Coda

Two Old Ladies

Work has been my best beauty treatment! It keeps the wrinkles out of the mind and the spirit. It helps to keep a woman young. It certainly keeps a woman alive!

—HELENA RUBINSTEIN, 1956

Helena Rubinstein died at ninety-two, in full command of her empire. At the time of this writing, Eugène Schueller’s daughter, Liliane Bettencourt, is eighty-seven years old and still an active member of the L’Oréal board. Madame Rubinstein personified her own views of what a woman’s life might be; Madame Bettencourt was raised in accordance with her father’s quite opposite views. Which is the more successful life model? Or, to put it another way, which, if either, leads to contentment?

If money is the key, then these must have been the happiest of lives. Helena Rubinstein died before rich lists, but would certainly have figured on them had they existed in her day. And in 2007 Liliane Bettencourt, with a fortune of $20.7 billion, was, according to Forbes, the wealthiest woman in the world, and its twelfth-richest person. By 2009, both her ranking and her fortune had slipped, to twenty-first place and $13.4 billion, respectively (she was rumored to have lost “an undisclosed amount of money” in a fund overseen by René-Thierry Magnon de la Villehuchet, whose judgment was less impressive than his name and who committed suicide after losing $1.4 billion in Bernie Madoff’s infamous Ponzi scam).1 Her place as wealthiest woman had been claimed by a Walmart heiress. But although comparable losses would devastate public finances in the city-sized economies, sums like these more usually represent, at the level of individual lives they can make no conceivable difference. For a Bettencourt, the only real difficulty is in disposal. How can one spend even a fraction of that money? Solving that problem has been one of her life’s chief occupations. “Fortune is an opportunity,” she told Le Figaro in 2008. “You only need to look around—there are actions that impose themselves—and then go for it. Simply, without ulterior motives, without calculation, without waiting for a ‘return on investment.’ ”

But money, however plentiful, cannot immunize its possessors against misfortune. And poverty, though always an inconvenience, is not always a fatal drawback. Helena Rubinstein was raised in poverty, but her subsequent instinct always to include her sisters in her good fortune attests to a strong sense of family solidarity. By contrast, Liliane Schueller, born to parents who had already become rich, suffered a cold and lonely childhood. When she was five, the rich little girl’s mother died of an abscess on the liver. And this calamity would shape Liliane’s life.

She has only once spoken publicly about this, in an interview with Egoïste magazine in 1987. “They came to fetch me in the middle of the night and I saw my father on his knees at the foot of my mother’s bed. . . . When she died there was no more music in the house. She was a musician. A very beautiful woman, very tall, who got on easily with other people. . . . It meant my father was left to raise me as he wanted. When he had time, that is. . . . It isn’t easy being raised by your father when your mother’s gone. There’s an absence of tenderness.”2

Liliane’s upbringing certainly presented her father with a problem. His wife’s death occurred at a moment when he was diversifying in numerous directions—celluloid, photographic film, Russia, paint. There could be no question of looking after Liliane himself even had he wanted to (which he surely did not, being a man for whom child-rearing was doctrinally a woman’s job). So he sent her to a Dominican convent school, where she remained for ten years. But the mother superior, though kind, was no substitute for the mother who had died. Nor did the holidays bring any respite from austerity. Home, Liliane remembered, was “all about the business, the economic climate, working hard.”

This did not imply grimness—on the contrary, Schueller enjoyed luxury. He filled his houses with specially commissioned furniture, owned a yacht and a Rolls-Royce. But he was a particularly unsuitable lone parent for an only daughter. Business was his sole interest: “Work was how he communicated with me, and vice-versa. When he talked to me about a book or some other thing, he was still talking about work. . . . Psychology, action, ideas, that’s still all business.” Yet this fascinating world was one into which, on principle, Liliane could never be admitted. Although she was sent to work in her father’s factory during the last three weeks of every vacation from the age of fifteen, starting by sticking labels on bottles, her father’s writings made it clear that there was never any possibility she might succeed him. Admittedly his wife had kept the business going while he was away during World War I, but that was out of necessity. For Liliane there was no such necessity. Nor, despite her obvious intellectual capacities, did she attend university. It was her husband who became L’Oréal’s vice president, her husband who, cushioned by his wife’s money, became a senator and a minister. Her job was to support, partner, entertain, do charity work. That was what women did.

