On June 15, Revlon, a multinational, mass-market cosmetics company, announced it was acquiring one of its rivals, Elizabeth Arden, for $419.3 million in cash. Corporate acquisitions, common as they now are, rarely send a frisson through rehearsal rooms at the Goodman Theatre. But the judicious timing of this particular combination of two consumer brands caused many eyebrows — penciled and otherwise — to rise among the chattering, creative classes assembled therein to work on a little something called “War Paint.”
“You know he’s a character in our show,” said the composer Scott Frankel, with a can-you-believe-it tone, as a guest entered the room in the wake of the acquisition. “A minor character,” noted Doug Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and book writer, grinning. “A little man who they squashed under their feet,” Michael Korie, the lyricist, observed.
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“An annoyance,” said Patti LuPone, the Broadway star, over a glass of wine later that evening, her eyebrows nearly reaching the ceiling of theater district eatery Petterino’s.
All were speaking of Charles Revson, one of the two founders of the prosaic Revlon brand. In “War Paint,” a new semifictional musical — opening, under the direction of Michael Greif, at the Goodman on July 18 — he functions as a mere fly landing in the ointment of the two great founding female colossi of what became the multibillion-dollar American beauty business. That would be Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, a pair of feuding rivals to be played, in Chicago and then likely on Broadway, by two of the great divas of the theatrical business, Christine Ebersole and, of course, LuPone. That is at least part of the foundation of why tickets to the Goodman premiere have moved faster than any line for L’Oreal.
To those assembled to tell the story of Arden vs. Rubinstein — a rivalry that spanned decades, from the 1930s to the 1960s, and forever changed how women thought about beauty products — Revson was an arriviste, an afterthought, a mass marketer. But Rubinstein and Arden — whose competitive personalities make up the main narrative trajectory of “War Paint” and who died, respectively, in 1965 and 1966 — were giants. On a par, Wright said, with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
During the years explored in “War Paint,” the notion of Arden acquiring Rubinstein would have been as absurd as a Rubinstein acquisition of Arden.
The two women who ran the businesses that bore their famous names refused even to meet in person, even though they poached each other’s assistants and each had salons in Manhattan just a short walk from one another. And in the world of makeup, they represented binaries that still exist in that business today. Arden, who was the daughter of a Canadian farmer, sold with her makeup the rosy implied promise of a WASP-ish Hamptons lifestyle and a pretty, upper-class life of comfort. On the other hand, Rubinstein’s brand emphasized science, a marketing strategy for cosmetics that you can still see, say, at the Clinique counter of your better local department store. A stocky, Polish emigre born in Krakow, Rubinstein was famous for promising a much more exotic look.
“Which, at the time, was code for Jewish,” said Frankel, whose previous collaborations with Korie include “Grey Gardens,” “Far From Heaven” and, once at Ravinia, a show called “Doll.”
In the view of the authors of “War Paint,” whose extant sources include both the dual biography by Lindy Woodhead that gave the show its title and a separate, subsequent documentary, the main attraction of this musical was the chance to tell the story of two famous, powerful women who not only were the CEOs of their companies but who also together invented an entire business upon which the likes of Revlon could later feed.
“Makeup was a new industry when these two women arrived,” Korie said. “These two really were the top of the line. Estee Lauder really was a direct copy of Ms. Rubinstein. Max Factor was just a Hollywood guy who put out a cheap line. Truly, everyone else came after them.”
Then again, who exactly were these women?
“They both were reinvented,” said Korie. “Both were very artful poseurs. Both were titanic saleswomen. Elizabeth spoke with a society accent — not an English accent, or even an American accent, but more like a character from Clare Booth Luce’s ‘The Women.’ As for Helena, well, my whole family came over on the boat, so I know her rhythms inside and out. I love the conflict of speaking in a high, fashionable, arty patois, and mixing it up with a Polish-Jewish patois and a bit of French or whatever else she threw in.”
“What really compelled me about these women,” said Wright, “was that they became so seismically successful even though they were both outsiders at heart. For all of their size and grandeur, these women mostly just wanted to belong. One was a Canadian who professed to be an American aristocrat. The other was a Jew from Krakow who professed to be lost Bohemian royalty. They both wanted a place in the American mythology of success.”
