Word: rubinstein
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Artur Rubinstein struck the final chords of a Chopin Polonaise, lifted his grey-fringed head, rose to acknowledge the applause. The audience rose with him. "May he live a hundred years," they sang, and clapped and stamped until he had walked ten times with ramrod dignity from the wings and bowed misty-eyed to the packed hall. After 20 years, 69-year-old Pianist Rubinstein was back in the country of his birth and in the city-Warsaw-where he played his first concert 63 years...
Until World War II, Rubinstein toured Poland occasionally, and long after he became a U.S. citizen, the Poles continued to claim him as their own ("He is the best," said one writer, "so he is a Pole"). But during the war, the Germans killed the family he had left in the textile city of Lodz, and Rubinstein avoided Poland as well as Germany during his postwar European tours. When he finally decided he was ready to return to Poland, his concerts became immediate sellouts; 1,200 people turned up merely to hear him rehearse. Before he played a note...
...rooms, Rubinstein was besieged by young musicians, to whom he had become a legendary figure on records, and by old friends who remembered him from the old days. Repeatedly, the sight of friends or familiar landmarks reduced Rubinstein to tears. He played five concerts instead of the three he originally planned. "They asked me," he said when he left, "what I thought of Warsaw now. I said, 'Divinely impractical!' Oh, Poles...
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...
Since few firms have unique products, they often try to outdo each other in boastful bragging about what they do have. Helena Rubinstein, who styles herself the "First Lady of Beauty Science," claims that her Tree of Life cream contains extract of human placenta "from nature's storehouse of nutrients for the unborn baby." To supply juice of water lilies for some of her other products, she keeps convents of nuns in London and Paris busy growing lilies. A year ago Lilly Dacheé introduced a finishing powder "which actually contains pulverized pearls," claimed that it made the skin...