Cruise Exec Spotlight: Edie Rodriguez

Girl Power

Edie Rodriguez brings passion and drive to her life — and Crystal Cruises.

By Fran Golden

Edie Rodriguez (née Edie Bornstein), president and chief operating office of Los Angeles–based luxury line Crystal Cruises, is a 53-year-old Type-A personality who sleeps four hours a night, likes fast cars, and never met a Neiman Marcus she didn’t like.

And she’s obsessed — with Rod Stewart.

“Okay, I’m a Rod Stewart fanatic,” she says in an interview with Porthole Cruise Magazine. “I have been a Rod Stewart fanatic since I was 12 years old and I have seen him perform 253 times around the world.”

For her 50th birthday, Stewart called her up on stage during a show in Las Vegas.

Stewart’s “Shelly My Love,” with the name Edie subbed for Shelly, was also played when Rodriguez married her long-time boyfriend, Emmy Award–nominated video producer/editor Tom Rodriguez last year in a lavish affair at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.

That was the first event in a year that she jokingly refers to as “four weddings and no funeral.”
While in Italy for their honeymoon, the couple tied the knot again shipboard with 18 of their friends joining them on a Crystal Cruises sailing. Before the end of the year, the couple also planned to do a quick third wedding at the Elvis Chapel in Vegas as well as a cocktail party and ceremony on the rooftop of their Los Angeles apartment.

Is that the kind of stuff Rodriguez thinks up in the wee hours of the night when she can’t sleep?
“Don’t kid yourself, you’re right,” she says in an accent that belies her New York roots. Part of her restlessness also has to do with her drive and her passion. “I am the Energizer Bunny with 1,000% work ethic,” she says.

Travel got into her soul as a child growing up in New York, when she decided her quest was to see the world. But there was the slight issue that she had no money, she laughs. So she went to work as a travel consultant, relocated to…

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^{Photo: Andrew Duany Photography Inc.}