Sheer, page 14
Ellen had a friend—she had so many friends in places I wouldn’t have known to look—who worked in brand marketing. He pitched Reveal to all the retailers and soon we were in boutiques across the country.
I celebrated by moving out of Ellen’s guest room. Three years into living with her, our situation had grown stale. I was tired of tiptoeing around to avoid Donald. It was like living with my parents all over again, but worse. Whereas my mother had been resentful of my father’s financial control over her life, Ellen operated from a position of make-believe, the fantasy being that she was a serious businesswoman. My mother’s anger was preferable to the sadness that Ellen’s delusion inspired in me. I was willing to accept Donald’s money and Ellen’s charade; I just didn’t want to be confronted with this arrangement after hours.
I asked Ellen if we could have a drink together at home. Five p.m. rolled around and I sat in Ellen’s chintz living room, staring at one of her Cubist paintings. Ellen swept in a few minutes later. Even in her own home, she liked to make an entrance. Her maid darted in with some glasses of chardonnay, ice cubes on the side, Ellen’s preferred beverage. Glass clinked against glass, and we sipped our drinks.
“I hope you know how grateful I am that you’ve let me stay with you,” I said as Ellen placed her glass atop a leather coaster on the coffee table.
“Of course,” Ellen said. “I enjoy our morning meetings. It’s good to have you close by.”
“Reveal is doing so well,” I said, as I fingered the stem of the wineglass. “I thought it might be time that I get a place of my own.”
Ellen and I had agreed that I could start paying myself a salary now that the company was in a profitable place. Ellen took her investment cut and I received a modest income. The rest of our earnings went back into growing Reveal. Ellen assured me it was normal that her investment cut was exponentially higher than my salary. She had put money into this, while I had only contributed my labor and my vision.
Ellen flinched, nearly imperceptibly. “You think you can afford your own apartment?”
“If I scrimp by, yes.”
“Why not stay here and save the money?”
I sipped my wine. It was so cold and diluted, there was barely any flavor. “It’s important that I spend time on my own,” I said. “To recharge.”
“You can’t recharge here?”
At this, Ellen cocked her brow and I wondered if she had an inkling of my nocturnal activities. After all, she had known about NYU and my age. Ellen probably wondered at my lack of interest in a boyfriend at twenty-five years old. I always returned home directly after any rendezvous. Occasionally, I dropped asides about my absolute devotion to Reveal to stave off concerns that my single status was anything more than standard-issue workaholism. As I crept closer to my thirties, I wasn’t sure that my efforts would do the trick.
“It’s better for Reveal that I have space from it when I’m not at the office,” I said. This was a lie; there wasn’t a second of my day when I wasn’t thinking about my company, it didn’t matter where I was. “Besides, I’m sure you and Donald will appreciate having the apartment back to yourselves.”
“Of course,” Ellen said sharply.
I realized then that I had been more of a buffer for Ellen than I had previously understood. She lived a fantasy of success, yes, but it wasn’t magical enough to exclude loneliness. Our morning sessions were her closest approximation of affection. My announcement was, to her, a form of abandonment.
Despite her chilly reaction to my news, Ellen set me up with a real estate agent. We saw upwards of twenty apartments, the majority of which were well outside my budget. Like most super-rich people, Ellen had no concept of an average woman’s household spending. Half the places she had the agent show me were on the Upper East Side. I asked the agent if we could venture farther south.
“How much farther south?” he replied.
“Below Midtown would be great,” I told him.
The morning I walked into the Flatiron studio it was ablaze with light. The poured-concrete floors brought the city’s sidewalks indoors. The vast casement windows framed the Sixth Avenue views like artwork. I could already imagine the low-slung Italian furniture I would eventually scatter throughout. The studio was somewhat outside my budget, but if I kept my expenses extremely frugal, I could afford it. Entertainment and vacations were not part of my repertoire, anyway. This, I thought, is what success looks like.
* * *
—
Barneys New York, the chicest department store in the city, hosted an event at which I could meet some of its top customers and talk up Reveal. These personal appearances with prospective high-spending clients were part of the job of being a founder. You would think that after all the practice of Ellen dragging me to her parties and lunches, I would be a pro at such endeavors. I excelled at one-on-one interactions. They were extensions of my work as a makeup artist and, frankly, my work in the bedroom. They were intimate, energizing. Personal appearances were the opposite. They required that I stand before a room of people and charm each person, simultaneously, as though they were all the same.
The Barneys event was in the store’s basement-level restaurant. This was 2001; today, the restaurant is on the store’s windowed top floor. The original subterranean location was cool and clubby. The Barneys PR person had reserved an area of the restaurant for our private lunch. There were twenty women in attendance. I arrived fifteen minutes before the start time and somehow I was late.
“We’ve been trying your cell for over thirty minutes,” the Barneys PR person hissed when I met her at the restaurant’s entrance.
“I always forget to leave that thing on,” I told her, having never been one for technology.
