‘Helena Rubinstein: The Woman Who Invented Beauty’, by Michèle Fitoussi – review

In New York, in the 1960s, in a sleek, silvery elevator, I rose from the marble halls of Helena Rubinstein’s gleaming emporium up towards the top floor office of a new friend who worked for that legendary beautician. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the lift stopped, the doors slid open and a tiny, squat figure with oily, inky hair scraped back and livid carmine cheeks above violently purple tweed capes stabbed with a jagged, surreal brooch, stood peering up at what I hoped was my youthful, English-rose complexion. A short, intense scrutiny. Then, imperiously: ‘Oy vey! But I sink ve can help. Tell Patrick he needs gif you our XXX recipe. Now, out of my vay’, she elbowed past me; we descended, not a word more, but not exactly in silence, for she was loudly sucking on a Lifesaver, and, by your leave, let go a none too discreet fart.

My unique encounter with the woman Cocteau called — not, given her machinations, without a touch of irony — the ‘Byzantine Empress of Beauty’, encapsulated her self-made aura: her battle against blemishes, her extravagant style, canny acumen and her famously brusque manner.

The friend I’d been meeting was a tall, elegant and extremely witty Irishman named Patrick O’Higgins. To say he ‘worked’ for this monstre maquillée is not the half of it. He walked her, arranged her contracts, travelled the world with her, was the shoulder she cried on, made amends for her manners, held the heavily jewelled hand when husbands and sons died. And he wrote an amusing, touching, critical but finally sympathetic book, simply titled Madame, about his many years with Helena Rubinstein.

Michèle Fitoussi’s biography of the same subject puts much factual flesh on Madame’s funny-bones. It is credibly researched, fairly accurate, without too many invented conversations and written in powder-pink, though somewhat cliché-ridden, prose.