Make-Up Man

Great spotlights tickled the sky over Hollywood one night last week. Raspberry floodlights bathed the south side, chartreuse beams the fac,ade, of a building near Hollywood Boulevard whose fluted white front bore the architectural devices of Greece, the French Empire, the U. S. Cinema. Under a marquee passed film folk and thousands of others who had been summoned with great powder-blue and orange cellophane invitations to attend the opening of "the world's greatest cosmetics factory"--the new $600,000 studio of Max Factor. Pudgy, 61-year-old Max Factor has been a cosmetician since at 13 he left a Russian synagog school to become an apprentice make-up boy in a traveling opera troupe. He built a cosmetics factory in Russia, exhibited in the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, lost his money, started again from scratch in Los Angeles shortly afterward. Friendly, willing in the pioneer days of the cinema to deliver personally a 50-c- stick of grease paint, Factor established his business on the firm basis of getting exclusive endorsements for his products. Mabel Normand was once his No. 1 endorser. Today nearly every important cinemactress, except Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Miriam Hopkins, is on the Factor list. With 70 distribution plants throughout the world, Factor claims he is the leading cosmetics manufacturer in the U. S., says he has cut into the French export trade, asserts that on the basis of the last Department of Commerce survey he led the world on six items. In business with Max Factor are Sons David (London office), Frank (chemical laboratory), Louis (plant superintendent), Sidney (Southern California chemistry student); Sons-in-law Bernard A. Shore (makeup adviser). Max Firestein (hair department). The much kidnapped Jacob ("Jake the Barber'') Factor is a brother. Lately Elizabeth Arden, who operates 22 high-priced beauty salons in the U. S., discovered that interest in socialite endorsements is waning, cast envious eyes at the Factor lineup. She went West, bought a cosmetic company, gave a great many parties. A second rival group are the Westmores, four brothers of a wig maker once associated with Max Factor, who have exclusive rights to the make-up departments of RKO, Paramount and Warner Bros, and have opened a Hollywood salon. But in the three-cornered battle Factor still wields the most potent weapon, star endorsements.

Max Factor does keep graduate chemists busy over the ingredients of his cosmetics, but typical of the faint air of hocus-pocus which surrounds the whole beauty industry was what guests saw at his studio last week. There was a spectroscopic contraption which, since Factor's speciality is "color harmony guidance," was supposed to show the slightest color deviation in the subject. There was a contrivance intended to calibrate facial contours minutely. Giant rollers ground grease paint to remove the tiniest speck of granular imperfections. From "the largest powder bin in the world" the powder was meticulously sifted through silk gauze by means of an electrical shimmy appliance. Guests beheld, in glass cases, the raw materials of cosmetics, labeled in spurious Latin. They browsed in the Max Factor Research Library in which there are not only bound volumes of the American Journal of Dermatology and Syphilology but also old copies of National Geographic and Pearson's Magazine.

Jean Harlow dedicated the studio's Blonde Room, done in powder-blue; Claudette Colbert the Brunette Room in dusty pink.

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