She dragged me to the long table where twenty women were already seated with expectant and vaguely annoyed expressions on their tightly pulled faces. The women looked to range from forty to fifty-five years old, but I was still adjusting my age perception to the surgical interventions of the Upper East Side. I plastered on my widest, most charming smile.
“Hello, ladies,” I chirped. “I’m excited to meet you all and introduce you to Reveal.”
Stoniness greeted me. Apparently these women didn’t like to be kept waiting.
“Maybe I should tell you about Reveal’s origin story.” I chose an empty seat in the middle of the table and shared my childhood Popsicle anecdote and how that inspired Flush years later.
“It’s a cute story,” said a tough blonde across the table from me. “And I know Reveal is the ‘It’ brand right now.” I smiled. “But I’m not totally convinced I can pull off a Popsicle-lip look. Is this really for adults?”
“It’s definitely for adults,” I said. “I actually call it an ‘orgasm in a bottle.’ ”
Nervous tittering filled the table.
“That’s catchy,” said another tough blonde. “How did you come up with that?”
“Reveal is about liberating women, aesthetically and spiritually,” I told her, my face beginning to warm. “It’s about making women feel beautiful showing their true selves, including their sexual vibrancy, as opposed to masking their radiance with heavy makeup. We also have a liquid highlighter called Glow.”
“It’s a lovely idea,” said a brunette. “What are you, twenty-nine?”
“Twenty-six,” I said. She wished she looked like me at twenty-nine.
“Right,” said the brunette. “I don’t mean to be contrarian here. It’s just we have concerns you’re too young to understand. Wrinkles, sunspots, visible pores—when you’re our age, coverage becomes necessary. There are things you want to hide.”
“I disagree,” I said. “Women should never hide themselves, no matter their age. All women are at their most beautiful when you can see them naturally.”
The first tough blonde laughed ruefully.
“My husband has never seen me without full foundation. We’ve been married for over thirty years. He probably wouldn’t recognize me if I walked around with so little makeup on,” she said. “What does your boyfriend think of your barefaced cheek-tint-and-highlighter look?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said, swallowing hard. “This isn’t about men. It’s about you and your face and what makes you happy.”
“I want to feel attractive to my husband,” said the brunette. “That makes me happy.”
“Really?” I said.
“We are all married to men,” added tough blonde number one. “How could this not be about men?”
Her question hung in the air. I couldn’t imagine making decisions about how I should look based on what men wanted. Why would I care about a man’s opinion when I had no interest in being with one? I thought back to Christine and how she had allowed Ted to cajole her into a fuchsia lipstick. Christine had been a child then and these were grown women. Still, they couldn’t discount men, or they weren’t ready to. Not for the first or last time, I realized how sad it was to be straight. Yes, I had a don’t ask, don’t tell life. Yes, this ate at me, slowly, in ways that I can now admit were harmful. This robbed me of the full range of human experience. But I wasn’t stuck with a man’s version of beauty. In that one significant way, I enjoyed a freedom that the women gathered at this table would never know. I didn’t resent tough blonde number one. I pitied her.
When she realized I had no plan to answer tough blonde number one’s question, the Barneys PR woman took over the proceedings. I didn’t sell very many Reveal products at that lunch. However, my vision for Reveal had never been stronger.
* * *
—
I wasn’t downtown the day the towers fell. A routine doctor’s appointment near my apartment spared me from that. I stopped at my Flatiron studio before heading to the office, and was home when I realized what had happened. There was screaming and yelling outside my window. I switched on my television set and saw it. Pure, utter horror.
I stayed inside the rest of the day; the television played the news the whole time. There was no reason to leave. I was afraid of how the air might smell, of what I might see. My parents tried to call my cell, I learned this days later, but they couldn’t reach me, the cellular networks and phone lines were overwhelmed. I spoke with Ellen, though. Of course, she managed to get through when no one else could, how I will never know. It was the only time I ever heard Ellen’s voice tremble, which sharpened the terror of that day. Ellen offered to have me come “home,” as she put it, to move back into the guest room. I considered it, I really did. But even amid that chaos, I held tight to the independence that had propelled me out of her apartment.
It is crazy to me that the youngest employee at Reveal today was only eight years old back then. Do they remember anything? Do they remember how people were scared to enter tall buildings after that, in a city teeming with skyscrapers? How people refused to go downtown below certain streets? Can they understand how it suddenly felt like your life could be ripped from you, any second of any day, because you had the fatal misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Of course, this possibility was always there—it is part of the bargain of being alive. But before the trauma of that event, most people could comfortably suppress this knowledge as they navigated daily existence. Afterward, there was no comfort to be had.
