Ugly Beauty (7 page)

This injection of funds allowed Schueller to set
himself up more sustainably. He hired a delivery boy and splurged on some
advertising. His first account books showed expenditures of 49 francs on
salaries, 28 fr. 25c on publicity.
12
And he and
his wife, Berthe, moved from their cramped quarters in rue d’Alger to a
four-room apartment at 7bis rue du Louvre, at the eastern end of rue
Saint-Honoré. As at rue d’Alger, this apartment housed not only living quarters
but the firm’s office, laboratory, and showroom. And as at rue d’Alger, the
business expanded and expanded, until the Schuellers found themselves sleeping,
as before, in a vacant maid’s room at the top of the house.

For many years they remained childless. Perhaps
this is hardly surprising. At first there was literally no room for children.
And then war broke out, and Schueller enlisted. Whether by accident or design,
it was not until 1922 that their only child, a daughter, Liliane, was born.
Schueller was by then forty-one, and Berthe cannot have been a great deal
younger. They had been married fourteen years; she did not become pregnant
again. There are hints that this was not for want of trying. In the plan for an
ideal world he set out in 1939, he insisted that women should marry young and
conceive early, since after the age of twenty-five “children are conceived and
born only with the greatest difficulty.”
13

The war interrupted the hair-dye business, along
with everything else. Schueller was overage, and at first the army refused to
take him. Later it agreed to admit him as a chemist, but he turned that down and
was eventually inducted into the 31st Artillery at Le Mans, leaving L’Oréal in
the hands of his wife. At the front he acted as a liaison officer, with
spectacular success. The citations for his various decorations describe him as
careless of personal danger, quick to grasp what was relevant, and precise in
conveying necessary detail.
14
He was mentioned
in dispatches at Verdun, the Aisne, the Chemin des Dames; in all, there were
five citations. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in the trenches, and by the
time he was demobilized, in 1919, he was a lieutenant of artillery and had been
awarded the Croix de Guerre with several palms. He enjoyed the army’s
adventurous life, and its lessons in organization were useful to him later in
business.

He returned to find that Berthe had done an
excellent job of managing the business. L’Oréal was flourishing, and the rue du
Louvre apartment was now far too small. They moved once again, just around the
corner, to rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, taking an entire floor at an annual rental
of 16,000 francs—four times what they had previously been paying—and soon needed
an additional floor for offices. Before long, revenue was running at 300,000
francs a month, and a large proportion of that was profit.

I
t all
seemed too easy, and Schueller began to get bored. He diverted himself by
embarking upon a voyage of industrial exploration, progressing from industry to
industry as one led to another.

The first move arose through his prewar activities
at
Coiffure de Paris
. In search of advertising, he
had met some manufacturers of celluloid combs. The war, with its demand for
nitrocellulose explosives, meant a large development of their chemical division.
They asked Schueller if he might be interested in helping them expand it, and
how much money he would want for doing so. He explained that money was not his
principal concern—he was already making plenty of that. What did interest him
was how big they expected the business to become. They would be happy, they
replied, with a million francs a year profits. By the end of the first year, the
profits stood at 4 million francs, of which Schueller was entitled to
one-quarter. Five years later, he had become the company’s principal
shareholder.

At the same time he started a new company, Plavic
Film, which took control of the Lumière film-manufacturing company of Lyon (run
by Auguste Lumière, one of the two brothers who in 1895 had made the first true
motion picture). Plavic manufactured movie and still photographic film. He
bought into another company that made Bakelite, and yet another making cellulose
acetate and artificial silk.

At this point, huge orders for celluloid began to
arrive from Russia. Schueller had recently renewed acquaintance with Jacques
Sadoul, his boyhood friend from the Lycée Condorcet. Capitaine Sadoul had been
sent to Moscow in 1917 as part of a French military mission intended to make
sure Russia remained on the Allied side. Excited by what he saw, he declared
himself a Communist and declined to return to France. Having worked in various
capacities for the Bolsheviks, he now returned to find that he had been accused
of treason and sentenced to death
in absentia
, and
took shelter with Schueller while gathering courage to give himself up. In the
event, the charges were dropped. Sadoul returned to thank his old friend and,
incidentally, put him in the Russian picture. The Russians, Sadoul said, were
granting concessions to foreign businessmen to set up new industries in the
U.S.S.R. Schueller, he insisted, should get himself in there.

