A Beautiful Rival, page 17
“You’re not really our mother, are you?” Horace’s eyes were slightly unfocused. “It’s just a role you play when it suits your purpose. I wouldn’t be surprised if you got someone else to give birth to us because you were too busy to do it yourself.”
She threw down her caviar spoon and covered her mouth with her hand, absorbing the hurt. Both boys had been born in the bedroom of their South London house with a midwife and doctor in attendance, and they hadn’t been easy births. Long labors, tears, sweat, and blood. She could describe to them the huge metal tongs the doctor used to yank them from her body, ripping her flesh, but they didn’t want to hear that.
“I know I wasn’t around as much as I should have been when you were younger,” she said, looking from one to the other. “I regret that now.”
Horace laughed unkindly. “It’s a bit late!” he said. “You couldn’t wait to shuffle us off to whichever nanny or school or relative was available so you could get on with your own life. Frankly, I’m surprised you even recognize us.”
Helena took a sip of her wine, trying to stay calm. “Is that what you think too?” she asked Roy.
He blushed a beetroot color right up to his hairline. “Well, not exactly,” he stuttered. “But you were away a lot.”
Helena had assumed the boys didn’t need her, but maybe they had. Maybe she’d got it wrong.
“It’s true I devoted my life to business rather than motherhood, but it hasn’t worked out too badly, has it? You have wanted for nothing. What kind of car was it you crashed, Horace? And how did you afford a car at your age?”
She glanced from one to the other. She hadn’t been much older than they were when she traveled on her own to Australia, hoping to make her fortune in that young country on the other side of the globe. Money had been tight so she went steerage class, bunking in a shared cabin near the engine room where the noise and vibrations kept her awake at night. She’d arrived in a vast land with diamond-sharp sunlight, to stay with distant relatives she’d never met before, in a sheep station miles from anywhere. And despite all the hardships she had managed to create an international business and become a millionairess. Somehow she didn’t think either of her sons could have done the same. They were soft; they didn’t have her gumption.
Horace had drained yet another glass of wine and he signaled the steward to refill it but Helena caught the man’s eye and said, “No more for him.” Roy sighed and rearranged his napkin on his lap, while Horace clenched his fists. Perhaps it was a time for more honesty.
“To tell you the truth, I never wanted children,” she said. “Your father was keen so I went along with his wishes.”
She realized she had miscalculated when she saw the looks of horror on their faces. Horace’s eyes filled with tears, which he swiped with the back of his hand, and Roy scraped back his chair as if to stand up and leave.
“No, wait!” she caught his arm. “I want you both now, more than anything.” She tried to choose her words carefully, so they understood. “You mean the world to me. But Edward was a good father and you didn’t seem to need me when you were younger. I thought it was better if I focused on what I was good at—making money. Had our situations been reversed and he was the one who worked while I was a traditional mama, perhaps you wouldn’t be so critical. But that’s not who I am, or who he is.” I’m not lazy like Edward, she thought. I never relied on anyone else to keep me.
“I’m sorry if we were an inconvenience,” Horace said, in a sarcastic tone. “That’s the impression you always gave.”
She sighed, shaking her head. “That’s not true. I built my business as a legacy for the two of you. You will never be poor, and neither will your children or grandchildren. That’s why I work so hard.”
It wasn’t just that, of course. She had always been driven, long before she had children. Competitiveness was in her nature. But having sons gave her hope that her brand would continue long after her death. Elizabeth Arden had no direct heirs, so strangers would take over her business when she died and do with it as they wished.
The steward came to clear their plates and another wheeled up a trolley with the silver soup tureen, dishing up a bowlful for each of them.
“It’s my dream that you will both work in the business after you finish college,” she suggested. “With a view to taking over one day.”
“I’d like to,” Roy said quietly, not looking at her.
“Good. I’ll get you a job in one of my factories next summer so you can learn from the ground up. Horace?”
He shook his head emphatically. “Not for me. I’m going to be either a writer, an artist, or a musician. I don’t know which yet, but I’ll be sure to tell you.” His tone was still hostile but she ignored that.
“Your father might be able to help you in those fields,” she said, with an inward sigh, thinking of the old saying: “You carry small children in your arms, but when they grow up, they sit on your head.”
She had hoped this voyage would be a vacation, where she could relax and regain her strength after some challenging months. Instead, it looked as though she would have a different kind of challenge to surmount—winning the affections of her younger son, and stopping him getting blotto every night. He had said some very hurtful things to her this evening, and she knew it wasn’t just the alcohol talking. She didn’t ever want her children to become estranged from her, the way she was from her father. If she could build multimillion-dollar business from scratch, she could certainly come up with a plan to win over her own sons.
Chapter 25
Elizabeth
September 1929
Elizabeth was cross when Laney told her that Dorothy Gray—a treatment girl she had sacked over a decade ago for having an affair with a married man—was opening a new salon at 683 Fifth Avenue. The cheek of it! Fifth Avenue was her domain! She decided to respond with something far more spectacular, right across the street.
