Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993 TAG: 9311170311
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Only her name wasn't Elizabeth Arden.
It was Florence Nightingale Graham, named after her mother's hero, the 19th century woman considered the founder of modern nursing.
Not a likely namesake for a woman who would pioneer the growth of cosmetics into a multimillion-dollar industry. Or who would help shape a cultural revolution while becoming the world's richest businesswoman.
Her modest early life in Canada and New York was an equally unlikely start for a woman who would become known as the merchant queen of modern beauty.
Born on New Year's Eve 1878, Graham was one of five children of a poor, tenant-farming couple who lived outside Toronto.
When she was 6 years old, her mother died of tuberculosis, making her upbringing even more of a hardship. She never finished high school.
Instead, she entered training to become a nurse. Despite her name, however, she didn't have the stomach for nursing, according to a biography, "Miss Elizabeth Arden," by Alfred Allan Lewis and Constance Woodworth.
She moved to Toronto and opted for work as a bank teller and as a receptionist for a company that made athletic supporters.
In 1908, she moved to New York City and soon went to work for Eleanor Adair, who ran a string of elite beauty parlors.
Under Adair, Graham discovered beauty culturists, who at the time claimed they could rejuvenate the skin by massaging it with "special preparations." This so-called scientific approach to beauty was new to the beauty business.
By 1909, Graham had opened her own beauty parlor on Fifth Avenue with the help of a $6,000 loan from her brother.
The name on what would become her trademark red-painted door was Elizabeth Arden, taken from Elizabeth Hubbard, who almost became her business partner, and "Enoch Arden," her favorite poem. Graham didn't believe her given name had the right flair for the beauty business.
She called her parlor a "salon" - a new term in the beauty business - and she targeted New York's high-society set.
This also was a new concept. At the time, helping nature along, so to speak, was not considered ladylike. For a woman to "paint" was scandalous.
But times changed, and Arden led the way in making cosmetics both fashionable and respectable - and an enormous industry.
She preached that glamour could be acquired. "Every woman has the right to be beautiful," she often said.
Within six months of opening, she paid back her brother's $6,000 loan.
In 1914, she opened a branch salon in Washington, D.C. That same year, several New York department stores started selling some of Arden's skin preparations. Two of these products, Creame Amoretta and Ardena Skin Tonic, would become the basis for the Arden fortune.
After a trip to France, Arden introduced European mascara and eye shadow to the American market in 1915. She also married Thomas Jenkins Lewis, a banker who would manager her wholesale division and help build the growing Arden empire.
Their marriage lasted 19 years. After their divorce, Lewis went to work for Arden's arch-rival, Helena Rubinstein. His Arden severance pay was $25,000.
A second marriage - reportedly performed during her lunch hour - to a Russian prince last just 13 months.
At the dawn of World War II, the Arden company was worth an estimated $25 million.
Elizabeth Arden's fame grew with her fortune.
She opened sales salons all over the world and health spas in Maine and Arizona, where customers paid $750 a week.
In the 1940s, she began raising race horses. Her endeavors in the sport and in cosmetics landed her on the cover of Time magazine in 1946.
Her horse, Jet Pilot, won the Kentucky Derby the following year. From 1943 to 1966, her stables earned $4.7 million in prize money.
Even in her later years, Arden remained youthful, energetic and demanding.
She looked 20 years younger than her 87 years, working up until the day before her death in 1966.
Her demands were legendary. She once stopped production on an entire cosmetics line because the pink packaging color was off. It cost her $100,000.
Of her employees, she said, "I only want people around me who can do the impossible."
She left an estate of more than $50 million, which included $1 million in jewelry and a castle in Ireland.
Her obituary in The New York Times received the same front page play that Virginia Sen. Harry F. Byrd's obituary had received two days earlier.
"There's only one Elizabeth like me," she liked to say in her later years, "and that's the Queen."
And she never compared herself to Florence Nightingale.
by CNB