It has been a frantic morning in the Madison Avenue office of Georgette Mosbacher, 40, socialite, skin-care mogul and wife of Houston oilman and Bush campaign finance chairman (and recently appointed Commerce Secretary) Robert Mosbacher Sr. Operating on four hours of sleep, Mosbacher has been at the office since 8, completely in command, part Damon Runyon broad, part Cosmo girl.
Mosbacher wears the uniform of the mega-well-to-do: coffee-colored Yves Saint Laurent knit, Bulgari knockoffs at her ears and throat. She telegraphs a subliminal message of wealth and privilege.
Like fellow Hoosier Dan Quayle, Mosbacher has a tendency to take refuge in platitudes: ”You can be anything you want to be” is her motto. Unlike Quayle, Mosbacher has a story that validates the cliche: A poor girl from the Midwest moves to Hollywood, marries (Robert Muir, real-estate developer), works (producing commercials for real-estate firms), divorces (1977).
She joins a cosmetic company, Faberge, as an executive in a newly created film-production division. She moves to New York, marries (George Barrie, the chairman of Faberge), works (as a Faberge licensing executive), divorces
(1982).
Meets and marries (1985) Texas` most eligible bachelor, one of the state`s richest men. Together they come up with about $35 million to buy one of the world`s most expensive skin-care lines (price of a jar of La Prairie eye cream: $65). She becomes a familiar face in the social columns.
Now, with the Bush presidency, Mosbacher`s influence will extend to politics. ”She`ll be a great asset at those tedious chicken a la king dinners,” one Houston social observer suggests. ”The Republican Party needs her.”
From an office softened by billowy shades and surrounded by the spires of midtown Manhattan, Mosbacher fulfills her role as the chairman and chief executive officer of La Prairie. With the assistance of a perpetually cowed secretary named Louise, Mosbacher dispatches baby gifts from Tiffany, makes hefty charitable donations, pens timely thank-yous and RSVPs to invitations. Lunch comes from a pretzel vendor on the street (”I`m Pritikin, so I can only eat starch”); she rushes out to have her nails done at a nearby Korean nail salon when she cannot find a manicurist to come to the office at a price she can abide (”Five dollars for a manicure!” she says, exiting the salon exultant at the bargain. ”In 20 minutes!”).
Back in the office, Louise anxiously relates that Mrs. Farkas, the dressmaker, doesn`t know anything about Mosbacher`s Bob Mackie dress. Nor does she know anything about coming to the apartment for alterations. Mosbacher looks panicked, then puzzled. Then, tightly, she asks Louise where she found the number for Mrs. Farkas. The truth tumbles out: Louise has called not Mrs. Farkas the dressmaker but Mrs. Farkas the socialite-Kimberly Farkas, who is a lot more famous for wearing dresses than for fixing them. Mosbacher is not amused.
”You have to set goals for yourself,” she says later, a line that, banality notwithstanding, has served her well. ”I wanted to be independent. Coming from a one-parent home, I don`t trust dependency. I don`t want to be in a position of depending on anyone.”
That was a notion shaped by family history: Mosbacher`s great-grandmother, widowed early, worked for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad until retirement age. Her grandmother divorced young and supported herself as a property manager for the rest of her life. Her mother ended up in similar straits in the small town of Highland, Ind.: Dorothy Bell was utterly devoted to George Paulsin, a charmer whose family owned and managed Highland`s bowling alley. The couple had four children; Georgette and George (there are two more daughters) were named after their father.
The family was thrown into chaos when Paulsin was killed by a drunk driver. When her mother went back to work, 7-year-old Georgette, who had been her father`s favorite, took over the child care.
Mosbacher always knew what she wanted. She spent her money astutely, preferring one angora sweater to three polyesters. After graduating from Indiana University in 1969 and working for an ad agency in Detroit, she followed her brother to California, where he had become an actor (he is now an attorney).
