H. Elena Rubinstein Research Paper

THE CRITICS

asked her, “Who’s your goy?” Rubinstein replied, “That’s Patrick! And . . . and, yes, he is my goy.”

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BOOKS

THE COLOR OF MONEY
Sometimes beauty is just business.
BY MALCOLM GLADWELL

H

elena Rubinstein was born in 1872 in Krakow’s Jewish ghetto, the eldest of eight daughters of a kerosene dealer. By her late teens, she had abandoned Poland for Australia, where she began cooking up vats of face cream. She called it Valaze, and claimed that it was the creation of an eminent European skin specialist named Dr. Lykuski and had been “compounded from rare herbs which only grow in the Carpathian mountains.” She rented a storefront in downtown Melbourne, and peddled her concoction at a staggering markup. In just over a
But what Kamprad did in 1961—cozy up to a police state, break the law—is not radically different from what Schueller did in 1940. Kamprad didn’t get too worked up about the moral consequences of collaborating with the Soviet bloc because he wasn’t interested in moral consequences. He was an entrepreneur trying to save his business. He was too much of an opportunist to risk engaging himself absolutely in favor of anyone. Kamprad was for Kamprad. Compare the Holocaust hero Oskar Schindler. Schindler was an entrepreneur as well. He came to Krakow, at the outset of the war, and realized that through the Nazis’ Aryanization program he could pick up a fully functioning Jewish-owned enamelware factory for next to nothing— essentially for promising to keep the factory’s former owners employed. He landed a lucrative war-supply contract. At Emalia, as the factory was known, he began to produce munitions, which gave his factory and his Jewish workforce an “essential to the war effort” designation. In the first five years of the war, he made a huge amount of money. But when the Germans decided to shut down Schindler’s operation in Krakow—and ship his workers to the gas chambers—Schindler did an about-face. He persuaded the Germans to let him move his employees and machinery to Brünnlitz, in Czechoslovakia. Here is the business professor Ray Jones, in his article “The Economic Puzzle of Oskar Schindler”:
Schindler used the money he had made [in Krakow] . . . to pay bribes
Wilber provides a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, outside the Washington Hilton, on March 30, 1981. It’s a harrowing story, more so than it seemed at the time, and Wilber, a reporter for the Washington Post, has tracked down virtually everyone who had anything to do with protecting the President or with saving his life at the hospital. Reagan lost nearly half his blood before his condition was stabilized, but he never lost his good humor or his stage presence. The book is meant to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the events, but the portrait of John Hinckley seems timely. An obsessed loner, his character twisted by mental illness, Hinckley fits the template for American assassins, and new models, alas, are still being produced. Shazam!, by Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear (Abrams Comicarts; $35). This collection of vintage Captain Marvel merchandise and relics conjures the Second World War era’s mania for superheroes. Captain Marvel had musculature and superpowers similar to those of Superman but inhabited a madcap world that could have been scripted by Preston Sturges. His whimsical charm proved so popular that he quickly became America’s topselling comic-book character, outselling Superman throughout the nineteenforties. But the tin toys, jigsaw puzzles, Christmas-tree ornaments, fan-club memorabilia, stuffed toys, original comic-book art, and a play cape (with fine print