One of the world's most forward thinking business minds and a creative force behind modern notions of beauty, Elizabeth Arden's Blue Grass dreams became lush Elysian Fields.

Elizabeth Arden was one of the world's greatest and most inventive fabrications. Born of Florence Nightingale Graham's imagination and savvy, Elizabeth's name was inspired by two books - but the tales of Elizabeth and Her German Garden and Enoch Arden bely the richness of the tenant farmer's daughter's personal story. Florence Nightingale Graham reaped the glorious dividends of one filly's gallop through blue grass fields. She became Elizabeth Arden and the envy of all who share Flo's childhood dream - "I want to be the richest little woman in the world!"

William Graham was an excellent horseman. Still the well-to-do Tadd's did not consider the Scotsman an advantageous match for their daughter Susan. After the couple eloped to Canada, William, now a tenant farmer, began to bring horses home with only lineage to recommend them. His young wife fell pregnant with the same regularity. Christine, Lillian and William were already working to feed the finely bred horses before Florence was born "with a whinney in [her] ear", and then, Gladys.

After Gladys' birth, tuberculosis sent their mother into a rapid decline. 'Chris' and 'Lollie' took over the running of the house, Willie helped with the farm chores and six year old horse-loving Flo became an accomplished stablehand - feeding, watering and exercising the horses.

Although an intelligent and promising student, Florence Nightingale never finished high school. Ever the 'family doctor' for siblings and horses, she took her cue from her namesake allowing a natural gift for healing to lead her to nurses' training school. Before her first semester was up, Florence realised that "I didn't really like looking at sick people. I want to keep people well, and young, and beautiful".

A chance meeting with a biochemist set-up a laboratory in Florence's mind. If cream could be used pharmaceutically to cure skin blemishes, it could also be used cosmetically to beautify. With this thought Florence left nursing cheerfully, full of chatter about the riches she would make and the horses she would breed.

Her father did not share her enthusiasm. but with Gladys' fervid assistance, Florence began to use the wood-burning kitchen stove to experiment at cooking up 'instant beauty'. The smell of her relentless experimenting eventually convinced the village that the family lived on rotten eggs. When a compassionate clergyman arrived on the doorstep bearing a basket of eggs, father's patience was exhausted. "You'll either get married or get back to Toronto and find a good, honest job", he demanded.

After a dreary succession of positions in Toronto, much to her father's dismay, the resolute Florence set off for New York - city of sin. but by the dawn of World War I, a lonely Florence was wandering the streets of Paris seeking knowledge about European beauty techniques. There she visited as many as four salons in a day. After each treatment she requested samples of every preparation used. Her accent proved most convenient, an American would be unable to obtain them in her home country.

Herself a scent sensation, the newly named Elizabeth adored fragrance. As well as sampling the makeup and skin products, Elizabeth bought every available variety of French perfume.

One night at the Cafe de Paris dramatically enhanced Elizabeth's vision of women and beauty. She felt pale and colourless beside the striking women on the dance floor. Drawn by their lustrous eyes, she found her own handsome China blue eyes dull by comparison.

With some shock she discovered the secret of the vivacious dancing eyes. The women were wearing mascara and eye shadow. She had never seen these worn outside the theatre.

Barely giving herself time to scoff down her English breakfast, she was out buying eye shadow and kohl. Her purchases seemed too harsh to produce the muted and subtle tones of the night before, so Elizabeth looked to the application.

Rounding up a terrified chambermaid and soothing her with French currency, Elizabeth began experimenting. The girl's fear turned to boredom, so often was the eye makeup, blended with rose-tinted rouge, re-applied. At the end an only partially satisfied Elizabeth showed the girl her reflection. The girl cried black streaky tears - Elizabeth had just learnt an important lesson about mascara that would never find its way into her advertising material.

Elizabeth left for New York on the British liner Lusitania. In the forced intimacy of a ship crowded with people fleeing to the safety of America, an attractive man found his way to the virginal Elizabeth Arden's table. They had met once before - she had come to him for her one bank loan. Practised in the art of flirtation which she considered an extension of the art of selling, Elizabeth immediately endeared herself to the charming dancer who in turn opened to her a popularity she had never before experienced. She fell out of loneliness, perhaps even in love....

Tommy Lewis was soon besotted. At the end of the trip he even alluded to marriage but Elizabeth was inexperienced in the lore of love. She told him she was unsure whether she loved him, that she was frightened of marriage after seeing what it had done to her mother, insistly revealing her business plans and aspirations, and protesting that she would have little time for anything beyond them.

