Chapter Five

A Takeover and Three Scandals

I regret having done . . . for a noble cause, things that may have inconvenienced other human beings.

—JACQUES CORRÈZE, JUNE 20, 1991

It is true that I hired Jacques Corrèze although he had been condemned twice . . . but he had just been released from jail. I don’t regret having hired him, he was everything I hoped he might be. And I’m not going to take lessons in patriotism from anybody!

—FRANÇOIS DALLE, JUNE 19, 1991

A weak man will always be more of a coward than a man in his prime; a Jew will always be more avaricious than a Christian.

—ANDRÉ BETTENCOURT, L’Élan, DECEMBER 13, 1941

I’ve led a useful life, after all.

—ANDRÉ BETTENCOURT, MARCH 9, 1995

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 the sixteenth century,” quipped one of the players, at which Madame snapped “Don’t—until you’ve paid the ten francs you owe me!”), back to Paris, on to Normandy, which held sentimental memories of her romance with Edward Titus, a stop at Saint-Cloud, where she had established her first French factory (“It’s where I was always happiest,” she sighed, “in my kitchen, my laboratory”). Then she returned to New York, suffered a stroke, and died.2

Helena Rubinstein’s death liberated a small mountain of possessions. Her estate was variously estimated at between $1 million and $100 million, depending on what was counted in. The American business alone grossed over $22 million a year.3 Officially, it was publicly owned, but in fact Madame personally held 52 percent of the shares—worth around $30 million—as she had done ever since the Lehman Brothers maneuver. The Park Avenue triplex was rented, in a move that would surely have appalled her, to Charles Revson of Revlon, an upstart whose name she had always refused to utter, referring to him only as “the nail man.” Her will, when it was read, contained 121 individual bequests.4 But that was just the property: gowns, jewels, pictures, real estate. The business was not so easily disposed of. The industry that she had founded in one room and a “kitchen” was by the time of her death the tenth-most important in the United States, just behind rubber. Helena Rubinstein, Inc., had become an empire. Where would it end up?

For her American competitors, the problem was easily solved. The business would be sold, and one of them would buy. Particularly keen was a firm called Cosmair. Set up in 1953, Cosmair, although nominally independent, was part-owned and effectively controlled by L’Oréal, and was L’Oréal’s sole U.S. licensee. The person appointed to run it by Schueller, John Seemuller, was half-American—he was the person who had performed those risky missions for the firm in France during the war, using his American passport to run forbidden items across the border between the occupied and nonoccupied zones. The Cosmair job may have been Schueller’s way of showing his appreciation. But Seemuller did not appreciate how tricky it might be to penetrate the American market, and made little headway.

Seemuller’s incompetence frustrated François Dalle, who was keen to extend L’Oréal’s reach into the huge market of the United States. He was also anxious to broaden L’Oréal’s range to include cosmetics, whose sales, as women cast off housewifery and flooded into the workplace during the 1960s and early seventies, were rising at an average of 10 percent a year. One of Dalle’s first acts on taking over as CEO was therefore to appoint his own man to head Cosmair: the suave and charming Jacques Corrèze, who had been vice president of L’Oréal’s Spanish subsidiary, Procasa. Corrèze was good at both administration and business, and was particularly good with money. Seemuller had quickly run through all the cash Paris allowed him, to little effect; Corrèze, Dalle remembered, was “close with his—which was to say, our—pennies.”5

In 1965, when Helena Rubinstein died, Cosmair was still small. It had only twenty employees, producing and distributing L’Oréal’s hair-care preparations to beauty parlors. But Corrèze had made a point of getting to know Madame—he was just the sort of man she liked, smooth, cultivated, and full of Old World charm—and when she died, he was determined that if anyone took over Helena Rubinstein, Inc., it would be Cosmair. At the end of the war, French manufacturers, who since 1940 had enjoyed a market in which anything they produced was snatched from the shelves, had been rocked by the sudden influx of unaccustomed competition from America. Now it was L’Oréal’s turn to extend its reach into America.

Helena Rubinstein, however, was not for sale. Although the American branch was publicly quoted, all its other branches (except the English business and its South African and Far East subsidiaries, which were the property of a foundation set up to avoid inheritance taxes) remained privately owned. The company was now managed by Madame’s son, Roy Titus, and her nephew and niece, Regina’s son and daughter Oskar Kolin and Mala Rubinstein, who were reported to have metamorphosed “from depression to a vibrant pragmatism.”6 Released from Madame’s beady eye and unsettling tendency to descend unannounced and bawl out all those present, they were enjoying the unaccustomed pleasures of self-rule.

But those pleasures did not last, for they did not get on. Indeed, the experience of Helena Rubinstein, Inc., as it declined after its founder’s death (in marked contrast to L’Oréal, which continued from strength to strength under Dalle) might have been designed to prove Eugène Schueller’s theory that business and family were best kept separate. Although Madame had always assumed that “the family” would carry on the business after her death, she had never trained a successor. That would not only have meant admitting her own mortality, but would have run the risk of transferring too much of her own power to someone else, something quite alien to her autocratic character.

Instead, she had encouraged rivalries. Although Roy was her firstborn, she had never taken him seriously, preferring his younger brother, Horace, whose only real interest in the firm while he was alive (he predeceased his mother, much to her anguish) had been as a source of cash. Her real business partners had been Oskar, a sharp accountant who did any necessary dirty work and was known to all as the Lord High Executioner, and his sister Mala, of whom she had been fond, and whom Roy bitterly resented. “She enjoys it,” her long-time secretary, Ruth Hopkins, said, she “plays one against the other.”7 But all this was secondary—for Madame, and nobody else, made the decisions: as she had liked to say, “I am the business.” The inevitable upshot was that her death left an unfillable void at the business’s center. Once the firm’s living trademark and main motive power had vanished, all that remained was a disunited boardroom with no clear strategy.

By 1972, the family had had enough and decided to sell. The buyer, Colgate-Palmolive, paid $146 million: more than twenty times earnings. But Colgate soon regretted its purchase. The overseas businesses, which continued to operate much as before, remained profitable. But the American arm soon began to lose money. Colgate’s idea had been to integrate the Rubinstein product range into its existing marketing operation. But as Madame could have told them had she still been around to do so, high-end beauty products require special sales techniques, different from those that sell everyday necessities like soap and toothpaste. By 1978, Helena Rubinstein’s losses were estimated at $22 million, and its debts at $50 million. Colgate had had enough, and Helena Rubinstein was once more for sale.

In early 1979, KAO, a Japanese toothpaste business, was reported to have offered $75 million for it. Later that same year, L’Oréal was again in the picture, the price now having dropped to $35 million. But neither sale materialized. In 1980, however, Colgate finally offloaded its unwise acquisition. The buyer was a privately owned concern, Albi Enterprises, the price $20 million, plus a Colgate guarantee for up to $43 million in bank loans.8 Albi quickly recouped its outlay by selling off Helena Rubinstein’s mass-market lines and its American headquarters. By 1985 the company’s only American employees were a dozen people in a New York office. They spent their days consolidating international financial statements, and no longer had any idea who they worked for.

Cosmair, by contrast, was doing very well. During the 1970s, Dalle had pushed L’Oréal’s U.S. subsidiary into high gear, investing heavily in research and identifying profitable niches in what the industry jargon called a “maturing” market. Some of this success was down to deep pockets: L’Oréal, and hence Cosmair, was now part-owned by the Swiss foods giant Nestlé. But Cosmair also had a dynamic new managing director of its own. Dalle, like Schueller before him, was looking out for a suitable successor, and had recently identified him in the person of Lindsay Owen-Jones. In 1985, Dalle planned to retire. There would follow a short interregnum, when the firm would be run by its head of research, Charles Zviak, after which, in the autumn of 1988, “O-J” would become L’Oréal’s CEO. In the meantime he was put in charge of Cosmair.

Arriving in New York in 1981, Owen-Jones won a reputation as a ruthless and aggressive player in an increasingly tough market. In 1983, Cosmair staged a brilliant coup, buying up the entire European stock of aerosol cans in preparation for the introduction of its Free Hold hair-styling mousse. The mousse became terrifically popular, and since Cosmair owned all the aerosol cans, no one could compete until they had found another source, which did not happen for several crucial months. Magazines that failed to place Cosmair’s ads in what O-J considered the best spots had the company’s advertising withdrawn. And the company ferociously, and successfully, jockeyed for counter space in department stores and other outlets. By 1984, Cosmair’s sales had tripled, to $600 million.

