PART ONE.OBSESSIVES, PIONEERS, AND OTHER VARIETIES OF MINOR GENIUS
“To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.”
The Pitchman
RON POPEIL AND THE CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAN KITCHEN
1.
The extraordinary story of the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ begins with Nathan Morris, the son of the shoemaker and cantor Kidders Morris, who came over from the Old Country in the 1880s, and settled in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Nathan Morris was a pitchman. He worked the boardwalk and the five-and-dimes and county fairs up and down the Atlantic coast, selling kitchen gadgets made by Acme Metal, out of Newark. In the early forties, Nathan set up N. K. Morris Manufacturing – turning out the KwiKi-Pi and the Morris Metric Slicer – and perhaps because it was the Depression and job prospects were dim, or perhaps because Nathan Morris made such a compelling case for his new profession, one by one the members of his family followed him into the business. His sons Lester Morris and Arnold (the Knife) Morris became his pitchmen. He set up his brother-in-law Irving Rosenbloom, who was to make a fortune on Long Island in plastic goods, including a hand grater of such excellence that Nathan paid homage to it with his own Dutch Kitchen Shredder Grater. He partnered with his brother Al, whose own sons worked the boardwalk, alongside a gangly Irishman by the name of Ed McMahon. Then, one summer just before the war, Nathan took on as an apprentice his nephew Samuel Jacob Popeil. S.J., as he was known, was so inspired by his uncle Nathan that he went on to found Popeil Brothers, based in Chicago, and brought the world the Dial-O-Matic, the Chop-O-Matic, and the Veg-O-Matic. S. J. Popeil had two sons. The elder was Jerry, who died young. The younger is familiar to anyone who has ever watched an infomercial on late-night television. His name is Ron Popeil.
In the postwar years, many people made the kitchen their life’s work. There were the Klinghoffers of New York, one of whom, Leon, died tragically in 1985, during the Achille Lauro incident, when he was pushed overboard in his wheelchair by Palestinian terrorists. They made the Roto-Broil 400, back in the fifties, an early rotisserie for the home, which was pitched by Lester Morris. There was Lewis Salton, who escaped the Nazis with an English stamp from his father’s collection and parlayed it into an appliance factory in the Bronx. He brought the world the Salton Hotray – a sort of precursor to the microwave – and today Salton, Inc., sells the George Foreman Grill.
But no rival quite matched the Morris-Popeil clan. They were the first family of the American kitchen. They married beautiful women and made fortunes and stole ideas from one another and lay awake at night thinking of a way to chop an onion so that the only tears you shed were tears of joy. They believed that it was a mistake to separate product development from marketing, as most of their contemporaries did, because to them the two were indistinguishable: the object that sold best was the one that sold itself. They were spirited, brilliant men. And Ron Popeil was the most brilliant and spirited of them all. He was the family’s Joseph, exiled to the wilderness by his father only to come back and make more money than the rest of the family combined. He was a pioneer in taking the secrets of the boardwalk pitchmen to the television screen. And, of all the kitchen gadgets in the Morris-Popeil pantheon, nothing has ever been quite so ingenious in its design, or so broad in its appeal, or so perfectly representative of the Morris-Popeil belief in the interrelation of the pitch and the object being pitched, as the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, the countertop oven that can be bought for four payments of $39.95 and may be, dollar for dollar, the finest kitchen appliance ever made.
2.
Ron Popeil is a handsome man, thick through the chest and shoulders, with a leonine head and striking, oversize features. He is in his midsixties and lives in Beverly Hills, halfway up Coldwater Canyon, in a sprawling bungalow with a stand of avocado trees and a vegetable garden out back. In his habits Popeil is, by Beverly Hills standards, old school. He carries his own bags. He has been known to eat at Denny’s. He wears T-shirts and sweatpants. As often as twice a day, he can be found buying poultry or fish or meat at one of the local grocery stores – in particular Costco, which he favors because the chickens there are $0.99 a pound, as opposed to a $1.49 at standard supermarkets. Whatever he buys, he brings back to his kitchen, a vast room overlooking the canyon, with an array of industrial appliances, a collection of fifteen hundred bottles of olive oil, and, in the corner, an oil painting of him, his fourth wife, Robin (a former Frederick’s of Hollywood model), and their baby daughter, Contessa. On paper, Popeil owns a company called Ronco Inventions, which has two hundred employees and a couple of warehouses in Chatsworth, California, but the heart of Ronco is really Ron working out of his house, and many of the key players are really just friends of Ron’s who work out of their houses, too, and who gather in Ron’s kitchen when, every now and again, Ron cooks a soup and wants to talk things over.
In the last thirty years, Ron has invented a succession of kitchen gadgets, among them the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator and the Popeil Automatic Pasta and Sausage Maker, which featured a thrust bearing made of the same material used in bulletproof glass. He works steadily, guided by flashes of inspiration. In August of 2000, for instance, he suddenly realized what product should follow the Showtime Rotisserie. He and his right-hand man, Alan Backus, had been working on a bread-and-batter machine, which would take up to ten pounds of chicken wings or scallops or shrimp or fish fillets and do all the work – combining the eggs, the flour, the breadcrumbs – in a few minutes, without dirtying either the cook’s hands or the machine. “Alan goes to Korea, where we have some big orders coming through,” Ron explained recently over lunch – a hamburger, medium-well, with fries – in the VIP booth by the door in the Polo Lounge, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I call Alan on the phone. I wake him up. It was two in the morning there. And these are my exact words: ‘Stop. Do not pursue the bread-and-batter machine. I will pick it up later. This other project needs to come first.’” The other project, his inspiration, was a device capable of smoking meats indoors without creating odors that can suffuse the air and permeate furniture. Ron had a version of the indoor smoker on his porch – “a Rube Goldberg kind of thing” that he’d worked on a year earlier – and, on a whim, he cooked a chicken in it. “That chicken was so good that I said to myself” – and with his left hand Ron began to pound on the table – “This is the best chicken sandwich I have ever had in my life.” He turned to me: “How many times have you had a smoked-turkey sandwich? Maybe you have a smoked-turkey or a smoked-chicken sandwich once every six months. Once! How many times have you had smoked salmon? Aah. More. I’m going to say you come across smoked salmon as an hors d’oeuvre or an entrée once every three months. Baby-back ribs? Depends on which restaurant you order ribs at. Smoked sausage, same thing. You touch on smoked food” – he leaned in and poked my arm for emphasis – “but I know one thing, Malcolm. You don’t have a smoker.”
The idea for the Showtime came about in the same way. Ron was at Costco when he suddenly realized that there was a long line of customers waiting to buy chickens from the in-store rotisserie ovens. They touched on rotisserie chicken, but Ron knew one thing: they did not have a rotisserie oven. Ron went home and called Backus. Together, they bought a glass aquarium, a motor, a heating element, a spit rod, and a handful of other spare parts, and began tinkering. Ron wanted something big enough for a fifteen-pound turkey but small enough to fit into the space between the base of an average kitchen cupboard and the countertop. He didn’t want a thermostat, because thermostats break, and the constant clicking on and off of the heat prevents the even, crispy browning that he felt was essential. And the spit rod had to rotate on the horizontal axis, not the vertical axis, because if you cooked a chicken or a side of beef on the vertical axis the top would dry out and the juices would drain to the bottom. Roderick Dorman, Ron’s patent attorney, says that when he went over to Coldwater Canyon he often saw five or six prototypes on the kitchen counter, lined up in a row. Ron would have a chicken in each of them, so that he could compare the consistency of the flesh and the browning of the skin, and wonder if, say, there was a way to rotate a shish kebab as it approached the heating element so that the inner side of the kebab would get as brown as the outer part. By the time Ron finished, the Showtime prompted no fewer than two dozen patent applications. It was equipped with the most powerful motor in its class. It had a drip tray coated with a nonstick ceramic, which was easily cleaned, and the oven would still work even after it had been dropped on a concrete or stone surface ten times in succession, from a distance of three feet. To Ron, there was no question that it made the best chicken he had ever had in his life.
It was then that Ron filmed a television infomercial for the Showtime, twenty-eight minutes and thirty seconds in length. It was shot live before a studio audience, and aired for the first time on August 8, 1998. It has run ever since, often in the wee hours of the morning, or on obscure cable stations, alongside the get-rich schemes and the Three’s Company reruns. The response to it has been such that within the next three years total sales of the Showtime should exceed a billion dollars. Ron Popeil didn’t use a single focus group. He had no market researchers, R &D teams, public-relations advisers, Madison Avenue advertising companies, or business consultants. He did what the Morrises and the Popeils had been doing for most of the century, and what all the experts said couldn’t be done in the modern economy. He dreamed up something new in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself.
3.
Nathan Morris, Ron Popeil’s great-uncle, looked a lot like Cary Grant. He wore a straw boater. He played the ukulele, drove a convertible, and composed melodies for the piano. He ran his business out of a low-slung, whitewashed building on Ridge Avenue, near Asbury Park, with a little annex in the back where he did pioneering work with Teflon. He had certain eccentricities, such as a phobia he developed about traveling beyond Asbury Park without the presence of a doctor. He feuded with his brother Al, who subsequently left in a huff for Atlantic City, and then with his nephew S. J. Popeil, whom Nathan considered insufficiently grateful for the start he had given him in the kitchen-gadget business. That second feud led to a climactic legal showdown over S. J. Popeil’s Chop-O-Matic, a food preparer with a pleated, W-shaped blade rotated by a special clutch mechanism. The Chop-O-Matic was ideal for making coleslaw and chopped liver, and when Morris introduced a strikingly similar product, called the Roto-Chop, S. J. Popeil sued his uncle for patent infringement. (As it happened, the Chop-O-Matic itself seemed to have been inspired by the Blitzhacker, from Switzerland, and S.J. later lost a patent judgment to the Swiss.)
The two squared off in Trenton, in May of 1958, in a courtroom jammed with Morrises and Popeils. When the trial opened, Nathan Morris was on the stand, being cross-examined by his nephew’s attorneys, who were out to show him that he was no more than a huckster and a copycat. At a key point in the questioning, the judge suddenly burst in. “He took the index finger of his right hand and he pointed it at Morris,” Jack Dominik, Popeil’s longtime patent lawyer, recalls, “and as long as I live I will never forget what he said. ‘I know you! You’re a pitchman! I’ve seen you on the boardwalk!’ And Morris pointed his index finger back at the judge and shouted, ‘No! I’m a manufacturer. I’m a dignified manufacturer, and I work with the most eminent of counsel!’” (Nathan Morris, according to Dominik, was the kind of man who referred to everyone he worked with as eminent.) “At that moment,” Dominik goes on, “Uncle Nat’s face was getting red and the judge’s was getting redder, so a recess was called.” What happened later that day is best described in Dominik’s unpublished manuscript, “The Inventions of Samuel Joseph Popeil by Jack E. Dominik – His Patent Lawyer.” Nathan Morris had a sudden heart attack, and S.J. was guilt-stricken. “Sobbing ensued,” Dominik writes. “Remorse set in. The next day, the case was settled. Thereafter, Uncle Nat’s recovery from his previous day’s heart attack was nothing short of a miracle.”
Nathan Morris was a performer, like so many of his relatives, and pitching was, first and foremost, a performance. It’s said that Nathan’s nephew Archie (the Pitchman’s Pitchman) Morris once sold, over a long afternoon, gadget after gadget to a well-dressed man. At the end of the day, Archie watched the man walk away, stop and peer into his bag, and then dump the whole lot into a nearby garbage can. The Morrises were that good. “My cousins could sell you an empty box,” Ron says.
The last of the Morrises to be active in the pitching business is Arnold (the Knife) Morris, so named because of his extraordinary skill with the Sharpcut, the forerunner of the Ginsu. He is in his early seventies, a cheerful, impish man with a round face and a few wisps of white hair, and a trademark move whereby, after cutting a tomato into neat, regular slices, he deftly lines the pieces up in an even row against the flat edge of the blade. Today, he lives in Ocean Township, a few miles from Asbury Park, with Phyllis, his wife of twenty-nine years, whom he refers to (with the same irresistible conviction that he might use to describe, say, the Feather Touch Knife) as “the prettiest girl in Asbury Park.” One morning recently, he sat in his study and launched into a pitch for the Dial-O-Matic, a slicer produced by S. J. Popeil some forty years ago.
