It was Monday, Oct. 12, 8:30 a.m., and on the set of CBS’s Early Show in midtown, the socialite eminence Evelyn Lauder and the actress Elizabeth Hurley were sitting in the green room, getting their hair sprayed, their lips painted and their faces dabbed with foundation.

They were there to talk about the Breast Cancer Awareness campaign of Estee Lauder Companies, where Mrs. Lauder is the senior corporate vice president and Ms. Hurley is a spokesperson. They both wore pink: Ms. Hurley a ruffled pink blouse with black trousers, and Mrs. Lauder a pink coat over a black dress and a weighty necklace made of silver-colored glass, netted and on a ribbon, by Oscar de la Renta. “A lot of things are on ribbons this year—it’s very hot,” she said later.

Right before the two were escorted outdoors for the segment, a producer approached Ms. Lauder’s publicist: “How does Ms. Lauder like to be called?”

“Mrs. Lauder,” the publicist replied.

“Mrs. Lauder,” who is 73, was born Evelyn Hauser in Vienna, from which she escaped with her parents during World War II. “It was a very dramatic story,” she told The Observer. “The ship on which we were sailing was one of three in a convoy that went the North Atlantic route, but that route had been mined by the Germans, and the first ship hit a mine and exploded, and we had to take in the survivors.”

In New York, Evelyn attended Hunter College High School and Hunter College. During her freshman year at the latter, a friend invited her to a party to meet two young men the friend had met over winter vacation in Florida. The friend wanted “Bob” to be her date, and so Evelyn would have to go with the one named Leonard. His mother Estee sold makeup; he lived on 77th Street; and he was in graduate school at Columbia.

“Leonard came to my house to pick me up on West 86th Street, he met my father and I went to this party,” Mrs. Lauder said. “When I came home, my father was waiting for me, so I thought something happened because he never waited for me. I said, ‘What happened to Mom?’ He said, ‘Nothing happened to Mom. I just wanted to tell you, that is a nice boy.’”

Mr. Lauder departed for the Navy. But he began phoning Evelyn regularly while away and asked her out for dates when he returned home on weekends. “The problem was that if you didn’t have a date by Tuesday, you were a wallflower,” she said. “So I always had a date Friday or Saturday night, so he would be my Sunday afternoon date. One time he taught me how to drive in a parking lot at Jones Beach. He had a Plymouth. I didn’t release the hand brake and I burned out the lining of his brakes!”

They married in 1959, at the Plaza in front of 150 guests. Since then, Ms. Lauder has become a philanthropist of the scale of the late Pat Buckley and Lady Astor, donating money to the Central Park Conservancy and New Yorkers for Parks, and establishing the Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Foundation with her husband. Then, after a breast cancer scare in the ’80s—she was never actually diagnosed—she shifted her efforts, raising $18 million in 1989 to open the first Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center of Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s Cancer Center; helping to create those Pink Ribbons; and founding the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF). And earlier this month, the Lauders’ foundation gave a gift of $50 million to open the new Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center, three times larger than the first.

 

AFTER THEIR  Early Show appearance, the ladies got into their red Lexus and headed to Fox’s Good Day New York, where Ms. Lauder ran into makeup artist Bobbi Brown, CEO of Bobbi Brown cosmetics, which the Lauder company bought in 1995.

“Bobbi! What are you doing here?” said Ms. Lauder, embracing her, and then turning to The Observer. “Bobbi is part of our family.”

Estee Lauder started out selling four products: all-purpose cream, creme pack, cleansing oil and skin lotion. But since Mr. Lauder joined his mother’s business, in 1958, it has grown to include the beauty brands Aramis, Bumble & Bumble, Clinique, La Mer, MAC, Origins, Tom Ford Beauty and Sean John fragrances. After Evelyn married Leonard and left her job as a schoolteacher in Harlem, she, too, joined her mother-in-law.

“She was very chic, very well dressed and had a beautiful home,” Mrs. Lauder recalled of her first meeting with Estee. “At their house on 77th Street, she had an all-white living room, from the carpeting to the silk on the couches to the draperies to the walls. I had never in my life seen an all-white living room!”

Mrs. Lauder added: “She was very welcoming. I would have never [worked for her] if she wasn’t. She said, ‘Someday this will all be yours. I’d really love you to do this with me.’”