Meanwhile, L’Oréal had not given up its ambitions regarding Helena Rubinstein, which was becoming weaker by the day. In 1983, following a Rubinstein family quarrel, a L’Oréal subsidiary had quietly acquired Helena Rubinstein’s Japanese and South American branches. And in October 1988, HR’s U.S. employees discovered, when they read the papers, that they had a new owner. Cosmair had bought Helena Rubinstein, Inc., including the European branches, for “several hundred million francs” (the franc was then valued at about ten to the pound sterling, and about seven to the dollar) in what the business press described as “a shrouded deal.”9 It made L’Oréal the biggest cosmetics business in the world, and put Jacques Corrèze where he had long wanted to be—in the chair of Helena Rubinstein.

“Nothing ever happens at L’Oréal—it’s really boring, nothing but bigger and bigger profits,” a financial analyst told Le Monde in June 1988.10

It would not stay boring long.

II

In February of 1988, eight months before the purchase of Helena Rubinstein was completed, L’Oréal learned, to its “utter astonishment,”11 that it had been placed on the blacklist of the Arab League’s anti-Israel boycott committee. The committee, whose offices were located in Damascus, had been set up in 1948, when the State of Israel was established, in an attempt to strangle the new state by cutting off all Arab trade with companies linked to Israel, or doing business with it. This proved rather an empty threat at first, but took on new force after oil prices quadrupled in 1973, leaving oil-producing countries with huge surpluses of petrodollars that made them highly desirable trading partners.

L’Oréal had for many years maintained subsidiaries in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. But although no company likes to face the prospect of losing an entire segment of the world market, it might in principle have ignored the boycott committee. Indeed, in principle it had no option but to do so, since complying with the boycott had been outlawed in France in 1981, at the start of President Mitterrand’s first term. L’Oréal, however, was not the only company involved. In 1974, Liliane Bettencourt had exchanged a large block of her L’Oréal shares for shares in the Swiss food conglomerate Nestlé—a company of which Dalle, when he retired in 1984, had become vice president. All these shares were now owned by a holding company, Gesparal, of which Liliane Bettencourt owned 51 percent and Nestlé 49 percent, and which itself owned 53.65 percent of L’Oréal. And if Nestlé, as part owner of L’Oréal, were to become involved in the boycott, that would be serious indeed: Arab markets accounted for 15 percent of its milk products exports.12

On the face of it, L’Oréal’s astonishment at being singled out by the boycott committee was logical. Helena Rubinstein did have an Israeli subsidiary—but L’Oréal had, as yet, no official ties with HR. In reality, however, the committee’s announcement came as no surprise at all, nor had the boycott committee suddenly acquired the gift of prophecy. This affair had been rumbling on ever since L’Oréal’s 1983 acquisition, through a subsidiary, of Helena Rubinstein’s Japanese and South American businesses. The boycott committee had told L’Oréal then that it was taking a risk, since the Rubinstein parent company had strong Zionist ties, but L’Oréal had set its sights on Helena Rubinstein and refused to be put off. On the contrary, the following year, 1984, they discreetly, and via another subsidiary, bought 45 percent of Helena Rubinstein, Inc., from Albi; and that same year, they sold off HR Inc.’s Israeli subsidiary to Israeli nationals in an attempt to head off the boycott threat. In 1985, however, the boycott committee announced that it was still not satisfied. L’Oréal indignantly riposted that it was not the owner of Helena Rubinstein—which indeed it was not. And there matters rested—until 1988.

L’Oréal had two problems. The first was that French law forbade it to deal with the Arab boycott committee. The second was that its ties to Israel, far from being cut, had recently been strengthened.

The first problem was annoying but not insurmountable. L’Oréal had for years been conducting discreet negotiations with the boycott committee. Now it dispatched France’s one-time ambassador to the United Nations, Claude de Kémoularia, to represent it in Damascus. M. de Kémoularia was a particularly apt choice, as he knew the people concerned: when President Mitterrand first outlawed all dealings with the boycott, it was Kémoularia who had been deputed to convince the Arab leaders that they would have to accept this new stance. Now he returned with a (to them) much more acceptable message, and was soon back in Paris with the boycott committee’s conditions. Among them was a stipulation that L’Oréal must either buy the whole of Helena Rubinstein or drop all links with the company; that all Israeli manufacture of Helena Rubinstein products must be stopped, along with all Helena Rubinstein activity in that country; and that all existing directors of Helena Rubinstein be removed and replaced (it was understood, by non-Jews: this was when Jacques Corrèze became HR’s chairman).

Since L’Oréal was anyway about to finalize the total purchase of Helena Rubinstein, Inc., Corrèze, who was in charge of the Israeli end of these negotiations, was dispatched to offer the Israeli buyer of the business in that country a manufacturing deal in Germany that would be far cheaper than maintaining an Israeli factory. The Israelis were happy to accept this offer, and were also persuaded to drop the name “Helena Rubinstein” for the preposterous reason that if the firm was to be L’Oréal’s Israeli agent, there was no reason to use this particular brand name. It was agreed that HR Israel would henceforth be known as Interbeauty. Only the paperwork remained to be finalized.

But just as the Helena Rubinstein problem seemed to have been settled, a new one arose. Although François Dalle was no longer CEO of L’Oréal, he still maintained ties with the firm, heading its strategy committee. L’Oréal had money to invest—in 1987 its net profits had for the first time topped the billion-franc mark—and in 1988 Dalle, looking for profitable ways to invest it, had done a deal with an old friend, Jean Frydman. Frydman, the son of Polish-Jewish parents who had emigrated to Paris when he was five, had known Dalle for thirty years. They had met soon after the war, in which Frydman had been a daring résistant, and had been good friends ever since. One of Frydman’s enterprises, CDG, owned a valuable catalogue of film rights, including the non-U.S. rights to High Noon, Citizen Kane, and other movie classics. It was agreed that L’Oréal would form a joint venture with CDG called Paravision, and that Frydman would sit on its board.

The Paravision deal was only a few weeks old when Dalle realized that it might raise problems for L’Oréal. Dalle had thought Frydman lived in Canada, where he owned a ranch, but in fact he now spent most of his time in Israel, and was domiciled in that country. And although the boycott committee’s conditions regarding Helena Rubinstein had been met, the final removal of L’Oréal from the blacklist had not yet been signed and sealed. That would not happen until the end of 1989. Meanwhile, in Damascus and Paris, multiple copies of questionnaires and affidavits languished on bureaucrats’ desks or got lost in embassies awaiting signature, and more and more generous sub rosa sweeteners to intermediaries were required, and envoys expensively shuttled back and forth, and nothing was settled. In the spring of 1989, therefore, Dalle suggested to Frydman that it might be a good thing if he temporarily stepped down from the joint venture’s board.

Thus far, both Dalle and Frydman agreed that this was the way things were. As to what happened next, however, they disagreed bitterly.

Dalle said Frydman had not objected to resigning temporarily from the Paravision board, and had even had a letter of resignation prepared by one of his aides. Frydman, on the contrary, insisted that he had objected, and strongly: he had no wish whatever to accommodate the Arab boycott committee. Despite this, however, his resignation was offered and accepted—without his knowledge—at a board meeting held, also without his knowledge, in April of 1989.

That he had known nothing about the meeting was not surprising, since investigations revealed that it had never taken place. L’Oréal at first tried to deny any such maneuver, then admitted that that was indeed what had happened. But such proceedings were apparently not unusual. Notional board meetings, fleshed out later on paper, were, Dalle insisted, quite normal in France.

However, Frydman was in no mood to listen to feeble excuses. For he had made another disturbing discovery. It concerned Cosmair’s Jacques Corrèze, who as the original instigator of the Helena Rubinstein deal was deeply involved in the boycott negotiations. Frydman knew Jacques Corrèze—or a Jacques Corrèze—only too well. While the fifteen-year-old Frydman had been escaping deportation and risking his life with the Resistance, Jacques Corrèze had been Eugène Deloncle’s loyal lieutenant in MSR—not merely propagating its hateful doctrines but actually leading the gangs who took possession of properties once owned by Jewish families like the Frydmans. After the war he had been disgraced and condemned to ten years’ hard labor. Could this Corrèze be the same person?

He could, and he was. This one-time Jew-baiter not only held an important position in a leading French company but was now engaged in the ethnic cleansing of an American Jewish firm whose takeover he had engineered. He had even had the chutzpah to visit Israel, several times, to negotiate the sale of Helena Rubinstein’s Israeli branch and the closure of its manufacturing operation there. It was Corrèze, Frydman declared, who had wanted him removed from the Paravision board. He was determined to expose L’Oréal’s fascist and racist connections, and show the world how it conducted its affairs.