“Come on over, folks. I’m going to show you the most amazing slicing machine you have ever seen in your life,” he began. Phyllis, sitting nearby, beamed with pride. He picked up a package of barbecue spices, which Ron Popeil sells alongside his Showtime Rotisserie, and used it as a prop. “Take a look at this!” He held it in the air as if he were holding up a Tiffany vase. He talked about the machine’s prowess at cutting potatoes, then onions, then tomatoes. His voice, a marvelous instrument inflected with the rhythms of the Jersey Shore, took on a singsong quality: “How many cut tomatoes like this? You stab it. You jab it. The juices run down your elbow. With the Dial-O-Matic, you do it a little differently. You put it in the machine and you wiggle” – he mimed fixing the tomato to the bed of the machine. “The tomato! Lady! The tomato! The more you wiggle, the more you get. The tomato! Lady! Every slice comes out perfectly, not a seed out of place. But the thing I love my Dial-O-Matic for is coleslaw. My mother-in-law used to take her cabbage and do this.” He made a series of wild stabs at an imaginary cabbage. “I thought she was going to commit suicide. Oh, boy, did I pray – that she wouldn’t slip! Don’t get me wrong. I love my mother-in-law. It’s her daughter I can’t figure out. You take the cabbage. Cut it in half. Coleslaw, hot slaw. Pot slaw. Liberty slaw. It comes out like shredded wheat…”
It was a vaudeville monologue, except that Arnold wasn’t merely entertaining; he was selling. “You can take a pitchman and make a great actor out of him, but you cannot take an actor and always make a great pitchman out of him,” he says. The pitchman must make you applaud and take out your money. He must be able to execute what in pitchman’s parlance is called “the turn” – the perilous, crucial moment where he goes from entertainer to businessman. If, out of a crowd of fifty, twenty-five people come forward to buy, the true pitchman sells to only twenty of them. To the remaining five, he says, “Wait! There’s something else I want to show you!” Then he starts his pitch again, with slight variations, and the remaining four or five become the inner core of the next crowd, hemmed in by the people around them, and so eager to pay their money and be on their way that they start the selling frenzy all over again. The turn requires the management of expectation. That’s why Arnold always kept a pineapple tantalizingly perched on his stand. “For forty years, I’ve been promising to show people how to cut the pineapple, and I’ve never cut it once,” he says. “It got to the point where a pitchman friend of mine went out and bought himself a plastic pineapple. Why would you cut the pineapple? It cost a couple bucks. And if you cut it they’d leave.” Arnold says that he once hired some guys to pitch a vegetable slicer for him at a fair in Danbury, Connecticut, and became so annoyed at their lackadaisical attitude that he took over the demonstration himself. They were, he says, waiting for him to fail: he had never worked that particular slicer before and, sure enough, he was massacring the vegetables. Still, in a single pitch he took in $200. “Their eyes popped out of their heads,” Arnold recalls. “They said, ‘We don’t understand it. You don’t even know how to work the damn machine.’ I said, ‘But I know how to do one thing better than you.’ They said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘I know how to ask for the money.’ And that’s the secret to the whole damn business.”
4.
Ron Popeil started pitching his father’s kitchen gadgets at the Maxwell Street flea market in Chicago, in the midfifties. He was thirteen. Every morning, he would arrive at the market at five and prepare fifty pounds each of onions, cabbages, and carrots, and a hundred pounds of potatoes. He sold from six in the morning until four in the afternoon, bringing in as much as $500 a day. In his late teens, he started doing the state- and county-fair circuit, and then he scored a prime spot in the Woolworth’s at State and Washington, in the Loop, which at the time was the top-grossing Woolworth’s store in the country. He was making more than the manager of the store, selling the Chop-O-Matic and the Dial-O-Matic. He dined at the Pump Room and wore a Rolex and rented $150-a-night hotel suites. In pictures from the period, he is beautiful, with thick dark hair and blue-green eyes and sensuous lips, and, several years later, when he moved his office to 919 Michigan Avenue, he was called the Paul Newman of the Playboy Building. Mel Korey, a friend of Ron’s from college and his first business partner, remembers the time he went to see Ron pitch the Chop-O-Matic at the State Street Woolworth’s. “He was mesmerizing,” Korey says. “There were secretaries who would take their lunch break at Woolworth’s to watch him because he was so good-looking. He would go into the turn, and people would just come running.” Several years ago, Ron’s friend Steve Wynn, the founder of the Mirage resorts, went to visit Michael Milken in prison. They were near a television, and happened to catch one of Ron’s infomercials just as he was doing the countdown, a routine taken straight from the boardwalk, where he says, “You’re not going to spend two hundred dollars, not a hundred and eighty dollars, not one-seventy, not one-sixty…” It’s a standard pitchman’s gimmick: it sounds dramatic only because the starting price is set way up high. But something about the way Ron did it was irresistible. As he got lower and lower, Wynn and Milken – who probably know as much about profit margins as anyone in America – cried out in unison, “Stop, Ron! Stop!”
Was Ron the best? The only attempt to settle the question definitively was made some forty years ago when Ron and Arnold were working a knife set at the Eastern States Exposition, in West Springfield, Massachusetts. A third man, Frosty Wishon, who was a legend in his own right, was there, too. “Frosty was a well-dressed, articulate individual and a good salesman,” Ron says. “But he thought he was the best. So I said, ‘Well, guys, we’ve got a ten-day show, eleven, maybe twelve hours a day. We’ll each do a rotation, and we’ll compare how much we sell.” In Morris-Popeil lore, this is known as “the shoot-out,” and no one has ever forgotten the outcome. Ron beat Arnold, but only by a whisker – no more than a few hundred dollars. Frosty Wishon, meanwhile, sold only half as much as either of his rivals. “You have no idea the pressure Frosty was under,” Ron continues. “He came up to me at the end of the show and said, ‘Ron, I will never work with you again as long as I live.’”
No doubt Frosty Wishon was a charming and persuasive person, but he assumed that this was enough – that the rules of pitching were the same as the rules of celebrity endorsement. When Michael Jordan pitches McDonald’s hamburgers, Michael Jordan is the star. But when Ron Popeil or Arnold Morris pitched, say, the Chop-O-Matic, his gift was to make the Chop-O-Matic the star. It was, after all, an innovation. It represented a different way of dicing onions and chopping liver: it required consumers to rethink the way they went about their business in the kitchen. Like most great innovations, it was disruptive. And how do you persuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to customers – not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.
Thirty years ago, the videocassette recorder came on the market, and it was a disruptive product, too: it was supposed to make it possible to tape a television show so that no one would ever again be chained to the prime-time schedule. Yet, as ubiquitous as the VCR became, it was seldom put to that purpose. That’s because the VCR was never pitched: no one ever explained the gadget to American consumers – not once or twice but three or four times – and no one showed them exactly how it worked or how it would fit into their routine, and no pair of hands guided them through every step of the process. All the VCR-makers did was hand over the box with a smile and a pat on the back, tossing in an instruction manual for good measure. Any pitchman could have told you that wasn’t going to do it.
Once, when I was over at Ron’s house in Coldwater Canyon, sitting on one of the high stools in his kitchen, he showed me what real pitching is all about. He was talking about how he had just had dinner with the actor Ron Silver, who was playing Ron’s friend Robert Shapiro in a new movie about the O. J. Simpson trial. “They shave the back of Ron Silver’s head so that he’s got a bald spot, because, you know, Bob Shapiro’s got a bald spot back there, too,” Ron said. “So I say to him, ‘You’ve gotta get GLH.’” GLH, one of Ron’s earlier products, is an aerosol spray designed to thicken the hair and cover up bald spots. “I told him, ‘It will make you look good. When you’ve got to do the scene, you shampoo it out.’”
At this point, the average salesman would have stopped. The story was an aside, no more. We had been discussing the Showtime Rotisserie, and on the counter behind us was a Showtime cooking a chicken and next to it a Showtime cooking baby-back ribs, and on the table in front of him Ron’s pasta maker was working, and he was frying some garlic so that we could have a little lunch. But now that he had told me about GLH, it was unthinkable that he would not also show me its wonders. He walked quickly over to a table at the other side of the room, talking as he went. “People always ask me, ‘Ron, where did you get that name GLH?’ I made it up. Great-Looking Hair.” He picked up a can. “We make it in nine different colors. This is silver-black.” He picked up a hand mirror and angled it above his head so that he could see his bald spot. “Now, the first thing I’ll do is spray it where I don’t need it.” He shook the can and began spraying the crown of his head, talking all the while. “Then I’ll go to the area itself.” He pointed to his bald spot. “Right here. OK. Now I’ll let that dry. Brushing is fifty percent of the way it’s going to look.” He began brushing vigorously, and suddenly Ron Popeil had what looked like a complete head of hair. “Wow,” I said. Ron glowed. “And you tell me ‘Wow.’ That’s what everyone says. ‘Wow.’ That’s what people say who use it. ‘Wow.’ If you go outside” – he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out onto the deck – “if you are in bright sunlight or daylight, you cannot tell that I have a big bald spot in the back of my head. It really looks like hair, but it’s not hair. It’s quite a product. It’s incredible. Any shampoo will take it out. You know who would be a great candidate for this? Al Gore. You want to see how it feels?” Ron inclined the back of his head toward me. I had said, “Wow,” and had looked at his hair inside and outside, but the pitchman in Ron Popeil wasn’t satisfied. I had to feel the back of his head. I did. It felt just like real hair.
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 everyone’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.
In the studio, Ron had set up eighteen Digital Jog Dial Showtimes on five wood-paneled gurneys. From Los Angeles, he had sent, via Federal Express, dozens of Styrofoam containers with enough meat for each of the day’s airings: eight fifteen-pound turkeys, seventy-two hamburgers, eight legs of lamb, eight ducks, thirty-odd chickens, two dozen or so Rock Cornish game hens, and on and on, supplementing them with garnishes, trout, and some sausage bought that morning at three Philadelphia-area supermarkets. QVC’s target was thirty-seven thousand machines, meaning that it hoped to gross about $4.5 million during the twenty-four hours – a huge day, even by the network’s standards. Ron seemed tense. He barked at the team of QVC producers and cameramen bustling around the room. He fussed over the hero plates – the ready-made dinners that he would use to showcase meat taken straight from the oven. “Guys, this is impossible,” he said, peering at a tray of mashed potatoes and gravy. “The level of gravy must be higher.” He was limping a little. “You know, there’s a lot of pressure on you,” he said wearily. “ ‘How did Ron do? Is he still the best?’”
With just a few minutes to go, Ron ducked into the greenroom next to the studio to put GLH in his hair: a few aerosol bursts, followed by vigorous brushing. “Where is God right now?” his co-host, Rick Domeier, yelled out, looking around theatrically for his guest star. “Is God backstage?” Ron then appeared, resplendent in a chef’s coat, and the cameras began to roll. He sliced open a leg of lamb. He played with the dial of the new digital Showtime. He admired the crispy, succulent skin of the duck. He discussed the virtues of the new food-warming feature – where the machine would rotate at low heat for up to four hours after the meat was cooked in order to keep the juices moving – and, all the while, bantered so convincingly with viewers calling in on the testimonial line that it was as if he were back mesmerizing the secretaries in the Woolworth’s at State and Washington.
