AN APPRECIATION : Farewell to the One and Only Aida Grey
Aida Grey, who died Friday of heart failure, made beauty her business--but she avoided its tragic flaw. She never slipped out of reach.
Imagine entering her Beverly Hills salon, a shrine to rococo gold and crystal on Wilshire Boulevard. There she would be, weighted with strands of jewels, fitted in a custom-made James Galanos suit. She was perfect, except for one thing. Her feet were dunked in a bucket of water. She was having a pedicure on her way to a cocktail party.
Hard to take such a woman seriously, you might think. But don’t kid yourself. In a flash she’d have you at her side, commanding: “I want you to dye your lashes, they’re too light. The eyes are fantastic, but you need a facial. I want you here every week.”
It was the same whether she was talking to Eleanor Roosevelt, who was her customer in the 1940s, or Nancy Reagan, who came in as the governor’s and then as the President’s wife. Opera diva Beverly Sills, socialite Caroline Ahmanson, Vogue beauty editor Shirley Lord and Nina Blanchard, of modeling agency fame, all came to her.
“She thought each woman’s complexion was unique, and she treated each woman individually,’ says Lord, who made appointments at Grey’s salon during every West Coast visit.
Ahmanson met Grey in the ‘50s when Ahmanson owned a modeling school and beauty boutique. She was shopping for skin-care products to carry in her own shop.
“She was ahead of everyone, with her all-natural products,” Ahmanson recalls. “And she was the most incredible salesperson.”
Six days each week, Grey would oversee the salon, with its army of facialists, masseuses and makeup artists in white coats. Between things, she would corral customers, sit them at a mirror and give them the lip wax, eyebrow shaping, rejuvenating serum treatment or whatever else she was certain they needed that instant .
In late afternoon she would set up a tapestry chair across from the salon’s front door. While directing her staff’s every move, she attended to her own beauty rituals: makeup, a hair style, manicure, pedicure. It was all to get her ready for an evening out. She kept the social calendar of teen-ager, most often filled with concert and dinner dates. She might well spend the afternoon with her face coated in a green mask, but but she never lost her authoritative air.
Of course, it wasn’t just air. Grey was a true pioneer and, some would say, a genius. She opened her first California salon--in Beverly Hills--in 1946. Earlier, she opened salons in New York and Paris. But on a vacation west with her first husband she fell in love with Los Angeles, and they decided to stay. They had one daughter, Loretta, and then divorced.
Even among her closest friends, Grey did not talk freely about her personal life. She did say that she had been raised in France, (her father, a dermatologist, inspired her) and that she gave up a career as a concert pianist to pursue the beauty business. But well into her 80s she would only admit to being a senior citizen.
The heart of her own business was the product line she developed. She promoted it tirelessly, in specialty stores as well as her own salons. She gave lectures in schools, hospitals and women’s prisons.
By the early ‘50s, Grey was poised to compete with the emerging cosmetic giants of the day, from Elizabeth Arden to Helene Rubenstein. But she decided to pull back. Then in her mid-40s, she had fallen in love again and married Douglas Behrend.
Says Ahmanson: “She wasn’t willing to be on the road, which would keep them apart.”
Soon after she made that decision, the world quite literally started coming to her. Investors from Hawaii, Hong Kong, Japan and Saudi Arabia inquired about opening Aida Grey salons and selling her products in their countries. There are now more than 100 franchises worldwide--plus a global mail-order business.
“I was put on this Earth for one reason,” she said, late in life. “To help people look better, that is what I’m all about.”
