Twinsburg Public Library (10050 Ravenna Road): The 50 Book Challenge Author Fair & Book Expo features about 20 authors, including Anastasia Hastings, Julie Ann Lindsey, Kathryn Long, Jane Ann Turzillo and Irv Korman, 1 to 3 p.m. Thursday at the Fairlawn-Bath branch of Akron-Summit County Public Library, 3101 Smith Road. Renée Rosen will sign “Fifth Avenue Glamour Girl” from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Renée Rosen now lives in Chicago her books include the Akron-set teen drama “Every Crooked Pot” and “The Social Graces,” about the wives of Gilded Age robber barons. "Fifth Avenue Glamour Girl” (432 pages, softcover) costs $17 from Berkley. According to the book’s author profile, Rosen’s next historical novel is about Ruth Handler, inventor of the Barbie doll.
(Israel did write an unauthorized biography of Lauder in 1985.) This construction is similar to that of Rosen’s “Park Avenue Summer” about a Youngstown girl who becomes the secretary of Cosmopolitan Magazine’s editor Helen Gurley Brown in 1956. The book is framed by an interview with the literary forger Lee Israel, who is trying to get Gloria to spill dirt on Lauder. Gloria, while trying to maintain her own secret past, takes quite a while to realize that others have their secrets, too. Trying to keep people from knowing her real identity, Gloria is apprehensive about attending fancy parties where she might run into people from her old life, and she is playing intermediary between Lauder and her good-guy husband while dealing with her own romantic issues. In these later years of the Depression, Lauder’s persistence and her own flawless complexion are her best selling assets, but the friendship becomes strained when Lauder begins to market to the social set to which Gloria had once belonged. Gloria is first turned off by Lauder’s aggressive approach, but they soon come to a touchy friendship. Accustomed to high society, she gets a job as a shampoo girl in the salon where she meets Lauder, who’s renting a corner of the shop to sell her products. In 1938, former socialite Gloria Downing has changed her name and is starting over in New York to conceal her connection to a family debacle. Lauder’s rise in the cutthroat cosmetic industry is dramatized in “Fifth Avenue Glamour Girl,” a novel by Akron native Renée Rosen. As they massaged "Super Rich All-Purpose Cream" into their skin, how many 1940s women knew that the luxurious product was whipped up in Estée Lauder’s tiny kitchen?
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