In the greenroom, there were two computer monitors. The first displayed a line graph charting the number of calls that came in at any given second. The second was an electronic ledger showing the total sales up to that point. As Ron took flight, one by one, people left the studio to gather around the computers. Shannon Popeil came first. It was 12:40 a.m. In the studio, Ron was slicing onions with one of his father’s Dial-O-Matics. She looked at the second monitor and gave a little gasp. Forty minutes in, and Ron had already passed $700,000. A QVC manager walked in. It was 12:48 a.m., and Ron was roaring on: $837,650. “It can’t be!” he cried out. “That’s unbelievable!” Two QVC producers came over. One of them pointed at the first monitor, which was graphing the call volume. “Jump,” he called out. “Jump!” There were only a few minutes left. Ron was extolling the virtues of the oven one final time, and, sure enough, the line began to take a sharp turn upward, as all over America viewers took out their wallets. The numbers on the second screen began to change in a blur of recalculation – rising in increments of $129.72 plus shipping and taxes. “You know, we’re going to hit a million dollars, just on the first hour,” one of the QVC guys said, and there was awe in his voice. It was one thing to talk about how Ron was the best there ever was, after all, but quite another to see proof of it, before your very eyes. At that moment, on the other side of the room, the door opened, and a man appeared, stooped and drawn but with a smile on his face. It was Ron Popeil, who invented a better rotisserie in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself. There was a hush, and then the whole room stood up and cheered.
October 30, 2000
1.
The extraordinary story of the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ begins with Nathan Morris, the son of the shoemaker and cantor Kidders Morris, who came over from the Old Country in the 1880s, and settled in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Nathan Morris was a pitchman. He worked the boardwalk and the five-and-dimes and county fairs up and down the Atlantic coast, selling kitchen gadgets made by Acme Metal, out of Newark. In the early forties, Nathan set up N. K. Morris Manufacturing – turning out the KwiKi-Pi and the Morris Metric Slicer – and perhaps because it was the Depression and job prospects were dim, or perhaps because Nathan Morris made such a compelling case for his new profession, one by one the members of his family followed him into the business. His sons Lester Morris and Arnold (the Knife) Morris became his pitchmen. He set up his brother-in-law Irving Rosenbloom, who was to make a fortune on Long Island in plastic goods, including a hand grater of such excellence that Nathan paid homage to it with his own Dutch Kitchen Shredder Grater. He partnered with his brother Al, whose own sons worked the boardwalk, alongside a gangly Irishman by the name of Ed McMahon. Then, one summer just before the war, Nathan took on as an apprentice his nephew Samuel Jacob Popeil. S.J., as he was known, was so inspired by his uncle Nathan that he went on to found Popeil Brothers, based in Chicago, and brought the world the Dial-O-Matic, the Chop-O-Matic, and the Veg-O-Matic. S. J. Popeil had two sons. The elder was Jerry, who died young. The younger is familiar to anyone who has ever watched an infomercial on late-night television. His name is Ron Popeil.
In the postwar years, many people made the kitchen their life’s work. There were the Klinghoffers of New York, one of whom, Leon, died tragically in 1985, during the Achille Lauro incident, when he was pushed overboard in his wheelchair by Palestinian terrorists. They made the Roto-Broil 400, back in the fifties, an early rotisserie for the home, which was pitched by Lester Morris. There was Lewis Salton, who escaped the Nazis with an English stamp from his father’s collection and parlayed it into an appliance factory in the Bronx. He brought the world the Salton Hotray – a sort of precursor to the microwave – and today Salton, Inc., sells the George Foreman Grill.
But no rival quite matched the Morris-Popeil clan. They were the first family of the American kitchen. They married beautiful women and made fortunes and stole ideas from one another and lay awake at night thinking of a way to chop an onion so that the only tears you shed were tears of joy. They believed that it was a mistake to separate product development from marketing, as most of their contemporaries did, because to them the two were indistinguishable: the object that sold best was the one that sold itself. They were spirited, brilliant men. And Ron Popeil was the most brilliant and spirited of them all. He was the family’s Joseph, exiled to the wilderness by his father only to come back and make more money than the rest of the family combined. He was a pioneer in taking the secrets of the boardwalk pitchmen to the television screen. And, of all the kitchen gadgets in the Morris-Popeil pantheon, nothing has ever been quite so ingenious in its design, or so broad in its appeal, or so perfectly representative of the Morris-Popeil belief in the interrelation of the pitch and the object being pitched, as the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, the countertop oven that can be bought for four payments of $39.95 and may be, dollar for dollar, the finest kitchen appliance ever made.
2.
Ron Popeil is a handsome man, thick through the chest and shoulders, with a leonine head and striking, oversize features. He is in his midsixties and lives in Beverly Hills, halfway up Coldwater Canyon, in a sprawling bungalow with a stand of avocado trees and a vegetable garden out back. In his habits Popeil is, by Beverly Hills standards, old school. He carries his own bags. He has been known to eat at Denny’s. He wears T-shirts and sweatpants. As often as twice a day, he can be found buying poultry or fish or meat at one of the local grocery stores – in particular Costco, which he favors because the chickens there are $0.99 a pound, as opposed to a $1.49 at standard supermarkets. Whatever he buys, he brings back to his kitchen, a vast room overlooking the canyon, with an array of industrial appliances, a collection of fifteen hundred bottles of olive oil, and, in the corner, an oil painting of him, his fourth wife, Robin (a former Frederick’s of Hollywood model), and their baby daughter, Contessa. On paper, Popeil owns a company called Ronco Inventions, which has two hundred employees and a couple of warehouses in Chatsworth, California, but the heart of Ronco is really Ron working out of his house, and many of the key players are really just friends of Ron’s who work out of their houses, too, and who gather in Ron’s kitchen when, every now and again, Ron cooks a soup and wants to talk things over.
In the last thirty years, Ron has invented a succession of kitchen gadgets, among them the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator and the Popeil Automatic Pasta and Sausage Maker, which featured a thrust bearing made of the same material used in bulletproof glass. He works steadily, guided by flashes of inspiration. In August of 2000, for instance, he suddenly realized what product should follow the Showtime Rotisserie. He and his right-hand man, Alan Backus, had been working on a bread-and-batter machine, which would take up to ten pounds of chicken wings or scallops or shrimp or fish fillets and do all the work – combining the eggs, the flour, the breadcrumbs – in a few minutes, without dirtying either the cook’s hands or the machine. “Alan goes to Korea, where we have some big orders coming through,” Ron explained recently over lunch – a hamburger, medium-well, with fries – in the VIP booth by the door in the Polo Lounge, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I call Alan on the phone. I wake him up. It was two in the morning there. And these are my exact words: ‘Stop. Do not pursue the bread-and-batter machine. I will pick it up later. This other project needs to come first.’” The other project, his inspiration, was a device capable of smoking meats indoors without creating odors that can suffuse the air and permeate furniture. Ron had a version of the indoor smoker on his porch – “a Rube Goldberg kind of thing” that he’d worked on a year earlier – and, on a whim, he cooked a chicken in it. “That chicken was so good that I said to myself” – and with his left hand Ron began to pound on the table – “This is the best chicken sandwich I have ever had in my life.” He turned to me: “How many times have you had a smoked-turkey sandwich? Maybe you have a smoked-turkey or a smoked-chicken sandwich once every six months. Once! How many times have you had smoked salmon? Aah. More. I’m going to say you come across smoked salmon as an hors d’oeuvre or an entrée once every three months. Baby-back ribs? Depends on which restaurant you order ribs at. Smoked sausage, same thing. You touch on smoked food” – he leaned in and poked my arm for emphasis – “but I know one thing, Malcolm. You don’t have a smoker.”
The idea for the Showtime came about in the same way. Ron was at Costco when he suddenly realized that there was a long line of customers waiting to buy chickens from the in-store rotisserie ovens. They touched on rotisserie chicken, but Ron knew one thing: they did not have a rotisserie oven. Ron went home and called Backus. Together, they bought a glass aquarium, a motor, a heating element, a spit rod, and a handful of other spare parts, and began tinkering. Ron wanted something big enough for a fifteen-pound turkey but small enough to fit into the space between the base of an average kitchen cupboard and the countertop. He didn’t want a thermostat, because thermostats break, and the constant clicking on and off of the heat prevents the even, crispy browning that he felt was essential. And the spit rod had to rotate on the horizontal axis, not the vertical axis, because if you cooked a chicken or a side of beef on the vertical axis the top would dry out and the juices would drain to the bottom. Roderick Dorman, Ron’s patent attorney, says that when he went over to Coldwater Canyon he often saw five or six prototypes on the kitchen counter, lined up in a row. Ron would have a chicken in each of them, so that he could compare the consistency of the flesh and the browning of the skin, and wonder if, say, there was a way to rotate a shish kebab as it approached the heating element so that the inner side of the kebab would get as brown as the outer part. By the time Ron finished, the Showtime prompted no fewer than two dozen patent applications. It was equipped with the most powerful motor in its class. It had a drip tray coated with a nonstick ceramic, which was easily cleaned, and the oven would still work even after it had been dropped on a concrete or stone surface ten times in succession, from a distance of three feet. To Ron, there was no question that it made the best chicken he had ever had in his life.
It was then that Ron filmed a television infomercial for the Showtime, twenty-eight minutes and thirty seconds in length. It was shot live before a studio audience, and aired for the first time on August 8, 1998. It has run ever since, often in the wee hours of the morning, or on obscure cable stations, alongside the get-rich schemes and the Three’s Company reruns. The response to it has been such that within the next three years total sales of the Showtime should exceed a billion dollars. Ron Popeil didn’t use a single focus group. He had no market researchers, R &D teams, public-relations advisers, Madison Avenue advertising companies, or business consultants. He did what the Morrises and the Popeils had been doing for most of the century, and what all the experts said couldn’t be done in the modern economy. He dreamed up something new in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself.
3.
Nathan Morris, Ron Popeil’s great-uncle, looked a lot like Cary Grant. He wore a straw boater. He played the ukulele, drove a convertible, and composed melodies for the piano. He ran his business out of a low-slung, whitewashed building on Ridge Avenue, near Asbury Park, with a little annex in the back where he did pioneering work with Teflon. He had certain eccentricities, such as a phobia he developed about traveling beyond Asbury Park without the presence of a doctor. He feuded with his brother Al, who subsequently left in a huff for Atlantic City, and then with his nephew S. J. Popeil, whom Nathan considered insufficiently grateful for the start he had given him in the kitchen-gadget business. That second feud led to a climactic legal showdown over S. J. Popeil’s Chop-O-Matic, a food preparer with a pleated, W-shaped blade rotated by a special clutch mechanism. The Chop-O-Matic was ideal for making coleslaw and chopped liver, and when Morris introduced a strikingly similar product, called the Roto-Chop, S. J. Popeil sued his uncle for patent infringement. (As it happened, the Chop-O-Matic itself seemed to have been inspired by the Blitzhacker, from Switzerland, and S.J. later lost a patent judgment to the Swiss.)
The two squared off in Trenton, in May of 1958, in a courtroom jammed with Morrises and Popeils. When the trial opened, Nathan Morris was on the stand, being cross-examined by his nephew’s attorneys, who were out to show him that he was no more than a huckster and a copycat. At a key point in the questioning, the judge suddenly burst in. “He took the index finger of his right hand and he pointed it at Morris,” Jack Dominik, Popeil’s longtime patent lawyer, recalls, “and as long as I live I will never forget what he said. ‘I know you! You’re a pitchman! I’ve seen you on the boardwalk!’ And Morris pointed his index finger back at the judge and shouted, ‘No! I’m a manufacturer. I’m a dignified manufacturer, and I work with the most eminent of counsel!’” (Nathan Morris, according to Dominik, was the kind of man who referred to everyone he worked with as eminent.) “At that moment,” Dominik goes on, “Uncle Nat’s face was getting red and the judge’s was getting redder, so a recess was called.” What happened later that day is best described in Dominik’s unpublished manuscript, “The Inventions of Samuel Joseph Popeil by Jack E. Dominik – His Patent Lawyer.” Nathan Morris had a sudden heart attack, and S.J. was guilt-stricken. “Sobbing ensued,” Dominik writes. “Remorse set in. The next day, the case was settled. Thereafter, Uncle Nat’s recovery from his previous day’s heart attack was nothing short of a miracle.”
