LITMIR.BIZ

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was good. And I said as much.

      “Well, I’m glad you agree,” Claudia said, her tone thick with irony. “Because a full two-thirds of our marketing budget for this year is now being redirected toward making Roxy D a household name—or should I say a dorm-room name.”

      “Hmmm,” I muttered noncommittally, while the impact of that sank in. For the past three years, my role, under Claudia’s leadership, had been to develop marketing and advertising that positioned Roxanne Dubrow as the premiere mature woman’s cosmetic company.

      “Now they’ve brought in this little chippy from the U.K., and apparently she’s cast a spell over the whole Dubrow clan—or at least Michael. But you know how Dianne listens to everything her brother says as if he were some sort of marketing genius.” This earned another roll of Claudia’s eyes, as she hated the fact that Michael, simply by virtue of his role as heir to the Dubrow crown, frequently imposed his point of view on everything from marketing to packaging to color palettes. He was very hands-on, and though I was loath to admit it, it was one of the things I had admired about him. His passion for the business. His ambition.

      “Suddenly Dianne is positively dazzled by the idea that the Roxy D brand is going to lure all those twentysomethings back to the Roxanne Dubrow counters. And she’s wagering big on that assumption,” Claudia finished, naming a figure that had me sucking in my breath.

      The last time our department had seen that kind of money was during the heyday of Roxanne Dubrow’s Youth Elixir—not that I had been around to witness that. Created in the early eighties, Youth Elixir was the moisturizer that Roxanne Dubrow had made its reputation on. Youth Elixir promised to refresh, refine and, most of all, restore all the vital moisture that started to seep out of the skin the moment a woman reached the big 3-0. It was a pretty good product. In fact, I might have been tempted to drop $65 for two ounces of the stuff if I didn’t get it by the case for free.

      “So what about the Youth Elixir campaign?” I asked, bewildered about where the money for the advertising for this would come. Youth Elixir had been such a perennial bestseller for Roxanne Dubrow that just six months ago, Dianne had advocated making the moisturizer the center of the Spring campaign. During a corporate strategy meeting held right here in the New York office, she had stated that putting the company’s flagship product on the front lines once more would remind consumers of the powerhouse product that had made Roxanne Dubrow what it is today, and hopefully convince new consumers to try it. But apparently that had all changed.

      “It’s on the backburner,” Claudia replied, giving me a look weighted with meaning. As if she saw this as the beginning of some end I could not yet fathom. “The idea is that if we successfully lure the younger market to the counter with Roxy D, they’ll eventually graduate to Roxanne Dubrow.”

      “Hmmm,” I said again, wondering at the implications of this for me. After all, the Youth Elixir campaign was to be my campaign to run, under Claudia’s leadership, of course.

      As if in answer to my unasked question, Claudia continued, “You and I are going to have our hands full over the next few months working on this dreadful new campaign.”

      I looked at her, feeling a bit of relief that I was to have a role in the campaign that was to be the company’s lifeblood, judging from the amount of money we were sinking into it. I had seen the careers of product managers of yesteryear shrink to nothing during budget changes. Though Roxanne Dubrow had acquired other brands over the years, I always felt fortunate to be working on the signature brands, especially when budget time came.

      “We need to do some testing, develop a new package,” Claudia was saying now. “Line up the talent for the print campaign….”

      My mind immediately began to roam over the current crop of models out there. “Well, there’s no shortage of younger models,” I said finally, realizing that the youth fever had already taken over in most marketplaces. That Roxanne Dubrow might, in fact, be a little late in jumping on this particular bandwagon.

      “Oh, Dianne has already made her decision,” Claudia said now, and I could tell how much it irked her to receive all her marching orders from on high. “She wants Irina Barbalovich,” she declared.

      I quickly wrapped my mind around that. Irina had been embraced by the fashion world ever since she had been plucked from her parents’ farm in rural Russia to walk the runways of Paris at the tender age of seventeen. In fact, in the past six months, she had gotten more magazine covers than Cindy Crawford at the height of her career. Which meant we were going to pay through the nose for her. Now I understood where most of that budget was going. Irina was the next generation of supermodel, and the fact that Dianne hoped to head up our spring campaign with her was big. Roxanne Dubrow usually chose a no-name stunner they inevitably turned into a star. Now it looked like Dianne was hoping to harness the power of the industry’s latest supermodel. “Didn’t you say they wanted a sixteen-year-old?” I asked, somewhat inanely, still trying to figure out the implications of this for us in marketing. “I think Irina’s closer to nineteen by now…” I continued, remembering a profile I had read of her when she did a recent cover for Cosmo.

      “Sixteen, nineteen. Whatever,” Claudia said, waving a hand dismissively, as if anyone under the age of twenty was not worthy of her regard. “She’s the next big thing, and if we don’t bring her on board soon, my dear Grace, we may find ourselves without a campaign at all.”

      I didn’t miss the threat beneath her words, but I took it with a grain of salt. Claudia was forever hinting at the annihilation of our jobs. I sometimes wondered if it was the only thing that motivated her to get out of bed and come to work these days.

      “We’ll get her,” I said, ready to take on the challenge. After all, there is nothing like a full work life to keep a woman from remembering how empty her love life has suddenly become.

      3

      “Give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.”

      —Mae West

      If Roxanne Dubrow’s new marketing plan sent a shudder through Claudia, it was like a balm to my soul. As I put together an agenda for the coming month, filled with meetings with New Product Development, entertaining bids from ad firms, talking with the sales reps about in-store positioning, I knew I was going to be okay. Even Lori seemed to shrug off her own personal crisis when I filled her in on what needed to be done for the new campaign. Maybe it was the excitement of seeing the new product that would one day be Roxy D, as boxes of Sparkle had already been shipped in from the Dubrow compound on Long Island for us to review. Or maybe it was the dozen long-stems Dennis had sent, which seemed to ameliorate any wounds his newly announced future plans had caused. For a brief moment, I even hoped for my own long-stems—not that I wanted Ethan back, but a girl did like a man to grovel a bit. Although I hardly expected that from Ethan. One of the few things he and I had in common was a stubborn streak a mile wide.

      Besides, I had already begun to build up a wall of indifference to him.

      So I was dually armed when I found myself sitting before the one person whose whole purpose, at least for the forty-five minutes a week we spent together, was to probe at whatever feelings she believed I was having.

      Shelley Longford, my therapist.

      “You broke up with him?” Shelley said after I had blithely related the story of my mishap with Ethan, after spending more than half the session seated in the chair across from her in a tiny, nondescript office on the fourth floor of an equally nondescript office building on W. 72nd Street, relating the more mundane details of my life. The new campaign at Roxanne Dubrow. The fact that I was having trouble getting my super to come up and fix a crack that had begun in the ceiling of my pretty, albeit ancient, bathroom. I think I was starting to bore myself, which probably made me blurt out the news of my breakup.

      In truth, I took a certain satisfaction in the shock that wreathed Shelley’s normally composed features. I had been seeing her just four months, and this was the first time I seemed to get some sort of rise out of her. The most I had seen before was a nervous tuck of that shiny dark hair behind

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