Tommy was limited by his perception of 'femininity'. He was unable to understand what he saw as an overriding, almost 'masculine' ambition. When he left the boat he left Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Arden buried her personal frustration in the pursuit of professional advancement. Ridding herself forever of Florence Nightingale Graham, Elizabeth Arden installed herself in the phonebook and in new grander surroundings.

To start adapting the best of the cosmetics and creams she had brought from Europe, particularly with many raw materials made unavailable by war, Elizabeth needed a thorough analysis of all preparations. With the war-time boom in the chemical field, big companies were not interested in orders on the scale of Elizabeth Arden's. Sent to a small firm of analytical chemists, Stillwell and Gladding, Elizabeth met the man to take on her challenge. After analysing al the products, Fabian Swanson was ready to make similar ones. "No", said Elizabeth. "I want a face cream that's light and fluffy - like whipped cream".

Meanwhile Arden's business and its staff of treatment girls was steadily building in New York and Washington. Convinced that her clients' resistance to the eye make-up she introduced was based on convention not aesthetics, Arden fast created a fashion sensation.

One afternoon Swanson burst into the salon with what looked like a jar filled with beaten egg whites. It was the cream Arden had envisioned - christened Venetian Cream Amoretta in line with her penchant for the Italianate and described as "a famous French formula" by the astute businesswoman. Elizabeth Arden's Ardena Skin Tonic was soon formulated to accompany the cream. In a promotional manoeuvre as inspired as the product - which proved that to be effective, a toner need not be harsh as pure wood alcohol - this gentle lotion soon brought the name "Elizabeth Arden" to people's lips, as well as faces.

With stock crowding them out of one treatment room, Elizabeth took on new larger premises in Fifth Avenue. Salon D'Oro was sumptuously furnished - in creating a splendid environment Elizabeth would always display an uncharacteristic disregard for cost.

On 8 May 1915, an agitated Tommy telephoned Elizabeth at the Salon with the news that the Lusitania had been sunk off Ireland by a German U-Boat. One thousand lives had been lost. Elizabeth agitated for a different reason. When Tommy suggested that their relationship at least should be salvaged from the 'dear old ship' she heartily agreed.

Tommy knew the way to this woman's heart - her business. Many romantic tete a tete's later Tommy turned up to the salon in uniform - he could not escape the war, but Elizabeth could not refuse his proposal.

In the summer of 1931, just as their marriage was starting to seriously falter, Elizabeth discovered what would prove her most fervent and sustaining love - for frisky doe-eyed yearlings. During the Saratoga racing season the Lewises visited an old friend and prominent horseman who led them into the company of the great stable owners, including Samuel Riddell. Convinced that Elizabeth needed a hobby and impressed by her guts as much as her business sense, after watching her merrily caress nine pounds of cantankerous horseflesh until the "sweet little baby" nuzzled her with the docility of a newborn colt, Riddell suggested 'horses'. Quickly recharged with the spirit of the 'stablegirl', she soon purchased a few show horses. But blue ribbons at horse shows were not enough to keep Elizabeth interested and to satisfy her compulsive need to win - she longed for the thrill of the turf.

When Leslie Combs became Elizabeth's adviser and manager of her horses, his greatest talent was for seeking out moneyed track novices. He grew with Elizabeth - by the time she was the most successful woman in racing, his Spendthrift farm had become one of the best breeding establishments in the United States.

After Tommy left Elizabeth, she became deeply committed to her stable, building it at a pace which caused one of the most profitable enterprises in the cosmetics industry to totter on the brink of ruin.

Elizabeth judged "a woman and a horse by the same standards. Legs, head, and backside". She started to link her two major interests, offering many a startled customer her own special endorsement for her new and successful Eight Hour Cream, "you must try this, I sue it on my horses".

When Gladys sent her a novel concept in fragrance developed in the House of Fragonard in Grasse, in the South of France, Elizabeth took one whiff and said it would be called Blue Grass in honour of her horses. Despite one of her manager's complaints that it would remind people of horse manure, Blue Grass has been a top seller for over 60 years.

In the stable as in the cosmetics industry, Elizabeth had to be in complete charge. Her philosophy was "always be better than anybody you hire". This led to inevitable conflicts with trainers, jockeys and stablehands. The horsebarn had to be as tastefully decorated as the Salon. Working with the cherry-pin, white and blue boudoir decor, the Blue Grass fragrance and Elizabeth's cooing baby talk, one trainer commented: "When I was a kid my mother used to say - only horses sweat. People perspire. That's not true in Mrs. Lewis' stable. Over there horses perspire. It's the trainers who sweat".