They both found their spots, of course, even though the press of the time tended to enjoy pitting them against each other, unquestionably a manifestation of the sexism of the day, given that famously competitive male figures were not subject to the same treatment. And given that the cosmetics industry of today is a $60 billion business in the United States alone, their achievements surely were comparable. “It was always Jew versus Gentile, American versus Eastern European. Like a Laurel and Hardy act,” Korie said. “I think both women came to resent that. They felt like the advances they made had earned them some respect.”
Respect, of course, often is bound by time.
For here we all were, on the day that the corporate entity that Revson founded scooped up the name of one of these two great feminist pioneers (the Rubinstein brand still exists, but it’s used only outside the United States).
Everyone involved in “War Paint” clearly felt aggrieved on Arden’s behalf, even though Arden’s empire actually had been compromised years ago with the excision of the Red Door salon business and a sale of the Arden name to Eli Lilly and Co., then Faberge, then Unilever.
Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spa(s), as they now are called, are actually operated under license by a company called Red Door Spa Holdings. There’s one on Michigan Avenue. Back in Arden’s day, they were not just the cornerstone of her business, they were the expression of the very essence of her enormously powerful and personal brand. “People used to think these were always brands with huge numbers of people working for them,” said Wright. “But in the beginning, it really was just these two women who were hugely influential.”
“I remember when I was at Juilliard,” LuPone said, “and my teacher, Elizabeth Skinner, arranged her weekly schedule around her weekly Red Door appointment, which was Tuesdays at 4.”
LuPone, of course, is playing the other party.
Did she ever wear the makeup of either woman?
“You’re lucky I’ve got makeup on now,” she said. “I don’t have clothes and I don’t know how to shop because I have to wear clothes and put on makeup every night. When I was young, I was a hippie. Well, a cosmopolitan hippie, since I lived in New York. I used to dress like a slob so I wouldn’t get hit on or robbed. Plus I never felt I was beautiful. I never thought I had a great figure. So I don’t know if I ever wore their makeup, although I have been to the Red Door. But you know what Helena used to say?”
And that was … ?
“‘There are no ugly women. Only lazy women.'”
LuPone grinned. “Beauty,” she said, drinking from her wine, “is such work.”
The writers of the show say they are well aware of the complexity of makeup, especially since their story runs, chronologically speaking, alongside the women’s movement. On the one hand, it could be seen as a patriarchal imposition, a tool to further male objectification, an invasive intrusion undermining natural beauty — and, indeed, the human process of aging. “Many women,” said Wright, “feel tyrannized by makeup.”
On the other hand, in the early years of the business, makeup was often described as a tool of empowerment, allied with the suffragette movement, for example. “From the point of view of women from that era,” Greif said, “makeup was the key to their liberation and to the liberation of other women.”
“Makeup,” observed LuPone, “gives you power. Helena understood that.”
Frankel said he plans — in some 22 musical numbers — to incorporate “the complexity of women’s relationship with cosmetics” into the music for the show, pulling from the stylings of the various decades under review and taking advantage, he said, of the chance to work with “the two greatest singing actresses of their generation — Christine a crystalline soprano with an effortless shimmer and Patti, with the chesty, thrilling, exciting belt.” And then he plans to mix it up. “They have both,” he said, “been game for anything.”
Ebersole, who grew up on the North Shore and still has friends in the area, said she was thrilled to take part in this project and to work with LuPone, whom she described, modestly, “as being on a whole different level from the rest of us.”
It was a generosity, Ebersole later allowed in a charming telephone conversation, that Arden would never have afforded Rubinstein. At one point they both turned each other in, anonymously, to the Food and Drug Administration.
In the end, you could argue, makeup is just one of the many hedges we all make against the sure bet of time. All the people involved in “War Paint” said that the theme of extending our mortality had increasingly presented itself as they have done the work that leads up to the Goodman opening. “We’ve all been surprisingly touched by the fragility of great old age,” Greif said. “To go from the problems of 17-year-olds to the problems of women who died at really old ages is quite remarkable. I was taken by surprise by the emotion of the depiction of very old age on stage.”
“So much of what we do is designed to deny the passage of time,” said Wright, summing up what made Rubinstein and Arden a great deal of money. “In the end, it levels us all.”
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
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