Dalle was apoplectic. He insisted that not only had he never been an anti-Semite, but that Frydman’s real aim in raising these irrelevant, if embarrassing, matters, was financial: to blackmail L’Oréal into conceding a better settlement regarding Paravision than they were prepared to offer. “Frydman’s using the Shoah to make himself some money, and that’s the beginning and end of it,” Dalle declared,13 a remark he later regretted, but did not retract. At L’Oréal’s 1991 annual general meeting, its new CEO, Lindsay Owen-Jones, gave shareholders a long explanation of its antiracist principles. His speech was met with “ringing applause,”14 and the company’s unions, including one that was Communist-led, issued a statement confirming that in all their dealings with L’Oréal and Dalle they had never been aware of any racism.

Frydman admitted that the Paravision affair had done him no harm financially. On the contrary, he emerged 200 million francs to the good—by no means negligible, though far less than he had asked and less than he had hoped for.15 But he was infuriated by Dalle’s insinuations (repeated by L’Oréal’s vice president, André Bettencourt) that money was his real concern in this affair. “There are three things he regards as sacred,” his brother, David, said, “his family, Israel, and the Resistance.”16 And L’Oréal, by employing Jacques Corrèze, had insulted two of them.

III

Just as the boycott committee’s interest in L’Oréal had not exactly been a total surprise, so Jean Frydman’s revelations regarding Jacques Corrèze’s previous life were not news to L’Oréal’s senior management.

Corrèze’s last public appearance in France had been in October 1948, when he had been chief defendant in the Cagoule trial, which had been postponed when war broke out but not canceled. For a while it had seemed as though the trial would be postponed indefinitely, for the enormous dossier of relevant papers—more than two tons of them—had vanished. There was a rumor that just before the Germans arrived in Paris in 1940 the papers had been sent for safekeeping to Lesparre in the Gironde, the constituency of Georges Mandel, then minister of the interior. But after the Liberation, when the examining magistrate traveled there from Paris to find them so that the prosecution could proceed, no one at the Lesparre Palais de Justice could help him.

The magistrate was about to return to Paris empty-handed when someone suggested that the concierge, who had been there throughout the war, might know something. As it turned out, she did. One night in June 1940, a party of men had arrived with a load of boxes which they hid in the washrooms. The boxes had been stacked up at one end, a wooden partition erected to conceal them, and the concierge sworn to silence. Then the men left. She had never said a word, but as far as she knew, everything was still where they had put it. Sure enough, there, behind a heap of assorted odds and ends, was the partition—and there, behind it, were the Cagoule papers: damp and stained, but still legible. In October 1945, those of the seventy-one accused who could be located were politely requested to present themselves at police stations. Fifteen obliged, and forty were eventually tried: amongst them, Jacques Corrèze.

Corrèze’s story, as he told it to the court, was a bizarre mix of thuggery, courtly love, and melodrama. He was, a reporter noted, “dark and romantic-looking, extremely courteous and remarkably intelligent”; he affected “a hand-on-heart frankness”17—but did not, in the end, reveal much. He told the court that before the war his father had been an interior decorator in Auxerre, where the Deloncles had a country house. In 1932 they decided to do the place up: Jacques went to look it over—and fell under their spell. “I was nineteen, and I fell deeply in love with Mme. Deloncle,” he testified. He insisted, however, that their relations had remained platonic. He joined the household as a sort of additional son, and lived with them from then on. But although Deloncle inducted him into La Cagoule, and later the MSR, he insisted that he had played little part in their policymaking. “I was just a soldier, they weren’t going to share the secrets of the gods with a boy like me!”18

The truth, as it emerged from the documents, was rather different. Corrèze had been no minor figure in “Monsieur Marie’s” clandestine universe, but had been his chief aide and confidant in both La Cagoule and MSR. His dossier contained an envelope with all the keys of the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, and maps of how to get to the minister’s private office, for use during the planned coup d’état of 1937. During the Occupation, “Colonel” Corrèze, whose group marched the streets of Paris in high boots, tunics, and cross-belts, oversaw expropriation operations, received reports from concierges and neighbors when the buildings were taken over, and made inventories of their contents. Among these was the building in the rue du Paradis that had housed the Ligue Contre Antisémitisme, where, subsequent to Corrèze’s “liberation” of it, the fascist Charbonneau so enjoyed returning to his cozy office after MSR meetings chez L’Oréal in rue Royale. Its filing cabinets, desks, chairs, safes, stepladders, were all carefully listed.19 And alongside the highly profitable expropriation business, rumors held that Deloncle had set up a “parallel” police to extort money from Jewish entrepreneurs, with Corrèze as its chief enforcer.20

However, in the middle of 1941, when the Germans abandoned the Nazi-Soviet pact and marched on Moscow, Deloncle lost interest in expropriations. The most important task as he now saw it was to join the fight against the Bolsheviks. He therefore set about raising a French volunteer force to fight in Russia alongside the Germans. The Légion de Volontaires Françaises (or LVF) was perhaps the extreme point of the collaboration. Of little consequence militarily (only 3,205 volunteers signed up), it had considerable psychological importance, allowing French fascists to feel that the Germans really valued them as partners. Corrèze, Deloncle’s loyal protégé, was one of the first to sign up. He spent the hellish winter of 1941–42 on the Russian front, failing to take Moscow, and returned in April 1942.

By then, however, the MSR was in disarray. For now that German victory seemed less certain, Deloncle was rethinking his position vis-à-vis collaboration. Unseated in a putsch by the assassin Jean Filliol, he opened contacts with the Americans, hinting that he was working with the résistant (and ex-cagoulard) General Giraud. The German army was already less than enthusiastic about him on account of a mini-Kristallnacht he organized in October 1941, when his men blew up seven Paris synagogues using explosives supplied by the Gestapo—a gesture that may have pleased the Berlin high command but appalled the Wehrmacht because it needlessly antagonized the French, without whose cooperation, or at least indifference, the Occupation would become much harder to sustain. Deloncle was becoming a liability.

On January 7, 1944, he was dealt with. At seven thirty that morning, the concierge of his apartment building in the fashionable 16th arrondissement was awakened by repeated knocking on the door. She opened it to find fifteen civilians armed with machine guns, some speaking perfect French, others with heavy German accents. They ordered her to go up to Deloncle’s apartment via the service stairs. They would follow. She was to ring Deloncle’s bell and say it was the gas meter reader. On the stairs, however, the party met Lucienne, the Deloncles’ maid. She opened their door with her key, and the armed men found themselves face-to-face with the Deloncles’ son Louis and a manservant holding a breakfast tray. Louis shouted, “Papa! Papa! Des terroristes!” and Deloncle appeared, wearing only his pyjama jacket. He left the room to get his pistol; the armed men followed. There were a number of shots. When the men left, Deloncle was dead, and Louis had a bullet in his head, leaving him permanently disabled.

Corrèze, who still lived with the Deloncles as one of the family, and who was standing naked in the hallway when the posse burst in, threw himself to the ground as soon as the shooting started, and escaped unharmed. He and Mercédès Deloncle, with whom he was still in love, were arrested and imprisoned, but released after a few days. Mercédès then vanished, not reappearing until more than a year later, when her daughter Claude married Guy Servant, an LVF stalwart and the son of a pro-Nazi friend, Patrice Servant.

Corrèze, for his part, abandoned politics following the assassination and went underground to join a Resistance network. This volte-face counted in his favor when it came to the épuration: he was sentenced only to ten years’ hard labor. At the end of the Cagoule trial he received a further ten years, to run concurrently with the first sentence.

He was freed in 1949, when an amnesty was announced: the three years he had already served before the Cagoule trial were judged to count as part of his sentence, making him eligible for freedom as this meant he had served five years in all, 50 percent of his sentence. However, prison was not his only punishment. Like many collaborators, including Mercédès Deloncle, whom he married as soon as he was freed, he had also been sentenced to dégradation nationale (public disgrace) and confiscation of all his property in France, past, present, and future. He turned to the man at once most likely to sympathize with him and most able to help: his old friend from the MSR, Eugène Schueller. Schueller had, after all, employed François Mitterrand, whose brother was married to Mercédès’ niece. And Schueller did not disappoint him.

