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There is
practically a little kindergarten class here,” he wrote her in the summer of
1919. The war had ended, and Madame had left for Europe to survey the remnants
of her French and English businesses, leaving him in charge not just of Roy and
Horace, now aged nine and seven, but Manka’s son, Johnnie, and a young cousin,
Helena Silberfeld. “With a house so full of children it is difficult to have a
little time to oneself.” 51 As though she needed
telling! Writing at midnight from Paris, where she had occupied a spare hour
laying linoleum herself, she commented: “If Mr. Titus had been here I would not
have made any progress whatsoever as he wouldn’t have allowed me to work.” 52
    By 1924 Titus had had enough of this life. When he
was unavailable, the boys were looked after by what their mother called “nice
women”—the kind of impecunious ladies who in a previous age would have become
governesses, and who, like governesses, were both better educated and cheaper
than housekeepers, nurses, or maids. 53 Leaving
his sons to their uncertain care, he returned to Paris, his favorite city, where
he would remain from then on. He had many old friends there, both from prewar
days and from New York, which during the war had become a sort of
Paris-in-exile.
    Artists such as Francis Picabia and the then
little-known Marcel Duchamp, desperate to get away from war-torn Europe, had
crossed the Atlantic in 1916 to find themselves American celebrities as a result
of the great 1913 Armory Show of modern art. Lionized by wealthy collectors,
they took their places at the center of a decadent, nihilistic, and blackly
exhilarating whirl in which everyone desperately tried to block out what was
happening across the Atlantic. But when the war ended, Paris became once more
the center of art and excitement. The exiles returned, and Titus knew them all.
With a mortgage from Helena’s property company Franc-Am Ltd., he opened a
bookshop on rue Delambre. He sold rare books and manuscripts on the ground
floor, and ran a small avant-garde publishing house, Black Manikin Press,
catering to the anglophone colony, from the rooms above.
    Meanwhile, Madame was expanding her repertoire. She
began to produce lipstick and other colored cosmetics and became interested,
too, in plastic surgery and the famous (and soon to become infamous)
monkey-gland extracts, both of which promised more tangible youthifying
possibilities than water lily buds. Monkey glands had originally been the
province of Dr. Serge Voronoff, who had observed that eunuchs aged faster than
men still in possession of their balls and had concluded that grafting pieces of
monkey testicle onto human testes might not only increase recipients’ potency
but might also slow the aging process. 7 By extension,
he was now touting the possibility that grafting monkey ovaries onto women might
produce similarly beneficial effects. A Dr. Kapp, whom Helena had met during her
initial whirlwind tour of European skin specialists in 1905, and who had since
been supplying her with creams and jellies, had become enthusiastic about this
idea, and she was anxious to keep him on board. “Put down all sorts of imaginary
things every month [i.e., as expenses] and I will take the money and pay Dr
Kapp,” she instructed Rosa Hollay from New York in 1920. Mrs. Hollay was also to
look out for potential surgery guinea pigs. “Do you know anyone who has a scab
or a crooked nose or something?” 54
    IV
    B y 1928,
Helena Rubinstein had become a New York institution. The opening of her new
salon at 8 East Fifty-seventh Street, on the site of Collis P. Huntington’s old
mansion, was marked by an article in The New Yorker , carefully orchestrated by Madame to
enhance her reputation for ice-cool acumen and elegant eccentricity. Her
original salon “ranked” (the article reported) “even then, as one of the finest
of all such ateliers in New York.” But she wanted a better place, and one she
owned rather than