Nathan Morris was a performer, like so many of his relatives, and pitching was, first and foremost, a performance. It’s said that Nathan’s nephew Archie (the Pitchman’s Pitchman) Morris once sold, over a long afternoon, gadget after gadget to a well-dressed man. At the end of the day, Archie watched the man walk away, stop and peer into his bag, and then dump the whole lot into a nearby garbage can. The Morrises were that good. “My cousins could sell you an empty box,” Ron says.
The last of the Morrises to be active in the pitching business is Arnold (the Knife) Morris, so named because of his extraordinary skill with the Sharpcut, the forerunner of the Ginsu. He is in his early seventies, a cheerful, impish man with a round face and a few wisps of white hair, and a trademark move whereby, after cutting a tomato into neat, regular slices, he deftly lines the pieces up in an even row against the flat edge of the blade. Today, he lives in Ocean Township, a few miles from Asbury Park, with Phyllis, his wife of twenty-nine years, whom he refers to (with the same irresistible conviction that he might use to describe, say, the Feather Touch Knife) as “the prettiest girl in Asbury Park.” One morning recently, he sat in his study and launched into a pitch for the Dial-O-Matic, a slicer produced by S. J. Popeil some forty years ago.
“Come on over, folks. I’m going to show you the most amazing slicing machine you have ever seen in your life,” he began. Phyllis, sitting nearby, beamed with pride. He picked up a package of barbecue spices, which Ron Popeil sells alongside his Showtime Rotisserie, and used it as a prop. “Take a look at this!” He held it in the air as if he were holding up a Tiffany vase. He talked about the machine’s prowess at cutting potatoes, then onions, then tomatoes. His voice, a marvelous instrument inflected with the rhythms of the Jersey Shore, took on a singsong quality: “How many cut tomatoes like this? You stab it. You jab it. The juices run down your elbow. With the Dial-O-Matic, you do it a little differently. You put it in the machine and you wiggle” – he mimed fixing the tomato to the bed of the machine. “The tomato! Lady! The tomato! The more you wiggle, the more you get. The tomato! Lady! Every slice comes out perfectly, not a seed out of place. But the thing I love my Dial-O-Matic for is coleslaw. My mother-in-law used to take her cabbage and do this.” He made a series of wild stabs at an imaginary cabbage. “I thought she was going to commit suicide. Oh, boy, did I pray – that she wouldn’t slip! Don’t get me wrong. I love my mother-in-law. It’s her daughter I can’t figure out. You take the cabbage. Cut it in half. Coleslaw, hot slaw. Pot slaw. Liberty slaw. It comes out like shredded wheat…”
It was a vaudeville monologue, except that Arnold wasn’t merely entertaining; he was selling. “You can take a pitchman and make a great actor out of him, but you cannot take an actor and always make a great pitchman out of him,” he says. The pitchman must make you applaud and take out your money. He must be able to execute what in pitchman’s parlance is called “the turn” – the perilous, crucial moment where he goes from entertainer to businessman. If, out of a crowd of fifty, twenty-five people come forward to buy, the true pitchman sells to only twenty of them. To the remaining five, he says, “Wait! There’s something else I want to show you!” Then he starts his pitch again, with slight variations, and the remaining four or five become the inner core of the next crowd, hemmed in by the people around them, and so eager to pay their money and be on their way that they start the selling frenzy all over again. The turn requires the management of expectation. That’s why Arnold always kept a pineapple tantalizingly perched on his stand. “For forty years, I’ve been promising to show people how to cut the pineapple, and I’ve never cut it once,” he says. “It got to the point where a pitchman friend of mine went out and bought himself a plastic pineapple. Why would you cut the pineapple? It cost a couple bucks. And if you cut it they’d leave.” Arnold says that he once hired some guys to pitch a vegetable slicer for him at a fair in Danbury, Connecticut, and became so annoyed at their lackadaisical attitude that he took over the demonstration himself. They were, he says, waiting for him to fail: he had never worked that particular slicer before and, sure enough, he was massacring the vegetables. Still, in a single pitch he took in $200. “Their eyes popped out of their heads,” Arnold recalls. “They said, ‘We don’t understand it. You don’t even know how to work the damn machine.’ I said, ‘But I know how to do one thing better than you.’ They said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘I know how to ask for the money.’ And that’s the secret to the whole damn business.”
4.
Ron Popeil started pitching his father’s kitchen gadgets at the Maxwell Street flea market in Chicago, in the midfifties. He was thirteen. Every morning, he would arrive at the market at five and prepare fifty pounds each of onions, cabbages, and carrots, and a hundred pounds of potatoes. He sold from six in the morning until four in the afternoon, bringing in as much as $500 a day. In his late teens, he started doing the state- and county-fair circuit, and then he scored a prime spot in the Woolworth’s at State and Washington, in the Loop, which at the time was the top-grossing Woolworth’s store in the country. He was making more than the manager of the store, selling the Chop-O-Matic and the Dial-O-Matic. He dined at the Pump Room and wore a Rolex and rented $150-a-night hotel suites. In pictures from the period, he is beautiful, with thick dark hair and blue-green eyes and sensuous lips, and, several years later, when he moved his office to 919 Michigan Avenue, he was called the Paul Newman of the Playboy Building. Mel Korey, a friend of Ron’s from college and his first business partner, remembers the time he went to see Ron pitch the Chop-O-Matic at the State Street Woolworth’s. “He was mesmerizing,” Korey says. “There were secretaries who would take their lunch break at Woolworth’s to watch him because he was so good-looking. He would go into the turn, and people would just come running.” Several years ago, Ron’s friend Steve Wynn, the founder of the Mirage resorts, went to visit Michael Milken in prison. They were near a television, and happened to catch one of Ron’s infomercials just as he was doing the countdown, a routine taken straight from the boardwalk, where he says, “You’re not going to spend two hundred dollars, not a hundred and eighty dollars, not one-seventy, not one-sixty…” It’s a standard pitchman’s gimmick: it sounds dramatic only because the starting price is set way up high. But something about the way Ron did it was irresistible. As he got lower and lower, Wynn and Milken – who probably know as much about profit margins as anyone in America – cried out in unison, “Stop, Ron! Stop!”
Was Ron the best? The only attempt to settle the question definitively was made some forty years ago when Ron and Arnold were working a knife set at the Eastern States Exposition, in West Springfield, Massachusetts. A third man, Frosty Wishon, who was a legend in his own right, was there, too. “Frosty was a well-dressed, articulate individual and a good salesman,” Ron says. “But he thought he was the best. So I said, ‘Well, guys, we’ve got a ten-day show, eleven, maybe twelve hours a day. We’ll each do a rotation, and we’ll compare how much we sell.” In Morris-Popeil lore, this is known as “the shoot-out,” and no one has ever forgotten the outcome. Ron beat Arnold, but only by a whisker – no more than a few hundred dollars. Frosty Wishon, meanwhile, sold only half as much as either of his rivals. “You have no idea the pressure Frosty was under,” Ron continues. “He came up to me at the end of the show and said, ‘Ron, I will never work with you again as long as I live.’”
No doubt Frosty Wishon was a charming and persuasive person, but he assumed that this was enough – that the rules of pitching were the same as the rules of celebrity endorsement. When Michael Jordan pitches McDonald’s hamburgers, Michael Jordan is the star. But when Ron Popeil or Arnold Morris pitched, say, the Chop-O-Matic, his gift was to make the Chop-O-Matic the star. It was, after all, an innovation. It represented a different way of dicing onions and chopping liver: it required consumers to rethink the way they went about their business in the kitchen. Like most great innovations, it was disruptive. And how do you persuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to customers – not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.
Thirty years ago, the videocassette recorder came on the market, and it was a disruptive product, too: it was supposed to make it possible to tape a television show so that no one would ever again be chained to the prime-time schedule. Yet, as ubiquitous as the VCR became, it was seldom put to that purpose. That’s because the VCR was never pitched: no one ever explained the gadget to American consumers – not once or twice but three or four times – and no one showed them exactly how it worked or how it would fit into their routine, and no pair of hands guided them through every step of the process. All the VCR-makers did was hand over the box with a smile and a pat on the back, tossing in an instruction manual for good measure. Any pitchman could have told you that wasn’t going to do it.
Once, when I was over at Ron’s house in Coldwater Canyon, sitting on one of the high stools in his kitchen, he showed me what real pitching is all about. He was talking about how he had just had dinner with the actor Ron Silver, who was playing Ron’s friend Robert Shapiro in a new movie about the O. J. Simpson trial. “They shave the back of Ron Silver’s head so that he’s got a bald spot, because, you know, Bob Shapiro’s got a bald spot back there, too,” Ron said. “So I say to him, ‘You’ve gotta get GLH.’” GLH, one of Ron’s earlier products, is an aerosol spray designed to thicken the hair and cover up bald spots. “I told him, ‘It will make you look good. When you’ve got to do the scene, you shampoo it out.’”
At this point, the average salesman would have stopped. The story was an aside, no more. We had been discussing the Showtime Rotisserie, and on the counter behind us was a Showtime cooking a chicken and next to it a Showtime cooking baby-back ribs, and on the table in front of him Ron’s pasta maker was working, and he was frying some garlic so that we could have a little lunch. But now that he had told me about GLH, it was unthinkable that he would not also show me its wonders. He walked quickly over to a table at the other side of the room, talking as he went. “People always ask me, ‘Ron, where did you get that name GLH?’ I made it up. Great-Looking Hair.” He picked up a can. “We make it in nine different colors. This is silver-black.” He picked up a hand mirror and angled it above his head so that he could see his bald spot. “Now, the first thing I’ll do is spray it where I don’t need it.” He shook the can and began spraying the crown of his head, talking all the while. “Then I’ll go to the area itself.” He pointed to his bald spot. “Right here. OK. Now I’ll let that dry. Brushing is fifty percent of the way it’s going to look.” He began brushing vigorously, and suddenly Ron Popeil had what looked like a complete head of hair. “Wow,” I said. Ron glowed. “And you tell me ‘Wow.’ That’s what everyone says. ‘Wow.’ That’s what people say who use it. ‘Wow.’ If you go outside” – he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out onto the deck – “if you are in bright sunlight or daylight, you cannot tell that I have a big bald spot in the back of my head. It really looks like hair, but it’s not hair. It’s quite a product. It’s incredible. Any shampoo will take it out. You know who would be a great candidate for this? Al Gore. You want to see how it feels?” Ron inclined the back of his head toward me. I had said, “Wow,” and had looked at his hair inside and outside, but the pitchman in Ron Popeil wasn’t satisfied. I had to feel the back of his head. I did. It felt just like real hair.
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 everyone’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.
In the studio, Ron had set up eighteen Digital Jog Dial Showtimes on five wood-paneled gurneys. From Los Angeles, he had sent, via Federal Express, dozens of Styrofoam containers with enough meat for each of the day’s airings: eight fifteen-pound turkeys, seventy-two hamburgers, eight legs of lamb, eight ducks, thirty-odd chickens, two dozen or so Rock Cornish game hens, and on and on, supplementing them with garnishes, trout, and some sausage bought that morning at three Philadelphia-area supermarkets. QVC’s target was thirty-seven thousand machines, meaning that it hoped to gross about $4.5 million during the twenty-four hours – a huge day, even by the network’s standards. Ron seemed tense. He barked at the team of QVC producers and cameramen bustling around the room. He fussed over the hero plates – the ready-made dinners that he would use to showcase meat taken straight from the oven. “Guys, this is impossible,” he said, peering at a tray of mashed potatoes and gravy. “The level of gravy must be higher.” He was limping a little. “You know, there’s a lot of pressure on you,” he said wearily. “ ‘How did Ron do? Is he still the best?’”
With just a few minutes to go, Ron ducked into the greenroom next to the studio to put GLH in his hair: a few aerosol bursts, followed by vigorous brushing. “Where is God right now?” his co-host, Rick Domeier, yelled out, looking around theatrically for his guest star. “Is God backstage?” Ron then appeared, resplendent in a chef’s coat, and the cameras began to roll. He sliced open a leg of lamb. He played with the dial of the new digital Showtime. He admired the crispy, succulent skin of the duck. He discussed the virtues of the new food-warming feature – where the machine would rotate at low heat for up to four hours after the meat was cooked in order to keep the juices moving – and, all the while, bantered so convincingly with viewers calling in on the testimonial line that it was as if he were back mesmerizing the secretaries in the Woolworth’s at State and Washington.
