When writ­ing a biog­ra­phy, a biog­ra­ph­er comes across a wealth of infor­ma­tion about their sub­ject. While one tries their best to be objec­tive while they write, it’s dif­fi­cult not to have a pref­er­ence for cer­tain episodes of the sub­jec­t’s life. When Michèle Fitous­si poured over the details of Hele­na Rubin­stein’s life for her biog­ra­phy, Hele­na Rubin­stein: The Woman Who Invent­ed Beau­ty, there were a few moments in par­tic­u­lar that struck a chord. Read about them below!

It’s dif­fi­cult to choose only one – she led such an amaz­ing life! The first that springs to mind, though, is the way in which she played the Lehman broth­ers – all-pow­er­ful busi­ness­men at the time – who had pur­chased her com­pa­ny for an astro­nom­i­cal amount in 1928, sell­ing it back to her for next to noth­ing in 1930. The crash had been and gone, and Hele­na Rubin­stein had under­stood how to prof­it from it…

I also love her exile in Aus­tralia, sent away on a boat at the age of 24. Leav­ing Europe alone, with­out a chap­er­one, was extreme­ly brave for any woman, let alone one so young. 

And then there’s her pur­chase of the entire apart­ment block on Park Avenue in 1941, because the land­lords refused to house a Jew­ish tenant. 

And sim­ply that way of rolling up her sleeves after the war, when she was more than 70 years old, in order to re-build her beau­ty salon and lab­o­ra­to­ry in France, both of which had been heav­i­ly bombed by the Ger­mans. She was a mil­lion­aire, she could have del­e­gat­ed the work, instead she pre­ferred to deal with it herself. 

And, of course, her great intel­li­gence and long-term vision, this woman lacked nei­ther courage nor panache, which is why I liked her straightaway.

Michèle Fitous­si was born in Tunisia to French par­ents, and has lived in Paris since the age of five. She worked as a jour­nal­ist at Elle mag­a­zine for years, inter­view­ing world lead­ers in areas as var­ied as pol­i­tics, human sci­ences, sports, lit­er­a­ture and the media. She is the author of screen­plays, fic­tion and non-fic­tion, includ­ing the inter­na­tion­al best­sellers Superwoman’s had Enough and The Pris­on­er. She also co-wrote Stolen Lives with Mali­ka Oufkir, which sold more than a mil­lion copies through­out the world and remained on the New York Times best-sell­er list for 25 weeks after being stamped as an ​“Oprah Book” by Oprah Win­frey. Her newest book, Hele­na Rubin­stein: The Woman Who Invent­ed Beau­ty, is now avail­able. Her forth­com­ing book about the 2008 ter­ror­ist attacks in Mum­bai will be pub­lished in France this September.

Relat­ed Content

• Essays: The Research
• Ger­ald Stern on ​“Writ­ing Biog­ra­phy: The His­to­ri­an’s Chal­lenge”