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But the primary point-of-sale for quality cosmetics like the Estee Lauder line is department stores, and they are in trouble. There are too many of them, and, as a result of the takeover fever of the late '80s, they are overburdened with debts that must be serviced by cutbacks. Since cosmetics and scents are impulse items whose sale depends on pampering the customer, they are vulnerable at understaffed counters.
Then there is the company's own situation. Estee, a superb saleswoman, is far less active now. And as Leonard points out, "Arden, Rubinstein, Revson -- when they passed on, so did their businesses. Others couldn't carry on in the same style." So the image must be altered from the mildly staid, middle- aged profile that the line has.
Burns should be about ideal to lead this tricky transition. There is nothing Old World about her. Her notion of a good time is to go skiing in her native Colorado. Unlike the Lauders, Burns doesn't have any celebrity friends. Although Leonard, a keen businessman, "plays his cards close to his vest, and he has 16 vests under that one," as a friend puts it, she is open and direct -- if very tough indeed. The old line about "what you see is what you get" fits her perfectly. The company is now hierarchical. Says Burns: "My vision does involve a lot of change, but when I get my restructuring done . . ." Odds are there'll be a lot less structure.
It is nearly impossible to find criticism of her. To most colleagues she seems like a relief, a reminder that in the right hands, business life can be simple. No plots, no paranoia, no last-minute surprises. Instead she imparts a sense of discovery to almost everybody she works with, a feeling that anything is possible -- at least for her team. Nowadays she is besieged by crude questions like "What makes you so successful?" Her old Bloomingdale's boss, Lester Gribetz, may have part of the answer: "It's important that she is not a New Yorker, and she doesn't have their brashness, aggression and hostility. She's a frontier girl."
Burns spent a lot of her childhood in Cripple Creek, Colo., the ghost of a gold boomtown. Robin had the run of it. "It was such a great place to live," she says, with a glazy gaze out her Manhattan window. My mother could just pick up the phone and ask the operator where I was." Her father moved out when she was three. She had little contact with him after that. Gribetz might have added her mother Bettina to the reasons for Robin's success. A Southerner by origin, "she is the original steel magnolia," says Burns, who is still very close to her. Bettina can't say enough about her only child. A favorite story involves the girl's refusal to lace up her tennis shoes. When the mother insisted, pointing to the safety factor, the tot removed the shoestrings completely. "She was showing me a better way," sighs Bettina, "and I had to agree." One day in primary school, a report card arrived with a poor grade in deportment. Bettina went to see the teacher. "Well, Robin finishes her work paper first and then helps the slower kids," came the reply. "She has to learn that they must do it on their own." These fond tales reflect Bettina's neat editing eye. Robin's enterprise and her eagerness to share what she knows turn up again and again.