The Chameleon

Follows the beautiful Claire Organ from her humble origins in a Chicago Marshall Field's Department Store through her marriages to a rich WASP, an Italian duke, a Hollywood producer, and a newspaper tycoon

Full of improbabilities, clich?s, celebrity names and fancy labels, Rautbord's (Sweet Revenge; Girl's in High Places) modern-day Cinderella story entertains despite the plot machinations and compulsive name-dropping. Or name-changing: the heroine starts off as Claire Organ and swiftly accumulates surnames and the concomitant husbands, new identities and social positions. For Claire Organ Harrison Duccio Lefkowitz Grant, besides being gorgeous, is gifted with a remarkable ability to reinvent herself time and time again, ostensibly as a matter of survival and to protect her children. But Claire's ascent into fabulousness was foreshadowed early in life. Born to an abandoned shopgirl in Chicago's Marshall Fields Department Store on December 23, 1923, Claire is raised by a triumvirate of sales ladies for the upscale store. Between the calligraphy and cooking classes, exposure to antiques and quality merchandise, and her "auntie's" guidance, Claire learns more than girls enrolled at the snootiest schools. Her chameleon-like ability to adapt colludes with her ambition as she becomes, successively, a WASP's wife, a Washington aide during WWII, an international hostess, a Hollywood player, a member of Congress and, ultimately, an ambassador. (The parallels to Pamela Harriman's life are titillating There's plenty of melodrama, romance and heartache in Claire's tale. While readers will enjoy her adventures and admire her spunk, however, they may also wonder why this capable, clever and charming heroine never manages to outgrow her longing for a man to rescue her, and to provide her with social and financial opportunities, an identity and a future.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Another fat letter stuffed with fashion tips and consumer- paradise cultural suggestions from Chicago socialite Rautbord, whose Sweet Revenge (1992) led us into her world of big spenders. Her newest is more serious, with vague echoes of the life of Clare Booth Luce. Rautbord here retails a Cinderella story of fatherless Claire Organ, the chameleon of the title, and her numerous wealthy princes whose gilded coaches never turn into pumpkins at midnight but only add to her personal wealth and power. Claire's abandoned mother, Violet Organ, a dreamy-eyed, shy saleswoman at Marshall Fields in Chicago in 1924, gives birth to Claire in the Fine Dress Department ``amid the pearl necklaces, silk lingerie, high-fashion shoes, and women's fancy custom apparel directly beneath Louis Comfort Tiffany's grand mosaic dome.'' Her arrival on Christmas Eve makes the Tribune's front page, and Claire becomes something of a ward of the store, spending her childhood compiling an encyclopedic knowledge of every top-quality brand name in each of its departments, including furniture. Violet becomes the store's top fashion expert for high-society weddings, an elevation that eventually leads to Claire's leap into Tuxedo Park high-society when she marries young William Henry Harrison V (``Harry''), a pilot who, after Pearl Harbor is bombed, is shipped to the South Pacific while Claire has his baby. When Harry's father becomes head of the War Production Board in Washington, Claire joins him as his assistant and shows her savvy for getting war matriel to the right sectors and, later, for helping him carry out the Marshall Plan. Successive lovers or husbands include her father-in-law, Harrison (who fathers her star-crossed second child), a nasty Italian shipping bigwig (who gets speargunned!), a Jewish movie producer, and a newspaper publisher. Celebrities from Claire's various eras help enliven an ever- smooth, sandalwood soaper with class stamped all over it. Quite dreamy, with mild dips into sexreal sugar all the way. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Unbelievable as it was for Claire Organ to first enter high society in 1941 at the age of 18 through marriage to a descendant of two former presidents, it was just the beginning of a life of unbelievable events that would take her both to the highest heights, surrounded by wealth and power, and to the lowest lows with barely a penny to her name--all the while clinging to the desperate hope of one day being with her one true, but forbidden, love. Claire's life story is so very unbelievable that it serves merely as a showcase for descriptions of the trappings and lifestyles of the very rich and very famous: furniture, food, jewels, gowns, parties, travel, high-stakes deals. As she moves through the higher echelons of society and politics in both the U.S. and Europe, the fictitious Claire is constantly rubbing shoulders with actual famous figures from the early thirties through the mid-seventies. Incidentally, Rautbord is a member of Chicago's Social Register and author of Sweet Revenge (1992) Grace Fill

Claire Organ was literally born and raised in the vast Chicago department store Marshall Field's. Thanks to her four wealthy husbands, her life is an unlikely but wild ride from FDR's White House to glamorous postwar Italy to Hollywood and finally to the U.S. Congress. The book is full of vicarious luxury, haute couture, exotic locales, and historical cameos by the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Lana Turner, and Jackie Onassis. The result is entertaining reading when one is able to overlook the occasionally ludicrous plot, the incongruous behavior of the heroine, and the book's odd message about a woman rising to international power largely as a result of the influences of the various men in her life, most of whom have treated her poorly. Rautbord (Sweet Revenge, LJ 7/92) was recently named one of Vanity Fair's 200 most influential women for her high-society benefit work. Her latest is a book to bring to the beach.ALisa Bier, Univ. of Texas at Austin
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.