In the greenroom, there were two computer monitors. The first displayed a line graph charting the number of calls that came in at any given second. The second was an electronic ledger showing the total sales up to that point. As Ron took flight, one by one, people left the studio to gather around the computers. Shannon Popeil came first. It was 12:40 a.m. In the studio, Ron was slicing onions with one of his father’s Dial-O-Matics. She looked at the second monitor and gave a little gasp. Forty minutes in, and Ron had already passed $700,000. A QVC manager walked in. It was 12:48 a.m., and Ron was roaring on: $837,650. “It can’t be!” he cried out. “That’s unbelievable!” Two QVC producers came over. One of them pointed at the first monitor, which was graphing the call volume. “Jump,” he called out. “Jump!” There were only a few minutes left. Ron was extolling the virtues of the oven one final time, and, sure enough, the line began to take a sharp turn upward, as all over America viewers took out their wallets. The numbers on the second screen began to change in a blur of recalculation – rising in increments of $129.72 plus shipping and taxes. “You know, we’re going to hit a million dollars, just on the first hour,” one of the QVC guys said, and there was awe in his voice. It was one thing to talk about how Ron was the best there ever was, after all, but quite another to see proof of it, before your very eyes. At that moment, on the other side of the room, the door opened, and a man appeared, stooped and drawn but with a smile on his face. It was Ron Popeil, who invented a better rotisserie in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself. There was a hush, and then the whole room stood up and cheered.
October 30, 2000
The Ketchup Conundrum
MUSTARD NOW COMES IN DOZENS OF VARIETIES. WHY HAS KETCHUP STAYED THE SAME?
1.
Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French’s. It came in a plastic bottle. People used it on hot dogs and bologna. It was a yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and vinegar, which gave it a mild, slightly metallic taste. If you looked hard in the grocery store, you might find something in the specialty-foods section called Grey Poupon, which was Dijon mustard, made from the more pungent brown mustard seed. In the early seventies, Grey Poupon was no more than a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year business. Few people knew what it was or how it tasted, or had any particular desire for an alternative to French’s or the runner-up, Gulden’s. Then one day the Heublein Company, which owned Grey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people a mustard taste test, a significant number had only to try Grey Poupon once to switch from yellow mustard. In the food world that almost never happens; even among the most successful food brands, only about one in a hundred has that kind of conversion rate. Grey Poupon was magic.
So Heublein put Grey Poupon in a bigger glass jar, with an enameled label and enough of a whiff of Frenchness to make it seem as if it were still being made in Europe (it was made in Hartford, Connecticut, from Canadian mustard seed and white wine). The company ran tasteful print ads in upscale food magazines. They put the mustard in little foil packets and distributed them with airplane meals – which was a brand-new idea at the time. Then they hired the Manhattan ad agency Lowe Marschalk to do something, on a modest budget, for television. The agency came back with an idea: A Rolls-Royce is driving down a country road. There’s a man in the backseat in a suit with a plate of beef on a silver tray. He nods to the chauffeur, who opens the glove compartment. Then comes what is known in the business as the reveal. The chauffeur hands back a jar of Grey Poupon. Another Rolls-Royce pulls up alongside. A man leans his head out the window. “Pardon me. Would you have any Grey Poupon?”
In the cities where the ads ran, sales of Grey Poupon leaped 40 to 50 percent, and whenever Heublein bought airtime in new cities sales jumped by 40 to 50 percent again. Grocery stores put Grey Poupon next to French’s and Gulden’s. By the end of the 1980s Grey Poupon was the most powerful brand in mustard. “The tagline in the commercial was that this was one of life’s finer pleasures,” Larry Elegant, who wrote the original Grey Poupon spot, says, “and that, along with the Rolls-Royce, seemed to impart to people’s minds that this was something truly different and superior.”
The rise of Grey Poupon proved that the American supermarket shopper was willing to pay more – in this case $3.99 instead of $1.49 for eight ounces – as long as what they were buying carried with it an air of sophistication and complex aromatics. Its success showed, furthermore, that the boundaries of taste and custom were not fixed: that just because mustard had always been yellow didn’t mean that consumers would use only yellow mustard. It is because of Grey Poupon that the standard American supermarket today has an entire mustard section. And it is because of Grey Poupon that a man named Jim Wigon decided, four years ago, to enter the ketchup business. Isn’t the ketchup business today exactly where mustard was thirty years ago? There is Heinz and, far behind, Hunt’s and Del Monte and a handful of private-label brands. Jim Wigon wanted to create the Grey Poupon of ketchup.
Wigon is from Boston. He’s a thickset man in his fifties, with a full salt-and-pepper beard. He runs his ketchup business – under the brand World’s Best Ketchup – out of the catering business of his partner, Nick Schiarizzi, in Norwood, Massachusetts, just off Route 1, in a low-slung building behind an industrial-equipment-rental shop. He starts with red peppers, Spanish onions, garlic, and a high-end tomato paste. Basil is chopped by hand, because the buffalo chopper bruises the leaves. He uses maple syrup, not corn syrup, which gives him a quarter of the sugar of Heinz. He pours his ketchup into a clear glass ten-ounce jar, and sells it for three times the price of Heinz, and for the past few years he has crisscrossed the country, peddling World’s Best in six flavors – regular, sweet, dill, garlic, caramelized onion, and basil – to specialty grocery stores and supermarkets. If you were in Zabar’s on Manhattan’s Upper West Side a few months ago, you would have seen him at the front of the store, in a spot between the sushi and the gefilte fish. He was wearing a World’s Best baseball cap, a white shirt, and a red-stained apron. In front of him, on a small table, was a silver tureen filled with miniature chicken and beef meatballs, a box of toothpicks, and a dozen or so open jars of his ketchup. “Try my ketchup!” Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed. “If you don’t try it, you’re doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life.”
In the same aisle at Zabar’s that day two other demonstrations were going on, so that people were starting at one end with free chicken sausage, sampling a slice of prosciutto, and then pausing at the World’s Best stand before heading for the cash register. They would look down at the array of open jars, and Wigon would impale a meatball on a toothpick, dip it in one of his ketchups, and hand it to them with a flourish. The ratio of tomato solids to liquid in World’s Best is much higher than in Heinz, and the maple syrup gives it an unmistakable sweet kick. Invariably, people would close their eyes, just for a moment, and do a subtle double take. Some of them would look slightly perplexed and walk away, and others would nod and pick up a jar. “You know why you like it so much?” he would say, in his broad Boston accent, to the customers who seemed most impressed. “Because you’ve been eating bad ketchup all your life!” Jim Wigon had a simple vision: build a better ketchup – the way Grey Poupon built a better mustard – and the world will beat a path to your door. If only it were that easy.
2.
The story of World’s Best Ketchup cannot properly be told without a man from White Plains, New York, named Howard Moskowitz. Moskowitz is sixty, short and round, with graying hair and huge gold-rimmed glasses. When he talks, he favors the Socratic monologue – a series of questions that he poses to himself, then answers, punctuated by “ahhh” and much vigorous nodding. He is a lineal descendant of the legendary eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi known as the Seer of Lublin. He keeps a parrot. At Harvard, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on psychophysics, and all the rooms on the ground floor of his food-testing and market-research business are named after famous psychophysicists. (“Have you ever heard of the name Rose Marie Pangborn? Ahhh. She was a professor at Davis. Very famous. This is the Pangborn kitchen.”) Moskowitz is a man of uncommon exuberance and persuasiveness: if he had been your freshman statistics professor, you would today be a statistician. “My favorite writer? Gibbon,” he burst out, when we met not long ago. He had just been holding forth on the subject of sodium solutions. “Right now I’m working my way through the Hales history of the Byzantine Empire. Holy shit! Everything is easy until you get to the Byzantine Empire. It’s impossible. One emperor is always killing the others, and everyone has five wives or three husbands. It’s very Byzantine.”
Moskowitz set up shop in the seventies, and one of his first clients was Pepsi. The artificial sweetener aspartame had just become available, and Pepsi wanted Moskowitz to figure out the perfect amount of sweetener for a can of Diet Pepsi. Pepsi knew that anything below 8 percent sweetness was not sweet enough and anything over 12 percent was too sweet. So Moskowitz did the logical thing. He made up experimental batches of Diet Pepsi with every conceivable degree of sweetness – 8 percent, 8.25 percent, 8.5, and on and on up to 12 – gave them to hundreds of people, and looked for the concentration that people liked the most. But the data were a mess – there wasn’t a pattern – and one day, sitting in a diner, Moskowitz realized why. They had been asking the wrong question. There was no such thing as the perfect Diet Pepsi. They should have been looking for the perfect Diet Pepsis.
It took a long time for the food world to catch up with Howard Moskowitz. He knocked on doors and tried to explain his idea about the plural nature of perfection, and no one answered. He spoke at food-industry conferences, and audiences shrugged. But he could think of nothing else. “It’s like that Yiddish expression,” he says. “Do you know it? To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish!” Then, in 1986, he got a call from the Campbell’s Soup Company. They were in the spaghetti-sauce business, going up against Ragú with their Prego brand. Prego was a little thicker than Ragú, with diced tomatoes as opposed to Ragú’s purée, and, Campbell’s thought, had better pasta adherence. But, for all that, Prego was in a slump, and Campbell’s was desperate for new ideas.
Standard practice in the food industry would have been to convene a focus group and ask spaghetti eaters what they wanted. But Moskowitz does not believe that consumers – even spaghetti lovers – know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. “The mind,” as Moskowitz is fond of saying, “knows not what the tongue wants.” Instead, working with the Campbell’s kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. These were designed to differ in every conceivable way: spiciness, sweetness, tartness, saltiness, thickness, aroma, mouth feel, cost of ingredients, and so forth. He had a trained panel of food tasters analyze each of those varieties in depth. Then he took the prototypes on the road – to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Jacksonville – and asked people in groups of twenty-five to eat between eight and ten small bowls of different spaghetti sauces over two hours and rate them on a scale of one to a hundred. When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people’s preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket. Over the next decade, that new category proved to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Prego. “We all said, ‘Wow!’” Monica Wood, who was then the head of market research for Campbell’s, recalls. “Here there was this third segment – people who liked their spaghetti sauce with lots of stuff in it – and it was completely untapped. So in about 1989 or 1990 we launched Prego extra-chunky. It was extraordinarily successful.”
It may be hard today, twenty years later – when every brand seems to come in multiple varieties – to appreciate how much of a breakthrough this was. In those years, people in the food industry carried around in their heads the notion of a platonic dish – the version of a dish that looked and tasted absolutely right. At Ragú and Prego, they had been striving for the platonic spaghetti sauce, and the platonic spaghetti sauce was thin and blended because that’s the way they thought it was done in Italy. Cooking, on the industrial level, was consumed with the search for human universals. Once you start looking for the sources of human variability, though, the old orthodoxy goes out the window. Howard Moskowitz stood up to the Platonists and said there are no universals.
Moskowitz still has a version of the computer model he used for Prego. It has all the coded results from the consumer taste tests and the expert tastings, split into the three categories (plain, spicy, and extra-chunky) and linked up with the actual ingredients list on a spreadsheet. “You know how they have a computer model for building an aircraft,” Moskowitz said as he pulled up the program on his computer. “This is a model for building spaghetti sauce. Look, every variable is here.” He pointed at column after column of ratings. “So here are the ingredients. I’m a brand manager for Prego. I want to optimize one of the segments. Let’s start with Segment 1.” In Mosko-witz’s program, the three spaghetti-sauce groups were labeled Segment 1, Segment 2, and Segment 3. He typed in a few commands, instructing the computer to give him the formulation that would score the highest with those people in Segment 1. The answer appeared almost immediately: a specific recipe that, according to Moskowitz’s data, produced a score of 78 from the people in Segment 1. But that same formulation didn’t do nearly as well with those in Segment 2 and Segment 3. They scored it 67 and 57, respectively. Moskowitz started again, this time asking the computer to optimize for Segment 2. This time the ratings came in at 82, but now Segment 1 had fallen 10 points, to 68. “See what happens?” he said. “If I make one group happier, I piss off another group. We did this for coffee with General Foods, and we found that if you create only one product, the best you can get across all the segments is a 60 – if you’re lucky. That’s if you were to treat everybody as one big happy family. But if I do the sensory segmentation, I can get 70, 71, 72. Is that big? Ahhh. It’s a very big difference. In coffee, a 71 is something you’ll die for.”
