Word: ardened
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...think this is the nastiest business in the world," says Elizabeth Arden...
...competitive world of calculated eccentricities in which only the books are always well balanced. It is a pink jungle of feuds and jealously guarded secrets in which people and ideas are pirated. The oldest feuders are two of the best-known names in cosmetics: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden (real name: Florence Nightingale Graham...
Elizabeth Arden studied to be a nurse, entered the cosmetics business because, she says, she wanted to make women beautiful as well as healthy. Before opening her own beauty salon in 1910, she spent an apprenticeship as secretary in a Fifth Avenue beauty shop. Today she grosses an estimated $15 million yearly, owns a topflight racing stable (Maine Chance). The carefully preserved beauty queens are the best ads for their own products: Rubinstein is in her 80s, Arden in her 70s-and their exact ages are as jealously guarded as their cosmetic secrets. Says an aide: "We never talk...
Elizabeth Arden has all this-and then some. She operates two remote Shangri-Las, also called Maine Chance, one in Maine and one near Phoenix, Ariz. (made more famous by Mamie Eisenhower's two-week stay last spring). At the Maine Chances, described by Elizabeth as "magic isles where cares and worries vanish," patrons not only get treatments for their face, figure and hair, but live an austere life that rules out fatty foods and liquor (if they are overweight), involves daily exercise and sports instruction. Cost: from $400 to $600 weekly, depending on accommodations...
Careful Guards. Both Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein abhor the other's ideas ("I don't go in for all that trash," says Miss Arden of one of her rival's favorite ingredients), but show a fondness for each other's personnel. Arden's raids on Rubinstein reached a climax in 1938, when she hired away Rubinstein's sales manager at a fancy salary. But Rubinstein struck back a year later by hiring as her vice president none other than Elizabeth Arden's ex-husband, Thomas J. Lewis, who had been general manager...