Conversation – 37

NATIONAL GERMAN CHOCOLATE CAKE DAY

On June 11 we celebrate the delicious food holiday known as National German Chocolate Cake Day! We can’t think of a better way to learn about a cake with American roots and get our chocolate fix for the day at the same time!

Although the name may sound like the cake originated in Germany, German chocolate cake did not. In fact, the cake’s roots can be traced back to 1852 when American Sam German made a type of dark baking chocolate for the American Baker’s Chocolate Company. Baker’s German Sweet Chocolate’s brand was named in honor of Sam German.

Her name at birth was Chaja.

She was born on December 25, 1872, in Kraków — then occupied Poland, under Austro-Hungarian rule — the eldest of eight daughters born to a Jewish shopkeeper and his wife who gathered their girls each evening for a beauty ritual that ended with cream applied to their faces. It was a small, domestic act. It contained, without anyone knowing it yet, the seed of an empire.
Chaja was bright, stubborn, and constitutionally unable to accept the life that had been arranged for her. When her father organized a marriage she had not chosen, she refused it. This was not a small act in 1880s Kraków. This was a declaration of a self that was not going to be handed over to someone else’s plan. Her father, by various accounts, was furious. She was sixteen years old.
She became Helena. She left.
First she went to Vienna to study medicine — briefly — and then, in the mid-1890s, she made the decision that would change everything: she sailed to Australia, alone, to live with relatives in a country she had never seen. She was in her mid-twenties. She spoke limited English. She brought with her a supply of the face cream her mother had used — made by a family friend in Kraków, a preparation of lanolin and herbs that she had grown up applying to her own face, which had given her, through Polish winters and the general harshness of the nineteenth century, a complexion that the sun-dried women of Melbourne could not stop asking about.
She saw a market.
In 1902 she opened a small shop in Melbourne. She had almost no capital and very little formal business training. What she had was a product, a face that proved it worked, and the particular resourcefulness of someone who had already refused a marriage, emigrated alone, and survived in a country where she was a foreigner with an accent and ambitions too large for the life available to her.
She sold cream. Then she made more cream. Then she made more products. She trained women as beauty therapists — she called them beauticians, professionalizing a role that had not previously been considered a profession. She opened a school dedicated to their training. She understood, with the instincts of someone who had watched her mother apply cream to eight daughters every evening, that women’s relationship with their own appearance was not vanity. It was one of the few areas in which a woman had genuine agency — the ability to shape how she was seen, to present herself with intention, to exercise a kind of power in a world that offered her very little of it.
She opened a salon in London. Then Paris. Then New York in 1915, when the First World War sent her across the Atlantic. Each move was calculated, deliberate, and executed with a precision that left her male competitors perpetually scrambling.
Her rivalry with Elizabeth Arden — another self-made woman who had built a cosmetics empire from almost nothing — is one of the great business stories of the twentieth century. They despised each other with the focused energy of two people who recognized, in the other, a mirror they would rather not look into. Helena called Arden “that woman.” Arden called Helena “that Pole.” Their competition drove both of them to greater heights than either might have reached alone.
In 1928, Helena sold her American business to Lehman Brothers for the then-enormous sum of around eight million dollars. It seemed like a triumph of financial acumen. Then the stock market crashed in 1929. She bought the business back at a fraction of what she had sold it for, watched the value of everything else collapse, and emerged from the Depression with her empire intact and her competitors diminished.
She was not a simple person. She worked with a ferocity that consumed everyone around her and acknowledged that it had consumed her children too. She married an Englishman named Edward Titus in 1908 — a journalist, charming and chronically unfaithful — and had two sons with him before they divorced in 1937. She then married a Russian prince, Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, who was twenty years younger, who she loved genuinely and who died in 1955. She was widowed at eighty-three.
Through it all she kept building. She was an art collector of serious discernment — one of the first collectors of African and Oceanic art in the Western world, accumulating one of the most important early collections of Latin American art, understanding instinctively that beauty was not a narrow category confined to European aesthetics but a language spoken across every human culture. Her salons were galleries. She brought women into contact with Dalí and Picasso and the African sculptures she hung alongside the mirrors and the skin creams.
She established the Helena Rubinstein Foundation in 1953, funding arts organizations, institutions serving women and children, and educational programs. Her business employed 32,000 people across fourteen countries. At the time of her death, American women were spending seven billion dollars annually on cosmetics — a market she had helped create from a supply of face cream carried in her luggage across the ocean.
Then came the morning in 1964 when three burglars entered her apartment on Park Avenue.
She was ninety-one years old. She was asleep. The men who came into her rooms were there for her jewelry collection — reputed to be worth over a million dollars, accumulated over a lifetime of acquisition by a woman who had understood since childhood that beauty was also an investment and that a piece of jewelry on the right wrist at the right moment was a statement of arrival that no amount of verbal argument could match.
She refused.
The details, as reported, are bare and sufficient: she told the burglars they could shoot her. That at her age, they were welcome to take her life. What they could not have was what she had built. The men left with two hundred dollars in cash they found in her handbag.
Three hours later, according to those who saw her, Helena Rubinstein emerged from her building immaculately dressed — Balenciaga, an Hermès scarf knotted around the handle of her bag, one of her signature bowler hats on her head — and went about her day.
She died less than a year later, on April 1, 1965, of natural causes, in New York City. She was ninety-two years old.
She had arrived in Australia with a suitcase of face cream and an idea. She left behind an international cosmetics empire, a foundation, an art collection, a professional vocabulary — the word beautician, the concept of the beauty salon as a space of self-determination — and a global industry that had not existed before she decided to build it.
She had been told no her entire life. By her father. By the markets. By the wars. By the Depression. By the men who could not understand why a Jewish woman from Kraków should have opinions about business strategy, art collecting, and the appropriate response to an armed burglar in her bedroom.
She had the same answer for all of them.
Take my life if you want it. You cannot have what I built.