The happy story of Max Factor, as enthusiastically told by Fred E. Basten in “Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World” (Arcade; $24.95), begins, like a movie, at a high-energy moment of extreme peril:
The little (“barely five feet tall”) Polish Jew’s involvement with the czar had advanced with the quick progressions of a fairy tale. One of ten children born to a worker in the textile mills of Lodz, he was reared by his siblings and had scant formal education. At the age of seven, he was set to selling oranges, peanuts, and candy in the lobby of Lodz’s Czarina Theatre; he later called this his “introduction to the world of make-believe.” At the age of eight, he worked as an apothecary’s assistant, learning some chemistry; at just nine, he became an apprentice to the city’s leading wigmaker and cosmetician. Within four years, he was proficient enough to join the staff of the Berlin hair stylist Anton, and by the age of fourteen he had moved on to Moscow, where he worked for Korpo, the cosmetician to the Imperial Russian Grand Opera. At his eighteenth birthday, Faktor was obliged to serve four years in the Russian Army; he was picked for the Hospital Corps, and took up nurse’s duties. “I did not like it but I learned much,” he later said.
Discharged at twenty-two, he opened a small shop in the Moscow suburb of R’azan, “making and selling his own creams, rouges, fragrances, and wigs.” According to Basten, a member of a passing theatrical troupe stopped in on the way to a performance before the imperial family, and, “within weeks, Max’s business took a royal upswing in sales and he was adopted by the summer court.” The courtiers adopted him so thoroughly that he had little time left for his own shop—“All my attention,” he remembered, “went to their individual needs by showing them how to enhance their good points and conceal the less good.” The aristocrats paid well and introduced him to their luxurious world but were possessive: he could not leave the court unescorted and was limited to brief weekly visits to his shop; he had to marry on the sly, and fathered three children in five years. Meanwhile, anti-Semitism was on the rise in Russia; in 1903, Czar Nicholas II “ordered a siege on the Jews he so feared and hated, and burned down their villages.” Max longed for America, where a brother and an uncle had settled in St. Louis, with its impending World’s Fair.
A friendly general noticed the court beautician’s downcast mood and, being told of Max’s secret family, arranged for his escape. Before an interview with the general’s personal physician, Max covered himself with yellowish makeup—an especially fairy-tale touch. His sickly appearance won him an official recommendation for three recuperative months in Karlsbad, a spa in far-off Bohemia to which court members often repaired. Russian guards accompanied him, however, so he continually faked a limp; as he hobbled into the main square of Karlsbad, whom should he find huddled at the fountain but his wife, Esther, and their three children! In a twinkling, they disappeared into the Bohemian (not Russian, as in the opening paragraph) forest and, walking mostly at night, travelled “seemingly endless miles”—hundreds and hundreds, it must have been, to the nearest seacoast—“until they reached a clearing in the woods. Ahead was a seaport where the steamship Molka III was boarding for America. Max happily paid the fare. Money was not a problem. Over the years, he had saved nearly $40,000, which he carried with him in a pouch.” No passports were required then, in the flood tide of immigration. A customs official misspelled “Faktor” as “Factor.” America was not without difficulties for Max and his magic pouch: his English was nonexistent at first, and remained heavily accented; an English-speaking partner who helped him set up shop at the fair in St. Louis absconded with the funds; his wife, less than two years after giving birth to their fourth child, dropped dead on a sidewalk; he sent to Russia for a second wife, and she, Helen, after bearing him his fifth off-spring, proved to be so temperamental that he had to divorce her. However, he had opened a barbershop in St. Louis, and it prospered; in 1908, he married a neighbor, Jennie Cook, and headed to California to try his luck supplying cosmetics and hairpieces to a new brand of entertainment, the motion pictures. In those days, one-reelers were being shot all over Los Angeles, under tirelessly blue skies, and Max, from his little shop on the edge of downtown (“Max Factor’s Antiseptic Hair Store. Toupees made-to-order. High-grade work”), spotted some “ghoulish” people passing by. He followed them to an empty lot where a bar brawl was being staged and filmed. Max was curious about what they had on their faces:
Such pastes, applied an eighth of an inch thick, formed a mask that cracked under the stress of facial expression; this didn’t matter at the distances of a live theatre, but in film closeups even hairline cracks showed. In 1914, working in his shop’s laboratory, Factor created “a greasepaint in cream rather than stick form, ultrathin in consistency, completely flexible on the skin, and produced in twelve precisely graduated shades.” The silent-film comedians—Chaplin, Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle—were the first to try it, and “returned not only to give Max their enthusiastic approval but to have him personally apply the new make-up.”