When Jim Wigon set up shop that day in Zabar’s, then, his operating assumption was that there ought to be some segment of the population that preferred a ketchup made with Stanislaus tomato paste and hand-chopped basil and maple syrup. That’s the Moskowitz theory. But there is theory and there is practice. By the end of that long day, Wigon had sold ninety jars. But he’d also got two parking tickets and had to pay for a hotel room, so he wasn’t going home with money in his pocket. For the year, Wigon estimates, he’ll sell fifty thousand jars – which, in the universe of condiments, is no more than a blip. “I haven’t drawn a paycheck in five years,” Wigon said as he impaled another meatball on a toothpick. “My wife is killing me.” And it isn’t just World’s Best that is struggling. In the gourmet-ketchup world, there is River Run and Uncle Dave’s, from Vermont, and Muir Glen Organic and Mrs. Tomato Head Roasted Garlic Peppercorn Catsup, in California, and dozens of others – and every year Heinz’s overwhelming share of the ketchup market just grows.
It is possible, of course, that ketchup is waiting for its own version of that Rolls-Royce commercial, or the discovery of the ketchup equivalent of extra-chunky – the magic formula that will satisfy an unmet need. It is also possible, however, that the rules of Howard Moskowitz, which apply to Grey Poupon and Prego spaghetti sauce and to olive oil and salad dressing and virtually everything else in the supermarket, don’t apply to ketchup.
3.
Tomato ketchup is a nineteenth-century creation – the union of the English tradition of fruit and vegetable sauces and the growing American infatuation with the tomato. But what we know today as ketchup emerged out of a debate that raged in the first years of the last century over benzoate, a preservative widely used in late-nineteenth-century condiments. Harvey Washington Wiley, the chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture from 1883 to 1912, came to believe that benzoates were not safe, and the result was an argument that split the ketchup world in half. On one side was the ketchup establishment, which believed that it was impossible to make ketchup without benzoate and that benzoate was not harmful in the amounts used. On the other side was a renegade band of ketchup manufacturers, who believed that the preservative puzzle could be solved with the application of culinary science. The dominant nineteenth-century ketchups were thin and watery, in part because they were made from unripe tomatoes, which are low in the complex carbohydrates known as pectin, which add body to a sauce. But what if you made ketchup from ripe tomatoes, giving it the density it needed to resist degradation? Nineteenth-century ketchups had a strong tomato taste, with just a light vinegar touch. The renegades argued that by greatly increasing the amount of vinegar, in effect protecting the tomatoes by pickling them, they were making a superior ketchup: safer, purer, and better tasting. They offered a money-back guarantee in the event of spoilage. They charged more for their product, convinced that the public would pay more for a better ketchup, and they were right. The benzoate ketchups disappeared. The leader of the renegade band was an entrepreneur out of Pittsburgh named Henry J. Heinz.
The world’s leading expert on ketchup’s early years is Andrew F. Smith, a substantial man, well over six feet, with a graying mustache and short wavy black hair. Smith is a scholar, trained as a political scientist, intent on bringing rigor to the world of food. When we met for lunch not long ago at the restaurant Savoy in SoHo (chosen because of the excellence of its hamburger and French fries, and because Savoy makes its own ketchup – a dark, peppery, and viscous variety served in a white porcelain saucer), Smith was in the throes of examining the origins of the croissant for the upcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, of which he is the editor-in-chief. Was the croissant invented in 1683, by the Viennese, in celebration of their defeat of the invading Turks? Or in 1686, by the residents of Budapest, to celebrate their defeat of the Turks? Both explanations would explain its distinctive crescent shape – since it would make a certain cultural sense (particularly for the Viennese) to consecrate their battlefield triumphs in the form of pastry. But the only reference Smith could find to either story was in the Larousse Gastronomique of 1938. “It just doesn’t check out,” he said, shaking his head wearily.
Smith’s specialty is the tomato, however, and over the course of many scholarly articles and books – “The History of Home-Made Anglo-American Tomato Ketchup,” for Petits Propos Culinaires, for example, and “The Great Tomato Pill War of the 1830s,” for The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin – Smith has argued that some critical portion of the history of culinary civilization could be told through this fruit. Cortez brought tomatoes to Europe from the New World, and they inexorably insinuated themselves into the world’s cuisines. The Italians substituted the tomato for eggplant. In northern India, it went into curries and chutneys. “The biggest tomato producer in the world today?” Smith paused, for dramatic effect. “ China. You don’t think of tomato being a part of Chinese cuisine, and it wasn’t ten years ago. But it is now.” Smith dipped one of my French fries into the homemade sauce. “It has that raw taste,” he said, with a look of intense concentration. “It’s fresh ketchup. You can taste the tomato.” Ketchup was, to his mind, the most nearly perfect of all the tomato’s manifestations. It was inexpensive, which meant that it had a firm lock on the mass market, and it was a condiment, not an ingredient, which meant that it could be applied at the discretion of the food eater, not the food preparer. “There’s a quote from Elizabeth Rozin I’ve always loved,” he said. Rozin is the food theorist who wrote the essay “Ketchup and the Collective Unconscious,” and Smith used her conclusion as the epigraph of his ketchup book: ketchup may well be “the only true culinary expression of the melting pot, and… its special and unprecedented ability to provide something for everyone makes it the Esperanto of cuisine.” Here is where Henry Heinz and the benzoate battle were so important: in defeating the condiment Old Guard, he was the one who changed the flavor of ketchup in a way that made it universal.
4.
There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother’s milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. “Umami adds body,” Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. “If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it’s thicker – it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food.” When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar – so now ketchup was also sweet – and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. Give a baby soup, and then soup with MSG (an amino-acid salt that is pure umami), and the baby will go back for the MSG soup every time, the same way a baby will always prefer water with sugar to water alone. Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating – about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?
A number of years ago, the H. J. Heinz Company did an extensive market-research project in which researchers went into people’s homes and watched the way they used ketchup. “I remember sitting in one of those households,” Casey Keller, who was until recently the chief growth officer for Heinz, says. “There was a three-year-old and a six-year-old, and what happened was that the kids asked for ketchup and Mom brought it out. It was a forty-ounce bottle. And the three-year-old went to grab it himself, and Mom intercepted the bottle and said, ‘No, you’re not going to do that.’ She physically took the bottle away and doled out a little dollop. You could see that the whole thing was a bummer.” For Heinz, Keller says, that moment was an epiphany. A typical five-year-old consumes about 60 percent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. “If you are four – and I have a four-year-old – he doesn’t get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases,” Keller says. “But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It’s the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize.” As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as 12 percent.
There is another lesson in that household scene, though. Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived. There the three-year-old was, confronted with something strange on his plate – tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts – and he wanted to alter his food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar. He wanted to subdue the contents of his plate. And so he turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once.
5.
A few months after Jim Wigon’s visit to Zabar’s, Edgar Chambers IV, who runs the sensory-analysis center at Kansas State University, conducted a joint assessment of World’s Best and Heinz. He has seventeen trained tasters on his staff, and they work for academia and industry, answering the often difficult question of what a given substance tastes like. It is demanding work. Immediately after conducting the ketchup study, Chambers dispatched a team to Bangkok to do an analysis of fruit – bananas, mangoes, rose apples, and sweet tamarind. Others were detailed to soy and kimchi in South Korea, and Chambers’s wife led a delegation to Italy to analyze ice cream.
The ketchup tasting took place over four hours, on two consecutive mornings. Six tasters sat around a large, round table with a lazy Susan in the middle. In front of each panelist were two one-ounce cups, one filled with Heinz ketchup and one filled with World’s Best. They would work along fourteen dimensions of flavor and texture, in accordance with the standard fifteen-point scale used by the food world. The flavor components would be divided two ways: elements picked up by the tongue and elements picked up by the nose. A very ripe peach, for example, tastes sweet but it also smells sweet – which is a very different aspect of sweetness. Vinegar has a sour taste but also a pungency, a vapor that rises up the back of the nose and fills the mouth when you breathe out. To aid in the rating process, the tasters surrounded themselves with little bowls of sweet and sour and salty solutions, and portions of Contadina tomato paste, Hunt’s tomato sauce, and Campbell’s tomato juice, all of which represent different concentrations of tomato-ness.
After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of “amplitude,” the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that “bloom” in the mouth. “The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing ‘Ode to Joy’ on the piano,” Chambers says. “They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist.” Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude. So are Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake. When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can’t isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. But you can with one of those private-label colas that you get in the supermarket. “The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous,” Judy Heylmun, a vice president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. “They have beautiful notes – all flavors are in balance. It’s very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it’s” – and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds – “all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything.”
Some of the cheaper ketchups are the same way. Ketchup aficionados say that there’s a disquieting unevenness to the tomato notes in Del Monte ketchup: tomatoes vary, in acidity and sweetness and the ratio of solids to liquid, according to the seed variety used, the time of year they are harvested, the soil in which they are grown, and the weather during the growing season. Unless all those variables are tightly controlled, one batch of ketchup can end up too watery and another can be too strong. Or try one of the numerous private-label brands that make up the bottom of the ketchup market and pay attention to the spice mix; you may well find yourself conscious of the clove note or overwhelmed by a hit of garlic. Generic colas and ketchups have what Moskowitz calls a hook – a sensory attribute that you can single out, and ultimately tire of.
The tasting began with a plastic spoon. Upon consideration, it was decided that the analysis would be helped if the ketchups were tasted on French fries, so a batch of fries was cooked up and distributed around the table. Each tester, according to protocol, took the fries one by one, dipped them into the cup – all the way, right to the bottom – bit off the portion covered in ketchup, and then contemplated the evidence of their senses. For Heinz, the critical flavor components – vinegar, salt, tomato ID (overall tomato-ness), sweet, and bitter – were judged to be present in roughly equal concentrations, and those elements, in turn, were judged to be well blended. The World’s Best, though, “had a completely different view, a different profile, from the Heinz,” Chambers said. It had a much stronger hit of sweet aromatics – 4.0 to 2.5 – and outstripped Heinz on tomato ID by a resounding 9 to 5.5. But there was less salt, and no discernible vinegar. “The other comment from the panel was that these elements were really not blended at all,” Chambers went on. “The World’s Best product had really low amplitude.” According to Joyce Buchholz, one of the panelists, when the group judged aftertaste, “it seemed like a certain flavor would hang over longer in the case of World’s Best – that cooked-tomatoey flavor.”
But what was Jim Wigon to do? To compete against Heinz, he had to try something dramatic, like substituting maple syrup for corn syrup, ramping up the tomato solids. That made for an unusual and daring flavor. World’s Best Dill ketchup on fried catfish, for instance, is a marvelous thing. But it also meant that his ketchup wasn’t as sensorily complete as Heinz, and he was paying a heavy price in amplitude. “Our conclusion was mainly this,” Buchholz said. “We felt that World’s Best seemed to be more like a sauce.” She was trying to be helpful.
