Word: calvined
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...sprinted up the business ladder at Bloomingdale's to a vice president's rung and did it in the '70s, when Bloomie's was the hottest and most innovative department store in the U.S. In 1982 she took over the moribund Calvin Klein fragrance business. While the public may not know who Robin Burns is, it has certainly heard of Obsession and Eternity, the two perfumes she launched with consummate marketing strategy and blatantly sexy ad campaigns...
Last year Minnetonka, the parent company of Calvin Klein cosmetics, was sold, and Burns found herself more responsive to Leonard Lauder's five-year professional courtship to join the family-owned, $2 billion-a-year business. The wooing had been fun on an international scale -- the occasional lunch in the Bois de Boulogne, the duets of shop talk, the tycoon's equivalent of ardor ("I am a patient man"). But this woman knew what she wanted: "I am not interested in profit improvement, acquisitions or expansion. A place looking for that won't benefit from what I bring...
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...
...cleanup crew that followed in Souter's wake to glean cloakroom prattle heard him compared to Calvin Coolidge and called a "mousy little guy." Bush can live with that. Souter is a Harvard-Phi Beta Kappa-Rhodes scholar mouse...
...certainly the wackier. Instead of a naturalistic kitchen-sink drama, this is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink melodrama-cum-farce, featuring fantasy sequences, flashbacks, ghosts, tall tales, quoted swatches of e.e. cummings verse and repeated incursions into a contemporary setting by a bearded and costumed Calvin. He recites his writings on predestination and free will and inveighs, sounding suspiciously like a televangelist, against the iniquities of Pop culture. The "war" of the title is not an event but a metaphor. It refers to the sense of embattlement that prompts some suburban householders to buy security systems and others...