Ugly Beauty (17 page)

You told me about your
fears, and various conversations I had before I left Paris seem
unfortunately to justify them. Do be very careful. You’re so terribly
impulsive about everything, but I think you should be very cautious about
revealing too much regarding the way you’ve helped some of us, and some
friendships should also be kept quiet; if you’re publicly compromised, those
who have been close to you might find themselves in a delicate
position.

I think, and I hope
you’ll agree, that the essential thing for you is to get social matters
organized. . . .

This prophecy of trouble ahead was soon fulfilled.
When the war ended, Schueller was hauled in front of the courts on a charge of
collaboration, where, as we have seen, he was liberated largely because of the
efforts of Pierre de Bénouville, whom he had barely met. And here, at last, is
the explanation for this surprising intervention: Bénouville had been a
contemporary of Dalle and Bettencourt at 104 rue de Vaugirard, and it was
largely to oblige these friends that he agreed to testify for Schueller.
Bettencourt, if not Schueller, had social matters highly organized, and
Schueller now benefited from his excellent connections.

Bénouville was not in any way put out by
Schueller’s links with the cagoulards and MSR—rather the opposite: he had
himself been an enthusiastic cagoulard. His name appears in the Corre list of
members, and although when questioned in old age he refused to admit directly
that he had belonged to La Cagoule, he reaffirmed that he thought Filliol and
Deloncle had been “good chaps who refused to give in” (
Des
gens très sympas qui ne voulaient pas céder
). On the same occasion he
said that he quite understood why it had been necessary to assassinate the
Soviet diplomat Dmitri Navachine—he had been trying to infiltrate the royalist
journal
Le Courrier Royal
, something Bénouville
seems to have felt merited a death sentence.
12
His nationalism was so extreme that it was impossible for him to countenance any
form of collaboration with the German occupation. But his gut loathing of the
left remained undimmed, even when they were his fellow
résistants
. As Pierre Péan’s
Vie et morts de
Jean Moulin
shows, he was almost certainly part of the complex
machinations that betrayed the Communist Resistance leader Jean Moulin to the
Germans. Moulin, a man Bénouville saw as standing “on the very left of the
left,” was an associate of Pierre Cot, who had been interior minister at the
time of the great demonstration of February 6, 1934, and who had ordered the
police to fire on the crowd: “That was something about Moulin that I didn’t like
at all.”
13
Bénouville preferred to deal with
characters like Georges Soulès, who had belonged to MSR but who in 1943 switched
over to the Resistance, and who was close enough to Bénouville to have a special
postbox arrangement to communicate with him.
14
Indeed, Bénouville was, if anything, to the right of Schueller
politically—certainly in his anti-Semitism. In 1937 he had been a regular
contributor to
Le Pays Libre
, a violently
anti-Semitic publication.
1

It was the 104 network, too, that steered
Bettencourt clear of the anticipated post-Liberation hazards. By the summer of
1944 it was obvious that anyone who wanted to enter public life after the war
would need to show they had been a
résistant
, and
Mitterrand and Bénouville, who both had starry Resistance credentials, had
worked together to ensure, while there was still time, that their old friend
Bettencourt would come out of the war with the correct reputation. They did so
by arranging to send him to Geneva on Resistance business.

I’m just back from
Geneva [Bettencourt wrote Schueller that September]. I can’t come to rue
Royale immediately, but I can tell you that your Swiss affairs are in good
shape. . . . As it turned out I didn’t need the money you so
kindly made available to me there. There was enough credit available from
the Resistance delegation. . . .
15