There is an exception, then, to the Moskowitz rule. Today there are thirty-six varieties of Ragú spaghetti sauce, under six rubrics – Old World Style, Chunky Garden Style, Robusto, Light, Cheese Creations, and Rich & Meaty – which means that there is very nearly an optimal spaghetti sauce for every man, woman, and child in America. Measured against the monotony that confronted Howard Moskowitz twenty years ago, this is progress. Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. But that makes it easy to forget that sometimes happiness can be found in having what we’ve always had and everyone else is having. “Back in the seventies, someone else – I think it was Ragú – tried to do an ‘Italian’-style ketchup,” Moskowitz said. “They failed miserably.” It was a conundrum: what was true about a yellow condiment that went on hot dogs was not true about a tomato condiment that went on hamburgers, and what was true about tomato sauce when you added visible solids and put it in a jar was somehow not true about tomato sauce when you added vinegar and sugar and put it in a bottle. Moskowitz shrugged. “I guess ketchup is ketchup.”
September 6, 2004
1.
Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French’s. It came in a plastic bottle. People used it on hot dogs and bologna. It was a yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and vinegar, which gave it a mild, slightly metallic taste. If you looked hard in the grocery store, you might find something in the specialty-foods section called Grey Poupon, which was Dijon mustard, made from the more pungent brown mustard seed. In the early seventies, Grey Poupon was no more than a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year business. Few people knew what it was or how it tasted, or had any particular desire for an alternative to French’s or the runner-up, Gulden’s. Then one day the Heublein Company, which owned Grey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people a mustard taste test, a significant number had only to try Grey Poupon once to switch from yellow mustard. In the food world that almost never happens; even among the most successful food brands, only about one in a hundred has that kind of conversion rate. Grey Poupon was magic.
So Heublein put Grey Poupon in a bigger glass jar, with an enameled label and enough of a whiff of Frenchness to make it seem as if it were still being made in Europe (it was made in Hartford, Connecticut, from Canadian mustard seed and white wine). The company ran tasteful print ads in upscale food magazines. They put the mustard in little foil packets and distributed them with airplane meals – which was a brand-new idea at the time. Then they hired the Manhattan ad agency Lowe Marschalk to do something, on a modest budget, for television. The agency came back with an idea: A Rolls-Royce is driving down a country road. There’s a man in the backseat in a suit with a plate of beef on a silver tray. He nods to the chauffeur, who opens the glove compartment. Then comes what is known in the business as the reveal. The chauffeur hands back a jar of Grey Poupon. Another Rolls-Royce pulls up alongside. A man leans his head out the window. “Pardon me. Would you have any Grey Poupon?”
In the cities where the ads ran, sales of Grey Poupon leaped 40 to 50 percent, and whenever Heublein bought airtime in new cities sales jumped by 40 to 50 percent again. Grocery stores put Grey Poupon next to French’s and Gulden’s. By the end of the 1980s Grey Poupon was the most powerful brand in mustard. “The tagline in the commercial was that this was one of life’s finer pleasures,” Larry Elegant, who wrote the original Grey Poupon spot, says, “and that, along with the Rolls-Royce, seemed to impart to people’s minds that this was something truly different and superior.”
The rise of Grey Poupon proved that the American supermarket shopper was willing to pay more – in this case $3.99 instead of $1.49 for eight ounces – as long as what they were buying carried with it an air of sophistication and complex aromatics. Its success showed, furthermore, that the boundaries of taste and custom were not fixed: that just because mustard had always been yellow didn’t mean that consumers would use only yellow mustard. It is because of Grey Poupon that the standard American supermarket today has an entire mustard section. And it is because of Grey Poupon that a man named Jim Wigon decided, four years ago, to enter the ketchup business. Isn’t the ketchup business today exactly where mustard was thirty years ago? There is Heinz and, far behind, Hunt’s and Del Monte and a handful of private-label brands. Jim Wigon wanted to create the Grey Poupon of ketchup.
Wigon is from Boston. He’s a thickset man in his fifties, with a full salt-and-pepper beard. He runs his ketchup business – under the brand World’s Best Ketchup – out of the catering business of his partner, Nick Schiarizzi, in Norwood, Massachusetts, just off Route 1, in a low-slung building behind an industrial-equipment-rental shop. He starts with red peppers, Spanish onions, garlic, and a high-end tomato paste. Basil is chopped by hand, because the buffalo chopper bruises the leaves. He uses maple syrup, not corn syrup, which gives him a quarter of the sugar of Heinz. He pours his ketchup into a clear glass ten-ounce jar, and sells it for three times the price of Heinz, and for the past few years he has crisscrossed the country, peddling World’s Best in six flavors – regular, sweet, dill, garlic, caramelized onion, and basil – to specialty grocery stores and supermarkets. If you were in Zabar’s on Manhattan’s Upper West Side a few months ago, you would have seen him at the front of the store, in a spot between the sushi and the gefilte fish. He was wearing a World’s Best baseball cap, a white shirt, and a red-stained apron. In front of him, on a small table, was a silver tureen filled with miniature chicken and beef meatballs, a box of toothpicks, and a dozen or so open jars of his ketchup. “Try my ketchup!” Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed. “If you don’t try it, you’re doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life.”
In the same aisle at Zabar’s that day two other demonstrations were going on, so that people were starting at one end with free chicken sausage, sampling a slice of prosciutto, and then pausing at the World’s Best stand before heading for the cash register. They would look down at the array of open jars, and Wigon would impale a meatball on a toothpick, dip it in one of his ketchups, and hand it to them with a flourish. The ratio of tomato solids to liquid in World’s Best is much higher than in Heinz, and the maple syrup gives it an unmistakable sweet kick. Invariably, people would close their eyes, just for a moment, and do a subtle double take. Some of them would look slightly perplexed and walk away, and others would nod and pick up a jar. “You know why you like it so much?” he would say, in his broad Boston accent, to the customers who seemed most impressed. “Because you’ve been eating bad ketchup all your life!” Jim Wigon had a simple vision: build a better ketchup – the way Grey Poupon built a better mustard – and the world will beat a path to your door. If only it were that easy.
2.
The story of World’s Best Ketchup cannot properly be told without a man from White Plains, New York, named Howard Moskowitz. Moskowitz is sixty, short and round, with graying hair and huge gold-rimmed glasses. When he talks, he favors the Socratic monologue – a series of questions that he poses to himself, then answers, punctuated by “ahhh” and much vigorous nodding. He is a lineal descendant of the legendary eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi known as the Seer of Lublin. He keeps a parrot. At Harvard, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on psychophysics, and all the rooms on the ground floor of his food-testing and market-research business are named after famous psychophysicists. (“Have you ever heard of the name Rose Marie Pangborn? Ahhh. She was a professor at Davis. Very famous. This is the Pangborn kitchen.”) Moskowitz is a man of uncommon exuberance and persuasiveness: if he had been your freshman statistics professor, you would today be a statistician. “My favorite writer? Gibbon,” he burst out, when we met not long ago. He had just been holding forth on the subject of sodium solutions. “Right now I’m working my way through the Hales history of the Byzantine Empire. Holy shit! Everything is easy until you get to the Byzantine Empire. It’s impossible. One emperor is always killing the others, and everyone has five wives or three husbands. It’s very Byzantine.”
Moskowitz set up shop in the seventies, and one of his first clients was Pepsi. The artificial sweetener aspartame had just become available, and Pepsi wanted Moskowitz to figure out the perfect amount of sweetener for a can of Diet Pepsi. Pepsi knew that anything below 8 percent sweetness was not sweet enough and anything over 12 percent was too sweet. So Moskowitz did the logical thing. He made up experimental batches of Diet Pepsi with every conceivable degree of sweetness – 8 percent, 8.25 percent, 8.5, and on and on up to 12 – gave them to hundreds of people, and looked for the concentration that people liked the most. But the data were a mess – there wasn’t a pattern – and one day, sitting in a diner, Moskowitz realized why. They had been asking the wrong question. There was no such thing as the perfect Diet Pepsi. They should have been looking for the perfect Diet Pepsis.
It took a long time for the food world to catch up with Howard Moskowitz. He knocked on doors and tried to explain his idea about the plural nature of perfection, and no one answered. He spoke at food-industry conferences, and audiences shrugged. But he could think of nothing else. “It’s like that Yiddish expression,” he says. “Do you know it? To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish!” Then, in 1986, he got a call from the Campbell’s Soup Company. They were in the spaghetti-sauce business, going up against Ragú with their Prego brand. Prego was a little thicker than Ragú, with diced tomatoes as opposed to Ragú’s purée, and, Campbell’s thought, had better pasta adherence. But, for all that, Prego was in a slump, and Campbell’s was desperate for new ideas.
Standard practice in the food industry would have been to convene a focus group and ask spaghetti eaters what they wanted. But Moskowitz does not believe that consumers – even spaghetti lovers – know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. “The mind,” as Moskowitz is fond of saying, “knows not what the tongue wants.” Instead, working with the Campbell’s kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. These were designed to differ in every conceivable way: spiciness, sweetness, tartness, saltiness, thickness, aroma, mouth feel, cost of ingredients, and so forth. He had a trained panel of food tasters analyze each of those varieties in depth. Then he took the prototypes on the road – to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Jacksonville – and asked people in groups of twenty-five to eat between eight and ten small bowls of different spaghetti sauces over two hours and rate them on a scale of one to a hundred. When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people’s preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket. Over the next decade, that new category proved to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Prego. “We all said, ‘Wow!’” Monica Wood, who was then the head of market research for Campbell’s, recalls. “Here there was this third segment – people who liked their spaghetti sauce with lots of stuff in it – and it was completely untapped. So in about 1989 or 1990 we launched Prego extra-chunky. It was extraordinarily successful.”
It may be hard today, twenty years later – when every brand seems to come in multiple varieties – to appreciate how much of a breakthrough this was. In those years, people in the food industry carried around in their heads the notion of a platonic dish – the version of a dish that looked and tasted absolutely right. At Ragú and Prego, they had been striving for the platonic spaghetti sauce, and the platonic spaghetti sauce was thin and blended because that’s the way they thought it was done in Italy. Cooking, on the industrial level, was consumed with the search for human universals. Once you start looking for the sources of human variability, though, the old orthodoxy goes out the window. Howard Moskowitz stood up to the Platonists and said there are no universals.
Moskowitz still has a version of the computer model he used for Prego. It has all the coded results from the consumer taste tests and the expert tastings, split into the three categories (plain, spicy, and extra-chunky) and linked up with the actual ingredients list on a spreadsheet. “You know how they have a computer model for building an aircraft,” Moskowitz said as he pulled up the program on his computer. “This is a model for building spaghetti sauce. Look, every variable is here.” He pointed at column after column of ratings. “So here are the ingredients. I’m a brand manager for Prego. I want to optimize one of the segments. Let’s start with Segment 1.” In Mosko-witz’s program, the three spaghetti-sauce groups were labeled Segment 1, Segment 2, and Segment 3. He typed in a few commands, instructing the computer to give him the formulation that would score the highest with those people in Segment 1. The answer appeared almost immediately: a specific recipe that, according to Moskowitz’s data, produced a score of 78 from the people in Segment 1. But that same formulation didn’t do nearly as well with those in Segment 2 and Segment 3. They scored it 67 and 57, respectively. Moskowitz started again, this time asking the computer to optimize for Segment 2. This time the ratings came in at 82, but now Segment 1 had fallen 10 points, to 68. “See what happens?” he said. “If I make one group happier, I piss off another group. We did this for coffee with General Foods, and we found that if you create only one product, the best you can get across all the segments is a 60 – if you’re lucky. That’s if you were to treat everybody as one big happy family. But if I do the sensory segmentation, I can get 70, 71, 72. Is that big? Ahhh. It’s a very big difference. In coffee, a 71 is something you’ll die for.”
When Jim Wigon set up shop that day in Zabar’s, then, his operating assumption was that there ought to be some segment of the population that preferred a ketchup made with Stanislaus tomato paste and hand-chopped basil and maple syrup. That’s the Moskowitz theory. But there is theory and there is practice. By the end of that long day, Wigon had sold ninety jars. But he’d also got two parking tickets and had to pay for a hotel room, so he wasn’t going home with money in his pocket. For the year, Wigon estimates, he’ll sell fifty thousand jars – which, in the universe of condiments, is no more than a blip. “I haven’t drawn a paycheck in five years,” Wigon said as he impaled another meatball on a toothpick. “My wife is killing me.” And it isn’t just World’s Best that is struggling. In the gourmet-ketchup world, there is River Run and Uncle Dave’s, from Vermont, and Muir Glen Organic and Mrs. Tomato Head Roasted Garlic Peppercorn Catsup, in California, and dozens of others – and every year Heinz’s overwhelming share of the ketchup market just grows.