Of course it was not what Helena Rubinstein did—and her father disapproved of her quite as heartily as Schueller would have done in similar circumstances. But although Herzl Rubinstein hated what his daughter had become, the home he provided, and the Jewish tradition of strong women that underlay its culture, gave her (albeit unwittingly, and to his horror) the self-confidence to break away. And the consequence was a life defined not by money but by the business success that produced it. Like Eugène Schueller, of whom this was also true, Rubinstein enjoyed her money—the more so since, like him, she had once been poor—but it was their work, not their bank balance, that mattered most to them. This was something of which Rubinstein, to the end of her long span, was acutely conscious, and which she profoundly valued. Work was, as she said, the best beauty treatment.

The upbringing Schueller gave his daughter, however, meant that this satisfying life could never be hers. That would have necessitated rebellion, which for her was unthinkable. Her love and respect for her father were “visceral,” a friend observed, her admiration for him, limitless. When he died, and she found herself owner of the business, she became, above all, the keeper of his flame—which included his values.3 Yet that same upbringing, with its constant emphasis on achievement, also ensured that, paradoxically, she could never be satisfied by the life for which it destined her. “As far as people are concerned, if a woman’s rich, she can’t be intelligent,” Madame Bettencourt told Egoïste defensively. “People park you in a corner and leave you there. Rich—it’s not an agreeable word. In fact it’s an ugly word. I prefer fortune. That implies luck.”

The sense conveyed in that interview is of a life pervaded by an undefined frustration. Raised to consume, able to possess anything she might desire, consumption holds no glamor for Schueller’s daughter. When an art critic cattily observed that Helena Rubinstein possessed “unimportant paintings by every important painter of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” Madame retorted, “I may not have quality but I have quantity. Quality’s nice but quantity makes a show.” 4 “Making a show,” though, is the last thing Bettencourt has ever wanted. “I like emptiness more than clutter,” she told Egoïste. “Even if I fall in love with a painting, I’m quite happy to see it on someone else’s wall.” Rubinstein kept her jewels in a filing cabinet, sorted alphabetically, A for amethysts, B for beryls, D for diamonds, ready to hand for instant use. Liliane Bettencourt owns an equally astonishing collection of gems—bags of cut but unset stones, diamond necklaces, shelves of emeralds, rubies, sapphires—but they are kept in a bank vault whose contents rarely see the light of day,5 while no photograph shows her wearing anything more extravagant than a pair of stud earrings. Rubinstein’s New York living room, like everything else about her, was tasteless but full of gusto. It sported an acid-green carpet designed by Miró, twenty Victorian carved chairs covered in purple and magenta velvets, Chinese pearl-inlaid coffee tables, gold Turkish floor lamps, life-sized Easter Island sculptures, six-foot-tall blue opaline vases, African masks around the fireplace, and paintings covering every inch of wall space. But in Liliane Bettencourt’s tasteful salon, gusto is conspicuous by its absence, the dead hand of the interior decorator everywhere apparent.

These contrasting styles are partly a function of milieu. Slender and terrifically elegant—in 2009 she was elected a permanent member of Vanity Fair’s best-dressed Hall of Fame—Liliane Bettencourt is a supreme exemplar of “bcbg,” bon chic, bon genre, a style to which all Frenchwomen aspire and whose standards, of both chic and genre, are set by the couture-clad haute bourgeoisie of which Madame Bettencourt is a leading member. In bcbg, taste is all, excess is suspect, and a rather uniform, perfectly executed, expensive understatement rules. The whole point is not to draw attention to oneself. The Bettencourts’ dislike of the public eye was legendary: for them, one of the privileges riches bought was total privacy. When Bruno Abescat, a financial journalist at L’Express, set out to write a book about “France’s wealthiest couple,” it was a year before he was able to get near them in the flesh—and then only at a public distribution of prizes financed by the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation.6

For Helena Rubinstein, by contrast, the whole point of spending money was to show you had money to spend. If nobody knew, half the pleasure was lost. In her milieu, wealth validated every eccentricity, and such was her status within it that even her ignorance was accepted as part of her personality. During a lunch in New York the conversation turned to the sad fate of Joan of Arc, burned as a heretic by an ancestor of Edith Sitwell, who was one of the guests. “Somebody had to do it!” cried Madame—an observation so stunningly crass that it would have barred her forever from bcbg circles. But the New Yorkers simply turned the conversation elsewhere.