The Geneva trip did what it was intended to do, and
in the years following the war, Bettencourt swiftly climbed the political
ladder. Meanwhile, his intimacy with the Schuellers grew. Liliane Schueller was
tubercular, and spent the winter of 1947–48 in the Swiss resort of Leysin; André
joined her there, at the chic Hotel Belvedere. Soon the two were engaged, and on
January 9, 1950, André Bettencourt and Liliane Schueller were married. The
ceremony took place at Vallauris, the home of a family friend, rather than at
Franconville or L’Arcouest. Evidently Liliane did not regard the second Madame
Schueller as part of the family—or not enough to host her wedding reception.
Nor, it seemed, did Schueller himself. Interviewed in 1954, he told journalist
Merry Bromberger that he had “lost his wife, who had been such a support to him
[and that] his daughter, Madame Bettencourt, the wife of a young deputy for
Seine-Infèrieure, looks after the house at Franconville.”
16
Of the former Miss Burrows there was no
mention.
2

By this time the 104-L’Oréal connection had widened
to include François Mitterrand. Mitterrand had had a busy and productive war.
After escaping from his prisoner-of-war camp he had become caught up in Vichy
politics, receiving the Francisque medal from Pétain himself, at the same time
using his position at the head of the prisoners-of-war organization to run an
important Resistance network. He had also fallen in love and got married. It was
a varied, thrilling, and risky double and treble life, and one he hugely
enjoyed. When the Liberation brought it to an end, he felt restless and
dissatisfied. He wanted to enter politics, but was unable to locate a suitable
political niche. Meanwhile his wife was pregnant, and he urgently needed to earn
some money. So he turned to his friends for help—and, as always, 104 did not
disappoint. Dalle, supported by André Bettencourt, used his influence with
Schueller, and for a while, before returning to politics and getting elected as
deputy for the Nièvre, Mitterrand edited
Votre
Beauté
.

He hated it. Editing a women’s magazine for a
beauty-products company was not the future the ambitious François had envisaged.
Every evening when he came home he grumbled to his wife about how he was wasting
his life. For Schueller, L’Oréal represented first a scientific challenge, and
then a bottomless fountain of cash. For Dalle, it would be a fascinating and
lucrative career following in the footsteps of a man he revered. But although
Mitterrand was grateful for the comfortable salary, he felt his association with
Votre Beauté
made him look ridiculous. Although
his actual name never appeared, his alter ego Frédérique Marnais was much in
evidence, writing articles and responding to readers’ letters. Why was François
Mitterrand, of all people, advising women on their emotional problems and beauty
routines? He made a few feeble attempts to turn
Votre
Beauté
into a literary magazine, but met with no encouragement—there
were, Danielle Mitterrand remembered, “constant battles with the editorial
board.”
17
And at home, things were also not
going well. The Mitterrands’ first baby died at the age of three months, an
event from which both he and his wife struggled to recover.

Frédérique Marnais welcomed in the new year of 1946
with a touching and heartfelt piece entitled “A Woman’s Most Beautiful Necklace:
The Arms of a Little Child.”
18
But by then the
association was clearly doomed. “I don’t exactly see this job as a religious
calling,”
19
he wrote irritably to his
L’Oréal superiors—a fatal admission in a company where this was precisely the
kind of dedication required from senior staff. As was inevitable, Mitterrand
left L’Oréal soon after, and spent the summer of 1946 looking for a winnable
seat in the Chamber of Deputies. In November he found it, in the department of
the Nièvre, and by 1947 he was minister for war veterans.

It was Mitterrand who brought Pierre de Bénouville
onto the Schueller scene. Hauled up before the courts in 1946 on a charge of
industrial collaboration, Schueller was in real danger of being convicted. And
he knew—none better—the damning evidence that might be brought against him, even
though a lot of what had been most compromising had not been recorded. In the
end it was the quality of the witnesses that mattered—who testified against you,
and who supported you. He needed to find people who would testify in his favor
and whom the court could not dismiss—in other words, people with good Resistance
credentials and political connections. The obvious person was Mitterrand, but he
was taken up by political campaigning. So Pierre de Bénouville was called
in—Mitterrand being an even older friend of his than Bettencourt, since the two
of them had not only been students together, but had attended the same school in
Angoulême.

Bénouville did not disappoint. It was thanks to him
that Eugène Schueller survived. He, who for the whole of his life had stood
quite outside the family, business, and educational networks whose members
controlled France, became caught up, through the boys from 104, at the very
center of one such network. From this moment on, Schueller, his family, friends,
and associates, would be part of the establishment—with all the potential for
scandal and embarrassment that entailed.

