Sunday Lunch with Sugar Rautbord
Sugar Rautbord is running a little late for lunch because, well, she had the Trumps at 11. And, the long pause from her assistant implies, you know how that can be.
Still, she has already arrived at RL, the clubby restaurant attached to Michigan Avenue's flagship Polo store, when I get there for our appointment. She has not, of course, taken a seat at our table -- the one that magically became available when I dropped her name in making the reservation -- but is, the host tells me, "visiting."
Nearly everyone in the crowded dining room seems to know Sugar, or to want to, so she flutters happily between the tables, offering smiles and personal greetings and more than a few of those oddly charming air kisses one generally associates with high society.
Sugar Rautbord, once Donna Louise Kaplan of the South Side scrap metal Kaplans, pulls all this off effortlessly, sensing my arrival without really looking and then immediately working me into her cheerful patter, prompting several of her well-heeled companions to politely pretend that they are avid Sun-Times readers.
Rautbord glides over to our table, still greeting and being greeted, and, once she sits, fixes her wide-eyed gaze on me.
I've come with a long list of questions, most of which are variations on the theme of "What is a socialite? How does one become one? What does one actually do?"
But Rautbord, whose name and visage have graced Chicago's society pages for slightly longer than she would care to acknowledge, isn't terribly interested in this topic. At 50-something, she is, she says, "very content to get off the stage" of the city's highbrow social scene.
She would rather discuss her life as a businesswoman. The president, owner and guiding spirit of Sugar Rautbord Public Relations Inc., Rautbord has made an industry of what she once simply thought of as her life.
"What, exactly, does the firm do?" I ask gently.
"Basically," she says, pausing a bit to find exactly the right words, "the kind of firm I have . . . it keeps you in the mix."
"So," I continue, referring to her morning meeting with the aforementioned Ivanka and Donald Jr., "the Trumps . . ."
An acting sponsor
"They're going to become more engaged in Chicago civic life," she says, mentioning several charitable and cultural endeavors the sibling real estate developers might underwrite.
Rautbord is acting as a sort of social sponsor for The Donald's grown children, making introductions and generally smoothing things along. She seems to say that she is being paid for this service, though the details are necessarily hazy, given the tackiness of talking about such things. Still, it is important to her that this is a professional endeavor.
"It's the kind of thing that if you did it informally," she says, "you wouldn't be taken seriously."
This is a slightly fraught moment for high society. In recent years, the "well-dressed volunteers" -- Rautbord's definition of a socialite -- who organize charitable benefits and throw important parties have come to include more and more women with professional credentials, if not actual careers. And, at the same time, the very work they used to do for free -- raising funds and organizing social networks -- has come to be viewed as a kind of professional service, available to anyone with a big enough wallet.
So, when Rautbord discusses the enterprise she calls "my little company," she treads a careful line.
"I have been involved with a lot of -- what do you call them? gentlemen? suitors? beaus? -- who were pretty serious industrialists," she says, almost modestly, before asking the waitress for a Cobb salad with no dressing or chicken, but plenty of bacon. "And they were frequently interested in meeting other people I knew, like journalists and political figures."
She pauses for a moment, making sure I am catching her meaning. "There comes a moment," she says, "when the orchid plant [as thank-you gift for making such an introduction] is not sufficient, so you either want a piece of the deal or you want to be paid somehow."
For Rautbord, that moment has clearly arrived.
"I've lived in the quote-unquote society world for a long time," she says, "and it was wonderful. But now I'm more comfortable in a business context."
'It's time'
As it happens, this change of attitude overlaps nicely with acknowledging that she has passed her 50th birthday.
"I can still be the writer," says Rautbord, who has penned three novels and is currently at work on a nonfiction project celebrating women in their 50s, "and I can still be the businesswoman, the mother, wife ... but I can't be the mistress anymore."
Rautbord, a divorced mother of a grown son, begins to tell me about the time when she first saw her own mother, a stunning beauty who had long dyed her prematurely gray hair, with her hair uncolored.
"One day," she remembers, "she just decided that it was time to be gray ... I think that moment was very important to me, like I walked in and my mom was totally gray and she was just like, 'It's time.'"
Absentmindedly tossing back her own blond tresses, Rautbord says, "Lately, a lot of people have been saying to me, 'How come you weren't at this party or this ball?' Well, it's like my mother said, 'It's time.'"
She returns, then, to talking about her clients, the young Trumps, "You know," she says, "it's really their time."
