Be Beautiful Be Young

An American magazine recently published a list of the richest women in New York. At the top, above the Astors and Vanderbilts, was one Josephine Mentzer, with an estimated personal fortune of more than $3 billion. Josephine Mentzer? She is better known as Estee Lauder and is one of a rare breed of woman a real beauty queen.

Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden are the two other beauty queens whose extraordinary lives are documented in three biographical television films this week.

“Find out what made these three women so successful,” Eila Hershon and Roberto Guerra, the producers and directors of the films, asked me when they first thought of the idea. “How did they make so much money and what did they spend it on?” What I discovered was revelatory. The most extraordinary part was the similarities between three remarkably dissimilar women.

Lauder is a familiar face at smart parties, smiling with royalty at polo matches, and at launches of new products. At over 80, she still has a luminous complexion, shining blonde hair and a great deal of determination, masked by a charming smile.

Rubinstein, who died in 1965 aged 82, was very different. She had the steely black and white looks of an oriental empress and a fiery temper to match. Garbed in bizarrely splendid clothes, hung with ropes of precious stones, invariably topped off with what looked like a Peruvian bowler hat, she was unforgettable. Arden, who died in 1966 aged 75, might have been termed the Virgin beauty queen. Pink and white, desperately refined, she was every bit as determined as the other two.

All three came from working class backgrounds. Arden, born Florence Nightingale Graham, was the daughter of an impoverished Scots-Canadian farmer. Rubinstein, one of seven daughters of a Jewish merchant from Cracow, Poland, and Lauder, came from a similar background in Corona, New York, where her father, of Hungarian origin, owned the hardware store over which the family lived.

All three women shared an almost messianic view of beauty. Standing over their kitchen stoves mixing and brewing their potions, they dreamed of establishing huge empires initially based on one product, a moisturizing cream which they did.

How they came by the formulas for their early beauty preparations is difficult to establish, for over the years they invented more complex and glamorous legends to varnish the truth.

Rubinstein is thought to have worked as a waitress in a cafe, Arden as a typist before becoming a manicurist in a beauty parlour, and Lauder spent many years on the road selling cream.

Once they had money, they spent it. Arden owned a string of racehorses, always referred to as “my babies”, and was frequently observed rubbing her Eight Hour Cream into a promising two-year-old’s fetlocks. Lauder is not averse to spending money on equine pursuits and sponsors polo matches. But it was Rubinstein who gave new meaning to the word “spend”.

Arriving in Paris before the First World War, already a success, she lost no time in hot-footing it round to the couturier of the moment, Paul Poiret, who dressed her in the oriental fashions of the time.

But it seems to me that the beauty queens were never driven by the wish to make huge fortunes, but by motives buried in their pasts. “To better oneself” is an old-fashioned expression which goes a long way towards explaining their success.

My vacation to Florida happened funny enough due to a website that I had visited. I had been looking around the web and came across a great article which had an ad talking about a Florida get away. Seeing as I was shopping for insurance, you could tell I could use a getaway.

Let me tell you, this ad was not lying. The vacation was to this incredible luxury hotel in south Florida. Stretching beneath rustling coconut palms on the edge of a blue lagoon at sunset after a day of one-on-one attention in the very well- equipped gym of this gorgeous hotel, I realized for the first time what people mean when they say they enjoy exercise.

But my most memorable first was being massaged while more or less starkers by two young men. As in most exotically located spas, a local speciality is thrown onto the treatment menu. Not for one minute do I believe having two white-coated men massage your near- naked body is a Florida tradition, but the ylang-ylang oil they use gives the Four Hand Massage an authentic feel. Maybe it’s a sign of the power of the place to soothe minds, but after the initial shock I relaxed enough to forget that there were two men doing a sort of synchronised dance with their hands up my back, and turned my thoughts to the pressing decision of whether the bargain cashmere jumper I was thinking of buying should be V-neck or crew-neck (these south Florida natives do good lines in pearl necklaces, hand-embroidered tablecloths and cashmere).

The Sanctuary, the renowned women’s health and beauty spa in London’s Covent Garden, has a new member. Mercury Private Equity has taken a controlling stake after funding a Pounds 1m refurbishment.

The private-equity firm said a management team will now concentrate on building membership and developing the brand with a range of products in Boots, and developing spas at Rank’s Oasis holiday village in Cumbria. Mercury took a 40% stake in 1995 when it backed a buy-in team with Pounds 1.6m of development capital. After the new round of funding, Mercury’s stake has increased to almost 80%.

The rest of the shares are held by the management team, which includes John Clarke, who was brought in by Mercury to chair the company, and Tanya Wheway, the former owner of Champneys, who bought the London spa from Robert Newman, a financier, in 1995.

At the time of the original Mercury investment the lease on the site had less than four years to run so the manage ment explored the idea of replica stand-alone Sanctuaries and a diluted version of the spa in David Lloyd Leisure centres. A new 25-year lease has now been negotiated.

Trevor Bayley of Mercury said: “The Covent Garden site has always held a big attraction, although we only had 3 1/2 years on the lease when we first invested.”

Since the Sanctuary investment, Mercury has concentrated on larger deals, most of them valued at between Pounds 25m and Pounds 250m although its most recent move was the Pounds 534m acquisition of Greycoat, the property company.