What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures Read online

  5.

  Ron Popeil inherited more than the pitching tradition of Nathan Morris. He was very much the son of S. J. Popeil, and that fact, too, goes a long way toward explaining the success of the Showtime Rotisserie. S.J. had a ten-room apartment high in the Drake Towers, near the top of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. He had a chauffeured Cadillac limousine with a car phone, a rarity in those days, which he delighted in showing off (as in “I’m calling you from the car”). He wore three-piece suits and loved to play the piano. He smoked cigars and scowled a lot and made funny little grunting noises as he talked. He kept his money in T-bills. His philosophy was expressed in a series of epigrams: To his attorney, “If they push you far enough, sue”; to his son, “It’s not how much you spend, it’s how much you make.” And, to a designer who expressed doubts about the utility of one of his greatest hits, the Pocket Fisherman, “It’s not for using; it’s for giving.” In 1974, S.J.’s second wife, Eloise, decided to have him killed, so she hired two hit men — one of whom, aptly, went by the name of Mr. Peeler. At the time, she was living at the Popeil estate in Newport Beach with her two daughters and her boyfriend, a thirty-seven-year-old machinist. When, at Eloise’s trial, S.J. was questioned about the machinist, he replied, “I was kind of happy to have him take her off my hands.” That was vintage S.J. But eleven months later, after Eloise got out of prison, S.J. married her again. That was vintage S.J., too. As a former colleague of his puts it, “He was a strange bird.”

  S. J. Popeil was a tinkerer. In the middle of the night, he would wake up and make frantic sketches on a pad he kept on his bedside table. He would disappear into his kitchen for hours and make a huge mess, and come out with a faraway look on his face. He loved standing behind his machinists, peering over their shoulders while they were assembling one of his prototypes. In the late forties and early fifties, he worked almost exclusively in plastic, reinterpreting kitchen basics with a subtle, modernist flair. “Popeil Brothers made these beautiful plastic flour sifters,” Tim Samuelson, a curator at the Chicago Historical Society and a leading authority on the Popeil legacy, says. “They would use contrasting colors, or a combination of opaque plastic with a translucent swirl plastic.” Samuelson became fascinated with all things Popeil after he acquired an original Popeil Brothers doughnut maker, in red-and-white plastic, which he felt “had beautiful lines”; to this day, in the kitchen of his Hyde Park high-rise, he uses the Chop-O-Matic in the preparation of salad ingredients. “There was always a little twist to what he did,” Samuelson goes on. “Take the Popeil automatic egg turner. It looks like a regular spatula, but if you squeeze the handle the blade turns just enough to flip a fried egg.”

  Walter Herbst, a designer whose firm worked with Popeil Brothers for many years, says that S.J.’s modus operandi was to “come up with a holistic theme. He’d arrive in the morning with it. It would be something like” — Herbst assumes S.J.’s gruff voice — “ ‘We need a better way to shred cabbage.’ It was a passion, an absolute goddam passion. One morning, he must have been eating grapefruit, because he comes to work and calls me and says, ‘We need a better way to cut grapefruit!’ ” The idea they came up with was a double-bladed paring knife, with the blades separated by a fraction of an inch so that both sides of the grapefruit membrane could be cut simultaneously. “There was a little grocery store a few blocks away,” Herbst says. “So S.J. sends the chauffeur out for grapefruit. How many? Six. Well, over the period of a couple of weeks, six turns to twelve and twelve turns to twenty, until we were cutting thirty to forty grapefruits a day. I don’t know if that little grocery store ever knew what happened.”