The Aeolian Building at 689–691 Fifth Avenue had been designed just four years earlier by the architects who had built Grand Central Station, and the lease was available. Elizabeth loved the French classical details of the building’s limestone exterior, the decorative marble spandrels above the windows, and the generous interior spaces. The entrance was right on the corner of West Fifty-Fourth Street, and she would occupy the spacious ground floor and six further floors above. In size and grandeur, it would completely dwarf Dorothy’s salon—and Madame Rubinstein’s come to that. It would have a black marble storefront and her signature red door, with a smart gray-liveried doorman posted outside.
Inside, she planned to have exercise studios and a dining room where healthy meals would be served, as well as dozens of private treatment rooms. Women could come for an entire day of beauty, and walk out the door scrubbed, rubbed, shampooed, scented, relaxed, and feeling years younger.
She signed the contract to take over the lease on September 13, 1929, without consulting Tommy. He was being a doomsayer these days, and she knew he wouldn’t agree with her making such a large investment. She had two motives: she had fallen in love with the building, and she wanted to make a bold statement by leasing it. She hadn’t panicked and sold her company, as her rivals had done, because Elizabeth Arden was still at the very pinnacle of her game.
A week after signing the lease on the Aeolian Building, Elizabeth was busy briefing her team of interior designers when Laney rushed in with news that the London stock market had crashed. She’d heard it on the radio. They hurried back to the office to listen to the latest updates.
The newscaster said the crash was being blamed on fraudulent dealing—Elizabeth didn’t follow the details, which were still coming to light—but the commentator was clear that it wouldn’t affect the American market. It was a one-off incident. All the same, she felt a twisting in her insides. It seemed a harbinger of bad luck, like breaking a mirror or walking under a ladder.
When she got home that evening, she was glad Tommy wasn’t there. She was fed up with him quoting so-called experts who predicted a crash could hit the American market and they would all be ruined. What nonsense! Their company was worth fifteen million dollars, according to Tommy’s Jewish banker friends. How on earth could she be ruined?
The thought made her anxious, though: that old gnawing anxiety, like a persistent toothache, that she would one day lose everything and have to scrabble to make ends meet, just as she had as a child. She remembered the hunger pains that felt like a rat gnawing her gut, and the cold so severe she lay in bed convinced she would be dead by morning. She couldn’t go back to that ever again.
Elizabeth lay awake that night with a tired body but an overactive brain, tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable. Sometimes she woke with a start and realized she had dozed off, but when she turned on her lamp to check the clock, only ten minutes had passed. She got up and pulled back the drapes to look out at the fingernail moon against a jet-black starless sky. A headache was pressing behind her eyebrows, and she knew she would be exhausted the next day. She never used sleeping capsules, but wished she had some now.
Instead, she decided to pour herself a nightcap, and crept down the hallway. The door of Tommy’s bedroom was open and she glanced in to see he wasn’t there. Where could he possibly be at this time of night? Maybe he had decided to sleep in the office. He did that sometimes.
The second whiskey did the trick: she fell asleep on the couch downstairs and was wakened at dawn by her housekeeper. At least she’d had a couple of hours’ sleep, although she still felt agitated. Surely she would sleep well that night.
But once again, Elizabeth couldn’t drop off. She brought the whiskey decanter up to her bedroom and drank a couple of glasses, which sent her to sleep for an hour or two—she wasn’t sure how long—before she wakened at just after three. She got up and paced the room while playing out different scenarios in her mind.
What if the market crashed and she couldn’t raise the rent for the Aeolian Building, or pay all the tradesmen she had hired to design the interiors? There would be a financial penalty if she canceled their contracts. Could it even bankrupt her? Could she lose everything she’d worked so hard for, while Madame Rubinstein and that whippersnapper Dorothy Gray counted their millions?
Each morning, she checked the financial reports in the papers. It seemed US traders were scrambling to sell their shares. Why? She wanted to yell at them. America is the world’s biggest economy. What are they thinking of?
The drop in the market seemed to level off by mid-October, but on the eighteenth it began to slide again. Elizabeth spent the week glued to the radio set. Traders were trying desperately to sell their shares and convert them into paper money as prices dropped further. By the twenty-fourth of the month, it was reported that the market had lost eleven percent of its value. Bookings at her salons plummeted, and lots of women didn’t turn up for appointments. Elizabeth nearly cried as she surveyed the week’s dismal takings.
On Friday the twenty-fifth the New York Times ran a cover story advising everyone to remain calm; a conglomerate of top bankers was going to buy up enough blue chip shares to stabilize the market. Elizabeth gave a sob of relief. These men were saviors; they would turn around the panic. That’s all it was—silly panic. There was absolutely no need for it.
At her Sunday tea, Bessie confided that she had asked her broker to sell her shares three weeks earlier, and Elizabeth snapped at her: “It’s people like you who are causing this drop in the market,” she said. “We all need to hold our nerve.”
Bessie was unrepentant. “I don’t trust the money men,” she said. “I’m keeping my savings under the mattress until they settle down.”
Elizabeth was so cross she made her excuses and left. The insomnia was making her crabby and she was finding it difficult to judge whether she was overreacting. With any luck, Monday would bring better news.