By the mid-30's there were 29 Elizabeth Arden Salons in the US and around the globe. Elizabeth decided the time was ripe to profit from the very lucrative hairdressing business, and brought hair styling to her Salons with a gimmick - Guillaume, who personally trained all her hairdressers in the latest French coiffure.

She survived the Depression largely by ignoring it. When the stock market crashed, Arden bought a building on Fifth Avenue as well as a lavish penthouse on the same street. While everyone else was concentrating on few large volume items she was manufacturing 108 different products and stocking them in 595 different shapes and sizes.

As meticulous about Christmas presents as she was about her producers, Elizabeth set her staff wrapping immediately after Thanksgiving and roared over a misplaced ribbon. Her Quixotic disposition was such that often between the forwarding of a gift (as early as December first) and Christmas Eve she would be 'not speaking to' the recipient - and was even known to ask that the gift be returned.

When women were being placed in new positions of control as America verged on entering World War II, Arden introduced a career course to help orientate them. Herself a fiercely successful role-model, Arden saw management and group control as emanating from women, in a magnification of household law and order.

Glady's internment in Ravensbruck was one of the few challenges in Elizabeth's life against which she was impotent. Her distress led her to dismiss Henri Maublanc, Gladys' husband, upon learning that although he had kept the Elizabeth Arden Salon open in Paris during the occupation he had not managed to free his wife.

By the time she turned 60, Elizabeth Arden had succeeded in a business noted for its 'treatment cosmetics', beyond Florence Nightingale's wildest dreams. Fortune magazine wrote: "She has probably earned more money than any other woman in US history, and she has done it by commanding the sun to stand still until she got the right shade of pink in a bottle, the right texture of cream in a jar, and a ribbon tied just so around a hundred-thousand soapboxes".

Her personal life was not so successful. Elizabeth shared strong feelings and interests in politics and horses with Tom White, a powerful executive in the newspaper and magazine empire. But White's marriage and Catholicism proved insurmountable obstacles to marriage. Instead Elizabeth was seduced by the charming Prince Michael Evlanoff. But as soon as they were married, Evlanoff started giving orders and bills from their courtship began to arrive. Elizabeth starved him out of her apartment.

The fall of France marked the end of Paris' domination of the American high fashion market. Years after hr first brief and unsuccessful foray into dressmaking, a little too suggestive of the Woodbridge farm girl's taste for pink bowed refinement, Arden entered the world of couture in 1943. This time success was assured as she introduced her own designer and clothes exclusively available in Arden Salons. However, Arden's characteristic inability to relinquish control made interaction with Charles James, her first designer, highly tempestuous. Subsequent collaborations with Castillo, Sarmi and De la Renta were also problematic. Arden was wilfully determined to own both the personal and professional lives of designers she expected to succeed without ever overshadowing her.

Around the same time as designer-clothes were rarifying Arden's Salons, the racing industry was turning into big business with the installation of betting machines. Arden's Maine Chance stables grew, as her cosmetic industry had, despite wartime restraints and conditions and despite her volatile temperament.

This businesswoman who horrified promoters by publicly offering all Miss America contestants treatment and make-up when she was a judge for the contest, penetrated Society just as the term was losing some of its awe. But her friendship with the royals dated back to the reign of King George V and Queen Mary and with Mamie Eisenhower to the General's presidency at Columbia University.

During the Eisenhower years she acquired a reputation for being old-fashioned and conservative. She was never unaware. She identified the trends early enough to set them, but the times were breeding a chaotic fashion very different to the refined good taste which had made her famous.

As she reached her 80s Arden's health deteriorated but her tireless spirit never waned. Buried in 1966, she left her creation to move with the times - Elizabeth Arden's flagship store in New York is currently being completely renovated with opulent abandon - but gone is Elizabeth's all-encompassing personal touch.

Arden might have been thinking of Charles Revson of Revlon fame when she said: "This business is essentially feminine. What male executive will throw away a whole batch of powder because the shade's off an indiscernible fraction? Sniff a half-dozen sachets daily for months to be sure the odour chosen is the most wonderful smell in the world? Or spend weeks mixing nail polish to get the right colour?" But she was describing the inimitable Elizabeth Arden.