The essentials of personal life, however, are unaffected by such details. And in that department Bettencourt, happily married for fifty-seven years, with a happily married daughter and grandchildren living just down the road in Neuilly, would seem to have beaten Rubinstein hands down. In 1987, after thirty-seven years of marriage, Liliane described her husband as “someone quite out of the ordinary”7; after his death in 2007 she remained in love with his memory. He was “charming, alive, intelligent. We were together fifty years, there was something indescribable between us, and then business and politics—it was so exciting.”8

By contrast, Rubinstein’s intimate life was a disaster. Her first husband, whom she married for love, constantly ran after other women. Her elder son bored her; her younger son, Horace, whom she adored, quarreled with her incessantly, made nothing of his life, and died in his forties. Artchil, whom she married for companionship, predeceased her by twelve years. So she blotted out the unbearable (Horace’s death, Titus’s infidelity) and compensated for the absence of real personal attachments with compulsive hyperactivity. And yet—despite this catalog of emotional catastrophes—her life was fulfilled in a way that Bettencourt’s never has been.

There is one striking similarity in the lives of Helena Rubinstein and Liliane Bettencourt. Each, in old age, established a friendship with a much younger man. As the years passed, these friendships became the women’s most important emotional focus. But the two relationships, apparently so similar, were quite different in emphasis. And those differences reveal, perhaps more than anything else in the lives of these two formidable women, their true vulnerabilities.

Helena Rubinstein’s young man, Patrick O’Higgins, was the impecunious playboy son of Irish diplomats. He first noticed her in 1950, a tiny nexus of palpitating impatience barreling down the New York street ahead of him, furiously tapping her foot when lights forced her to wait before crossing the road. He had no idea who this vision might be, but soon afterwards ran into her at a cocktail party and was introduced. She was then seventy-eight, at the height of her power in the social and fashionable worlds. He was fifty years her junior, handsome, charming, and disorganized. She at once took a fancy to him, but although their conversation was noted by Rubinstein-watchers, nothing came of it until a year or so later, when out of the blue she asked him to lunch. After a copious meal (“I need to keep up my energy!”) they went on to see Ben-Hur (“Most interesting! I’m glad the Jewish boy won!”) then returned to her apartment, where, over a glass of whiskey, she asked him, “What do you really want to do with your life?” When he hesitated, she at once took over: “Let Me tell you!”9 And tell him she did, from then on until the day she died, fifteen years later.

O’Higgins’ role in Madame’s life was to do and be whatever she required at the time. He accompanied her everywhere, as secretary, nurse, escort, interpreter, PR man, social director, and majordomo. Her strange and compelling personality mesmerized him. A floating bachelor (he may well have been gay, though he never openly admitted it—in the 1950s and sixties, when he knew Madame, homosexuality was still unmentionable), he received from her a focus his life had hitherto lacked. After first Artchil and then Horace died, they became increasingly close, until toward the end of her life he described their relationship as that of “a devoted son and a demanding mother.”10 “Who’s your goy?” the Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion once asked her during a long and tedious dinner. “That’s Patrick!” Madame beamed. “And . . . and, yes, he is my goy.”11

Significantly, money played a relatively small part in their relationship. When she first employed him they agreed on a salary of $7,000 a year. To him, at the time, it seemed a fortune, though as the years went on he realized that others who did considerably less than he were paid considerably more. But although he often remarked on Madame’s habitual tightness with money, O’Higgins never contemplated leaving her—or not on that account. Their one serious contretemps was emotional, when she refused to admit he might need to mourn the death of his mother. Her refusal was partly a jealous reaction—she hated the thought of sharing him, even with the dead. And partly, too, it reflected her horror of death and refusal to admit its existence. Her invariable response to bereavement was to pretend it hadn’t happened, drowning grief in perpetual motion. But O’Higgins was made of less stern (one might say, more human) stuff, and her callousness brought on a nervous breakdown.

They were reunited in the end. Distraught at his absence, she wrote him letters: “I want to forget our differences. I hope you know that I love you as a mother. The mother you lost!” For a while he was unmoved—particularly since those letters somehow never enclosed promised checks. But eventually “I . . . realized that it was impossible for me to leave Madame. I couldn’t escape from her. . . . Her letters had touched me and I longed to be by her side.”12 From then until the day she died, he was with her.