It seemed everyone in Manhattan was glued to a morning newspaper or to a radio set on Monday the twenty-eighth. She saw men standing on street corners, shoulders hunched as they read the latest. The market opened and straight away the radio reported that the slide in share prices was continuing, despite the bankers’ rescue plan.
“Why don’t they close the stock exchange?” Elizabeth asked Laney in frustration. “Then they can’t sell any more.”
But they didn’t, and on the twenty-ninth there was the steepest fall yet, with sixteen million shares sold in a single day. The value of the American market had fallen by a quarter.
Only a handful of women came to the salon that week, and the crash was the only subject of conversation.
“I heard folks are queuing outside banks to withdraw their money, and the banks are not letting them in,” one said in hushed tones.
Elizabeth thought of Bessie; perhaps she had been right to put her money under her mattress. Elizabeth’s was all in the banking system. Should she be withdrawing it before it was too late?
“My husband told me that Wall Street traders are leaping off the tops of skyscrapers. Many of them will be ruined.”
Elizabeth couldn’t listen to any more. She hurried out of the salon and wandered down Fifth Avenue, with no direction in mind, just letting her feet take her where they would. Everyone was rushing, as if they had important business to attend to, although they were miles from the Financial District. She felt numb, and above all exhausted. Sleep deprivation had left her brain befuddled and all she could do was walk.
When her high-heeled shoes gave her blisters, she turned and limped toward home. Tommy was in the sitting room with a newspaper in one hand, the radio set playing in the corner. He looked up at her, contempt etched all over his face, and threw the paper down.
“That’s it,” he said. “We’re ruined.” His eyes were cold. “We had a chance to cash in and you turned up your nose, so now we have to suffer the consequences.”
Elizabeth didn’t reply. She headed for her bedroom to take off these blasted shoes. Her heels were bleeding and her stomach was spiraling with nerves.
There’s nothing to be done, she thought to herself. I’ll wait it out. It can’t be too bad.
The image of Madame Rubinstein flashed into her mind. She had known this would happen. That’s why she had sold to Lehman Brothers. She’d probably moved all her money overseas. She felt a surge of fierce fury toward her rival, as if she were somehow single-handedly responsible for the entire crash.
Chapter 26
Helena
October 1929
Helena was in Paris when the American stock market crashed. She read the news in the press and wasn’t surprised it had happened, but was still taken aback by the scale of the collapse. She kept in touch with Charles Welch, her US company’s new manager, via dozens of daily cables crisscrossing the Atlantic. He wrote that it need not be a setback for their plans to get products into drugstores. The company’s share price had tumbled, like the rest of the market, but it would bounce back up again. He urged her not to worry, but she replied, Clearly you don’t know who you are dealing with: worry is my second nature.
Increasingly it became clear to her that the entire US economy was shrinking and the repercussions were going to be felt around the world. Unemployment would rise, businesses would go bust, and banks would fail, each putting pressure on the other, like tumbling dominos. Would women still have spare cash to spend on beautifying themselves? Helena knew her own fortune was safe—she would be a millionairess for the rest of her life—but she couldn’t bear it if the company that bore her name collapsed. She had a creeping sense that she had made a mistake in selling out. She wished she were still at the helm to steer her business through this crisis. No one understood her customers as well as she did.
Her agitation intensified because she was feeling lousy. Her monthly bleeds were heavier than ever. She often woke in the night clammy with sweat and had to get up to change her nightgown. Waves of giddiness came upon her suddenly. Her ankles swelled and her knees creaked. She was fifty-six years old—eight years older than she had told the New Yorker the previous year—and assumed these were symptoms of the change of life. Did every woman go through this? How on earth did they put up with it?
When she had returned to Paris from Sydney six months earlier, at first she had stayed with Edward, but they argued constantly. He hadn’t forgiven her for not telling him she was selling the company and resentment soured the atmosphere. There was no sexual reunion, just continual sniping. She called him a lazy bum, he called her imperious. In a fit of pique, Helena sacked him from his role as supervisor of her Paris properties, and that hadn’t gone down well. After a month, she moved into an apartment above one of her salons, just to get some peace. The arguments were too draining, on top of her physical malaise and her anxiety about the company.
Horace stayed with his father but met her for dinner once a week. He and Helena had made peace during their trip to Australia, and she had even taught him to be a fairly passable bridge player. His character was weak, like his father’s, but Helena adored him all the same. She got him to carry messages back and forth to Edward so she didn’t have to be in direct contact.
From what she could gather, Black Manikin Press was doing well. Lady Chatterley’s Lover had sold several thousand copies. The memoirs of his Jockey Club friend, Kiki de Montparnasse, gave it another bestseller. Helena told Horace to let Edward know she was reducing his allowance forthwith.
“Ask your father why he thinks I should continue to subsidize him,” she demanded. “He is making his own decisions for Black Manikin so he should behave like a grown man and live off his own earnings.”
Horace had an unfortunate habit of defending his father. “He’s got a lot of overheads,” he protested. “And the price of paper and printing has gone up.”
“A successful business adjusts its prices to cope with fluctuations,” she said. “Your father has good instincts about books but he never had a head for business, more’s the pity.”
