A New York ‘It Girl’ Goes Hollywood
Can Hollywood intimidate one of New York’s hottest “it girls”?
It seemed so, judging by Aerin Lauder’s jitters before stepping onto the red carpet at the Golden Globes on Sunday evening. “Do you think anyone will know who I am?” asked the Estee Lauder heiress, who is fast becoming as visible as the cosmetics company’s star face, Elizabeth Hurley.
Looking every inch a celebrity herself in a white Oscar de la Renta gown, the 30-year-old Lauder stopped to do interviews with E!, ABC, NBC, CBS and others. Afterward, the mother of two pronounced her Hollywood debut was “not nearly as bad as I had expected.’
After an hour or so at the ceremony, Lauder and husband Eric Zinterhofer, 29, left to watch the rest of the show on TV at the Dreamworks/Universal party at Trader Vic’s at the Beverly Hilton. Hubby turned in early, but Lauder partied on, dropping into the InStyle bash to say hello to fellow University of Pennsylvania alum Melissa Rivers. (Mom Joan Rivers interviewed Lauder for E! on the red carpet). Last stop: the Miramax party.
Just before 11 p.m., Lauder called it a night, heading back to her room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Photos taken, interviews given, mission accomplished.
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Visiting Hollywood wasn’t a social call for the executive director of creative marketing of the company her grandmother started 54 years ago. Doing the red carpet and after-party scene was a public relations move.
‘You can’t be a major company today without paying attention to celebrities. They are the leaders in beauty and fashion,” Lauder said, eyeing Gwyneth Paltrow at a nearby table during lunch at the Ivy the day before the awards.
Lauder’s appearance at the awards show is part of a campaign to freshen up the Lauder brand, which has traditionally been associated with a mature woman. Hurley is still the company’s official celebrity spokesperson, appearing in a new magazine ad campaign which Aerin helped conceptualize, based on the brand’s successful lifestyle-oriented ads of the 1970s.
But reaching out to other celebrities is part of today’s fashion game. So the Estee Lauder spa at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills was closed to the public all weekend for Bjork, Holly Hunter, Jane Seymour, Frankie Muniz and others to be manicured and massaged.
The company also created a special gift-- “24K,” a gold nail polish in a high-heel-shaped bottle that was designed and signed by Manolo Blahnik--for each Golden Globe presenter and nominee.
Lauder’s turn on the red carpet was deemed as good as gold. How many potential cosmetics customers had she reached with the interviews? Her publicist cooed, “It could be 100 million. That’s 100 times the readership of Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue.”
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Lately, Lauder has been photographed and interviewed for just about every high-profile fashion magazine. For her trip to L.A., she was joined by two company publicists, a hairstylist flown in from New York for the occasion, and a Harper’s Bazaar reporter assigned to trail her all weekend.
The phrase “down-to-earth” is used repeatedly to describe her, but Lauder’s life does include a car and driver, an impeccable designer wardrobe (De la Renta is a good friend), a nanny and an antiques-filled Park Avenue apartment.
She has a model-thin body but no personal trainer (“my 18-month-old keeps me in shape”), loves to eat (she snacked on a pupu platter at Trader Vic’s), and her biggest beauty problem is looking too young. (“Last week, when I was having dinner with my parents, I got carded,” she said.)
The morning of the Golden Globes, she went hiking with her husband in the Hollywood Hills. “That’s what’s so great about Eric: He makes me do things I wouldn’t otherwise do,” she said.
Lauder and Zinterhofer met in college, where he was a year behind her. After graduating, she went back to visit him often, staying over at his fraternity house. One weekend, she remembered arriving to find he had a haircut that made him “look like he had a wig on.” She decided to even it out.
“I asked him if he had a wastebasket and, of course, being a guy, he didn’t. So I cut his hair and threw the pieces out the window,” she said, laughing. “It was just gross.”
Although Lauder goes out socially in New York two to three times a week, she said she’d rather stay home and rent a movie. She loves kids and often warms up to people by talking about her two toddler sons.
Even though Lauder is becoming a familiar face herself, she can be star struck. She spotted Catherine Zeta-Jones at the Vanity Fair party, but didn’t want to walk up and introduce herself.
“Are you kidding?” Lauder scoffed. “Would you?”