Rubinstein spent her last year putting finishing touches to her will. She left O’Higgins $5,000 in cash plus a yearly income of $2,000 “so he won’t starve.” He calculated that, should he survive twenty years (in fact he died thirteen years later, in 1980), this amount must represent a capital outlay of between sixty and eighty thousand dollars. Might she not have left him a larger sum outright? But then he recalled a conversation in which she’d said, “If I was to leave you twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, what would you do with it?” He’d replied, “Spend it! Have a lovely holiday!” at which she’d nodded sagely—and acted accordingly, in what she saw as his best interests.13 Given his devotion and her great wealth, the bequest was far from generous. But that did not affect the love and respect he felt for her. They shine through the funny, affectionate memoir he left of their life together, a testament to the humanity that lay behind Rubinstein’s overbearing and egotistical façade.

Liliane Bettencourt’s young man was (and is) a different matter. François-Marie Banier is a well-known photographer, novelist, and all-round man-about-town twenty-five years her junior. As with O’Higgins and Rubinstein, the relationship is quasi-filial, with no hint of sex. Banier, unlike O’Higgins, is openly gay. “I see him with his partner, who is charming, cultivated, and intelligent,” Bettencourt told the Journal du Dimanche in 2008.14

As with Rubinstein, too, the friendship is the more significant in that Madame Bettencourt has evidently found close personal relationships difficult. “I like to keep a distance between myself and other people,” she told Egoïste. She had to be persuaded into marriage, and does not seem to have felt wholly at ease even with her own daughter, Françoise. “She was always rather an inscrutable child,” Bettencourt told an interviewer in 2008, a year after her friendship with Banier had sparked a public fight between the two. “She got on better with my husband. Mother-daughter relations are very different from father-daughter relations.”15

Banier has thus achieved an intimacy denied to anyone else. But where Patrick O’Higgins’ attachment to Helena Rubinstein was independent of what she paid him (never, in any case, more than a very moderate salary), Banier’s relationship with Madame Bettencourt appears to be rather different.

The two first met in 1969, at the home of the journalists Pierre and Hélène Lazareff, Neuilly neighbors of the Bettencourts. Madame Bettencourt was then in her forties—as Banier remembered, “the most sought-after woman in society—very impressive and extraordinarily beautiful.”16 But they did not become close at that time. That happened eighteen years later, in 1987, when Bettencourt was sixty-five and Banier thirty-nine. He was assigned to photograph her for the Egoïste interview, they became friends, and the friendship flourished. Banier quickly became a habitué of the Bettencourt mansion; inevitably, Madame Bettencourt was at home much more than her busy husband. Soon he was not just her friend but her principal friend.

Ironically, during that interview, one of the questions was about whether she wasn’t afraid of being loved just for her money. “How would one like to be loved, then?” she said. “Does one have to be ugly and undersized and fat before one can know that one’s loved for oneself?”

That she loves Banier for himself is beyond doubt. And she is not alone in doing so. As he himself put it, “Wherever I go, I make waves” (“Il y a toujours eu de vacarme derrière moi”).17 Louis Aragon was besotted by him; he charmed François Mitterrand, Samuel Beckett, and Vladimir Horowitz. When he wanted to be an actor, Robert Bresson and Eric Rohmer gave him parts in their films. His novels—three published before he was twenty-five—were the talk of Paris. Diane von Furstenberg prefers his photographs to anyone else’s; Johnny Depp insists Banier’s portraits of him are unique and made Banier godfather to his daughter Lily-Rose.

Banier approaches all social encounters with the same all-consuming concentration. “Not many people are really interested in others. But I’m genuinely fascinated by everyone I meet, whether it’s someone I know or a passer-by in the street. I speak to them with my real voice. . . .”18 It could almost be a definition of how charm works. The photographs, the books, the films, are all secondary: his real metier is to enchant. It is compulsive—and the compulsive is by definition compelling.

