All Washington is divided into two camps: Georgette fans and Georgette foes.
No one is neutral about Georgette Mosbacher, who has achieved the distinction of being universally known in little more than a week of high profiling at inaugural festivities.
Ask anyone on the streets, in the cafes, at Georgetown soirees, on Capitol Hill, and everyone will have an opinion about the woman New Yorkers call ”Jawsette” for her alleged penchant for gossip, the woman the fashion publication W dubbed the ”Social Cyclone.”
She attracts attention like a magnet, so much so that her husband, new Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher, left her at home when he traveled to Capitol Hill for his confirmation hearing. He explained-only half-jokingly-that he wanted the confirmation story to appear on newspaper business pages rather than their style pages.
Those who love Georgette say she will bring glamor, brains, pizzazz and sex appeal to the capital.
They say her up-to-the-minute, theatrical style will fill a fashion vacuum left behind by Nancy Reagan.
They say she`ll bring to the scene healthy young go-go women like her New York friends Ivana Trump and clothes designer Carolyne Roehm to replace battle-weary socialites like Nancy`s friends Oatsie Charles and Betsy Bloomingdale.
They say she`ll inject a sense of fun into the staid Washington establishment while providing an honorable role model for working women because she owns and operates her own company, La Prairie, the ultrachic, ultrapricey New York skin-care concern.
”As people get to know her,” said close Washington friend Ann Hand,
”they won`t look at her as just a beautiful face.”
Let`s get to the dirt
Those who loathe her say Georgette is brassy, brazen, self-indulgent and conniving, as out of place in the seat of government as a naughty story in a nunnery.
They question the appropriateness of her self-acknowledged conspicuous consumption when the destitute are huddled on the capital`s streets.
They say she violates President Bush`s inaugural aspiration to lead a government that represents ”the quieter, deeper successes that are made not of gold and silk but of better hearts and finer souls.”
They resent her media magnetism as nothing more than professional self-promotion, and deride her corporate ascendancy as rampant exploitation.
They even mock her eyebrows, which she had tattooed on her forehead by an Indiana cosmetician, and they doubt her publicly stated size 6. ”She`s a 12 at least,” said an observer who sized up Georgette at one of the several galas she attended.
Georgette is too . . . well, too New York for Washington, and if that doesn`t say it all, then nothing does.
”Georgette definitely makes a statement,” said one capital observer.
”Everyone`s waiting to see if she overshadows Barbara Bush. That`s a cardinal sin, although it`s unlikely Mrs. Bush would care.”
A lot of pluses
Pat Harrison, a well-wired public relations executive who entertained the Mosbachers at a pre-inaugural luncheon, said the city`s reaction was predictable.
”She`s smart. She`s married to a Cabinet officer. Plus she`s gorgeous. Plus she`s rich,” said Harrison. ”You put that all together and you have the woman everyone wants to hate.”
Nothing quite like Georgette has hit the capital since Elizabeth Taylor arrived on the arm of her sixth husband, Sen. John Warner (R., Va.). But Taylor was a relic compared with fresh-faced, 42-year-old Georgette in her designer togs and sable coats.
Anyway, Taylor was a mere senator`s wife with no job, no intimate White House associations and no mystique after a lifetime of exposure in the supermarket tabloids and fan magazines.
The third Mrs. Mosbacher, by contrast, is as new as tomorrow`s fad. The chairman and chief executive of La Prairie hit town like a bomb and blasted her way through inauguration week parties with no apparent concern for the swath she was cutting through the parochial, envy-ridden, judgmental Washington establishment.
A little background
Georgette is the wife of a Cabinet officer who is a close friend of the president and Barbara Bush. Georgette is virtually unknown outside of New York and Houston, where she spent several years at the top of society, and even in Washington she is known more for the nuclear impact of her stylish presence than for her accomplishments and background.
And what a background it is.
She was born to a humble family across the Indiana border from Chicago, and became at age 7 the caretaker for two sisters and a brother when her father was killed in a car accident and her mother became the family`s chief breadwinner.
She worked her way through Indiana University, earning a bachelor`s degree in education, and took a job in a Detroit advertising agency.
After following her brother to Los Angeles, where he hoped to become an actor, Georgette met and married Robert Muir, a real estate developer.
The marriage did not last, and Georgette moved to New York in 1977 after their divorce and began work in a film production subsidiary of Faberge Inc. Afer a promotion to another division of Faberge, she met and married the company`s 67-year-old chairman, George Barrie. She was 33.
But her second marriage did not last either, and she and Barrie were divorced in Las Vegas in 1982 after a year`s separation.
ivorce. They were married in 1985.
She sells sheep`s placenta
Although oil magnate Mosbacher was enormously wealthy, with a personal fortune reportedly in excess of $200 million, Georgette had little interest in the typical life of the rich Houston wife.
”I`m pressure-oriented. I move fast,” she told a Texas Monthly reporter.
So, with a little help from Mosbacher, and a lot from a group of wealthy investors she assembled, Georgette acquired La Prairie, whose principal product is an expensive unguent, containing stabilized sheep`s placenta, that is supposed to smooth wrinkles in aging skin.
New York-based La Prairie has since become one of the hottest skin-care companies in the world, and Georgette has leveraged her corporate clout to jackknife into the city`s social and cultural nirvana.
But whatever it takes in New York to have the`m flamboyant,” Georgette acknowledged in a recent interview for Vanity Fair. ”I like glamor and clothes and going out. I`m a conspicuous consumer. My husband accepts that.” She compared her flamboyance to Henry Kissinger`s public displays of vanity. ”It didn`t hurt him,” she concluded.
Maybe not. But the Sunday before she was to make her social debut as the spouse of a top Cabinet officer-designate and Bush intimate, Georgette was introduced to the capital in a Washington Post magazine cover story that proclaimed her ”nervy, sexy, flashy and filthy rich.”
Georgette, predicted the Post in a withering allusion to a notorious stripper, was about to become ”the most talked about woman to hit the nation`s capital since Fanne Foxe took a swim in the Tidal Basin.”
If Georgette read the story, she seemed undaunted when she showed up recently for a luncheon of businesswomen.
In front of a battery of cameras and reporters whose assignment was Georgette no matter what, the red-haired executive exploded into the Four Seasons hotel in a gray knit dress that glorified her curvaceous frame. She flung her sable coat to a waiting aide, beamed for the cameras, cooed for the press, embraced her husband, with whom she had shared a limousine only moments before, and stole the show from Marilyn Quayle, who was winding up a speech to the women.
And that`s the way it is
”That`s the kind of attention she is going to get,” concluded Harrison. ”I remember when Marian Javits, wife of the former New York senator, came here, took one look around and then refused to live here. You have more flexibility in New York. There`s more tolerance for flamboyance. Here, you`re either up or you`re down, in or out, alive or dead. It`s crazy.”
But Mosbacher said he intends for his wife to spend most of her evenings in Washington, taking the hourlong shuttle flight from New York to the capital for the round of social and political obligations that naturally befall the wife of a Cabinet secretary.
And the Mosbachers` friends believe the hullabaloo that follows Georgette wherever she goes will die down once the capital gets used to her.
”She`s a very warm, open, Midwestern person,” said Wayne Gibbens, a top Republican insider. ”She takes the time to have a personal exchange with people. I think the Mosbachers will bring excitement to Washington, as a couple and as individuals.” –
