Ugly Beauty by Ruth Brandon Read Free Book Online

the spring of 1929 his Black
Manikin Press published D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s
Lover , which went into three printings within a year. And in 1930 he
published another smash hit, the English translation of Kiki’s Memoirs . Kiki was Man Ray’s mistress, and her racy tale came
with embellishments by the Montparnasse Americans—saucy photos by Man Ray, and
an introduction by Ernest Hemingway. Admittedly, Helena was fabulously wealthy
and Titus still relied on her subventions, but for the first time in their
married life, with Helena on a low and Titus doing well, the balance tilted his
way.
    When she fell ill, Titus was kind and attentive,
frequently coming over to visit her in London. After all the years of quarrels
and separations, was it possible that their marriage might yet be salvaged? They
were both over sixty, he pointed out—retirement age, when people think of
drawing a pension and putting their feet up. The Lehman deal had given Helena
more money than even she could ever spend. Wasn’t it time to relax a little?
    Depressed by this prospect, she hatched a new plan.
The combination of the financial downturn and Lehman’s mishandling meant that
shares in Helena Rubinstein, Inc., had sunk from $60 to $3. Why not try to buy
back control? She could set the business on its feet again, and still be left
with a healthy profit. Some of her old board members still remained in place.
One of them slipped her a list of shareholders—mostly women—and she wrote to
every one, explaining how the business’s only chance of survival lay in
restoring it to the hands of its creator and convincing them to let her use
their proxy votes. Meanwhile she bought whatever shares came on the market,
building up a considerable holding.
    The whole process had to be conducted discreetly,
and for a while it was uncertain whether or not it would succeed. A letter from
Titus during this edgy period shows that he, for one, hoped it would not. “Look
here, outside of your wounded pride, which is not a wound that can be healed, if
you do not win, you will gain something more valuable,” he wrote.
    You have two fine boys,
whom you do not enjoy possessing, you have a husband if you would only once
begin to really believe in him, who loves you truly and sincerely, whatever
his faults are, you finally have yourself, to whom you have never, never
given a real chance. These are the only things that substantially matter.
The children’s life, your life and mine, the combined life of the four of
us. Everything else are only things, just things.
. . . 58
    Vain hopes! Things , as
he should have known, were all that mattered to Helena. An expenditure of $1.5
million, combined with the proxies, netted majority control. Madame was in the
saddle once more, with a net profit of $6 million after the sale and buyback.
Lehman’s furiously issued a communiqué denouncing this brilliant maneuver as
“financially illiterate,” but she had trounced them handsomely, and recovered
her health and happiness in the process. “Ahead of me once more was the lonely
treadmill of work,” she sighed in her memoir. 59 And with that, miraculously restored, she sailed for New York.
    [ 1 ] The
title of this chapter is taken from a Helena Rubinstein advertisement
that appeared in Australian Home Journal in
1907.
    [ 2 ] Even
today this domestic bias still holds good—arguably, the two most
successful contemporary female entrepreneurs are Martha Stewart, with
her multimillion-dollar homecrafts empire, and Anita Roddick, with her
comparably successful Body Shop chain, both of which began, as it were,
at the kitchen table.
    [ 3 ]These
prices are in shillings and pence: three shillings and sixpence, five
shillings and sixpence, sixpence. There were twenty shillings in a pound
and twelve pence in a shilling.
    [ 4 ]
Similarly, when writer Michael Greenberg was trying to make a living
selling discount cosmetics in the Bronx, he found that if the price was
too low—say,