In fact, it was not Schueller who officially hired Corrèze, but François Dalle. Dalle insisted he did so without any input from Schueller. He thought Corrèze had paid his debt to society, his sentence was “not amongst the most serious,” and “as a participant in the Resistance, I thought it was important to demonstrate tolerance at a time of reconciliation in France.”21 But like so many of the pronouncements emanating from L’Oréal after Frydman’s revelations, this left much unsaid. For Corrèze was by no means the only cagoulard to find salvation at L’Oréal after the war. It was rumored that even Jean Filliol, who had been sentenced to death in absentia on three separate counts and had lived the rest of his life on the lam, was among them (though one scandal sheet hinted that Filliol didn’t actually have a L’Oréal job but was living on blackmail money extorted during a clandestine trip to Paris in 1946).22 Indeed, it was common knowledge in certain circles that Schueller “looked after his own” and “could be relied on to fish out people who were going under.”23

Of course this was hardly surprising. Schueller had only by the narrowest of margins, and by a concerted effort on the part of influential friends, escaped the punishments meted out to so many of his wartime colleagues. The least he could do was to help the less fortunate as he himself had been helped. Just as Helena Rubinstein’s business success had allowed her to provide a refuge from the Jew-hunters, in the shape of far-flung employment, for her nieces, nephews, sisters, and brothers-in-law, L’Oréal allowed Schueller to do the same for Deloncle’s band of brothers. Jean Filliol’s son and daughter, using their mother’s name of Lamy, took a job with L’Oréal’s Spanish subsidiary, Procasa, as did the son of Michel Harispe, Corrèze’s confederate in Jewish expropriation, and Deloncle’s brother and son.1

Corrèze, like the other ex-cagoulards, followed the well-trodden route to Franco’s Spain, where a sympathetic regime allowed them to start life afresh. But unlike most of them, for whom this exile was little more than an afterlife, he took his work seriously and put all his considerable energy and charm into making a success of it. Sent to the United States in 1953, “he visited all the New York hairdressers with his little bag of samples, selling our hair dyes.”24 Within a few years Corrèze was heading a sizable organization, had become an important figure in L’Oréal, and was considering the purchase of Helena Rubinstein, Inc. His subsequent negotiations in Israel were congenial on both sides. “They knew all about my past,” Corrèze said (somewhat of an exaggeration: what he told the Israelis was that he was not proud of his past during World War II, and that they should not bruit his name about because “then he wouldn’t be able to help anymore”25). He found them “delightful people.”26 And this liking was wholly reciprocated. “He was a big man, very warm and charismatic. You really wanted to please him,” said Gad Propper, the Israeli businessman who dealt with him.27

In 1959, Corrèze was officially amnestied, and in 1966 he was rehabilitated. He could once more participate in French life and own property there. From then on he lived between the Bahamas and Paris, where his apartment overlooking the Seine was described by those who knew it as “palatial.”

But although his past was now officially expiated, it lived on in the minds of those Corrèze and his friends had hunted. Deeds that the perpetrators recalled only with great difficulty remained vivid in their victims’ memories. Serge Klarsfeld, the indefatigable French lawyer and Nazi-hunter, had amassed a large collection of papers pertaining to the Nazi persecution of the Jews in France, among them several documents attesting to Corrèze’s anti-Semitic wartime activities. In the wake of Frydman’s accusations, Klarsfeld passed these papers on to the American Office of Special Investigations, so that the Justice Department could decide whether or not to place Corrèze on its special watch list of foreigners believed to have participated in religious or racial persecution.

The affair was now getting seriously embarrassing for L’Oréal, and on June 25, 1991, Jacques Corrèze resigned from the company. He was seventy-nine years old and suffering from cancer of the pancreas: on June 26, the day after his resignation, he died. A short statement was issued in his name. “I cannot change what has been. Allow me simply to express my most heart-felt and sincere regrets for the acts that I may have committed 40 years ago, and their consequences, however indirect.”28

IV

At the same L’Oréal annual meeting, in 1991, where Lindsay Owen-Jones had been cheered when he rejected any taint of racism, André Bettencourt, L’Oréal’s vice president, had reiterated Dalle’s contention that Jean Frydman’s real concern was financial.29 Infuriated, Frydman vowed he would not rest until Bettencourt had been forced to retract and, hopefully, was hounded out of L’Oréal.

His task was not, on the face of it, easy. Since the war, Eugène Schueller’s group of young friends from 104 had done spectacularly well—and become spectacularly influential. By 1991, when the Corrèze scandal broke, François Dalle had become one of France’s industrial elder statesmen; Pierre de Bénouville was (among other things) second-in-command to Marcel Dassault, né Bloch, the aviation magnate; François Mitterrand was well into his second term as president of France. As for André Bettencourt, he had become not only a powerful political figure but immensely rich. He had been a valiant résistant, with the Resistance Medal and the Croix de Guerre 1939–45, with palms, to prove it. He was a senator, and had been many times a minister under presidents of both the right and the left—in the Foreign Ministry during the presidency of Pierre Mendès-France, a minister under General de Gaulle, and a cabinet minister under Georges Pompidou, who had been not just president but a close friend, as was François Mitterrand, the current holder of that office. And he was one-half of France’s wealthiest couple: the fortune inherited by his wife on her father’s death had grown. She was now France’s richest woman.

Frydman was undeterred. In 1994, after reading Pierre Péan’s book Une Jeunesse française, which revealed the far-right connections and dubious youth of Bettencourt’s friend Mitterrand, he thought he would do some basic research himself—starting with the weekly columns Bettencourt had written for La Terre Française between December 1940 and July 1942. On the rare occasions Bettencourt had been confronted with his authorship of these pieces he had played them down as being harmless, unimportant contributions to an obscure farming magazine. But was that true? It should be easy enough to find out: the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris had a set of copies. Frydman’s brother David went to have a look at them.

His first finding was that La Terre Française was by no means as innocuous as Bettencourt implied. It might have been, once, but during the Occupation it had been taken over by the Germans, acting through a small company called “Le Comptoir financier français.” This was wholly financed by the Nazi Propagandastaffel and in 1949 suffered the fate narrowly avoided by Eugène Schueller, of having its assets confiscated as punishment for aiding the enemy. The magazine’s contents were a careful mix of agricultural articles and general-interest hearts-and-minds pieces designed to appeal to a deeply conservative and distrustful section of the population.

Bettencourt’s column Ohé les jeunes! was a mix of religious and political uplift geared to the Church calendar and the changing seasons. The pieces appeared between December 1940 and June 1942, and were featured prominently, sometimes taking up the entire front page. And what they contained was dynamite. Bettencourt’s public image was founded on his being an old résistant and a pillar of the Republic. But his wartime writings promoted a down-the-line antidemocratic pro-Nazi agenda. “All the old formulas of excessive liberty” must be abandoned: “the words democracy, dictatorship, republic, universal suffrage, organized proletariat, liberty, equality, have had their day.”30 Denunciations of suspect neighbors were a duty “insofar as they truly serve the community.”31 As for the Jews, “rubbing their hands [after the crucifixion, they] cried, ‘Let his blood fall on us and our children!’ You know exactly how it fell, and still falls. The edicts of the eternal Scriptures must and will be accomplished.”32 And, if this material were not graphic enough, “Their race is forever stained with the blood of the just. They will be universally accursed. . . . Today’s Jews . . . will be spat out [seront vomis]. It’s already happening.”233

All these prejudices had long been familiar to the devotees of Action Française, and it was no surprise to find them voiced by an ambitious young man of Bettencourt’s religious and conservative background. His generation had never seen the Republic as anything but enfeebled and corrupt; for the circles in which he moved, the Jews embodied everything—liberalism, secularism, cultural dilution—that was destroying their beloved France. For forty years these same prejudices had been brandished in an ongoing and increasingly bitter war of words. Bettencourt was simply repeating what he had heard all his life.

However, it could hardly have escaped this highly intelligent young man that by the time he wrote his pieces the war was no longer a war of mere words. On the contrary, in the context of the Nazi Occupation, the familiar phrases had become lethal weapons. The extolling of denunciation was particularly sinister—not just repellent in itself, but because it laid a duty on readers to impose what was probably a death sentence upon anyone who did not conform to the ruling ideology.3 And to denigrate the Jews in an era of deportations, expropriations, and extermination camps, was direct incitement to persecution.

Bettencourt’s first intimation that Frydman had disinterred his articles and was preparing to publish them was at a symposium on museum management he was moderating. When questions were invited, David Frydman stood up and said he was proposing to fund a museum of the collaboration. He had a set of Bettencourt’s articles for La Terre Française. Would Bettencourt agree to donate the manuscripts to Frydman’s museum?

