Elizabeth Arden: Canada’s Beauty Queen

When Canadian-born cosmetics brands come to mind it’s usually MAC Cosmetics, Lise Watier, Ojon or Cargo Cosmetics. But before them all there was – and 100 years later, still is – Elizabeth Arden, Canada’s original beauty queen.  The pint-sized cosmetics dynamo Elizabeth Arden stood just five feet tall but stands alongside Canadian culture giants like John Molson and other famous snowbirds who flew south like Neil Young, Mary Pickford, Frank Gehry and Joni Mitchell. The entrepreneur-turned-magnate ran a multi-national empire, her shade on the lips of everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Mrs. Eisenhower. And she was born and raised in Ontario.

Elizabeth Arden, née Florence Nightingale Graham (named after the famous nurse), was born December 31, 1884 and raised on 200 acres of land in Woodbridge, Ontario – back when it was rural farmland rather than the high-priced suburban Toronto real estate it is today. Her mother was English (from Cornwall) and her father William Graham, a horse-mad Scot. Florence inherited his penchant for thoroughbreds. Arden went to nursing school but by 1907 had dropped out and moved to New York with her brother William. There she worked at Eleanor Adair’s beauty salon; Adair was a European and the first to provide ‘facial treatments’ in the United States. Soon she quit and with $6,000 borrowed from William, bought a stake in the Elizabeth Hubbard beauty shop. When Arden proved too headstrong for a partnership, she took over allegedly choosing the new name, as lore has it, to save the expense of repainting both words on the sign – and because her favourite poem at the time was Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden.” The shop and beauty treatment destination had a red door with a big brass nameplate.

While Hollywood studios turned glamour into a corporate product, Elizabeth Arden sold glamour as an attainable everyday lifestyle (it’s fitting that unabashed Old Hollywood glamour-loving Catherine Zeta-Jones is the current global spokeswoman and face of the brand). In Arden’s early days in the 1920s, cosmetics were most commonly used on the stage and screen; Arden adapted and popularized it for everyday use, making it acceptable for ‘respectable’ ladies to wear eye makeup along with ‘Total Look’ coordinating lip and nail lacquer; she also pioneered skin care treatments to make the complexion itself healthy, not just mask it with product. She was a marketing genius, from the packaging to the creation of  lifestyle illusions. “Every woman has a right to be beautiful,” is one of her most well-known copy lines.

By the 1930s Arden still owned every single one of her more than 100 international salons, all company stock and was president and chairman of the board. Fortune magazine said at the time she “earned more money than any other businesswoman in the history of the United States.” Her Manhattan salon The Red Door at 691 Fifth Avenue was the height of chic and of innovation and the city’s first day spa. Said the New York Times: “She soon convinced women that they could attain that mysterious thing called beauty if they permitted themselves to be steamed, rolled, massaged and bathed in wax in her sumptuously decorated salon.” Author Clare Booth Luce was a client and in the star-studded film adaptation of her comedy of manners The Women, the Red Door is where Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer go for ‘Jungle Red’ manicures and to do their daily calisthenics. That shade may have been blood red but both Arden’s personal and cosmetic trademark was, to borrow a quip from Diana Vreeland, “Think Pink!” Convinced that pink was the most universally flattering colour for women, she dressed in it head to toe and even decorated her Fifth Avenue duplex in pink. Salmon-pink lipstick was also the signature Arden shade.

Being driven to succeed cost Arden her first, 24-year marriage to Thomas Lewis, the banker who had provided her with all-important American citizenship; later, briefly, she had a second husband, a deposed Russian noble. But her first love was always the beauty business. And it demanded most of her time, because as her success multiplied, so did competitors: Charles Revson, Max Factor, Charles of the Ritz and Arden’s particularly hated nemesis, Helena Rubinstein. The bitter rivals jostled for the best placement at department stores like Filene’s in Boston, wooed one another’s star staff and stole chemists from one another for years (topping it off: when Arden and husband Lewis divorced, he went to work for Rubinstein). When Arden posed for Karsh, who also famously photographed Churchill, Einstein, Bernstein, the Kennedys, Cary Grant, Anna Magnani, in a dramatic plumed hat it was one-upmanship after Salvador Dali had painted Rubinstein’s portrait (the latter was depicted as tied to a rock by a rope of emeralds). Lindy Woodhead’s biography, War Paint, chronicles the heated rivalry between Rubinstein and Arden and was made into a television feature last year on PBS called “The Powder and the Glory”. Woodhead affectionately calls her “a tough little Canadian” who could swear like a longshoreman.

