KDhamptons has all of the information on Richard Kirshenbaum’s juicy novel, Rouge! Richard Kirshenbaum is a Sagaponack resident who has been vacationing out East since childhood. He wrote Rouge, which is soon to be a major motion picture!

Shot at his converted Quaker meeting house in Sagaponack, where he wrote a good deal of the book.

ROUGE is rich with rivalry and twists and also rich with, simply, richness: mansions and manservants, titles and tiaras, stolen sex and husbands bought and paid for. It’s an enchanting, thrilling novel that takes readers back in time to experience how trailblazing women lived at the top of their game in America.

Richard Kirshenbaum’s impressive background as a master marketer and chronicler of New York’s moneyed class gives readers a rare front seat as he delves into the world of high society and business through his characters. He is one of the most sought after personalities in New York City advertising and branding, a serial entrepreneur, and best-selling author who has published five books. His last,“Isn’t That Rich, Life Among the One Percent” published by Open Road, based on his monthly column for the NewYork Observer, was recently sold to ABC Studios in partnership with Ben Silverman. His new book and first novel, Rouge,will be made into film by Sony and produced by Wendy Finerman who won an Oscar for Forrest Gump and also produced The Devil Wears Prada. Currently, Kirshenbaum is CEO and Founder of NSG/SWAT, a high-profile boutique branding agency he launched in 2011. Kirshenbaum has lectured at Harvard Business School, The Newhouse School of Communications, has appeared on 20/20, CNN, MSNBC and had a cameo in Morgan Spurlock’s The Greatest Movie EverSold. He was named to Crain’s New York Business’s “40 underForty” list, was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 2000, and was named one of the most powerful New Yorkers by Gotham Magazine in 2012.

The book revolves around the lives, loves and sacrifices of the visionaries who invited the modern cosmetics industry based in the Hamptons, New York, Palm Beach and Paris. Josephine Herz is a global icon and the richest woman in the world, who transformed herself from plain Josiah Herzenstein, who fled Poland after WWII. Josephine’s lifelong rival, Constance Gardiner, is the ultimate horsey society girl who invents the door-to-door business and motivates a female workforce, the”Gardner Girls,” but whose deepest secret threatens everything she’s built. They were the smartest, toughest entrepreneurs in mid-century America—and the first women to top major corporations, built upon their own creations.They looked deep into the souls of the women around them, saw what they yearned for, and provided it, inventing the beauty business along the way. Their own lives were a stylish stew: big circles of Dior “New Look” skirts, bright red lipstick, banquettes at “21”with drivers outside waiting to take them home to Park Avenue. CeeCee Lopez is a bi-racial beauty who overcomes prejudice and heartbreak to found the first African-American hair relaxer company and become her community’s first female millionaire. And Mickey Heron is a dashing ladies’ man whose cosmetics business was founded in a Hollywood brothel. All women are tangled in a brutal struggle to be number one—and not to be found out.

This is a must-read. Order here.

—by Willa O’Connor