Later, Bettencourt would try to pretend that he could not remember what he had written all those years ago, and that in any case, his articles had been anodyne and unimportant. But his reaction to Frydman’s intervention indicated that, on the contrary, he remembered only too well, and knew the effect disclosure might have on his current image. The shock was palpable. He turned pale and left the room. When he returned, he was urged by a member of the panel not to answer, but rejected this suggestion with the words “I am a public figure, I must answer.” He went on: “It is true that I had the misfortune to write for La Terre Française, but I redeemed myself. I was in the Resistance. I even represented the National Council of Liberation at Geneva.”34

Bettencourt at once used his powerful position as a senator to try to prevent the matter going any further. When Frydman returned to the library to make sure he had photographed everything, he found that all copies of La Terre Française had vanished. He looked elsewhere, in vain: the magazine had been removed from every library in France—except the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Versailles site, where he finally tracked it down. It had recently been moved there from the library’s then main building in rue Richelieu, probably escaping Bettencourt’s sweep because at the crucial moment it was in transit between locations.4

In the autumn of 1994, Jean Frydman set out his findings in a pamphlet, Pour servir la mémoire, giving the names and details of the old fascists “recycled” by Schueller and reproducing the more explosive of Bettencourt’s Terre Française articles. The result was all he had hoped, and all Bettencourt had dreaded. Not only was there a renewed focus of attention on L’Oréal’s dark history, both in the French press and in other countries, but Serge Klarsfeld requested the U.S. Department of Justice to put Bettencourt on its watch list of undesirable aliens. That listing in turn prompted New York congressman Eliot L. Engel to write Bettencourt a letter demanding clarification on three counts. How had he been able to obtain an American visa, given that applicants were required to state whether they had been implicated in any Nazi persecutions? What about those articles, now republished by Frydman, from La Terre Française—in particular one containing the phrase “Today’s Jews will be spat out. It’s already happening”? And had Bettencourt, during the war, been a collaborator or a résistant?

Bettencourt declined to respond to Frydman’s allegations, on the grounds that the conflict between Frydman and L’Oréal was still before the courts, and that as vice president of L’Oréal he was debarred from commenting. But he did reply to Congressman Engel’s letter. He had no memory of filling in a visa application form, as he normally used a diplomatic passport; in any case, he would not fill in such a form himself—tasks like that were the job of his staff. As a résistant, he had been imprisoned in Nancy and had met Allen Dulles, head of the American OSS, while on a mission to Switzerland. He had been asked to write for La Terre Française because he had previously been active in the Catholic young farmers association (Jeunesse Agricole Catholique), and this was a farming magazine. He had been France’s official representative at the funeral of Israel’s David Ben-Gurion, when he had been received by Golda Meir and Abba Eban, hardly a mission for an anti-Semite. Nor would anyone with a record of collaboration have been tolerated by de Gaulle or Mendès-France, who had not only been a staunch résistant but was himself Jewish. He held the Resistance Medal. His son-in-law was a Jew. He rested his case. As for Mr. Engel’s citation of a phrase about the Jews being “spat out,” supposedly published in the Christmas 1940 edition of La Terre Française, he assured him that no such phrase appeared in that article. Indeed, it did not: it turned out that Frydman’s notes were in error. The phrase had appeared the following Easter, in a piece, also by Bettencourt, entitled “Carillon pascale.”

Frydman’s pamphlet, and its repercussions, prompted investigations into other aspects of André Bettencourt’s wartime life—in particular, his claim to have been active in the Resistance. He had undeniably been awarded the Resistance Medal, but for what, exactly?

In his letter to Congressman Engel, Bettencourt wrote that in 1944 he had been sent to Geneva to represent the Conseil National de la Résistance. There, under the assumed name of Grainville, he had contacted many members of the Resistance and also members of the English and American intelligence services, in particular Allen Dulles and Max Shoop of the OSS, on behalf of the Ministry for Prisoners of War. He returned to France with Dulles at the time of the Allied landings in the south of France.

But these claims did not stand up to examination. It was true that Bettencourt did go to Switzerland in the summer of that year. Mitterrand had tasked him with contacting American agents in Switzerland in order to obtain funds on behalf of the Ministry for Prisoners of War, which was trying to foment unrest in German prisoner-of-war camps. Once he had the money he was to pass it on to Mitterrand.

It was not a hard task, and he accomplished it easily enough, making the requisite contacts and forwarding the money—$2,500,000 in all,35 though what became of it is unclear. No POW insurrections of the type it was supposed to fund were recorded. However, he certainly did not, as he claimed, represent the Conseil National de la Résistance. That organization was headed by Jean Moulin and General de Gaulle, who were convinced that America’s ultimate intention was to turn France into an American client state, and forbade all contact with the American secret services in Switzerland, particularly in financial matters. When confronted with this faux pas by the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, Bettencourt backtracked: he had made a mistake, he had actually been part of the delegation of the Mouvements Unifiés de la Résistance—a different and much less significant body, headed by his old friend (and Jean Moulin’s mortal enemy) Pierre de Bénouville. But it transpired that this position, too, was impossible: the MUR had ceased to exist on December 31, 1943,36 nine months before Bettencourt visited Switzerland.

Nor did he meet Allen Dulles: Bettencourt’s dealings were with Dulles’s deputy, Max Shoop.37 And even had Dulles and Bettencourt been acquainted, they could not have journeyed to France together. Dulles did not leave Switzerland until the night of August 29–30, while Bettencourt told Pierre Péan in an interview that from August 21 he was in Paris, where he and Dalle were helping Mitterrand with post-Liberation policy regarding prisoners of war.538

Bettencourt’s first line of defense was to insist that everything about his past was known and had long been dealt with and dismissed. “I answered the questions about La Terre Française in my very first electoral campaign,” he told New York’s Congressman Engel. And some years later, interviewed for a book, he said, “Everyone knew perfectly well what my position was during the war.”39 When this tack failed to impress, he declared that although he regretted what he had written, it was insignificant: “I mentioned the Jews two or three times and the freemasons once. . . .”40 And finally he pleaded ignorance. He had not known what was happening to the Jews: “I would never have written those words if I’d had any idea of what the Jews were going through. . . . No one knew anything about Jews being arrested and deported to extermination camps,” he complained to an interviewer.41 Nor had he had any idea who the real owners of La Terre Française were: “I knew absolutely nothing about that. . . . For me it was just a magazine with a large circulation among agriculturalists.” 42 And when all these excuses failed, he simply went into denial. When confronted with yet another outrageously anti-Semitic, antidemocratic article written for yet another Pétainist youth publication (L’Élan, published in Bordeaux), “I don’t remember,” he flatly replied.43

None of it worked. The Frydmans’ revelations ended Bettencourt’s public career. On December 13, 1994, he quietly resigned from L’Oréal (where he was replaced as vice president by his son-in-law, Jean-Pierre Meyers, by a supreme irony a Jew whose grandfather had died in Auschwitz) and declared he would not be standing in the Senate elections due to take place the following year. He insisted that these decisions had nothing to do with the Frydmans’ investigations or Congressman Engel’s letter, which he made a point of not having received until December 16, three days after his resignation. On the contrary, he said, L’Oréal’s CEO, Lindsay Owen-Jones, had been aware for some time of his impending departure: at the age of seventy-six he could no longer fulfil his duties as actively as he should, and from now on he would have to curtail his activities. But sources “close to L’Oréal’s management” told Le Monde that, on the contrary, the letter and the resignation were by no means unconnected. The troubles stemming from the Corrèze affair were only just behind them, and they were anxious that this new embarrassment should remain confined to Bettencourt himself and not taint the company or its principal shareholder, who was, of course, his wife.44

The tone Bettencourt took thereafter, on the rare occasions when he consented to speak about the affair, was one of sadness and indignation. He was, he asserted, the victim of a malicious conspiracy. But “the more I say, the more I stoke the polemic. . . . It’s all a terrible trap,” he complained to Le Monde. “Have some consideration for my dignity. It’s appalling to imply that I could possibly have participated in genocide!” 45 And writing to Congressman Engel he reiterated the accusation that had so enraged Jean Frydman when he had first made it, saying that in his view, “this sudden revival of interest in articles . . . written half a century ago is at least partly due to the misrepresentation of events by people who want to make sure their financial interests prevail.” 46

V

It seems clear that neither André Bettencourt nor Jacques Corrèze felt guilty about what they had done during the war. Their regret was rather for the embarrassment their youthful acts caused them later. But that regret manifested itself quite differently in the two men, and had different roots.

Bettencourt’s chagrin clearly stemmed from the sense that he had been unfairly picked out. Countless others—including, doubtless, many of his own acquaintances—had acted as discreditably as he. Even if they had not, as he had, actively promoted fascism, they had adjusted their lives to it without too much trouble. But the épuration was supposed to have dealt with all that. One of its important functions had been to act as an “exercise in the suppression of memory,” 47 so that France could step forward into the future, confident that the worst offenders had been punished. For private individuals, this amnesia took effect almost instantly. Thus, the journalist Merry Bromberger, profiling Schueller in 1954—only six years after his second trial—glossed over his wartime career with the comment “From time to time his enthusiasms have led him where he shouldn’t have gone.” 48

All this meant that when Bettencourt said, “Everyone knew perfectly well what my position was during the war,” the truth was in reality just the opposite. People thought they knew—and wanted nothing more than to go on thinking so. No one in the French establishment welcomed his exposure. It undermined the whole edifice. If Bettencourt was shown to be a liar, whose story could be believed?