The upshot was a concession to make celluloid and
also photographic film stock. In reality this boiled down to a comb factory. But
in 1928, Lenin’s NEP (New Economic Policy), which had allowed small businesses
to operate for private profit in an effort to rebuild Russian industry, was
abandoned by Stalin in favor of a collectivization program of five-year plans,
and the Russians bought Schueller out.

Meanwhile, in 1927, he became interested in the
manufacture of cellulose paints, which shared many laboratory processes with
celluloid, and was soon managing director of a paint firm, Valentine. As he put
it, however, “it wasn’t enough to manufacture paint—we also had to sell it”
15
; so he went to see André Citroën, whose
company was the world’s fourth-largest automobile manufacturer. Citroën gave him
a contract for 23 million francs; there were also valuable contracts with
Renault and Peugeot. But this arrangement, though lucrative, left the company at
the mercy of just a few clients. Schueller decided to branch out and sell his
quick-drying paints to the public—by radio.

Radio advertising was new. It had hit France
courtesy of the young advertising genius Marcel Bleustein, who recognized its
potential during a year’s stay in America. Returning to Paris in 1926 at the age
of nineteen, he opened his own advertising agency, Publicis. By Christmas of
1927, he had his first client, and in 1935 bought a private station, Radio LL,
which he rechristened Radio Cité. It was the first station in France to
broadcast uninterrupted from six a.m. till midnight, with talent contests, news
reporting, singing stars such as Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf—and
commercials interspersed amid the programming. Schueller persuaded Bleustein to
let him advertise with a sung jingle, in the style of Maurice Chevalier:

Elle se vend en tout petits bidons,

Valentine, Valentine,

Elle se fait dans les plus jolis tons,

Valentine, Valentine. . .

(It’s sold in little cans, / Valentine,
Valentine, / And in such pretty tones, / Valentine, Valentine
. . .)

At first Bleustein was reluctant—perhaps because he
hadn’t thought of this idea himself. But Schueller won him over, and the
advertising jingle hit France.

After a while, Schueller decided to exchange his
shares in plastic and celluloid for his partners’ shares in Valentine, leaving
him with just two business interests—Valentine and L’Oréal. But this comparative
calm did not last long.

In 1928, following his Russian adventure, Schueller
had got involved with yet another business: a brand of soap called Monsavon,
created just after World War I by a M. Wisner. The brothers Henri and Philippe
de Rothschild were persuaded to put 18 and 20 million francs, respectively, into
the business, lost the lot, and wanted out. They were prepared to sell cheaply.
Schueller bought it from them for nothing, paying only for existing stocks and
such money as remained in the bank.

Monsavon went on losing money. It wasn’t a bad
product, but brands like Palmolive and Cadum were much better known—so much so
that shoppers, especially in rural areas, would request “a cadum of
Monsavon.”
16
Schueller was losing 300,000
francs a month. He sold his cars and mortgaged the two houses he now owned, at
L’Arcouest and at Franconville, just outside Paris.

With Valentine and L’Oréal both flourishing, the
obvious answer was to cut his losses and close Monsavon down. But acknowledging
defeat was something he could not bring himself to do. Business, for him, meant
risk. “Difficult problems like Monsavon interest me more than easy successes,”
he said at the end of his life. “It’s the way I’m made. . . . You
can’t argue with the way you’re made.”
17
He
reduced production: the monthly loss fell to 30,000 francs, a level he could
bear. He reformulated the product, reorganized the factory, publicized the
improvements in the papers. Sales still did not rise.