Banier’s particular specialism, however, is wealthy and well-connected old ladies, whose pursuit appears to have been the first of his many careers. He embarked upon it at the age of nineteen, when he got to know Marie-Laure de Noailles, the maecenas of the Paris avant-garde, then sixty-four. “Didn’t you have anything better to do at the age of nineteen?” asked an interviewer; to which Banier responded, “It’s as though you asked me why I bothered to visit Leonardo da Vinci.”19

Well, up to a point. Unlike Leonardo, wealth, not talent, had been Madame de Noailles’s entrée into the artistic world. Banier, on the other hand, was poor: his father worked at the Citroën factory.20 Both father and son, however, rejected the fact of poverty. Banier père hid his real life even from his family, pretending he was the bourgeois he dreamed of being; and his son, whom he ill-treated and who hated him, inherited this dream and singlemindedly fulfilled it. François-Marie followed the old precept: if you want to be rich, go where the money is. And it worked.

In 1971, when he was twenty-four, Banier published a novel, Le Passé composé (The Perfect Tense), which is in some ways transparently autobiographical. The hero, also called François (but whose surname, de Chevigny, implies membership of a class to which Banier did not, yet, belong), is poor but would like to be rich. He latches on to a rich girl from Neuilly, Cécile, and before their first date wanders through the Bois de Boulogne near her house, clutching a record he will give her as a present. “One day this boy, wandering around with a record in his hand, will have a big house with a big garden. People will say, ‘Did you see? That’s François de Chevigny! He’s got lots of money. He has a house full of beautiful things, and a huge garden with enormous trees.’ ”21 Now Banier, too, has all that. When speaking of his elderly lady friends, he never mentions their wealth. But it appears to have been the central fact of these relationships.

Of course, there were other attractions. Madame de Noailles knew everyone, and introduced Banier to her world. He repaid her with devoted attention. When she died of pneumonia in 1970, it was Banier who heard her last words. By then he had already made another conquest—Madeleine Castaing, the “diva of decorators.” Castaing owned a smart shop on the corner of rue Jacob and rue Bonaparte and was famous, among other things, for her collection of paintings by Chaim Soutine, whom she had known in the 1920s. (When Banier’s fictional François is courting Cécile, one of his lures is a promise to introduce her to Madeleine Castaing and show her the famous collecton of Soutines.22) When Castaing’s husband of fifty years died in 1969, the young Banier obtained an introduction and stepped in to console her;23 the friendship lasted until her death in 1992, at the age of ninety-eight. The photographs he took of her in extreme old age, nightgowned and wigless on her staircase, became famous. Her family detested them—saw them, indeed, as a form of abuse—but according to Banier it was she who initiated this photo shoot.24 “You’ve got a nerve,” he says Castaing said when she saw the photographs. “But that’s fine: It’s me.”25 They were exhibited everywhere, and launched Banier’s photographic career.

Asked whether Banier “tried to use the friendship for material profit,” Castaing’s grandson said that thefts of family property had been a constant topic of conversation between his parents for as long as he could remember. A Soutine, he said, had disappeared during the 1930s, probably stolen by the famously light-fingered writer Maurice Sachs; another went—who knows where?—during the 1980s, along with his grandparents’ letters from Picasso, Satie, and Cocteau. “And as it happens, I know that my grandmother gave François-Marie Banier a place with a conservatory in rue Visconti, in the 6th arrondissment of Paris. Things were just like that . . .”26

By 1987, when Banier met Liliane Bettencourt for the second time, Madeleine Castaing was already ninety-three. Clearly, this source of support could not last much longer. So it was a happy chance that, at the crucial moment, another generous friend should present herself. Pressed as to whether he didn’t sometimes think his penchant for elderly ladies a little strange, Banier replied, “The young have fewer secrets than the old. It isn’t just that they’re old, they’re loners. Also I find a person more beautiful at 108 than at eight years old. But I photograph young people too.”27

What he did not add was that the old people who seemed most to interest him were also rich. Immaterial as this may be to Banier (“I don’t take from people, I let them blossom, because I love and respect them,”28) this financial nexus is what the world chiefly sees. And in the case of Liliane Bettencourt, the pickings have been unimaginably huge. Beginning in 1996, there were regular outings when her chauffeur, under oath to tell no one, “particularly not M. Bettencourt,” would drive Liliane the short distance from Neuilly to the Trocadero, where Banier would be waiting. Together they would continue to the nearby avenue Georges Mandel, where Banier’s notary had his office; there she would make over money to Banier, and the notary would check the paperwork.29

