Helena Rubinstein. Michele Fitoussi

      She had never met a man like Edward William Titus. He knew everything there was to know about painting, literature, music and politics, and was only too pleased to play Pygmalion. Helena could listen to him for hours on end – he was never pedantic or boring. He was a marvellous teacher: clear, precise and entertaining.

      She thought she knew Melbourne well, but he took her to parts of the city she had never seen. Her long working days hadn’t given her much opportunity for outings. Practically every evening, Edward took her to the theatre, the most popular form of entertainment in turn-of-the-century Australia. Companies from all over the world toured the cities and people flocked to each show eagerly. Audiences were very mixed and the atmosphere friendly – quite unlike the polite restraint of the European theatrical scene.

      Helena was charmed by Edward’s regular features and silver-tinged dark hair, which gave him the air of a distinguished English gentleman. He was always close shaven and smelt pleasantly of lavender cologne; his suits were tailor-made in London, his bootmaker was Italian, and his shirts came from Charvet of Paris.

      He was also a fine connoisseur of women’s fashions and approved of Helena’s Parisian outfits. He noticed the tiniest details – the hang of a skirt, the ruffle on a blouse, or the trimming on a hat. When she returned home after an evening out with him, she would find herself humming a Grace Fletcher or Dorothy Brunton tune as she undressed in front of the mirror. They would have dinner after the show in Melbourne’s most fashionable restaurants. ‘The food’s awful here,’ Edward would complain, ‘a far cry from in France. When we go to Paris, I’ll take you out and you’ll see what I mean.’

      Helena felt like a country bumpkin. Edward had only just arrived in Melbourne and was already at home everywhere he went! He was on first-name terms with all the maîtres d’, always got the best tables, and introduced her to French wine and Chinese food. ‘He opened a whole new world to me,’ she wrote.1 His conversation was peppered with famous names, including many that Helena had never heard of: artists, writers, painters and intellectuals; the powerful, the titled, English noblewomen, Parisian countesses, and New York socialites. But although he was a snob and name-dropper, he wasn’t remotely in awe of the wealthy and the privileged – to Helena’s great surprise, for she had imagined them to be superior. ‘It isn’t who you are that’s important, my dear, it’s what you do,’ he would tell her.

      We don’t know who Edward William Titus really was. His life before he met Helena Rubinstein in Australia remains shrouded in mystery. Just like her, he was deliberately vague about it. He is often described in biographies as ‘a Polish-born American journalist’, although little is known about the articles he wrote and the newspapers he worked for before he came to Australia.

      According to Edward’s nephew Emmanuel Ameisen, the representative of the French branch of Helena Rubinstein at the end of the 1930s and its managing director after the Second World War, Titus changed his name from Ameisen before leaving for Australia in 1904 or 1905.2 It was a strange choice of name for a Jew, as Emmanuel’s son Olivier points out: ‘Titus was the Roman emperor who destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem. But then Edward was a genuine nonconformist.’3

      So, like Helena Rubinstein, Edward Titus had more than one life. In his first, he was born Arthur Ameisen on 25 July 1870 in Podgorze, a Kraków suburb. His father, Leo Ameisen, was married to Emilie Mandel and owned a small soda factory. The eldest of nine siblings, the youngest of whom was Emmanuel Ameisen’s father Yakov, Arthur went to the state primary school in Kraków and continued his education at St Anne’s gymnasium.4