  S. J. Popeil’s finest invention was undoubtedly the Veg-O-Matic, which came on the market in 1960 and was essentially a food processor, a Cuisinart without the motor. The heart of the gadget was a series of slender, sharp blades strung like guitar strings across two Teflon-coated metal rings, which were made in Woodstock, Illinois, from 364 Alcoa, a special grade of aluminum. When the rings were aligned one on top of the other so that the blades ran parallel, a potato or an onion pushed through would come out in perfect slices. If the top ring was rotated, the blades formed a crosshatch, and a potato or an onion pushed through would come out diced. The rings were housed in a handsome plastic assembly, with a plunger to push the vegetables through the blades. Technically, the Veg-O-Matic was a triumph: the method of creating blades strong enough to withstand the assault of vegetables received a US patent. But from a marketing perspective it posed a problem. S.J.’s products had hitherto been sold by pitchmen armed with a mound of vegetables meant to carry them through a day’s worth of demonstrations. But the Veg-O-Matic was too good. In a single minute, according to the calculations of Popeil Brothers, it could produce 120 egg wedges, 300 cucumber slices, 1,150 potato shoestrings, or 3,000 onion dices. It could go through what used to be a day’s worth of vegetables in a matter of minutes. The pitchman could no longer afford to pitch to just a hundred people at a time; he had to pitch to a hundred thousand. The Veg-O-Matic needed to be sold on television, and one of the very first pitchmen to grasp this fact was Ron Popeil.

  In the summer of 1964, just after the Veg-O-Matic was introduced, Mel Korey joined forces with Ron Popeil in a company called Ronco. They shot a commercial for the Veg-O-Matic for $500, a straightforward pitch shrunk to two minutes, and set out from Chicago for the surrounding towns of the Midwest. They cold-called local department stores and persuaded them to carry the Veg-O-Matic on guaranteed sale, which meant that whatever the stores didn’t sell could be returned. Then they visited the local television station and bought a two- or three-week run of the cheapest airtime they could find, praying that it would be enough to drive traffic to the store. “We got Veg-O-Matics wholesale for $3.42,” Korey says. “They retailed for $9.95, and we sold them to the stores for $7.46, which meant that we had four dollars to play with. If I spent a hundred dollars on television, I had to sell twenty-five Veg-O-Matics to break even.” It was clear, in those days, that you could use television to sell kitchen products if you were Procter & Gamble. It wasn’t so clear that this would work if you were Mel Korey and Ron Popeil, two pitchmen barely out of their teens selling a combination slicer-dicer that no one had ever heard of. They were taking a wild gamble, and, to their amazement, it paid off. “They had a store in Butte, Montana — Hennessy’s,” Korey goes on, thinking back to those first improbable years. “Back then, people there were still wearing peacoats. The city was mostly bars. It had just a few three-story buildings. There were twenty-seven thousand people, and one TV station. I had the Veg-O-Matic, and I go to the store, and they said, ‘We’ll take a case. We don’t have a lot of traffic here.’ I go to the TV station and the place is a dump. The only salesperson was going blind and deaf. So I do a schedule. For five weeks, I spend three hundred and fifty dollars. I figure if I sell a hundred and seventy-four machines — six cases — I’m happy. I go back to Chicago, and I walk into the office one morning and the phone is ringing. They said, ‘We sold out. You’ve got to fly us another six cases of Veg-O-Matics.’ The next week, on Monday, the phone rings. It’s Butte again: ‘We’ve got a hundred and fifty oversold.’ I fly him another six cases. Every few days after that, whenever the phone rang we’d look at each other and say, ‘Butte, Montana.’ ” Even today, decades later, Korey can scarcely believe it. “How many homes in total in that town? Maybe several thousand? We ended up selling two thousand five hundred Veg-O-Matics in five weeks!”

  Why did the Veg-O-Matic sell so well? Doubtless, Americans were eager for a better way of slicing vegetables. But it was more than that: the Veg-O-Matic represented a perfect marriage between the medium (television) and the message (the gadget). The Veg-O-Matic was, in the relevant sense, utterly transparent. You took the potato and you pushed it through the Teflon-coated rings and — voilà! — you had French fries. There were no buttons being pressed, no hidden and intimidating gears: you could show-and-tell the Veg-O-Matic in a two-minute spot and allay everyon
e’s fears about a daunting new technology. More specifically, you could train the camera on the machine and compel viewers to pay total attention to the product you were selling. TV allowed you to do even more effectively what the best pitchmen strove to do in live demonstrations — make the product the star.

  6.

