HOW MAX FACTOR BECAME PREGNANT

The first silent filmmakers dealt awkwardly with lighting. Subjects of still photographs wore no makeup, and one had no difficulty making out their features. But actors onstage slathered their faces. A still photo can be held near the face, but the back row of the theater needs to make out the actor’s eyes and lips.

Theatrical makeup survived in early film, as the actors and directors all came from the stage. The makeup’s not so jarring on the actresses—women have always made up for effect, onstage and off-. But many actors wear heavy lipstick in silents and in early talkies. These are black-and-white films, and it’s reasonable to assume early directors wanted to make the actors’ lips look more red.

However, red in black-and-white goes black. It took a while for the black-lipped actors to come to the directors’ attention, from which we might assume that the director’s job ended when he yelled “cut,” and that he didn’t see the assembled film till its triumphant sneak in Fresno.

Makeup was also used on the stars to correct, enhance, or in fact obliterate features thought in need of alteration. Merle Oberon, an Anglo-Indian, had her hairline raised and her skin lightened to make her look more European. African American actors had their skin darkened to make them unmistakably less so. Joan Crawford’s eyebrows were shaved and replaced with huge painted crescents.

Many stars had their noses straightened by the ancient stage technique of highlights and shadows.

Today, as of old, an on-screen lovely will awake, fresh and stretching, in the Early Morn, and we are all the better able to appreciate her beauty, as she’s wearing ten pounds of eye makeup, and eyelashes longer than Peter O’Toole’s in Lawrence of Arabia. (The reference intended for the film but also applicable to its Hero, who enjoyed dressing up.)^I

Al Pacino plays Phil in Phil Spector. In his mansion hangs a portrait of Lawrence. Al shows the house to his lawyer, Helen Mirren, and explains that Lawrence was 5'2", liked little boys, probably wasn’t even in the army, and won World War I. J. Edgar Hoover, we are told, liked wearing a tutu, but everybody enjoys a change. That’s why we went to the movies.

Wise exploitation of the close-up changed the relationship between Lighting and Makeup. Cinematic inventors shaped the face through lights and shadows, and the camera’s proximity required the invention of new, non-oil or wax-based, makeup.

Maksymilian Faktorowicz came to America from Poland in 1904. He was born near Lodz, just like my grandparents. This, in the Jewish world, is called yicchus, or “descent,” which can be claimed not only genealogically but through any connection, however remote or, indeed, fanciful.

We always held that Audrey Hepburn was Jewish because we wanted her to be. She was not, but Katharine (noted elsewhere) was, her original family name Hebron. And she had bad skin. No problem onstage, where there were no close-ups, but her film work needed Max Factor. He not only created makeup for her, Jean Harlow, and all the greats of the Golden Age, he created Makeup. He coined the term to sell the mascara and eye pencils he produced for the movies, and was the first to market it to the general public. Much of the ruse de guerre of the war between the sexes (now carried out as Diplomacy by Other Means) was created by Max for the films.

Much modern technology comes to us from the military—or, as our more squeamish time would have it, the Space Program. The Flickers were the Space Program of sexuality and courting. As Tolstoy told us, the kids exchange the salacious and taboo at school, bring it home, and corrupt the parents. (Some think that it was, in fact, their children who taught the pirates to go “Arrrghhh…”)

Max came from my people’s neck of the woods, as did Helena Rubinstein. Chaja Rubinstein was born near Kraków. She and her family moved to Australia in the 1890s. She carried some jars of face cream in her luggage, the Natives down under were entranced and wanted some. She began making face cream with the lanolin that, we may assume, was otherwise a glut on the market there, and one thing led to another. She made a huge fortune and gave much of it away.

My particular connection is through Maximilian furs.

They’re still around today, a worldwide brand name. But when I was associated, they were a family-owned outfit—the most prestigious of furriers in the poshest of showrooms in Manhattan, their clients the superrich, royalty, and movie stars.

Mme Potok was the owner and designer. She was the mother of my friend Andy. When I was other than affluent, in New York, I would occasionally drop by her showroom, fortuitously, at lunchtime, and find her in her office with a tuna sandwich, and she’d have her people make me one, too. She and her family were the grandest furriers in Warsaw. They left one day ahead of the Nazis and were eventually admitted to the United States through the auspices of Helena Rubinstein.

It was Mme Potok who told me that she’d asked her benefactor, “Helena, what is it you really sell? You aren’t actually selling anything of use, it’s just inert white cream,” and Mme Rubinstein said, “I’m selling the most precious thing in the world. I’m selling hope.”

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It’s the oddest thing, being married.

I look at my wife and see a smiling, graceful beauty. Over the years, I’ve come to think, “Ah, that’s what we look like.” But it’s not what I look like. My reflection in the mirror is familiar, but that’s not what I look like, either—that image is backward. When it’s flipped to accuracy, through an iPad or photograph, I seem to myself misshapen.

