“I don’t know much about Lyn,” Barbara Walters says, adding that her friend Georgette “gives very interesting cocktail parties for friends. Her sister usually coordinates it.”
Fire and ice
(Harry Naltchayan/THE WASHINGTON POST) - Georgette and Robert Mosbacher at the Corcoran for an inaugural pre-party on Jan. 18, 1989.
(Dayna Smith/THE WASHINGTON POST) - Georgette Mosbacher, with a military escort, arrives at a State dinner for President Lech Walesa of Poland on March 20, 1991. Her husband was behind them as is customary.
In Tampa, the Romney campaign offered the sisters separate rooms, but they preferred to stay together. Lyn checked in early and Georgette waited for the winds and rain from Hurricane Isaac to subside before flying down two days later. When she arrived, Georgette looked around the hotel room in disapproval: “This place is not clean.”
“I thought I did it,” Lyn said, as Georgette wiped all the surfaces.
During this, the sisters’ seventh convention together, Lyn keeps Mrs. Mosbacher, as she calls Georgette in public, on schedule and in face powder as the two breeze through dinners and delegations like tropical birds amid a flock of pale gulls. Georgette wears stars-and-stripes earrings, her colored red hair in a crest, her eyebrows permanently darkened red by a tattoo artist in Gary, Ind. Lyn is ice to Georgette’s fire. She wears her bleached hair short, prefers a paler lip gloss and had her eyebrows tattooed light brown in Washington. She dons a cream-colored Renato Ballestra frock, which, like many of her outfits, was handed down to her by Georgette and was tailored to fit her smaller frame.
Despite differences in build, (“Don’t think we’ll go there, hon,” Lyn says) the sisters share laugh lines and almond-shaped eyes. Lyn’s prominent cheekbones and resemblance to the actress Annette Bening have prompted reports that she once modeled. (“Wikipedia doesn’t get much right,” Georgette says. “She was a housewife.”)
Both sisters wear gold Eagle pins on their lapels, identifying them as Romney mega-donors, and a stack of VIP credentials around their necks. At the convention, they could be seen bickering outside exclusive donor powwows (“Don’t be upset,” Georgette pleaded with Lyn outside a brunch organized by billionaire Paul Singer. “It was an honest mistake.”) or giddily relaying how Ann Romney, for whom Georgette has served on the host committee for several fundraisers in New York, privately reacted to Democratic attacks on her dressage-competing mare. (“My horse has more style and more class in its hoof than they do in their whole deal,” Lyn recounts.)
‘Being my sister is not easy’
As she waited for Lyn in the Westin lobby, Georgette explains how she beckoned her sister decades ago to move to New York from the Midwest after Lyn divorced Vladimir Gastevich, a lawyer 20 years her senior. “Look, there’s no such thing as a divorce that isn’t tough,” she says with authority. “It was devastating and, yeah, you turn to your sister. So I was there to catch her.”
Lyn returns, brandishing needle and thread.
“Being my sister is not easy,” Georgette offers. “I mean, here I am. I live this glamorous life and my sister is always in the background. Not everyone can play that role; not everyone can do that.”
“Well, that’s why it works,” says Lyn, who has retained more of her Hoosier twang than her sister.
Lyn positions herself behind Georgette, who is sitting in a blue wicker chair. Lyn remembers the timing and the circumstances of her move to New York differently. “I’ll never forget that day she called me up and said ‘I need your help, I need your help,’ ” Lyn recalls, growing teary.
Loading...
Comments