  This was a lesson Ron Popeil never forgot. In his infomercial for the Showtime Rotisserie, he opens not with himself but with a series of shots of meat and poultry, glistening almost obscenely as they rotate in the Showtime. A voice-over describes each shot: a “delicious six-pound chicken,” a “succulent whole duckling,” a “mouthwatering pork-loin roast . . .” Only then do we meet Ron, in a sports coat and jeans. He explains the problems of conventional barbecues, how messy and unpleasant they are. He bangs a hammer against the door of the Showtime, to demonstrate its strength. He deftly trusses a chicken, impales it on the patented two-pronged Showtime spit rod, and puts it into the oven. Then he repeats the process with a pair of chickens, salmon steaks garnished with lemon and dill, and a rib roast. All the time, the camera is on his hands, which are in constant motion, manipulating the Showtime apparatus gracefully, with his calming voice leading viewers through every step: “All I’m going to do here is slide it through like this. It goes in very easily. I’ll match it up over here. What I’d like to do is take some herbs and spices here. All I’ll do is slide it back. Raise up my glass door here. I’ll turn it to a little over an hour.…Just set it and forget it.”

  Why does this work so well? Because the Showtime — like the Veg-O-Matic before it — was designed to be the star. From the very beginning, Ron insisted that the entire door be a clear pane of glass, and that it slant back to let in the maximum amount of light, so that the chicken or the turkey or the baby-back ribs turning inside would be visible at all times. Alan Backus says that after the first version of the Showtime came out Ron began obsessing over the quality and evenness of the browning and became convinced that the rotation speed of the spit wasn’t quite right. The original machine moved at four revolutions per minute. Ron set up a comparison test in his kitchen, cooking chicken after chicken at varying speeds until he determined that the optimal speed of rotation was actually six r.p.m. One can imagine a bright-eyed MBA clutching a sheaf of focus-group reports and arguing that Ronco was really selling convenience and healthful living, and that it was foolish to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars retooling production in search of a more even golden brown. But Ron understood that the perfect brown is important for the same reason that the slanted glass door is important: because in every respect the design of the product must support the transparency and effectiveness of its performance during a demonstration — the better it looks onstage, the easier it is for the pitchman to go into the turn and ask for the money.

  If Ron had been the one to introduce the VCR, in other words, he would not simply have sold it in an infomercial. He would also have changed the VCR itself, so that it made sense in an infomercial. The clock, for example, wouldn’t be digital. (The haplessly blinking unset clock has, of course, become a symbol of frustration.) The tape wouldn’t be inserted behind a hidden door — it would be out in plain view, just like the chicken in the rotisserie, so that if it was recording you could see the spools turn. The controls wouldn’t be discreet buttons; they would be large, and they would make a reassuring click as they were pushed up and down, and each step of the taping process would be identified with a big, obvious numeral so that you could set it and forget it. And would it be a slender black, low-profile box? Of course not. Ours is a culture in which the term “black box” is synonymous with incomprehensibility. Ron’s VCR would be in red-and-white plastic, both opaque and translucent swirl, or maybe 364 Alcoa aluminum, painted in some bold primary color, and it would sit on top of the television, not below it, so that when your neighbor or your friend came over he would spot it immediately and say, “Wow, you have one of those Ronco Tape-O-Matics!”

  7.

  Ron Popeil did not have a happy childhood. “I remember baking a potato. It must have been when I was four or five years old,” he told me. We were in his kitchen, and had just sampled some baby-back ribs from the Showtime. It had taken some time to draw the memories out of him, because he is not one to dwell on the past. “I couldn’t get that baked potato into my stomach fast enough, because I was so hungry.” Ron is normally in constant motion, moving his hands, chopping food, bustling back and forth. But now he was still. His parents split up when he was very young. S.J. went off to Chicago. His mother disappeared. He and his older brother, Jerry, were shipped off to a boarding school in upstate New York. “I remember seeing my mother on one occasion. I don’t remember seeing my father, ever, until I moved to Chicago, at thirteen. When I was in the boarding school, the thing I remember was a Sunday when the parents visited the children, and my parents never came. Even knowing that they weren’t going to show up, I walked out to the perimeter and looked out over the farmland, and there was this road.” He made an undulating motion with his hand to suggest a road stretching off into the distance. “I remember standing on the road crying, looking for the movement of a car miles away, hoping that it was my mother and father. And they never came. That’s all I remember about boarding school.” Ron remained perfectly still. “I don’t remember ever having a birthday party in my life. I remember that my grandparents took us out and we moved to Florida. My grandfather used to tie me down in bed — my hands, my wrists, and my feet. Why? Because I had a habit of turning over on my stomach and bumping my head either up and down or side to side. Why? How? I don’t know the answers. But I was spread-eagle, on my back, and if I was able to twist over and do it my grandfather would wake up at night and come in and beat the hell out of me.” Ron stopped, and then added, “I never liked him. I never knew my mother or her parents or any of that family. That’s it. Not an awful lot to remember. Obviously, other things took place. But they have been erased.”