As the years went on, the gifts got larger. In 2002, $14 million (€11 million) was handed over; in 2003, $315 million (€250 million), mostly in the form of a life insurance contract of which he is the beneficiary; in 2004, $7.6 million (€6 million); in 2005, $71 million (€56 million); in 2006, $315 million (€250 million); in 2007, $2.5 million (€2 million). Nine paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and Leger have been signed over to Banier: they remain in Neuilly, but he will possess them after Bettencourt’s death.30 According to one account, he no sooner admired a Matisse painting hanging in one of her houses—its blue, he remarked, was “the color of our friendship”—than she said, “It’s yours, François-Marie!” The Bettencourt Schueller Foundation, which supports both artistic activities, such as painting and filmmaking, and science, in particular medical research, has an annual budget of $160 million. That is a lot of money. But it is dwarfed by the untold wealth that has been lavished on Banier.1

“There have never been quarrels in the Bettencourt family, particularly not about money or power,” admiringly declared their chronicler in 2002.31 But this happy state of affairs was soon overtaken by events. If André Bettencourt remained unaware how attached his wife had become to Banier, as her instructions to the chauffeur would seem to indicate, their daughter Françoise both suspected what was afoot and was deeply disturbed by it. A few days after M. Bettencourt’s death in November, 2007, Banier allegedly tried to get the new widow to adopt him as a son, which would give him the right to half her estate. A month later, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers launched a criminal complaint accusing him of abus de faiblesse, arguing that her increasingly frail mother was no longer capable of withstanding emotional pressure, and producing copious evidence from Madame Bettencourt’s staff showing that Banier had bullied her.

Liliane Bettencourt indignantly denies that she is vulnerable. She argues, reasonably enough, that she is entitled to do whatever she likes with her own money. When the case first came to court there were rumors that she had even called in President Sarkozy, another Neuilly neighbor, to get it thrown out—a maneuver, if that is what it was, that failed (and which she denied, asserting, accurately enough, that Sarkozy “has other things to think about”).2

And although it is unarguable that Banier has made a profitable career out of befriending rich elderly ladies, a habit some might find distasteful, the ladies themselves have not appeared to object. Why would they? Few old ladies are courted and made much of by glamorous younger men, and many might enjoy the experience. From their standpoint, Banier provided, and provides, the one thing money can’t buy. Who can put a price on friendship? “I make Liliane rich, Banier makes her live,” Lindsay Owen-Jones is reported as saying.32 “He’s an artist, that’s what I like,” Madame Bettencourt explained in 2008, after the friendship had become a matter of scandal. “Artists see things differently. Times change, everything’s moving, you’ve got to stay in the swim . . . I was with him just a few days ago in the United States. We met some most interesting people. A big family, very artistic, with ten children. It’s not much fun only seeing people like oneself, is it?”33

An interesting light has recently been shed on Bettencourt-Meyers’ motivation in bringing this case. She is, after all, already unimaginably rich: Liliane Bettencourt has made over a large part of her estate to her daughter. Why, in those circumstances, would any daughter want to cause her aged mother such anguish, dragging her through the courts and making the family a focus for public prurience? In a similar situation Castaing’s family drew back from this path. “As far as I’m concerned these aren’t legal matters, they’re about something else altogether,” her grandson remarked.34

The answer, rumor has it, is business: the business in which neither Liliane nor Françoise Bettencourt, being female, play an active part. However, Jean-Pierre Meyers, Françoise’s husband, is both a L’Oréal board member and (more significantly) a member of its management committee. He is also on the board of Nestlé; and there are hints that he “would like to do Nestlé a favour.”35 Nestlé owns 30 percent of L’Oréal, the Bettencourts, 31 percent; in 2004 Liliane Bettencourt signed an agreement freezing these holdings until six months after her death. It is common knowledge that Nestlé has for years wanted to acquire L’Oréal. If it can be proved that Madame Bettencourt was not competent when she signed that agreement, it is nullified, and Nestlé is free to move.3

Between Banier and Meyers, Liliane Bettencourt seems to be at other people’s mercy. Or rather, at the mercy of the men in her life, starting with her father, whom she revered and could never contradict. Schueller brought up his daughter to do what he thought women were made for—to embellish the lives of her menfolk. And it has been the pattern of her life ever since.

