On 1 January 1901, a year after Helena’s arrival in Toowoomba, the Australian Commonwealth was proclaimed, a federation of the country’s six major colonies. On the twenty-second of that month, Queen Victoria died at the age of eighty. Her son Edward VII succeeded her, and several months later the first Australian Parliament in Melbourne was inaugurated.
The Lamingtons moved their children and servants back to Brisbane and were very busy with the coronation celebrations. In spite of herself, Helena was caught up in the whirlwind that would mark her real debut in society. Lady Lamington introduced her to all her friends as a beauty specialist. For shy Helena, who was still not at ease among the scornful, exclusive aristocracy, the only way to arouse people’s interest was to talk about her cream and her plans to manufacture it.
They all found this terribly amusing and encouraged her as if it were some charming eccentricity. The English adored people like Helena. She played at being light-hearted, but her mind remained alert. She must not allow herself to become intoxicated by a world she knew she could never belong to, no matter what she did.
The interlude came to a sudden end when Lady Lamington informed her of the family’s departure for Bombay. Over time the two women had developed a real respect for each other. But there was no room in Helena’s heart for regret. She had never seen her stint as a domestic servant – albeit a privileged one – as anything other than temporary. It was time for her to start teaching Australian women how to be beautiful.
A thirty-year-old woman who was determined to succeed in a city like Melbourne could do only one thing: work. Just like the thousands of other single young women who, in those days, made up more than a third of the workforce.
Melbourne was a new city of over 500,000 inhabitants. Founded in 1834 at the mouth of the River Yarra by two of Her Majesty’s subjects, the city was named after the prime minister, Lord Melbourne. Twenty years later the land of convicts had become a promised land. And the rumour was spreading like wildfire: gold had been found in a river near Ballarat, just 65 miles north-west of Melbourne.
Eastern Australia experienced a gold rush frenzy comparable to that in California and Alaska. From all over the world men armed with picks and shovels disembarked in Port Phillip Bay and headed off to settle in the gold-mining towns that were spreading like weeds. The dream didn’t last long – four years at most – but that didn’t matter. Melbourne had begun to grow exponentially. There may have been little gold but the colonists were raking in money from real estate and finance. They were building churches, offices, cafés, restaurants, hotels and shopping galleries left, right and centre. Wide boulevards were laid out and parks were landscaped. In less than forty years Melbourne became one of the most important cities in the Empire and was known as the richest city in the world. Its stock exchange was as important as that of the financial hubs of New York and London, if not more so.
The economic crisis of 1891 brought a halt to the boundless expansion. Melbourne continued to develop but no longer with the frenzy of its early years. Before long, Sydney, the capital of New South Wales, had overtaken it. At the time of Helena’s arrival, the city inhabited by over thirty nationalities was still known as Marvellous Melbourne, or Smellbourne, after the sophisticated sewer system the city had just installed. Helena marvelled at how modern it all was, far surpassing anything she had ever seen. In comparison, Kraków, Vienna and even Brisbane seemed dreary.
The only cloud on the horizon was the poverty that crippled her. Her savings from the salary she had received from the Lamingtons would be just enough to cover the rent of a furnished room and basic daily necessities while she looked for a job. Without the means to pay for them, she could only daydream about concerts, shows and restaurants.
During the hot summers the people of Melbourne lived outdoors. The women were healthy and muscular from playing tennis, pedalling merrily on their bicycles, and swimming in the sea, modestly clad from head to toe. An Australian swimmer, Annette Kellerman, would soon invent a more revealing swimsuit.
However, despite the protection offered by hats and parasols, the sun still damaged women’s skin, and the winter wind chapped it, leaving premature lines around lips and eyelids. And, like the inhabitants of Coleraine and Brisbane, these city women did little to protect their skin.
As in all the major cities in Australia, novelty was more than welcome. The social system was far more advanced than in Europe. Workers’ rights were respected – the hard-won eight-hour working day had just been introduced. Suffragettes were particularly active. In Sydney, Louisa Lawson, a writer, publisher and journalist, campaigned for women’s rights. Ten years earlier she had founded The Dawn, a monthly journal with an all-female editorial team. Distributed throughout Australia and even overseas, the magazine discussed politics, domestic violence, and girls’ education.
Thanks to the activism of these feminists, most Australian women were given the vote in 1902, four years after the women of New Zealand. Only the Aborigines were left out. They would wait another sixty-five years to be granted full citizenship, even though they had lived in Australia for over 50,000 years.
The role of women in this pioneer country, where life was tough for everyone, was almost as important as that of men. No one found it surprising to see so many young saleswomen, secretaries, journalists, barmaids, chambermaids, waitresses or telephone operators at the brand-new exchange. They earned half as much as their male colleagues, but they were intoxicated by their new independence. Besides, once they had paid the rent, bills and food, they still had a little bit left over to spend on trinkets, silk stockings or cosmetics. And they didn’t refrain from spending.
Helena Rubinstein’s spectacular rise in Australia could also be explained by her innate sense of timing, which, in business, as in love, is essential for success. She was in the right place at the right time, in a country where women were beginning to shake off the fetters that had been imposed on them for so long. In later years in London, Paris and New York, the scenario would be the same: her beauty expertise would keep step with women’s progress. There was nothing frivolous about wanting to be beautiful, and besides, political rights, work, and financial autonomy went hand in hand with an improved appearance. This last point even became an act of resistance. Helena fully understood as much: to succeed in life, a modern woman owed it to herself to have not only a good mind, but also the good looks to go with it.
But for the time being Helena had not given this too much thought. What she wanted above all was to earn money, and quickly. After so many years of hardship, nothing and no one could frighten her, except poverty.
She found a room in a family guesthouse in the suburb of St Kilda, and had no choice but to take up two waitressing jobs, which would just about keep her head above water. She worked at La Maison Dorée in the mornings, and in the afternoon and evening at the Winter Gardens Tea Room, a café frequented by writers, musicians and artists. Up at dawn, she worked like a dog, until her legs were swollen and her feet sore. When at last she returned to her tiny lodgings, well after midnight, she hardly had the strength left to lie down on her bed, where she would drift off the minute her head hit the pillow.
There were evenings when she was so tired that she neglected Gitel’s sacrosanct precepts: brush your hair, clean your face, apply your cream. But no matter how discouraged she became in such moments of extreme solitude and exhaustion, she had no intention of giving up. At dawn she would grit her teeth and head valiantly into the day.
She may have been down and out, but she had chosen her jobs wisely. La Maison Dorée and the Winter Gardens Tea Room were two strategic venues for meeting people. The salary