For what made the Bettencourt case so disturbing (and what so infuriated him) was the certainty that it was not unique. His shameful trajectory had, after all, only been revealed by the sheerest chance. If Corrèze had not become obsessed with taking over Helena Rubinstein, if the Boycott Office had not intervened, if Dalle had not picked Jean Frydman as a partner for L’Oréal, none of his wartime activity would have come out. It was possible that the fates had picked the one rotten apple out of the barrel—possible, but not probable. What of the industrialists who had so enthusiastically funded La Cagoule, and whose names still remained household words in France? Would their stories, had they been forced to reveal them, have been so very different? And how many public figures had, like Bettencourt himself, transformed themselves into résistants at the last minute—as his friend François Mitterrand put it, “mal embarqués, bien arrivés”?49 Were not their careers based, as his was, on lies and concealments?

One of the people most anxious that Frydman should not pursue his vendetta to the bitter end was Mitterrand himself. “This story has gone too far,” his aide Charles Salzmann told David Frydman. The president didn’t want the affair discussed in the press because they might write “all sorts of things.”50

But it was too late: they already had. As more and more of the L’Oréal story seeped out, Mitterrand’s many detractors seized upon the Schueller connection, pointing up his far-right relations and questioning whether he had played the important part in the Resistance that he had always claimed. In particular, they pounced upon a decoration he had played down: the Francisque, the medal awarded for outstanding service to Vichy and Pétain. Mitterrand could hardly deny receiving it—when his party went into opposition, in 1962, the Gaullist deputies amused themselves by shouting “Francisque! Francisque!” whenever he rose to speak51—but he had hitherto explained it away by saying “When I received it in 1943, I was in England [i.e., on Resistance business]. That was really useful when I got back—it was the best possible alibi.”52 Now, however, when people looked into the issue more closely, they found that a photograph existed of him receiving the medal in person from the Marshal’s own hand.

That Mitterrand should have been part of Vichy was no surprise. Of all the gang from 104, his background was probably the furthest right, and his family was intertwined, in many ways and on many levels, with La Cagoule. Not only was his sister, Marie-Joséphine, for many years the lover of Jean Bouvyer, who was involved in the Rosselli assassination, but the Mitterrands were actually related to the Deloncles via Mitterrand’s brother, Robert, whose wife was Mercédès Deloncle’s niece. During the days of La Cagoule and the MSR, the Mitterrands cut off contact with the Deloncles, but after Deloncle was killed they looked after his daughter, Claude, and her young children. And when, in 1949, Mercédès Deloncle finally married her long-time love Jacques Corrèze, the Mitterrands were present in force at their wedding. In 1984, when President Mitterrand, visiting New York, attended a party at the Hotel Pierre in New York given by the local French community, Corrèze’s friends and colleagues were astonished to see the president greet him with a warm hug.53

But the point about Mitterrand’s far-right connections, which he so fervently did not wish exhumed, was that they had never been secret. When he first emerged as a leader of the left, during the 1950s, the political scandal sheets made much of this sudden volte-face. “Our aim here isn’t to determine the exact relations between M. Mitterrand and La Cagoule: everyone knows that that monster (by which of course we mean La Cagoule) had many heads and thousands of feet. We merely note that it’s odd that an eminent member of the UDSR [Mitterrand’s party] should be mixed up in the intrigues of [cagoulards] . . . who managed, during the Occupation, to construct a Vichyist/Gaullist/collabo/résistant synthesis before which the most persistent bloodhounds would lose heart,” commented one in 1953; in 1954, another invoked “the political waters in which Mitterrand first met his friend Schueller, the father-in-law of Bettencourt, who’s now a minister.”54 And the same was true of Jacques Corrèze. If anyone wanted to look, his beginnings with L’Oréal were an open secret. The latter article went on to mention “the cagoulard Jacques Corrèze, who owes his job in Madrid to Schueller . . . .” And later, as Lindsay Owen-Jones, Dalle’s successor, said quite plainly, “This is not a guy who tried to hide in Argentina or Brazil. He never changed his name.”55 It was all out there—if you wanted to know it.

The truth was that most people did not want to know. They wanted to look forward, not backward. In the words of Mitterrand’s Socialist Party colleague Laurent Fabius, whom he had made France’s youngest-ever prime minister, “What did I care what he’d done thirty years ago?”56 François Dalle, for instance, knew all about Corrèze, but decided to employ him nonetheless. In Dalle’s eyes, he had paid his debt to society. “As a participant in the Resistance, I thought it was important to demonstrate tolerance at a time of reconciliation in France.”57

But, then, neither Dalle nor Owen-Jones had ever suffered at the hands of Corrèze and his like. Those who had were not so blithe about letting bygones be bygones. And France’s problem, in the postwar years, was that the two sides—the victims and the rest—could never agree as to the best way forward. One side wished to move on, the other—for whom closure was impossible unless the past was recognized—could not move on until it had seen justice done. The L’Oréal affair exhumed this split, which was why so many people found it so painful.

This problem was not unique to France. In one form or another it affected many countries after the war. But what made the French situation particularly edgy was that anti-Semitism had for so many years been one of the mantras of the anti-Republican right—and that for many, the differentiation this implied between French Jews and the “real” French had never really been effaced. Thus, in 1980, when a bomb exploded at a synagogue in Paris’s rue Copernic, the then prime minister, Raymond Barre, commented, “This disgusting attack was aimed at the Jews who were going to the synagogue, but it actually injured innocent Frenchmen who were crossing the street.”58 If as late as 1980, in the mind of a moderate politician, Jews and “innocent Frenchmen” were still instinctively differentiated, then it was clear just how embedded in the national psyche Action Française’s demonization still remained.

Obviously, there were real differences between a Bettencourt, who simply blew with whatever wind prevailed, and a Corrèze, who had been a committed Nazi and who made a point of insisting that he had always acted on principle. The Senator Bettencourt of 1994 probably was genuinely different from the young man he had once been, just as the climate of postwar opinion was genuinely different from that in which he had been brought up. Admittedly his career was based on lies. But by the time Frydman resuscitated them he had told the official story so often that he had probably come to believe it. Had he truly been that young fascist cheerleader? His reaction to David Frydman’s revelations showed that he knew he had. But how could that young man have turned into the person he was now? Was it really he who had inveighed against “the republic and her masks of parliamentarianism and liberalism,” he who had called for “a leader who commands, not a crowd of clerks eternally discussing”? 59 It was impossible—yet it was true. A journalist who spoke to him on the phone after his resignation said he sounded “wounded and tormented.”60 “There’s this incredible atmosphere of hate,” Bettencourt said.

I had to withdraw from the only occasion I’ve been offered to put my side of things on television. . . . because I found out they were going to accompany it with images of the Germans marching up the Champs-Élysées. . . . You just have to put up with it; every time you talk about it you just fall into another trap. To say I’m an anti-Semite is shameful when my only daughter is married to a Jew who’s like a son to me. After fifty years of an existence devoted to my country, am I only to be seen as an anti-Semite and anti-Freemason? It’s horrible.61

No such bitter regret was ever felt by Corrèze. He had never, as Bettencourt had, suppressed the person he had once been. On the contrary, he insisted that he did what he did when the MSR was in its prime “for a noble cause,” haughtily declaring that although he had lost faith in the MSR some time before Deloncle died, he had not abandoned his old mentor while he lived because “I do not desert my friends.”62 Had his views changed simply because they were no longer admissible? It seems unlikely. Rather, his whole life had been a continuation of the same game, and when that game was exposed, he was not so much embarrassed as furious.

Naturally, he never went so far as to publicly glory in his past. When first questioned about his role in expelling Jews—including Georges Mandel, who until June 1940 had been minister of the interior, and Bernheim the well-known art dealer—from their homes and businesses, he, too, resorted to evasion, first denying everything. “I can’t recall it—I don’t think that can be true,” he said first, then insisted that there was a difference between what he had done and actually maltreating Jews (“faire des saloperies contre les juifs”).63 Which was true enough: he had waited for others to do the dirty work, and then taken the profits. A few days later he issued a written statement asserting that “There’s no one, among those hunted during the Occupation, Jewish or not, who can complain of having suffered, in his person or his goods, from my activity.”64 But in the end his actions were what they were, and he did not apologize for them.

