Endearing monster

By Gerald Clarke

MADAME, AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY OF HELENA RUBINSTEIN by Patrick O'Higgins. 296 pages. Viking. $7.95.

If no man is a hero to his valet, per-haps no woman can be a heroine to her secretary. That, at least, might be one lesson to be derived from this colorful, bitchy, bizarre biography of the late Helena Rubinstein, written by the rather unctuous Irishman who served as her factotum for nearly 14 years.

Born in Cracow, Poland, "Madame" founded her empire in Australia in the early 1900s by successfully marketing a version of her mother's home-brewed recipe for face cream. When O'Higgins first saw her in 1950--plowing down Madison Avenue, a crocodile bag in one hand and a brown-paper lunch bag in the other--she was the undisputed queen of the beauty industry; he was travel editor of Fleur Cowles' peekaboo fashion magazine, Flair. Sometime later, after an introduction by mutual friends, he was invited to become her personal secretary. His salary was modest ($7,000), and his functions were vague: for a long time he just sat in her office, witnessing conversations and opening and closing doors. But by the time she died in 1965, at the age of 94, O'Higgins had become, by his description, almost a foster son.

Madame was, of course, a great businesswoman, with an intuitive sense of what products would sell and an eccentric genius for publicity. She ruled her company much the way that Catherine the Great ruled Russia--through nepotism and terror--and openly played one faction of the huge family she kept employed against another. "Go tell my nephew, what's-his-name, that he's a rotten vice-president," she once ordered her secretary. "They all want to prove their worth," she complained to O'Higgins, "but they all want to enjoy their own lives. People . . . people . . . and I'm alone! With burdens . .. such burdens!"

Although Madame lived in a 36-room Park Avenue apartment, she would try to save money by prowling her company's offices, flicking off lights. Her secretary would be dispatched to stocking sales at Bloomingdale's basement. Madame bought jewelry and art in huge quantities; she wound up with second-rate works by most of the first-rate artists of the century. "I may not have quality," she admitted, "but I have quantity. Quality's nice, but quantity makes a show!"

Granite Mask. Still, if Madame was a monster, she could be an endearing one, a cross between Auntie Mame and J.P. Morgan. She was, as O'Higgins points out, both earthy and plain-spoken to friends in high places and low. Her main problem seems to have been in dealing with those close to her, and except on rare, touching occasions, she could or would not allow true emotion to penetrate her granite mask.

O'Higgins is a B-grade writer with a weakness for overstretched metaphor: "Her dentures clattered like castanets on crusts of French bread," for example, or "popping back on her feet like a piece of bread from a toaster." He does have a fine ear for dialogue and a relish for tattletales that make Madame entertaining bathtub reading. If someone would do him the favor of stealing his dog-eared thesaurus, he might even make a good gossip columnist. .Gerald Clarke

-Gerald Clarke

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