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Going from Klein to Lauder, says industry observer Alan Mottus, "is the difference between turning around a speedboat and turning around a tanker." Carol Phillips, who virtually invented the money machine known as Clinique, notes that "she must deal with the baggage of years of company success and go through the line with a butcher knife, tailoring and trimming."
For this she will need a free hand, but most observers think Leonard Lauder is ready to give it to her. There have been a couple of blowups, caused by the fact that Burns is tougher with stores than he is, but mostly, as an old-timer says, "Leonard gets a ton of vitamins out of having her around."
Where does Burns get her own zip? "She has a crazy appetite for this business," says Phillips. She does. Julia Horowitz, a pal from Syracuse days, remembers a vacation they took a few years ago on Antigua: "Every day at 1 o'clock she would go into town and spend two or three hours on the phone with the office."
Horowitz also knows the quieter side of Burns. "My parents died 10 years ago," she says, "and afterward I really fell apart. Of all my family and friends, she was the one who hung in there." In fact Burns has had a couple of setbacks in life, both impossible to conceal, and handled them with admirable determination and reserve. In high school her face was badly cut in a car crash, and it took several operations to repair the damage. Years later, just before she was to be married to a man well known in the cosmetics business, his company announced that it was suing him for fraud. Says Burns: "I can tell you that these were painful situations. But I am a great believer in self-management, that you must survive and find a way to play the hand you are dealt."
With the switch to Lauder, she will have a more visible profile in the business world and the media. That, according to her feminist friend Gloria Steinem, is ideal. "I think of Robin as the new woman executive -- a lot more individual in dress and behavior, with a sense of humor, a whole person. That's why both men and women love working for her. She makes it fun for the individual."
Frontier girl? New woman? As Burns sees it, a little of both. "Cripple Creek was a free-spirited place to grow up," she says. "Neither my mother nor the community ever revealed any prejudice to me, and I never saw any until I got to Syracuse." So what others may see as new is natural to her. "It's hard to have emotional ties in a new job," she observes. "What I got at Vassar was a bonding to Lauder. You know why? What we all wore there was sweats and T shirts. Everyone. I loved that equality. It's what makes work fun."