Helena Rubinstein was no one’s patsy: the self-effacing do not become captains of industry. Insufferable, selfish, bullying, crass, she did the exploiting, if any. For Schueller, this was the very reason why women should not aspire to the workplace. But Rubinstein showed, by example, and in a way that no woman had ever done before, that Schueller’s prescription for the female sex was not just patronizing: it was—for those with ambitions beyond the home such as his own daughter might have nourished—actively cruel.

Rubinstein’s astonishing self-confidence resounds through every word ever written about her. It was what enabled her to create the life she desired, and the fact of having achieved that life constantly reinforced it. And here, surely, is the core of the matter. For self-confidence is what the beauty business has always been about, has always been its true commodity. The creams, the paints, the injections, the operations, are merely routes to that all-important end. Self-confidence was what the Victorians wanted to deny their womenfolk. It was what Helena Rubinstein and her customers aimed to achieve through cosmetics. Selling it gave Eugène Schueller the riches to buy power. But in a nice irony, the company he used as a cash-cow now arguably wields more real power—trading, as it does, in self-confidence—than any political party, any economist, ever has or ever will.

The Banier affair, though it aroused a good deal of attention, seemed relatively trivial—if not to those concerned, at least to the world at large. But in the summer of 2010 it suddenly acquired a new and scandalous political dimension. Liliane Bettencourt’s staff were already outraged by what they saw as Banier’s bullying of their employer—the more so when he reacted to their criticisms by having several of them sacked after years of faithful service. Now the increasingly deaf and infirm Madame Bettencourt was, it seemed to them, being mercilessly manipulated by yet another interested party—her financial adviser, Patrice de Maistre. So her butler decided to take matters into his own hands and acquire proof of what was going on. He did so by bugging his cocktail tray—an item, in his experience, always central to these conversations. He then passed the memory card containing the recordings to Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, who transferred them to twenty-eight CDs that she delivered, three weeks later, to the police.

What emerged was dynamite. The recorded conversations between Madame Bettencourt and de Maistre showed that Banier had not been the only one allegedly benefiting from the L’Oréal heiress’s open purse. There had also, it seemed, been sub-rosa cash subventions to politicians, including the minister responsible for taxation, whose helpful inattention would of course have been highly advantageous to the Bettencourt interests, and whose wife was conveniently employed by de Maistre in the Bettencourt office. And although the legal limit for individual contributions to French political campaigns was €7,500, the election campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president (and a member of André Bettencourt’s old party), appeared to have benefited to the tune of €150,000. It also transpired that André Bettencourt, while he was alive, had kept a chest full of cash conveniently at hand, cash that he doled out every election season to members of his political party, the UMP (Union pour un mouvement populaire), in unmarked envelopes.

There were other recordings, too, of telephone discussions between de Maistre and Fabrice Goguel, a tax lawyer and onetime official adviser to Madame Bettencourt on tax affairs. These conversations gave rise to allegations that Goguel was still involved with the estate—not advising on tax avoidance, which of course is legal, but on tax evasion and money laundering, which very much are not. Tens of millions had been stashed away in a Swiss bank account; other conversations seemed to show that de Maistre, worried about Switzerland’s new openness on such matters, was anxious to transfer this money to Singapore, where it could be more securely hidden. There was also an island in the Seychelles that had never been declared to the tax authorities. Bettencourt’s people asserted that the island no longer belonged to her and had been given to Banier, but Banier denied this: He had no use for it; there were too many sharks and mosquitoes. . . . Twenty years after the Frydman revelations, L’Oréal’s owners were once again enveloped in controversy.

The parallels between the Nazi scandal of 1989–1995 and the affaire Bettencourt that began in 2007 (and which continues to fill the headlines at the time of this writing in summer 2010) are striking. In both cases, what began as something relatively banal expanded and metamorphosed into a huge political scandal. In 1989, the spark was a disagreement over a board meeting that may or may not have taken place and in 2007, a family quarrel over money. In both cases, the event that moved the affair onto a new, hotly political plane was a wholly unpredictable chance event. If L’Oréal’s François Dalle had not decided to bring his old friend Jean Frydman into the business at what turned out to be exactly the wrong moment, Eugène Schueller’s Nazi past, with all its ramifications, would have remained conveniently forgotten, as so many similar pasts were forgotten. And if Liliane Bettencourt’s butler had not conceived the wholly baroque notion of bugging his cocktail tray, the affaire Bettencourt would have remained the comparatively innocuous affaire Banier.