It was during her marriage to the head of Faberge that she added jet-setters to her roster of contacts. But the marriage to Barrie was a miserable match: The couple separated after a year and were divorced a year later. A mutual friend suggested she look up Robert Mosbacher-the scion of an old East Coast family, now the chairman of Mosbacher Energy-the next time her work took her to Houston.
Georgette saw it as her mission to bring fun into Mosbacher`s life. He had enjoyed a long first marriage that ended when his wife died at 44 of cancer. His second marriage, to prominent Houstonian Sandra Gerry, ended in divorce. ”He married on the rebound,” Georgette says. ”It was a disaster.” They married March 1, 1985, three years after they met. But it has taken her somewhat longer to hook Houston: ironic, because she possesses in abundance the qualities that city seems to hold so dear.
Mosbacher says that her Faberge experience left her hungry to own a cosmetic company. Applying La Prairie eye cream one night, she realized she held the answer in the palm of her hand.
When La Prairie fell into the hands of a French concern called Sanofi, the new Mrs. Mosbacher used some Houston contacts to make her move. She called Sanofi every month for a year, offering to buy La Prairie. With her husband`s backing and some shrewd New York advisers Mosbacher beat out bigger guns such as Revlon, Avon and Estee Lauder.
Some people have questioned whether a former midlevel executive has the capability to run a corporation with $60 million in sales last year. So Mosbacher hired Ted Thomas, a well-respected cosmetics-industry executive, to take care of the details as president while she carries out her personal imperative: doling out beauty advice on a grand scale. Here Mosbacher`s models are the so-called Working Rich, career women such as Ivana Trump and designer Carolyne Roehm, who got big career boosts from their husbands` millions. If there once were women who married so they wouldn`t have to work, today those same women marry so they can work the way they want to.
When Mosbacher was just a socialite, designers needed her more than she needed them. They were the ones who benefited most when she landed on the Houston Chronicle`s best-dressed list or appeared on the ”Today” show touting couture. Now, as a corporate head, she has all the more reason for dressing in a way that garners the right sort of style-setting publicity.
One recent afternoon, she found herself in Arnold Scaasi`s small, sunny atelier to check out his new furs and gowns. In attendance are fashion editors from Vogue magazine and New York Times fashion arbiters Bernadine Morris and Carrie Donovan. On one side of the room Joan Rivers comforts her tiny Yorkshire terrier.
Across the aisle sit the best billboards in America, members of New York`s Nouvelle Society, spectacularly married women who are young enough, rich enough and prominent enough to capture the attention of the fashion press. They are Mrs. Donald Trump (Ivana), Mrs. Robert Trump (Blaine), Mrs. Saul Steinberg (Gayfryd), the former Mrs. Sid Bass (Anne) and, snuggling into her own front-row folding chair, Mrs. Robert Mosbacher. Seeing them all seated together, perfectly coiffed, perfectly dressed, not a bad nose in the bunch, the outsider experiences a queasy sense of deja vu. They look like the most popular girls in high school.
The music comes up, the models waft down the aisle in lavish creations of chiffon, sequins and fur. ”That`s for going to the A&P,” Gayfryd Steinberg joshes to Georgette, studying a pink-satin ball gown with a matching reversible coat lined in mink. ”It`s what I wear in the morning,” Georgette jokes. ”I love ermine,” she says a few minutes later, her eyes locked on the snowy fur making its way down the runway. ”But what can you do with an ermine coat?” she pines. ”You can`t check it. You can`t leave it in the car!”
After riding down the elevator and locating her driver, Georgette seems exhilarated, almost satisfied with her accomplishments.Riding up Park Avenue in her limousine, however, Mosbacher is uncharacteristically subdued.
She dangles a leather-tipped khaki shoe from her foot and studies it critically.
”I was the only one there in flats,” she says finally.
”What`s wrong with that?” she is asked.
”Nothing,” she says, peckish. ”Thank goodness I don`t care what they think.”