The characteristic that struck reporters during the Cagoule trial in 1948 was his arrogance. He sat aloofly at the end of the row, leaning away from his fellow accused, his handsome head thrown back, viewing the proceedings from a distance down his well-shaped nose. He answered questions, when addressed, with a weary politeness. He was, journalists remarked, a romantic figure. He was also utterly unrepentant. And unrepentant he remained. Interviewed on television in June 1991, he was asked, “Do you feel you were a real anti-Semite?” to which he flashed savagely back, “I don’t know if I was, but I’m about to become one!”65

He did not, like Bettencourt, try to cheat the gods. Rather, in a classic tale of hubris, he simply gave them the finger, pushing his luck, because he felt himself invincible. Given his past, and his defiant arrogance, it is hard to believe that Helena Rubinstein’s Jewishness played no part in Corrèze’s absolute determination to acquire her business. He never showed any interest in the very comparable Elizabeth Arden, who was an equally powerful player, who died only a year after Madame, and whose business went downhill in much the same way as Helena Rubinstein’s. On the contrary, it seems in character that, having arrived in New York and sized up the situation, he should have decided to resume the old game he had so enjoyed in Paris—Colonel Corrèze redivivus, minus only the high boots and cross-belts. Everything he did points to his enjoyment of this underlying drama, his pleasure doubtless enhanced by the fact that only he was aware of it.

We have no way of knowing when he first set his sights on Helena Rubinstein’s business, but since Madame was already over eighty when he arrived in New York, he must have realized even before he met her that Helena Rubinstein, Inc., would come into play sooner rather than later. He made a point of getting to know her; and to good effect. Dalle testified that it was Corrèze’s personal friendship with Madame that enabled L’Oréal to acquire Helena Rubinstein Spain—the first step to the eventual takeover of the entire company.66 When the boycott difficulties arose, it was he who insisted on conducting the Israeli end of the negotiations. He dropped hints to the Israelis regarding his past—which helped convince them that he was an honest broker—but as at the Cagoule trial this apparent frankness, whose effect was so disarming, in fact concealed far more than it revealed. And as the saga of the boycott became more and more tangled, his behavior became increasingly flamboyant. At one point he floated a crazy plan that might have come from Deloncle himself: a project called Operation Rocher to create a bogus company in Switzerland, apparently quite unconnected to L’Oréal, that would buy the Helena Rubinstein international operation.67 He would control Helena Rubinstein—at, it seemed, any cost—and ended up occupying its chair in the same way as, during the war, he and his MSR cronies occupied the one-time offices of the Ligue Contre Antisémitisme, Georges Mandel’s apartment, and the Bernheim art gallery. Would anyone realize who he was? Would they make the connection? Eventually, of course, someone did. And then he defeated them after all—by dying.

VI

The story of L’Oréal’s takeover of Helena Rubinstein, and the ensuing explosions, is an almost perfect dramatic construct. Had it not been for the vicious anti-Semitism of Schueller and his friends, Madame would never have rediscovered her Jewish identity and established the Israeli presence that gave rise to the boycott problems. Had Jacques Corrèze not been disgraced in France as an old Nazi he would not have ended up in New York, nor been so enchanted by the prospect of taking over a Jewish business. His and Schueller’s eventual unmasking was a direct, if unforeseeable, consequence of their previous actions.

For the businessman who had to deal with the consequences, however, the scandals were nothing less than a nightmare. Lindsay Owen-Jones, L’Oréal’s fourth CEO, assumed office in the autumn of 1988—just at the moment the boycott storm broke—and spent the next six years firefighting, as successive news stories rose from the dead to rip through L’Oréal’s image.

A large part of his effort to repair the damage was directed at the reestablishment of that image with the Jewish community and Israel. American reaction to the boycott settlement had been angry, and L’Oréal faced a $100 million lawsuit alleging it had broken U.S. laws designed to prevent American firms from cooperating with the Arab boycott of Israel. In June 1994, therefore, L’Oréal announced that it had bought a 30-percent stake in Interbeauty (formerly Helena Rubinstein Israel) at a price of $7 million. Six months later, in January 1995, the company opened a factory in the Israeli town of Migdal Ha-Emek, producing Elseve shampoo, Plenitude antiwrinkle cream, and a line of products for export using Dead Sea minerals, called Natural Sea Beauty. That same year, L’Oréal agreed to pay $1.4 million to the U.S. government to settle its legal problems, and thanked the Anti-Defamation League “for its support of L’Oréal’s business and community services activity in Israel.” Bettencourt had resigned, Corrèze was dead, the Jewish lobby was happy. In 1997, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America gave L’Oréal its International Leadership Award. Owen-Jones heaved a sigh of relief and prepared to turn his attention to other matters.

And then, in 2001, ten years after the Corrèze affair, six years after Bettencourt’s exit, the Nazi past returned to haunt L’Oréal once more.

In the freezing winter of 1948, Eugène Schueller announced to his protégé François Dalle that they were going to visit L’Oréal’s German subsidiary, which had its headquarters in Karlsruhe, just across the Rhine from Schueller’s native Alsace. The company had opened its first German agency in Berlin, in 1922, but it did not do as well as expected, and its manager, Frau Kuhm, refused to produce her account books. In 1930 L’Oréal sacked her (to her fury—she sued, but lost) and opened another office under the management of a Frenchman, André Tondu.68

The Berlin premises were destroyed during the war, and after it Tondu, who remained in charge, moved the business to Karlsruhe. There, under the name Haarfarben und Parfümerien (Hair Dyes and Perfumery) he rented the ground floor and cellar of a house in the center of town, at number 18, Kaiserallee. The business at that point was “Lilliputian,” Dalle remembered: its “factory” consisted of the cellar room, an area of about 300 square meters.69

When the business needed more space, in February 1949, Tondu signed purchase papers on its behalf for a property situated just round the corner, at 17, Wendtstrasse. This house and the one at 18, Kaiserallee, shared a common neighbor, number 19, Wendtstrasse, a once-luxurious mansion that had been bombed during the war, and which occupied the corner lot where Wendtstrasse met Kaiserallee. If Tondu could consolidate, and buy this property also, his business would then occupy an important and valuable site in the center of town.

In November 1951, he seemed to have received some assurance that he would indeed, sooner or later, be able to buy number 19. That month, Haarfarben bought the house at 18, Kaiserallee, whose ground floor and basement it had hitherto been renting—a move that only made sense if they now knew they would also be able to buy the ruined lot situated between the two properties they owned already. And in 1954 they duly did so.

The seller was a large insurance company, the Badischer Gemeinde Versicherung Verband (BGV), which had acquired number 19 in 1938 from a Frau Luise Dürr. The property, however, was not owned by Frau Dürr. Rather, it belonged to the family of a wealthy lawyer named Dr. Fritz Rosenfelder in whose name she was acting. Until 1936, Dr. Rosenfelder had lived there with his mother-in-law, his wife, Kaethe, and their young daughter, Edith. But the family was Jewish, and by the end of 1936 they knew they would have to leave Germany. Dr. Rosenfelder spoke French and had studied in Paris, and he therefore decided to move his family to that city, traveling on ahead to look for accommodations. They would join him there as soon as he had found somewhere suitable for them all to live.

By the time he was ready to receive them, however, the situation in Germany had deteriorated further. For Jews to leave was no longer a straightforward matter. There was now invariably a price to pay: in the Rosenfelders’ case, this included their house. They would need exit visas, and to obtain them, Dr. Rosenfelder was told he must designate an agreed Aryan to handle all his business in Germany—which meant transferring “all the rights” to this person, including the right to dispose of property.70 The holder of this power of attorney would be Frau Dürr. Dr. Rosenfelder had never met her and knew nothing about her. No one, least of all an experienced lawyer, would willingly sign over his property to such a person in this way. But as it was the only way to get his family out of danger, he signed.

The family duly came to Paris and in September of 1938 moved into an apartment in the rue des Saussaies, near the Champs-Élysées (as it happened, just across the road from where the Gestapo would establish its headquarters). Meanwhile, on January 20, 1938, Frau Dürr transferred rights in number 19, Wendtstrasse on behalf of Dr. Rosenfelder “once of Karlsruhe, now of New York,”71 to BGV.

For the Rosenfelders, as for so many Jewish families, the war was a time of unspeakable torment. In 1939, Dr. Rosenfelder was sent by the French to the first of a series of internment camps, where food was scarce and living conditions atrocious.6 During intervals of freedom he managed to get visas for his family to emigrate to America, but his mother-in-law refused to go: America, she declared, had no culture. By 1941, however, it was clear that Paris, though doubtless cultured, was no longer safe for Jews. Fritz Rosenfelder was interned once again, this time at Les Milles, near Aix-en-Provence, and Kaethe, Edith, and Kaethe’s mother, Emma, decamped to Allauch, a small town not far away, where they lodged with a family and Edith went to school.

So things went on for some months. Then one day, when Edith chanced to be at the beach with her teacher, her mother and grandmother were picked up by the milice. They were sent to the infamous internment camp at Drancy, a staging post for Auschwitz, where they died. Edith was saved by a young village girl who arrived before the gendarmes could find her, and who helped her hide.

