own benefit rather than an employer’s. Of
course, few young men were as driven as he had been. Nevertheless, the second
salary would make every worker a stakeholder in his own factory.

It would also, Schueller thought, solve the problem
of impersonality, which inevitably increased as the business grew larger. While
his own business had still been small, he had worked alongside his employees and
transmitted his own enthusiasm to them. But when it grew larger, and personal
contacts became rarer, he saw that most workers had no real interest in their
job. It was then, he wrote, “that the problem of restoring some sense to the
life of the men who worked in my businesses began to obsess me.”
29

These theories, dismissed by contemporaries as
“Schueller’s
dada
” (Schueller’s hobbyhorse) were in
fact extremely forward-looking. As he realized, in a recession nothing is more
fatal than the deflationary spiral of ever-reduced prices, jobs, and wages. It
was this problem he sought to tackle.

Schueller knew the second salary worked: he used
the system in his own factories, and they, as everyone could see, flourished.
2
Others of his ideas—social security for the unemployed paid for
through an automatically deducted national insurance (revolutionary, he
admitted, “but we live in revolutionary times”
30
); a united Europe in which the mark and the franc would be one
monetary unity in a European economy
31
—are now
part of everyday life. In economics he was a visionary, and a benign one.

He did not stop at economics, however. Having
lighted upon an idea that he felt would save the world, he felt impelled to
design the world he would save. And that was altogether more problematic. For
the second salary did not take the form of a simple monthly addition to the
paycheck. Rather, it went to workers’ wives and children, to the retired, the
ill and the unemployed, in the form of grants. Only after these grants had
permitted the wives, children, and old to live “properly” were surpluses passed
on to the workers themselves, as bonuses.
32
But
who was to define “properly”?