There’s a New Book About Mary Kay Ash and Dallas Real Estate, and We Got a Scoop!

If you live in Dallas, the name Mary Kay Ash pulls about as much weight as Ebby Halliday. In fact, our own Elaine Raffel worked for Mary Kay Cosmetics. Fun fact: Elaine hired ME to freelance for Mary Kay when I was a young mom.

Elaine’s story earlier this month about Richard Rogers’ homes drew the attention of a lovely woman in New York City who wrote a book about Mary Kay, which goes on sale TODAY! She is Mary Lisa Gavenas. Her book “Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay Ash” is loaded with Dallas real estate dirt because beautiful, lavish homes always follow fortune and fame.

We also love that it’s loaded with citations from CandysDirt.com.

“I’ve actually cited CandysDirt.com in the book’s endnotes (there are over a thousand of those),” Gavenas told me. Love it!

You will definitely want to buy this book. I personally cannot wait. And stay tuned — I’ve offered to have a book signing party for Mary Lisa when she comes to Dallas… and we shall do it at a Frank Meier house!

Did you know that Mary Kay almost lived in a high-rise? Neither did we.

Most people know about the Frank L. Meier-designed Round House on Lupton Circle that Mary Kay Ash built with her husband Mel. And everyone knows about the now-demolished Fred Wynn-designed Pink Palace in Preston Hollow, where she lived after Mel’s death. But almost no one knows that between those two, Mary Kay went to enormous expense to commission another residence — and then decided not to move in.

Here’s that story from “Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay Ash,” published by Viking Penguin and available for purchase on April 28:

While Mel was alive, everyone pretended that he paid for the Round House and its upkeep. No need for that anymore.

Nor to pretend that the 4,500 square feet of the Round House were still big enough for Mary Kay. Gone were the days when a dozen or so Directors in Qualification trooped through for their tea, cookies, and tour. Planning her dream house, Mary Kay had never dreamed she would be hosting three hundred or four hundred women at a time. “It was a tradition that the directors [in qualification] would visit with Mary Kay at home, and by now there were so many of them that the Round House was getting kind of cramped,” Erma Thomson, her longtime assistant, explained. At the same time, Mary Kay noticed that her National Sales Directors were moving into huge showplaces. As Thomson said, “She thought she might like to have a place like that too.”

Richard was also pressuring her to live someplace bigger. He had long since moved into his own Frank L. Meier–designed, built-to-order $5.38 million mansion, sited where he could sit on his back terrace and watch golfers struggle with the fourteenth hole at the Bent Tree Country Club. Ben, who had left the company years before, had a house more than twice the size of his mother’s, on a lot seven times as big.

So, with the intention of creating a single superluxury complex big enough to satisfy Richard, set a standard for her NSDs, and entertain all those DIQs, Mary Kay bought three high-rise apartments in a new complex near the Galleria. Then she hired Meier again.

Interior walls were torn down and renovations underway before she began to think better of it. Thomson remembered her saying, “‘I don’t want to live up in the air.’” Meier remembered her visiting the site and going to the balcony to admire her new view: “She came back inside and told me, ‘Frank, the height makes my poodle nervous.’” And that was the end of that.

©Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay by Mary Lisa Gavenas

@Selling_Opportunity