Fritz, meanwhile, had escaped from Les Milles. When he heard what had happened, he realized there was no way of retrieving his wife and mother-in-law. He and his daughter made their perilous way to Switzerland, where, weakened by his successive ordeals, he died in 1945. Edith, then seventeen, ended up in a camp for Jewish displaced persons, where she stayed until an uncle who had made it to Brazil agreed to take her in. She traveled to Brazil, married there, and had two children. But she could never bear to talk about the war, or her dead mother and grandmother. She told her children she didn’t remember.72

In 1951, the year Edith Rosenfelder married, BGV took full legal possession of 19, Wendtstrasse. Until 1949, regulations imposed by the victorious Allies had prevented any dealing in property stolen from the Jews by the Nazis. But on January 1st of that year these restrictions were lifted, and in August 1950, BGV began the process of establishing their legal right to number 19. In the absence of living claimants, all such matters were decided via the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO), based in New York.

There were, of course, living claimants: not just Edith Rosenfelder, but an uncle, Fritz’s brother, Karl Rosenfelder, who was then still alive. And it seems that Karl Rosenfelder was trying to lay claim to his family’s property. But BGV made no effort to contact him—on the contrary: an internal memorandum dated June 4, 1951, records that a lawyer had phoned to say that Karl Rosenfelder had been in touch with a view to establishing his right to restitution of the property, but that if the matter could not be settled by negotiation via the JRSO, he (the lawyer) would not pursue the matter, as he had no wish to act against his friends in BGV.73 As it turned out, this man had been chairman of the Association of National Socialist Lawyers for Karlsruhe during the 1930s and was personally responsible for the banning of Fritz Rosenfelder from practicing. He was unlikely, to say the least, to have been an enthusiastic advocate for Fritz’s brother Karl.

The matter was settled, without reference to either Karl or Edith Rosenfelder, on November 5, 1951. On that day, BGV agreed to pay JRSO 5,000 deutschmarks as compensation, in return for ownership of the lot at 19, Wendtstrasse.74 Later they claimed that Karl Rosenfelder had signed the document, but neither they nor anyone else have ever produced his signature.

Meanwhile, André Tondu’s property purchases on behalf of Haarfarben progressed in close step with BGV’s. In January 1949, as we have seen, the restriction on dealing in stolen Jewish properties was lifted, allowing BGV to begin the formalization of its ownership of 19, Wendtstrasse. In February, Tondu made the first of his purchases—number 17, Wendtstrasse. And he bought the property at 18, Kaiserallee on the very day—November, 5, 1951—that the BGV/JRSO matter was settled, that same day reconfirming his purchase of 17, Wendtstrasse.

Two and a half years later, on June 29, 1954, the Wendtstrasse saga was completed—at least as far as Tondu and Haarfarben/L’Oréal were concerned. That day Tondu, on behalf of Haarfarben, bought number 19 from BGV for DM 27,000. The transfer document noted that a restitution procedure had been initiated concerning ownership of this property, but that the file had been closed, entitling the present owner [BGV] to dispose of the property.75 Haarfarben/L’Oréal now owned the entire corner site at the junction of Kaiserallee and Wendtstrasse. They would remain there for the next thirty-seven years, selling the property in 1991 (the same year, as it happened, that the Corrèze scandal broke).

Edith Rosenfelder, now Edith Waitzfelder, living in Rio de Janeiro, knew nothing of these maneuverings. But her daughter, Monica, noticed that the other Jewish families they knew in Rio, many of whom had arrived there in circumstances very similar to Edith’s, had all received restitution payments from Germany. Edith had received nothing; and although she hated talking about her family’s life in Germany, and what had happened to them, she said enough to indicate that they had been well-off and had owned a substantial property in Karlsruhe. Why, then, had she been neglected? What had happened to her rightful compensation?

Monica Waitzfelder determined to find out. She moved to Paris, found a job there, and set about unraveling her family’s German affairs.

The task, which she carried out in the intervals of her busy life as an opera director, turned out to be difficult and complex. Papers that should have been available somehow could not be found. Bureaucrats were unhelpful. A clause in the November 5, 1951, agreement by which BGV acquired 19, Wendtstrasse, for example, stated that “The JRSO undertakes, inasmuch as the defendant (the BGV) acts in conformity with instructions from the JRSO, to compensate the defendant to a maximum of 5,000 DM if a situation arises where those with a priority right make themselves known and validly undermine the defendant’s position.”76 But when Waitzfelder made inquiries regarding this clause, she was informed that the compensation had already been paid, and the matter was closed. Yet how was this possible? No one but Edith, her uncle Karl having now died, had a priority right, and she had never made herself known to JRSO, since by the time she found out what was going on in Karlsruhe, the JRSO no longer existed.

“L’Oréal is still very powerful [in Karlsruhe],” was the explanation offered by one nervous and unhelpful woman at the Karlsruhe town hall when asked why she could not supply copies of the relevant documents. Bit by bit, however, Monica Waitzfelder accumulated the documents and pieced together the story. The 1954 papers recording BGV’s sale of 19, Wendtstrasse to Haarfarben stated that “The compensation rights owed to victims of the war remain entirely within the possession of the vendor.” That was to say, BGV—the people who had illegally acquired the property in the first place.

On June 18, 2001, Maître Charles Korman, acting for Monica Waitzfelder, wrote to Lindsay Owen-Jones, managing director of L’Oréal, detailing what his client had uncovered. Valuations of sales and rental income for comparable properties indicated that the Waitzfelders had been cheated, over the years, of a substantial sum. The amount named by Korman was DM 60,556,726, (roughly, €30,000,000, or $40,500,000). He made it clear that both he and Ms. Waitzfelder would prefer an out-of-court settlement, but failing that they would go to court.

However, in letters to the lawyer and, later, to Edith and Monica Waitzfelder, Owen-Jones rejected all notion of a settlement. He declined to acknowledge that L’Oréal had any responsibility in the affair, asserting that Haarfarben was quite distinct from L’Oréal and that L’Oréal had not bought a majority holding in it until 1961. If strictly true in a legal sense, in practice the company always regarded the German subsidiary as part of the parent organization. There is particular mention of Haarfarben as part of the L’Oréal family in staff magazines from 1948 and 1949, while a paragraph in L’Oréal Deutschland’s website describes how André Tondu restarted the business in Karlsruhe after it was bombed out of Berlin.

Owen-Jones insisted that the JRSO transaction of 1951, in which due compensation had been awarded, had been signed by Karl Rosenfelder (though he, too, failed to produce any signature). He declared his “deepest conviction . . . that L’Oréal has done no wrong to Mrs. Edith Rosenfelder,” and announced that L’Oréal had appointed its own lawyers to deal with the case. They were Michel Zaoui and Jean Veil, two well-respected Jewish advocates, one of whom (Zaoui) had been a leading prosecutor in the Klaus Barbie trial—a choice whose insulting implications were not lost on the Waitzfelders.77 Owen-Jones had clearly been advised that the law was on his side, and, that being so, he was not inclined to give in.

L’Oréal did indeed win the case, both at the first hearing, when the Waitzfelders’ complaint was declared out of time, and later, to Korman’s great surprise, on appeal. But it is still hard to understand why Owen-Jones decided to fight rather than settle. From a publicity point of view, it would surely have been better for L’Oréal to portray themselves as prepared to right old wrongs rather than as legalistic skinflints upholding shameful Nazi theft. The Waitzfelders would doubtless have settled for less than the stated sum—not that €30 million would bankrupt a company of L’Oréal’s size and wealth. In 1988, Capital magazine calculated that the Bettencourts, its main shareholders, were getting richer at the rate of €14.2 million a day, or €590,000 an hour, while in 2001 their share of the company’s dividends amounted to more than €81 million.78 As Owen-Jones presided over year after year of double-digit growth, the share price rose from $8 in 1990 to $76 in 2000. When he took charge, Liliane Bettencourt, the company’s largest shareholder, was already the wealthiest woman in France; he made her the wealthiest woman in the world.

From its very inception, however, Owen-Jones’s tenure as L’Oréal’s CEO had been marked by rumblings from the Nazi past. When he took charge, in 1988, the Frydman affair was just about to explode. He spent seven years negotiating his way through that minefield, and succeeded in extricating his company without ever once actually admitting the various allegations. Perhaps the Waitzfelder case was simply one too many for him. To settle would be to acknowledge that L’Oréal really was tainted; and that, perhaps, was more than he could bring himself to do.

Whatever his motivation, the result has been hard on the Rosenfelder family. Edith Rosenfelder still lives, in difficult circumstances, in Brazil. Monica Waitzfelder has told her lawyers not to contact her unless they have good news to offer, as she otherwise finds the whole affair too upsetting. At the time of writing, she had not heard from them. The case is still unresolved, and it is before the European Court of Human Rights.