Ironically, the Canadian-born Arden can also be credited with creating the first all-American perfume, Blue Grass, inspired by her horsey southern stomping grounds. It launched 75 years ago; an advertisement illustrated by Vertès in March 1941 Harper’s Bazaar proclaims that Blue Grass “is for thoroughbreds – like the country of blue-ribbon winners it’s named for.” Evoking the wildflowers near the Kentucky Derby Louisville racetrack, the perfume is still on the market today. When Arden died of a heart attack at age 81, in 1966, her estate was valued at $40 million. So perhaps it’s time we thought of Elizabeth Arden as our original Queen Elizabeth and that other queenly Liz merely as Her Royal Highness the Queen of England.

Wartime Beauty Contributions
Over in England ‘Wrens’ (the Women’s Royal Naval Service) were issued ‘Auxiliary Red’ lipstick from Cyclax in their standard-issue service beauty kits, in cylinders specially-designed to fit uniform pockets. Back in the USA, Arden created Montezuma Red, the precise colour of the stripe and hat tassels commissioned and non-commissioned female Marine officers wore (according to rules, women could wear lipstick and nail lacquer but it had to conform precisely in its shade to their uniform red). By 1944 the rationing of materials for the war effort meant that silk and even rayon supplies for pantyhose had dwindled, Arden ran ads for liquid stockings in the form of a new leg paint that wouldn’t stain clothes or shoes called Velva Leg Film (it cost $1 a bottle and came in Sun Bronze or Sun Beige); “With this modern ‘hose,’ your legs appear slimmer, trimmer, more chiseled.” Naturally, Helena Rubinstein responded with her own Aquacade Leg Lotion.

The Eighties & Naughties
For better or for worse, Elizabeth Arden the company pioneered celebrity perfumes. In 1990 Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds became a sensation; the Arden celebrity fragrance stable now includes bestseller Britney Spears, Usher, Hilary Duff, Mariah Carey alongside designers like Juicy Couture, Nanette Lepore and Badgley Mischka. And true to the company’s scientific skin care roots, Arden partnered on the anti-aging sensation Prevage with dermatological research company Allergan, formulated with idebenone (an ingredient originally formulated in the late Eighties for the treatment of Alzheimer’s). It remains
a bestseller.

Six Degrees Of Separation
Arden herself was nothing if not six degrees of separation from other cultural figures, major and minor. Perpetually tanned matinée idol manqué George Hamilton’s father (whose name was also George Hamilton) lead his famously peripatetic existence because he was a sales manager on the road – for Elizabeth Arden. Alongside Eleanor Roosevelt, Arden was also one of the first and founding members of Fashion Group International, the organization begun primarily to bolster women working in fashion, design, public relations and media. In gardens around the world one can plant Elizabeth Arden tulips in her distinctive rich salmon-pink lipstick shade. The LPGA boasts an Elizabeth Arden Classic tournament. Arden was even the early patron of Valerian Rybar, taking him under her wing after spotting some of his millinery on an opera star, he went on to design her salon interiors. By the time he died he was known internationally as the world’s most expensive decorator. And like director David Cronenberg and Leonard Cohen, Arden received France’s highest honour, the Légion d’Honneur. For twenty years, Arden also underwrote and produced an eponymous high-fashion couture label. Several of its gems were among the prized Audrey Hepburn wardrobe recently sold at auction: including the little black Elizabeth Arden cocktail dress Hepburn wore the fateful night in 1953 when her Roman Holiday co-star Gregory Peck introduced her to future husband Mel Ferrer. Most notably, Oscar de la Renta was the last designer for the couture house of Elizabeth Arden; she had lured him to New York from Paris (where he’d been a design assistant at Lanvin) to work on her custom couture collection. In 1965 Arden shuttered the fashion division, de la Renta launched his own off-the-rack house and the rest is American fashion history.

by Dave Lackie