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By her high school days, the family had moved to Colorado Springs. There wasn't much money around -- the bungalow Burns lived in would probably fit into her current office -- but you could set a sitcom at Cheyenne Mountain High in the '60s. There were "keggers" (beer parties) and "woodsies" (gatherings in a nearby park) set to Simon & Garfunkel and the Beach Boys. Her old pals remember her as a lively girl, just the kind you'd like to take for a spin in your first fire engine. She did seem to figure things out fast and was aware of a wider world. "She taught me french kissing," says a classmate, Gordon Riegel, "not because she was fast, but because she read about it in some magazine like Vogue and was curious."
To her classmates' astonishment she left the West to go to Syracuse University, although she had never heard of it before a recruiter showed up at Cheyenne Mountain. Just curious, as usual. She did a double major in education and business. Teaching, she decided, was not for her: "The kids were great; the red tape was horrible." But college increasingly became an assignment to complete. The world of part-time jobs was more real than the lecture hall, and inevitably, New York City beckoned.
In 1974 there was pressure to hire women, and blue-chip firms recruited aggressively on campus. "It really turned me off," says Burns, who backs several feminist causes but can compete very nicely on her own. Instead she chose Bloomingdale's state-of-the-art executive-training program and burned up the syllabus. "I worked 10 hours a day, seven days a week," she says, "but it was exhilarating."
Then came window coverings, more fun than a ramble around Cripple Creek. "They wanted to get more aggressively into imports, so here I am, 23 or 24, on an eight-week trip to Europe, India, Japan. I truly thought I'd gone to heaven." Same thing with decorative pillows: "I had a collection of Seurat and Van Gogh made out of needlepoint in India. I merchandized them as art, not pillows -- $500 apiece. They sold out in one day, so I didn't have time to enjoy the fun." And lamps: "You pick up shells, antique tea cans, baskets, boxes, anything. They wire them in the warehouse, and then you say, Now how much do you think we can sell this for?"
Her globe trotting ended and her big-time career began when she was promoted into fragrances. Bloomingdale's vice president Myron Blumenfeld, now retired, was "astonished at the way she could handle people older and more sophisticated than she was. She put issues in front of people and never let the meeting wander."
Robert Taylor, who ran Minnetonka, knew she had what he desperately needed. The Calvin Klein line had no marketing strategy, wretched relations with stores and a disgusted muse, Klein himself. In fact the designer refused to meet Burns for several months, but she went about her job anyway. To her the Obsession launch remains the high point of her professional life. She had, as usual, put together a team that was superenergized and fanatically devoted. Kim Delsing, Burns' successor as Calvin Klein president, says, "It was like the kids running the zoo. Robin had the ability to let her mind go -- What if we did this? What if? What if?"