The thing I remember most from that day is not the footage of those stricken towers—though that footage will never leave me. Nor is it the sense of a world forever reconfigured. Nor the unimaginable loss and the penetrating fear that would wake me in the middle of the night, for weeks after, with no warning, and leave me shaking and drenched in sweat. The thing that I remember most is the news reports, on television and in the next day’s papers, about the throngs of people roaming the city, cell service down, searching with desperation for their children and husbands and wives and girlfriends and boyfriends and colleagues and friends. There was no one on those streets searching for me. I was alone, in my apartment, ice-cold bottle of vodka by my side, the news loop my only companion.
I don’t say this out of self-pity. What I’m trying to express is a sense of clarity that emerged from the tragedy of that day. I had made a choice of absolute devotion to Reveal, at the expense of everything else. Instead of questioning that, I doubled down.
Investor Relations
Many businesses fled downtown after 9/11. To Ellen’s credit—and Donald’s—Reveal remained in SoHo, though the motivation wasn’t altruism. It was about appearances. New York needed to project resilience and so, too, did a New York–based company. Besides, Ellen was able to renegotiate our lease and, suddenly, our rent was a fraction of the price.
Money was on her mind. My performance at the Barneys lunch had convinced her that we required image-maintenance help, which would in turn demand more funds.
“I would like you to interview some public relations candidates,” Ellen told me one afternoon at lunch in early 2002, between bites of a Nicoise salad at a Madison Avenue canteen.
“Isn’t that something we can outsource? We’ve had plenty of press already without one,” I replied. Ellen frowned as I chewed my steak frites. It was increasingly evident that my days of French fries were numbered.
“Barneys did not go well,” Ellen said. “I don’t want something like that to happen again. In our current climate, we must be extra careful. You need someone to shape Reveal’s messaging and keep it consistent.”
“That Barneys lunch was an outlier,” I argued. “Those women were angry that I was late, even though I was actually early, and they were an older demographic. Not everyone thinks like they do.”
Ellen narrowed her eyes. “Older women, as you put it, have money to spend. We can’t just rely on youth. An experienced PR person would understand how to reach both groups without alienating anyone.”
“Fine. I’ll start interviewing people,” I said, as I sliced a bite of steak and shoved it in my mouth.
“Good. And speaking of money, we really need to bring on some new investors,” Ellen continued, her frown returning. “We are running out of funds to grow Reveal and pay these new employees. There’s no way I can continue this situation single-handedly. I was chatting with the financier Chip Adler the other night at the breast cancer research gala. He expressed interest in Reveal. He’s noticed all the celebrity fragrances coming out and those two big indie acquisitions a couple of years back. He believes that in times of great stress, women will turn to beauty as a salve. Chip could bring on some other people, too. He wants to meet with you first and get to know your vision better.”
“Okay,” I said. “No problem.”
“He mentioned Thursday evening would work.”
A waitress approached our table to clear our plates. Ellen had barely finished half her salad. As the waitress reached across me to remove my steak frites, I caught her eyes and smiled. I watched the waitress’s retreating figure clandestinely. Or so I thought.
“Careful there,” Ellen said pointedly.
I could feel my cheeks reddening.
“I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your home,” Ellen said sternly, “but if we are continuing this journey together, you must promise you will remain discreet. Not everyone is as open-minded as I am. You’re a founder. This brand will live or die on your image.”
I nodded.
“We are in a different league now. There’s no room for sloppy mistakes. Compartmentalize—that’s what leaders do. I know you have what it takes.” Ellen flagged down the same waitress, who paused at our table. She glanced in my direction, and I stared down at the white tablecloth. “We’ll take the check, please. Just the check.”
I had committed yet another youthful mistake by allowing Ellen a glimpse at my vulnerability. Sex is a basic human need, but investors don’t want to see you as human. Neither do customers. To them, you must be aspirational. A woman of any sexuality who fulfills her basic need isn’t aspirational, she isn’t a leader, she’s out of control. Our society believes that, unlike men, women are incapable of having sex without emotions. Nobody wants an entrepreneur who feels things; they want an entrepreneur who earns money.
Ellen was right: leadership requires strength and a sense of priorities. The reality was—still is, frankly—that the particulars of my personal life would have negatively impacted business, should such particulars have come to light. Hers was a tough-love approach, no arguments there. As a twenty-seven-year-old, I felt protected, like she had my best interests in mind. Today, I wonder whether “love” was ever in the mix at all.
* * *
—
Chip Adler asked to meet for a drink at a hotel on Park Avenue. Dark and clubby with oversized leather armchairs and brass sconces, the hotel’s lounge was a bastion of clichéd masculinity. Ellen had instructed me to wear a dress and heels—but not too high, Chip’s on the short side. I obeyed her orders and had on a long-sleeved black jersey dress that clung to my hips as I waited for Chip in an armchair. He arrived a few minutes after me, in a cloud of cologne and entitlement. I greeted him with a handshake and he held my proffered hand far more tightly than professional decorum dictated. He was, indeed, petite.
Chip flagged down a waiter.
“The usual,” he told the guy, then gestured at me. “And the lady will have—”