The problem Schueller faced was the problem all
cosmetics and toiletry manufacturers face—that their products are almost
indistinguishable, and that brand loyalty must somehow be engineered despite
this. Publicity is therefore all important. As Helena Rubinstein observed,
“There’s nothing like a clever stunt to get something off the ground.” Her
favorite campaign was the one for the fragrance “Heaven Sent,” when in the late
1940s thousands of pale-blue balloons were released over Fifth Avenue, each one
bearing a sample of the fragrance, with the tag: “A gift for you from heaven!
Helena Rubinstein’s new ‘Heaven Sent.’ ”

Schueller, too, realized that he needed a really
huge publicity campaign. He returned to Bleustein and Radio Cité, and this time
he did not confine himself to mere jingles, but bought an entire program, the
extremely popular
Crochet Radiophonique
, which he
interspersed with catchy advertisements for Monsavon and sponsored singing
contests, broadcast live from different locations. For six months nothing
happened. Then sales suddenly took off. Monsavon took and retained first place
in soap sales. Schueller was vindicated.

Sales of L’Oréal also rose during the 1920s, not
because of any advertising campaign but because of a new hairstyle: the bob. The
fashion for short hair began during World War I, when many women took jobs in
factories. The popular film stars Clara Bow and Louise Brooks were famously
bobbed, as was Coco Chanel, the up-and-coming fashion designer, who cut her hair
off after singeing it one day. Just as Chanel’s straight, comfortable clothes
meant the end of corsets, padding, and petticoats, so her new short hair did
away with laborious, long-drawn-out hair-washing and -drying sessions. Women
everywhere began to cut their hair. Like lipstick a few years earlier, the bob
became the symbol of a new freedom and independence. Men were horrified. “A
bobbed woman is a disgraced woman!” thundered one in outrage. “ . . .
How strangely ill at ease our poor shorn sisters would have been had they been
present in the Bethany home that day!”
18

Schueller, too, was gloomy—not because of possible
troubles in Bethany, but because L’Oréal’s sales had always been predicated on
women having lots of hair to dye. He anticipated a catastrophic drop in demand.
He could not have been more wrong. Short hair needs frequent cutting, and only
men’s barbers had the appropriate skills. Faced with a female invasion, they
were hesitant at first, but soon reinvented themselves as hairdressing salons,
and flourished as never before. “Before the bob became the accepted style, there
were less than 11,000 beauty shops in America. . . . Today there are
more than 40,000 beauty shops in operation in America alone,” wrote hairdresser
George E. Darling in 1928.
19
And more
hairdressers meant more hair-dyeing outlets.

Short hair did, however, present some difficulties
when it came to coloring. The bob was about modernity, and hence youth: a gray
bob looked anomalous. But a large proportion of short hair consists of roots, so
that any coloring must be frequently retouched. And this meant frequent dyeing
sessions, which were bad both for the hair and the pocket.

One easy answer was to bleach. Schueller set to
work and produced L’Oréal Blanc. It quickly became the rage. Advertisements
throughout Europe and America were overtaken by a blond invasion. He soon
occupied the whole building in rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and opened, too, his
first proper factory, in rue Clavel, out in Paris’s 19th arrondissement. In
1929, for the first time, L’Oréal achieved revenues of more than a million
francs a month.

Almost at once another problem presented itself:
the permanent wave, or as it was more usually known, the “perm.” The difficulty
this time was that perms do not take on dyed hair if the dye forms an
impermeable colored film on the outside of the hairs, as L’Oréal’s existing dyes
did. Permed hair needed a dye that would penetrate the hairs and color them from
the inside. Some new British and American dyes did this, and threatened to sweep
the market.

Schueller had in fact discovered and patented just
such a dye during his early researches, in 1907. But he had never used it. As
with the penetrating dyes his competitors were selling, its active ingredient
was paraphenylenediamine. “Para” had a fatal flaw: as
Skin
Deep
would reveal, some people were allergic to it. If they used it
they would suffer from an itchy, flaky scalp, or in the worst cases a facial
rash and swelling of the eyelids, face, and neck. Urged now by his colleagues to
resuscitate this dye, Schueller hesitated. L’Oréal’s reputation was built on its
not
provoking allergic reactions. “If one client
starts to scratch, there go twenty years of confidence!” he objected. But
without the new formula, sales would continue to fall.