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rented. The palace of the Southern Pacific Railway magnate
Collis P. Huntington, recently deceased, caught her eye: she took it instantly,
“without pausing to inquire just how many thousands, or hundreds of thousands,
of dollars the building could cost. She saw to it later that it wouldn’t be too
many. Madame is impulsive but canny. . . .” When the salon was
finished, she told the interviewer, she had to spend three days in a sanitarium
to recover. “Always after the opening of a new salon she has a nervous
breakdown; she expects it and looks forward to it. It is part of her
schedule.” 55
    Decided, imperturbable, astute, elegant —such was the public Madame Rubinstein. Her
most potent product, as she well knew, was herself. Eagerly scanning Helena
Rubinstein’s advertisements, emblazoned as they invariably were with pictures of
the eponymous founder—ageless, elegant, beholden to no man—women hoped that if
they did as she advised, they might become as successful as she was. Salon
patrons would often plead for some extra-special beauty cream not available to
the general public. If the customer insisted, she would be sold an unlabeled jar
for $50, with the whispered assurance that it was “Madame’s own cream.” 56
    But beneath the visible surface seethed a quite
different person, assailed by anxieties, doubts, fury, and hypochondria. She had
created this vast sprawling empire (“There are remote cities which have
Rubinstein agencies where there are not even Ford agencies,” Vanity Fair marveled); everyone depended upon her for
instructions, for policy, above all for money; and yet she felt, at every
moment, as though the whole laboriously constructed edifice might come tumbling
down and she would find herself in poverty once more. Her favorite photographs
showed her in her white coat in a laboratory, one of the great women scientists
of the world engaged in a ceaseless search for more potent ingredients. But she
knew, even if she did not choose to remember, that her vaunted medical studies
amounted to a two-month tour of visits to selected practitioners. At any moment
some prying journalist might find her out and expose her for a quack.
    One solution to these constant worries—the solution
favored by Titus—was to bow out, sell her business, and live on the proceeds.
Eventually the temptation was too much, and on December 11, 1928, Lehman
Brothers acquired the American arm of Helena Rubinstein. It netted Madame, who
retained the European and Australian interests, a cool $7,300,000—over $84
million today. All her worries should have been at an end.
    On the contrary, they got worse. Deprived of the
work that had taken up the greater part of her time, she was bored and
frustrated. Impotent to intervene, she had to watch as Leh-man’s sales strategy,
which she had endorsed—to expand into a more mid-range market—came unstuck in
the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash. The upmarket end of the trade was
unaffected. In fact, sales rose: the first example of the now well-documented
“lipstick effect,” in which, during hard times, women who otherwise would have
bought an expensive outfit buy a nice lipstick instead. 8 But
lower-priced items did less well, and the new range of mass-market goods tainted
Helena Rubinstein’s upmarket outlets by association. “I knew that they would
make a mess of it,” she told Patrick O’Higgins. “What do bankers know about the
beauty business? Except that it can make money for them. After they bought me
out they tried to go mass; to sell my products in every grocery store. Pfft! The
idea wasn’t bad. But the timing was all wrong.” 57
    In October 1930, she became ill—struck with
appendicitis in Vienna, Titus said. But this was no mere appendicitis. The
following May found her still confined to bed at her sister Ceska’s London flat,
and boiling with frustration. Ironically, Titus, for the first time in his life,
was enjoying considerable professional success. In