Ugly Beauty by Ruth Brandon

Author:Ruth Brandon [Brandon, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2011-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

I

On April 1, 1965, Helena Rubinstein relinquished her avid grip on life. In a memoir published the previous year she had for the first time admitted her real birthdate. She was ninety-two years old.

Until a year before her death, Madame had remained in active, some thought hyperactive, charge of her business. But on the morning of May 21, 1964, she was surprised by thieves in her New York triplex. They gained entry by pretending to deliver a flower arrangement, then tied up the butler at gunpoint and made for the main bedroom, which they expected to find empty. Madame, however, was no longer an early riser. On the contrary, she liked to conduct much of her business from her bed. At eight thirty a.m. she was eating her breakfast toast, prior to conferring with her secretary and publicity adviser.

Presented with the traditional choice—her money or her life—she retorted that at her age she didn’t care if they killed her, but she was damned if they were going to rob her. At which point she realized that her keys—including the keys to her safe and the filing cabinet in which she kept her jewels—were in her purse on the bed, under the intruders’ noses.

Fortunately the purse was buried deep in papers, and the thieves were by then busy emptying drawers and disconnecting phones. Madame silently extracted the keys and with characteristic presence of mind dropped them in the one place she could be sure no one would ever look: down her ample bosom. By the time the thieves noticed the purse it contained only some handfuls of paper, a powder compact, five twenty-dollar bills, and a pair of diamond earrings worth around forty thousand dollars. The earrings rolled away as they upended it, and Madame covered them with a Kleenex. One of the thieves grabbed the money. “Your friend took a hundred dollars out of my purse. See that you get your share,” she admonished his friends. Furious and frustrated, aware that time was passing and that other household members would soon arrive, they ripped off her bedcovers, tore the sheets in strips and tied her to a chair, before fleeing with their negligible loot. And there, screaming at the top of her still-considerable lungs, she was found by the butler, who had managed to break free of his own bonds. After he freed her, Madame instructed him to put the thieves’ roses in the icebox, in case there should be company for lunch. She calculated that after paying $40 for the roses, they had made just $60 profit on their morning.1

Madame was justifiably proud of her sangfroid. But the shock drained her, and she never recovered either her confidence or her health. As always when faced with a crisis, she took refuge in motion, traveling from New York to Paris, on to Tangiers and evenings of bridge with such of the ancient International Set as still survived (“If you add up the combined ages round this table we’re back in

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