Then, there were wigs. Max persuaded Cecil B. De Mille, in town to direct the large-scale Western “The Squaw Man,” that wigs and hairpieces painstakingly formed of real human hair (135,168 individually knotted strands went into an average Max Factor wig, with sixty thousand in a full beard and a mere seven thousand in a false mustache) were more photogenic than “clumsy substitutes such as straw, mattress stuffing, excelsior, Spanish moss, wool, tobacco leaves, even mohair stuffing from Model-T Fords!” De Mille admired Factor’s wigs but said he couldn’t afford them, and suggested renting them. The deposit needed to safeguard the costly wigs posed a sticking point, which Factor, resorting not for the last time to his brood of useful children, circumvented by waiving the deposit and having De Mille hire his three sons as Indian extras, paying them three dollars a day; at the end of each day, they collected their father’s wigs or had their pay docked. By 1916, Max Factor & Company was booming enough to move to larger quarters, in the prestigious Pantages Building, “at the center of it all.”
Triumph followed triumph. As Basten—a former assistant in the company’s public-relations department—tells it, Max devised false eyelashes for Phyllis Haver, who was tired of having pies smashed in her face and wanted to move up to vamp roles. He created a yellow makeup to lighten Rudolph Valentino’s skin so that the actor, who ground pigments to help speed up the process, could escape bit parts as a swarthy villain. Max brought the tempestuous Pola Negri to heel by shouting back at her in their native Polish. When he outgrew his space in the Pantages Building, he moved to a new store, on South Hill Street, and called it the House of Make-Up. The theatrical term “make-up”—Max always insisted on the hyphen—had been considered risqué, but at the urging of his son Frank he began applying it to his products, and it swept the world. Snubbed when he visited the German offices of Leichner, for whose stick greasepaint he had been a longtime American distributor, he cabled his sons, “Start selling greasepaint in tubes,” and the tubes were, of course, another triumph. For Douglas Fairbanks’s sweaty exertions, Max invented “the first perspiration-proof body make-up” and then “devised the reverse—cinematic sweat—by simply combining equal parts of water with mineral oil.” For M-G-M’s production of “Ben-Hur,” he and his staff conjured up more than six hundred gallons of light-olive makeup to match the army of pale local extras to the darker extras already filmed in Italy. He conquered the persistent problem of lip pomade’s melting under the hot studio lights by firmly pressing two thumbprints onto the actress’s upper lip and then one thumbprint on her lower lip, thus single-handedly creating the sensational new look of “bee-stung” lips. For Joan Crawford, he created “the smear.”There seemed no limit to the labors that Hollywood could set before this diminutive Hercules. Each technical advance in cinematic art posed a fresh problem in makeup. When, in the late twenties, sound came in, the microphones “picked up the noisy sputter of the carbon arc lights—the standard film lighting used . . . for fifteen years.” The new tungsten lamps were quiet but also much hotter, and provided a softer light. “The old Orthochromatic film, which had been used since the birth of the film industry, was not sensitive enough to properly record faces under the new lighting.” And so:
This new Panchromatic makeup was, Frank admitted, “horrifying to look at” in daylight. For its invention, Max Factor was presented with a special certificate by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in recognition of his contribution to “Incandescent Illumination Research.” Frank recalled, “I had never seen my father simultaneously so happy and so on the verge of tears.” Dr. Herbert Kalmus, an M.I.T. graduate, had been developing Technicolor film since 1912; its first successful two-color (red and green) version was employed throughout the Douglas Fairbanks feature “The Black Pirate,” in 1926, and its full three-color form was displayed in Disney cartoons of the early thirties and an otherwise undistinguished live-action two-reeler, “La Cucaracha,” in 1934. Everybody who viewed Technicolor, including Kalmus and Max, “realized something was wrong”:
The fully refined preparation, its name changed to Pan-Cake, for its panlike container and its cakelike form, was perhaps Max Factor’s greatest invention; not only did it make Technicolor visually palatable but women on the set kept stealing it off the shelves for personal use. Based upon the spectroscopic perception that skin holds a multitude of tints yet is “essentially a translucent covering with relatively little color of its own,” Pan-Cake was too dark to successfully wear at night. Max at first resisted the popular demand that it be produced in lighter shades, saying that it was made for the movies and there was only enough of it for them, but Frank saw to its wide commercial release; it “immediately became the fastest- and largest-selling single make-up item in the history of cosmetics,” outselling all sixty-five of the imitations advertising themselves with the now magic word “cake.”
It was not long after this that Max, in Europe with his son Davis pursuing some of the possibilities that his company’s international success had created, received a death threat (modestly demanding two hundred dollars, or else) that unnerved him and prompted his return home; he died in his bed in 1938, at the early age of sixty-one. Max Factor & Company did not die with him; Frank even legally changed his name to Max to smooth over the transition. Under its new Max, the company supplied the copper-green makeup that Margaret Hamilton wore as the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz,” as well as the color of the Munchkins and the six that flash by in the Horse of a Different Color sequence. For the masses, it produced Tru-Color, “the world’s first perfect lipstick . . . non-drying but indelible,” its mettle proved in many an ordeal at the Kissing Machine—a device with rubber lips, a crank, and a pressure gauge. But Basten’s idolizing tome loses steam once its dapper, ambidextrous (he could apply makeup with either hand), chemically resourceful hero passes from its narrative.