For the public, the affaire Bettencourt’s chief scandalous revelation (perhaps less a revelation than a confirmation of what we always suspect but can rarely prove) was the way the very rich and very powerful casually assume that the laws governing everyone else are, for them, purely optional. Taxes need be paid only by the disorganized, limits on political contributions are routinely ignored, public servants can always be bought, and the happy recipients of cash-stuffed envelopes naturally do all they can to forward the interests of their paymasters.

The tax aspect, at least, would not have shocked Eugène Schueller. He was paranoid about taxation, ending his life as a supporter of Pierre Poujade, the anti-tax, anti-intellectual small shopkeepers’ hero, whose protectionist Union de Défense Commerçants et Artisans gained fifty-three seats in the 1955 elections. In the perfect economic system, to which Schueller devoted his intellectual energies for the last thirty years of his life, taxation would be related not to income but to energy use. As for democratic accountability, he regarded it with contempt. A self-proclaimed authoritarian, Schueller thought government should be run in the same way as an efficient company, by those who had proved their fitness to lead by rising to the top. When political power was at the mercy of the popular vote—just as when a company found itself at the mercy of the trade unions—weak, inefficient leadership would invariably result. Few of today’s public figures would actually utter such thoughts out loud. But one consequence of the affaire Bettencourt has been to show that many public figures actually conduct their lives upon such assumptions.

Both the affaire Bettencourt and the affaire Banier from which it sprang are about money—specifically, the huge fortune belonging to Schueller’s daughter Liliane. But one can’t help noticing that the one person who doesn’t really figure in the drama is Liliane herself. She is simply a huge fountain of cash, which the various men in her life have tapped into in order to fulfill their desires. First there was her husband, André Bettencourt, whose political progress she financed and supported. Where did the cash come from, which stuffed those envelopes he kept ready, each election season, for the procession of political beggars? M. Bettencourt was a vice president of L’Oréal, but it was his wife who owned the company—and the money. Then there was François-Marie Banier, who befriended Liliane in 1987. Banier, a poor boy, dreamed of becoming rich; she fulfilled his dream. And now her financial adviser, Patrice de Maistre, appears to have his own ideas regarding her money.

The striking thing about Madame Bettencourt is that she seems to accept that this is simply how the world works. It is agreed by all that she is, or was, “a brilliant woman.” Unlike other brilliant women, however, and despite all her apparent advantages, she never had a career of her own, but confined her role to furthering the careers of other people. The butler’s recordings show a pitiful puppet whose strings are pulled alternately by Banier and de Maistre. According to Bettencourt’s onetime nurse, emboldened by the recordings to testify, Banier uses his emotional thrall to get his hands on yet more of Madame Bettencourt’s money; de Maistre instructs her, word for word, on what she must say when she meets the important politicians who are his friends, and he makes out checks for her to sign, impatiently explaining how the benefits they will buy are cheap at the price. For his pains, he has received the Légion d’Honneur. But no conceivable benefit accrues to Liliane Bettencourt.

Anyone who knows about Eugène Schueller and his ideas will recognize that this fate—to have all the money and none of the power—might have been precisely, albeit unintentionally, designed by the father Liliane idolized. Just as the Nazi scandal was a consequence of his politics, so the affaire Bettencourt is a consequence of his social theories. Schueller, as we have seen, had decided opinions on many subjects, among them the place of women in society. Women, in his view, were there to support men. They were for making homes and breeding children; they should never compete in the man’s world of work. This is the mold in which Liliane was cast, and she did not question it. First her widowed father’s dutiful daughter, then her husband’s supportive wife, she now, it seems, exists for the benefit of Banier, de Maistre, and their friends. It is for men to dictate the program. Liliane, true daughter of her father, merely facilitates it.

It is deeply ironic that the source of all this money should be cosmetics, the same commodity that constituted Helena Rubinstein’s escape route from a similar situation. For Rubinstein and her clients, lipstick, powder, rouge, and the rest of the arsenal symbolized women’s claims to an equal footing in public life. In this sense, the affaire Bettencourt is simply another episode in the standoff between Helena Rubinstein and Eugène Schueller. More than half a century after their deaths, it continues.