  When Ron came to Chicago, at thirteen, with his grandparents, he was put to work in the Popeil Brothers factory — but only on the weekends, when his father wasn’t there. “Canned salmon and white bread for lunch, that was the diet,” he recalls. “Did I live with my father? Never. I lived with my grandparents.” When he became a pitchman, his father gave him just one advantage: he extended his son credit. Mel Korey says that he once drove Ron home from college and dropped him off at his father’s apartment. “He had a key to the apartment, and when he walked in his dad was in bed already. His dad said, ‘Is that you, Ron?’ And Ron said, ‘Yeah.’ And his dad never came out. And by the next morning Ron still hadn’t seen him.” Later, when Ron went into business for himself, he was persona non grata around Popeil Brothers. “Ronnie was never allowed in the place after that,” one of S.J.’s former associates recalls. “He was never let in the front door. He was never allowed to be part of anything.” My father, Ron says simply, “was all business. I didn’t know him personally.”

  Here is a man who constructed his life in the image of his father — who went into the same business, who applied the same relentless attention to the workings of the kitchen, who got his start by selling his father’s own products — and where was his father? “You know, they could have done wonders together,” Korey says, shaking his head. “I remember one time we talked with K-tel about joining forces, and they said that we would be a war machine — that was their word. Well, Ron and his dad, they could have been a war machine.” For all that, it is hard to find in Ron even a trace of bitterness. Once, I asked him, “Who are your inspirations?” The first name came easily: his good friend Steve Wynn. He was silent for a moment, and then he added, “My father.” Despite everything, Ron clearly found in his father’s example a tradition of irresistible value. And what did Ron do with that tradition? He transcended it. He created the Showtime, which is indisputably a better gadget, dollar for dollar, than the Morris Metric Slicer, the Dutch Kitchen Shredder Grater, the Chop-O-Matic, and the Veg-O-Matic combined.
/>   When I was in Ocean Township, visiting Arnold Morris, he took me to the local Jewish cemetery, Chesed Shel Ames, on a small hilltop just outside town. We drove slowly through the town’s poorer sections in Arnold’s white Mercedes. It was a rainy day. At the cemetery, a man stood out front in an undershirt, drinking a beer. We entered through a little rusty gate. “This is where it all starts,” Arnold said, by which he meant that everyone — the whole spirited, squabbling clan — was buried here. We walked up and down the rows until we found, off in a corner, the Morris headstones. There was Nathan Morris, of the straw boater and the opportune heart attack, and next to him his wife, Betty. A few rows over was the family patriarch, Kidders Morris, and his wife, and a few rows from there Irving Rosenbloom, who made a fortune in plastic goods out on Long Island. Then all the Popeils, in tidy rows: Ron’s grandfather Isadore, who was as mean as a snake, and his wife, Mary; S.J., who turned a cold shoulder to his own son; Ron’s brother, Jerry, who died young. Ron was from them, but he was not of them. Arnold walked slowly among the tombstones, the rain dancing off his baseball cap, and then he said something that seemed perfectly right. “You know, I’ll bet you you’ll never find Ronnie here.”

  8.

  One Saturday night, Ron Popeil arrived at the headquarters of the television shopping network QVC, a vast gleaming complex nestled in the woods of suburban Philadelphia. Ron is a regular on QVC. He supplements his infomercials with occasional appearances on the network, and, for twenty-four hours beginning that midnight, QVC had granted him eight live slots, starting with a special “Ronco” hour between midnight and 1 a.m. Ron was traveling with his daughter Shannon, who had got her start in the business selling the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator on the fair circuit, and the plan was that the two of them would alternate throughout the day. They were pitching a Digital Jog Dial version of the Showtime, in black, available for one day only, at a “special value” of $129.72.