The company survived to develop makeup for television, but its glory days were with the golden age of the movie studios, when the stars used to provide product endorsements for as little as a dollar. Their glamour rubbed off on Max Factor, and vice versa. As the nation’s cinema palaces emptied and the fading studios cut their costs, Factors started to drift out of the executive ranks of what had been, ever since Max’s boys became “Jewish Indians” to protect hired wigs, a family firm. Its stock began to trade on the New York Stock Exchange in the early sixties, shortly after it acquired the French company of Parfums Corday; in 1973, it was itself acquired, by the Norton Simon conglomerate, which ten years later was taken over by Esmark, which a year later merged with Beatrice Companies, which made Max Factor part of its International Playtex division and moved its headquarters to Stamford, Connecticut. This left high and dry in Hollywood the Max Factor Make-Up Studio, a palatial Art Deco showpiece with offices and labs and makeup rooms (for brunettes, blondes, redheads, and “brownettes”), whose opening, in 1935, as floodlights probed the skies and stars from Betty Grable to Bela Lugosi signed a parchment Scroll of Fame, had been the crowning glory of Max Factor’s ascent. Now the building, restored after some thin times, survives as Donelle Dadigan’s Hollywood History Museum, Ms. Dadigan being a “Beverly Hills real estate developer and passionate Hollywood memorabilia collector.” But of course all the memorabilia in the world won’t bring back Max Factor’s Hollywood or—and who would mourn?—the innocence of a cultural climate where makeup was a shameful secret, associated with sexual prostitution and stage performers.
This biography foregrounds its central figure in almost total isolation from the history of cosmetics and the beauty industry—topics of lively interest to contemporary social historians, almost all of them female, as it happens. In the slim and frivolously titled “Read My Lips: A Cultural History of Lipstick,” by Meg Cohen Ragas and Karen Kozlowski (1998), we learn that an ancient Egyptian papyrus shows a woman applying lip rouge. “Inventing Beauty,” by Teresa Riordan (2004), points out that as photography became, from 1870 to 1900, more popular so, too, did cosmetics, and that, “as the Depression deepened, cosmetics sales climbed steadily,” and that, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the proliferation of synthetic compounds freed cosmetics from the drawbacks of naturally viscid and odorous oils and solvents. Riordan illustrates her text with patent applications of beauty enhancers right out of a torturer’s manual. “Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture,” by Kathy Peiss (1998), counters arguments, raised with special vehemence in the countercultural sixties, against the beauty industry’s manipulation and trivialization of women by pointing out that it gave multitudes of needy women respectable employment as beauticians, manicurists, and saleswomen, as well as enabling some entrepreneurs, like Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, and the African-American Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C. J. Walker, who manufactured hair-care products, to head up successful corporations. Max Factor, Peiss asserts, became a factor in this female-dominated industry by shunning the air of foppish effeminacy that since the eighteenth century had attached to male hairdressers: “Photographs of Factor show him simultaneously as makeup artist, chemist, and father figure.” To preserve this solemn image his publicists discouraged him from giving, in his comically strong accent, interviews.
Sally Pointer’s “The Artifice of Beauty: A History and Practical Guide to Perfumes and Cosmetics” (2005) offers a thorough and harrowing history of cosmetics, going back to the first prehistoric traces of red ochre found in graves. The reader puts the book down convinced of the incorrigible human, and particularly feminine, appetite for beauty aids. Pointer quotes eight apt lines by George Gascoigne, in his blank-verse satire of 1576, “The Steele Glas”:
Even as Gascoigne wrote, his monarch, Elizabeth I, was poisoning her complexion with ceruse, a lead-based skin whitener used in ancient Rome and revived in the Renaissance. Ceruse persisted into the eighteenth century as an ingredient in potent “washballs,” long after many a woman of fashion had died of such toxins. The contemporary barbarism of piercing (eyebrow, tongue, navel) was preceded in the eighteen-nineties by a craze for nipple rings; a contemporary wearer wrote that “many ladies are ready to bear the passing pain for the sake of love.”
For the sake of love, broadly speaking, American women in the early twentieth century, overcoming Puritan scruples enforced by male employers, husbands, editorial writers, and legislators (in Kansas in 1915 a law was proposed making it illegal for women under the age of forty-four to wear cosmetics “for the purpose of creating a false impression”), began to paint themselves. Movies enhanced by Max Factor makeup were not alone to blame, but they did help legitimatize artifice and its false impressions. Their heightened images spoke to women of an attainable better self. As I remember it, years ago a scientific study, which electronically tracked eyeball movement, demonstrated that, during the showing of a motion picture, the eyes of the men in the audience followed the woman on the screen. But so did the eyes of the women. ♦