The Lauder family members hold the majority of the stock at the public company. Mrs. Lauder’s son William is the executive chairman (son Gary is a venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley); her nieces Aerin and Jane work there; and the elder Mr. Lauder is chairman emeritus. Mrs. Lauder, meanwhile, keeps an office and two assistants, and meets weekly with the fragrance development heads. She would not disclose her salary: “I don’t even know what it is, if you really want to know the truth.”

At Fox’s studios, where Ms. Hurley changed into a different pink blouse, the ladies ran into Sopranos actor Vincent Pastore. “E. Hurley. We were in Mickey Blue Eyes together. Hello!” Ms. Hurley said to Mr. Pastore, jutting out her hand. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m doing world hunger,” he replied.

“We’re here for breast cancer!” Ms. Hurley said.

“Have you met Los Lonely Boys?” Mr. Pastore said, ushering over the Hispanic rock band from Texas. 

 

AFTER ANOTHER CREAM couch, another pink shirt from Ms. Hurley and another perky host—at LXTV—the ladies arrived at the Waldorf Astoria’s Presidential Suite. It was noon. “The fixtures in that bathroom—it’s from the ’30s!” Mrs. Lauder told Ms. Hurley and her bodyguard as she appeared from the rest room. In a vast, empty dining hall nearby, they met up with eight co-chairs (Anne Eisenhower, Arlene Taub, and Gail Hilson among them) of the upcoming BCRF luncheon to do a formal tasting and finalize the menu. Tickets are $1,600 each; $1.8 million has already been raised.

Rice-crusted halibut with long beans, shitake mushrooms, coconut sticky rice and ginger passion-fruit sauce appeared. “I think it’s a little white-looking. Can we do something about that?” Mrs. Lauder asked. The chef promptly resolved the problem with a julienne of peppers atop the coconut rice.

Next came wild king salmon and balsamic vinegar-glazed chicken. Among the topics of discussion as the ladies nibbled: Milking pregnant cows gives 11-year-old girls breast cancer; Bergdorf Goodman is empty, but the shoe department isn’t because, according to Ms. Lauder, “You can wear last year’s suit with this year’s shoes”; and, according to Ms. Taub, birth-control pills are responsible for certain strains of cancer and “are the worst thing that has ever happened to women.” Ms. Hilson disagreed: “But they gave women sexual freedom.” To which Ms. Taub retorted: “And what’s so good about that?”

Mrs. Lauder changed the subject to recent advances in reconstructive surgeries. “So are you saying that people with mastectomies can keep their own nipples now?” asked Ms. Hurley.

For dessert, they tried low-fat strawberry parfait, pistachio dacquoise, warm apple-strudel crepes and a Pavlova, which Ms. Lauder found “divine,” but which was overruled by a popular vote for the strudel.

“Do you text, Evelyn?” Ms. Hurley was now asking Mrs. Lauder.

“No. I like handwriting and I like voices,” she replied. 

“What about a BlackBerry?” one of the others asked.

“My thumbs are too fat,” the doyenne said.

Unlike Mrs. Lauder, the young socialites of today seem more concerned about making their reality TV debut than creating a philanthropic legacy. Does she think they understand the responsibility that comes with their social standing?

“I think they do,” Mrs. Lauder said. “You think of Allison Roosevelt and Tory Burch and my nieces Aerin and Jane and my son William and certainly my California son Gary are extremely philanthropic with a great deal of organizations like the Aspen Institute, the Fresh Air Fund and RDC. It is important for us to be able to network with younger people because we can’t live forever.”

After a break, The Observer met the ladies at Bloomingdale’s at 5 p.m., where they would light the department store’s facade pink. Ms. Hurley managed to bring along two brand-new pink outfits, and Mrs. Lauder, having had a chance to change, was now wearing an all-pink dress herself, and heels. Her hair had been redone and her makeup reapplied, and she was smiling her way through the room.

Ms. Hurley said this was entirely in character and recalled when the Lauders attended her wedding to Indian textile heir Arun Nayar in Jodhpur, India, in 2007. 

“They were the last people standing. It was 5 in the morning, they were in turbans and jewelry and they were up dancing to hip-hop!” Ms. Hurley said. “Evelyn has more energy than any teenager I’ve ever met. She just hits the ground and runs.”

ialeksander@observer.com