The movies also offer beauty through distortion. Attempts in film to make people look “more real” seem, some small time later, as foolish as painting the silent star’s lips red. The movies are an abstraction from our consciousness, which itself is an abstraction of what may or may not be an ultimate reality. Stanislavski imported palm trees to dress a tropic set in Moscow, and onstage they of course looked fake. Because they were real.

Theatrical Realism, at the turn of the century, was the depiction of unpleasant or unfortunate actions and situations: poverty, alcoholism, adultery. On-screen—as developments in the camera outshone the stodgy old script—it came to mean the offer of shocking images: fake blood, real or faked sex, pyrotechnics, car crashes, the cartoon destruction of whole worlds, and so on. But these are no more “real” than Gidget Goes Hawaiian. They just employ a different mode of artifice.

I began writing plays at the end of the Kitchen Sink period. In the fifties, the presence of the sink, or the paterfamilias in an undershirt, gave the imprimatur to drama and films that Diversity does today—they were a fashionable gimmick touted (or even understood) as a closer approach to Reality.

In 1997’s Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon, a mathematics prodigy from Southie, is urged by his best friend, Ben Affleck, to escape the Old Neighborhood, with its (unspecified) aridities, take his talent, and flee. From what?

This last hurrah of the Kitchen Sink called on the audience to accept that the Neighborhood Life was somehow bad—and that the Hero’s gift could only be enjoyed in Berkeley or some other intellectual Paradise. The Kitchen Sink reappears now as the “life in the hood” films of the Black or Hispanic Experience. In another generation the children of these filmmakers, now affluent, will regard this as a foreign experience.

Leon Uris wrote Exodus, a cri de coeur of Judaism; his grandchildren are probably writing for South Park.

All film is an alteration, not only employing light and sound in the service of fantasy but playing upon our consciousness, such that we accept the manipulated as “true to life.” But all film is manipulated by its creators—actors, directors, designers, and editors.^II

If the film is actually a product of The Script (Ricky played the villain Gupta in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies and reported that there was no script, that the actors were called day by day to improvise a scene), the uber-manipulation is the director’s vision. If it is a good script, the film is his vision not of Life but of the Script.

The self-deluded feel they “have a script in them,” not realizing that it’s in them, as they have neglected to write it down. Should they actually do so, they will hate it, as it will have nothing to do with how it felt when it was “in them.” They may then attempt to wrestle the thing closer to The Feeling they had, but they’ll never get it closer, as the feeling, which felt like an idea, was only a feeling—their attempts are like a chef saying he wanted to make the couscous taste like the First Day of School.

The good script is the triumph of wretched persistence over narcissism. In its enjoyment, the audience is freed of the curse of their consciousness by the author, who lugged that burden up the hill.

Many movie stars seem misshapen when viewed up close. My friend Daniel said that Bette Davis had the largest head he’d ever seen. One can discern a certain attractive prognathism in, for example, Burt Lancaster, and I will not mention Clark Gable’s ears. But the camera, like our mirror reflection, might like some of these deformities, and so do we viewers. Just as we enjoy the reassembled deformities of the writer’s mind.

The year 1964 was graced by two masterpieces, Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove—Sid Lumet, and Stanley Kubrick, respectively. The stories are identical. A nuclear strike is inadvertently launched against Russia, and the President and All His Men must avert disaster.

Fail Safe is horrifying, and Dr. Strangelove the funniest film ever made. They are renditions of the same imaginary but possible event, and both are true. What, then, is Realism? Well, one might say, don’t be disingenuous; it is, of course, the attempt to get close to an observed reality. But what testimony is more impeachable than that of an Eyewitness?^III

Art forms distort what we call perception into a new reality. Nothing is truer than Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but what does it “mean”?

Max and Helena were household names in the twentieth century. Their brands endure, their names are no longer part of our current speech. But they were.

Schoolyard joke, circa 1955.

A. Did you hear Helena Rubinstein got pregnant?

B. Yeah?

A. Max Factor.

A cultural artifact, of interest only to the Urban Archaeologist. And to genius.

I shared the joke, as I do all those of my youth, with my son, Noah.

“Yeah, that’s funny, Dad,” he said—a complete dismissal—“but I can make it better.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Did you hear Max Factor got pregnant?”

“Yeah?”

“Helena Rubinstein.”

1. I. At the premiere, Noël Coward told O’Toole that had he been any prettier the film should be retitled Florence of Arabia.
2. II. Documentaries are no more “real” than features—they’re just movies.
3. III. See the irreconcilable differences in political opinion, each side convinced not that its opponents are wrong but that they are insane.