II

F
or Helena
Rubinstein, too, the war changed everything.

The buyback from Lehman Brothers had marked, as
Titus feared, the end of their marriage. They divorced in 1937, and by 1938
Madame had married again.

She met her new husband, the Georgian prince
Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, at a bridge party given by her old friend
Marie-Blanche de Polignac (the daughter of her even older friend, Jeanne
Lanvin). His title was a little dubious—gossip had it that when he presented his
intended bride with a copy of the
Almanach de Gotha
,
the page detailing his heritage had been specially printed and inserted. But no
one was about to travel to Georgia to check it out. And in the meantime he was
handsome, charming, and he made her laugh. They met again, several times, before
she left Paris for New York. “Where do you like to dine in New York?” Artchil
artlessly enquired. At the Colony, Helena replied. “Two weeks later he
telephoned me, in New York. He had just arrived and meant to hold me to my
promise, he said. Within an hour he called for me at my home, and that evening
we dined at the Colony. How could I resist such a man? Our courtship was brief.
In his usual direct way he said, ‘We are neither of us children, Helena, and you
need me.’ ”
20
He was forty-three, she,
sixty-six. They understood each other perfectly.

It was an excellent marriage. Unlike Titus, Artchil
was only too happy to be Mr. Helena Rubinstein. He appreciated the opulent
living and material peace of mind this title bestowed, and the price was not
excessive: “I only had to sleep with her once,” he is reported to have
said.
21
After that he looked, with tactful
discretion, elsewhere—an arrangement which suited them both perfectly. At
sixty-six, an ardent sex life was not one of Helena’s requirements, if indeed it
ever had been. She had married Artchil for other reasons. He was presentable,
sweet-tempered, funny, and affectionate; her family, who mostly regarded each
other with suspicion and dislike, all loved Artchil. And—he made his wife a
princess! That little Chaja Rubinstein would become Princess Gourielli was a
fate even her most extravagant imaginings could not have anticipated.

It was also indirectly because of Artchil that she
had to acknowledge something that had not concerned her since she left
Kazimierz: the fact of her Jewishness.

Helena’s idea of relaxation had hitherto been
limited to bridge or the theater. But Artchil wanted to give parties, so she
found a suitable apartment: a twenty-six-room triplex on Park Avenue at
Sixty-fifth Street. When she tried to buy it, however, her offer was turned
down: the building had a no-Jews policy. Enraged, Madame bought the building.
The apartment was hers. But for the first time in her life, anti-Semitism had
become something she could not ignore.

Since leaving Krakow she had not lived among Jews;
neither, until the problem with the Park Avenue apartment building, had
discrimination brought her Jewishness home to her. It was true that her
Jewishness enforced certain business imperatives. When she set up her first
American branches they were in cities where Jews were accepted, such as San
Francisco, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Atlantic City; she left strongholds of
anti-Semitism such as Boston, Washington, Palm Beach, and Newport to her goyishe
rival Elizabeth Arden, whose business was distinctly WASP-oriented. But she felt
no personal affinity with Jews—rather the contrary. She had refused to live on
New York’s Upper West Side because it was “too Jewish,” and disliked the French
Riviera, the preferred playground of her rival Estée Lauder, for the same
reason.

It looked, for a while, as though this distancing
would survive even World War II. When, toward the end of the thirties, Marc
Chagall asked her for some money to help relatives escape from Germany, she told
him to try elsewhere. And when war broke out she followed her usual practice and
left for distant parts, taking an extended cruise with Artchil to Central and
South America. Everything, including real estate, was wonderfully cheap there,
and she took the opportunity to establish branches in Buenos Aires, Rio de
Janeiro, and Panama. She was soon, she happily told the
New
York Times
, doing “astounding” business.
22
Over the following four years she went back twice, eventually, as
always, placing relatives in charge of the new offices.