It is possible, of course, that ketchup is waiting for its own version of that Rolls-Royce commercial, or the discovery of the ketchup equivalent of extra-chunky – the magic formula that will satisfy an unmet need. It is also possible, however, that the rules of Howard Moskowitz, which apply to Grey Poupon and Prego spaghetti sauce and to olive oil and salad dressing and virtually everything else in the supermarket, don’t apply to ketchup.
3.
Tomato ketchup is a nineteenth-century creation – the union of the English tradition of fruit and vegetable sauces and the growing American infatuation with the tomato. But what we know today as ketchup emerged out of a debate that raged in the first years of the last century over benzoate, a preservative widely used in late-nineteenth-century condiments. Harvey Washington Wiley, the chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture from 1883 to 1912, came to believe that benzoates were not safe, and the result was an argument that split the ketchup world in half. On one side was the ketchup establishment, which believed that it was impossible to make ketchup without benzoate and that benzoate was not harmful in the amounts used. On the other side was a renegade band of ketchup manufacturers, who believed that the preservative puzzle could be solved with the application of culinary science. The dominant nineteenth-century ketchups were thin and watery, in part because they were made from unripe tomatoes, which are low in the complex carbohydrates known as pectin, which add body to a sauce. But what if you made ketchup from ripe tomatoes, giving it the density it needed to resist degradation? Nineteenth-century ketchups had a strong tomato taste, with just a light vinegar touch. The renegades argued that by greatly increasing the amount of vinegar, in effect protecting the tomatoes by pickling them, they were making a superior ketchup: safer, purer, and better tasting. They offered a money-back guarantee in the event of spoilage. They charged more for their product, convinced that the public would pay more for a better ketchup, and they were right. The benzoate ketchups disappeared. The leader of the renegade band was an entrepreneur out of Pittsburgh named Henry J. Heinz.
The world’s leading expert on ketchup’s early years is Andrew F. Smith, a substantial man, well over six feet, with a graying mustache and short wavy black hair. Smith is a scholar, trained as a political scientist, intent on bringing rigor to the world of food. When we met for lunch not long ago at the restaurant Savoy in SoHo (chosen because of the excellence of its hamburger and French fries, and because Savoy makes its own ketchup – a dark, peppery, and viscous variety served in a white porcelain saucer), Smith was in the throes of examining the origins of the croissant for the upcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, of which he is the editor-in-chief. Was the croissant invented in 1683, by the Viennese, in celebration of their defeat of the invading Turks? Or in 1686, by the residents of Budapest, to celebrate their defeat of the Turks? Both explanations would explain its distinctive crescent shape – since it would make a certain cultural sense (particularly for the Viennese) to consecrate their battlefield triumphs in the form of pastry. But the only reference Smith could find to either story was in the Larousse Gastronomique of 1938. “It just doesn’t check out,” he said, shaking his head wearily.
Smith’s specialty is the tomato, however, and over the course of many scholarly articles and books – “The History of Home-Made Anglo-American Tomato Ketchup,” for Petits Propos Culinaires, for example, and “The Great Tomato Pill War of the 1830s,” for The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin – Smith has argued that some critical portion of the history of culinary civilization could be told through this fruit. Cortez brought tomatoes to Europe from the New World, and they inexorably insinuated themselves into the world’s cuisines. The Italians substituted the tomato for eggplant. In northern India, it went into curries and chutneys. “The biggest tomato producer in the world today?” Smith paused, for dramatic effect. “ China. You don’t think of tomato being a part of Chinese cuisine, and it wasn’t ten years ago. But it is now.” Smith dipped one of my French fries into the homemade sauce. “It has that raw taste,” he said, with a look of intense concentration. “It’s fresh ketchup. You can taste the tomato.” Ketchup was, to his mind, the most nearly perfect of all the tomato’s manifestations. It was inexpensive, which meant that it had a firm lock on the mass market, and it was a condiment, not an ingredient, which meant that it could be applied at the discretion of the food eater, not the food preparer. “There’s a quote from Elizabeth Rozin I’ve always loved,” he said. Rozin is the food theorist who wrote the essay “Ketchup and the Collective Unconscious,” and Smith used her conclusion as the epigraph of his ketchup book: ketchup may well be “the only true culinary expression of the melting pot, and… its special and unprecedented ability to provide something for everyone makes it the Esperanto of cuisine.” Here is where Henry Heinz and the benzoate battle were so important: in defeating the condiment Old Guard, he was the one who changed the flavor of ketchup in a way that made it universal.
4.
There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother’s milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. “Umami adds body,” Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. “If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it’s thicker – it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food.” When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar – so now ketchup was also sweet – and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. Give a baby soup, and then soup with MSG (an amino-acid salt that is pure umami), and the baby will go back for the MSG soup every time, the same way a baby will always prefer water with sugar to water alone. Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating – about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?
A number of years ago, the H. J. Heinz Company did an extensive market-research project in which researchers went into people’s homes and watched the way they used ketchup. “I remember sitting in one of those households,” Casey Keller, who was until recently the chief growth officer for Heinz, says. “There was a three-year-old and a six-year-old, and what happened was that the kids asked for ketchup and Mom brought it out. It was a forty-ounce bottle. And the three-year-old went to grab it himself, and Mom intercepted the bottle and said, ‘No, you’re not going to do that.’ She physically took the bottle away and doled out a little dollop. You could see that the whole thing was a bummer.” For Heinz, Keller says, that moment was an epiphany. A typical five-year-old consumes about 60 percent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. “If you are four – and I have a four-year-old – he doesn’t get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases,” Keller says. “But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It’s the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize.” As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as 12 percent.
There is another lesson in that household scene, though. Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived. There the three-year-old was, confronted with something strange on his plate – tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts – and he wanted to alter his food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar. He wanted to subdue the contents of his plate. And so he turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once.
5.
A few months after Jim Wigon’s visit to Zabar’s, Edgar Chambers IV, who runs the sensory-analysis center at Kansas State University, conducted a joint assessment of World’s Best and Heinz. He has seventeen trained tasters on his staff, and they work for academia and industry, answering the often difficult question of what a given substance tastes like. It is demanding work. Immediately after conducting the ketchup study, Chambers dispatched a team to Bangkok to do an analysis of fruit – bananas, mangoes, rose apples, and sweet tamarind. Others were detailed to soy and kimchi in South Korea, and Chambers’s wife led a delegation to Italy to analyze ice cream.
The ketchup tasting took place over four hours, on two consecutive mornings. Six tasters sat around a large, round table with a lazy Susan in the middle. In front of each panelist were two one-ounce cups, one filled with Heinz ketchup and one filled with World’s Best. They would work along fourteen dimensions of flavor and texture, in accordance with the standard fifteen-point scale used by the food world. The flavor components would be divided two ways: elements picked up by the tongue and elements picked up by the nose. A very ripe peach, for example, tastes sweet but it also smells sweet – which is a very different aspect of sweetness. Vinegar has a sour taste but also a pungency, a vapor that rises up the back of the nose and fills the mouth when you breathe out. To aid in the rating process, the tasters surrounded themselves with little bowls of sweet and sour and salty solutions, and portions of Contadina tomato paste, Hunt’s tomato sauce, and Campbell’s tomato juice, all of which represent different concentrations of tomato-ness.
After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of “amplitude,” the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that “bloom” in the mouth. “The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing ‘Ode to Joy’ on the piano,” Chambers says. “They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist.” Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude. So are Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake. When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can’t isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. But you can with one of those private-label colas that you get in the supermarket. “The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous,” Judy Heylmun, a vice president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. “They have beautiful notes – all flavors are in balance. It’s very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it’s” – and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds – “all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything.”
Some of the cheaper ketchups are the same way. Ketchup aficionados say that there’s a disquieting unevenness to the tomato notes in Del Monte ketchup: tomatoes vary, in acidity and sweetness and the ratio of solids to liquid, according to the seed variety used, the time of year they are harvested, the soil in which they are grown, and the weather during the growing season. Unless all those variables are tightly controlled, one batch of ketchup can end up too watery and another can be too strong. Or try one of the numerous private-label brands that make up the bottom of the ketchup market and pay attention to the spice mix; you may well find yourself conscious of the clove note or overwhelmed by a hit of garlic. Generic colas and ketchups have what Moskowitz calls a hook – a sensory attribute that you can single out, and ultimately tire of.
The tasting began with a plastic spoon. Upon consideration, it was decided that the analysis would be helped if the ketchups were tasted on French fries, so a batch of fries was cooked up and distributed around the table. Each tester, according to protocol, took the fries one by one, dipped them into the cup – all the way, right to the bottom – bit off the portion covered in ketchup, and then contemplated the evidence of their senses. For Heinz, the critical flavor components – vinegar, salt, tomato ID (overall tomato-ness), sweet, and bitter – were judged to be present in roughly equal concentrations, and those elements, in turn, were judged to be well blended. The World’s Best, though, “had a completely different view, a different profile, from the Heinz,” Chambers said. It had a much stronger hit of sweet aromatics – 4.0 to 2.5 – and outstripped Heinz on tomato ID by a resounding 9 to 5.5. But there was less salt, and no discernible vinegar. “The other comment from the panel was that these elements were really not blended at all,” Chambers went on. “The World’s Best product had really low amplitude.” According to Joyce Buchholz, one of the panelists, when the group judged aftertaste, “it seemed like a certain flavor would hang over longer in the case of World’s Best – that cooked-tomatoey flavor.”
But what was Jim Wigon to do? To compete against Heinz, he had to try something dramatic, like substituting maple syrup for corn syrup, ramping up the tomato solids. That made for an unusual and daring flavor. World’s Best Dill ketchup on fried catfish, for instance, is a marvelous thing. But it also meant that his ketchup wasn’t as sensorily complete as Heinz, and he was paying a heavy price in amplitude. “Our conclusion was mainly this,” Buchholz said. “We felt that World’s Best seemed to be more like a sauce.” She was trying to be helpful.
There is an exception, then, to the Moskowitz rule. Today there are thirty-six varieties of Ragú spaghetti sauce, under six rubrics – Old World Style, Chunky Garden Style, Robusto, Light, Cheese Creations, and Rich & Meaty – which means that there is very nearly an optimal spaghetti sauce for every man, woman, and child in America. Measured against the monotony that confronted Howard Moskowitz twenty years ago, this is progress. Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. But that makes it easy to forget that sometimes happiness can be found in having what we’ve always had and everyone else is having. “Back in the seventies, someone else – I think it was Ragú – tried to do an ‘Italian’-style ketchup,” Moskowitz said. “They failed miserably.” It was a conundrum: what was true about a yellow condiment that went on hot dogs was not true about a tomato condiment that went on hamburgers, and what was true about tomato sauce when you added visible solids and put it in a jar was somehow not true about tomato sauce when you added vinegar and sugar and put it in a bottle. Moskowitz shrugged. “I guess ketchup is ketchup.”
September 6, 2004
Blowing Up
HOW NASSIM TALEB TURNED THE INEVITABILITY OF DISASTER INTO AN INVESTMENT STRATEGY
1.
One day in 1996, a Wall Street trader named Nassim Nicholas Taleb went to see Victor Niederhoffer. Victor Niederhoffer was one of the most successful money managers in the country. He lived and worked out of a thirteen-acre compound in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and when Taleb drove up that day from his home in Larchmont he had to give his name at the gate, and then make his way down a long, curving driveway. Niederhoffer had a squash court and a tennis court and a swimming pool and a colossal, faux-alpine mansion in which virtually every square inch of space was covered with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American folk art. In those days, he played tennis regularly with the billionaire financier George Soros. He had just written a best-selling book, The Education of a Speculator, dedicated to his father, Artie Niederhoffer, a police officer from Coney Island. He had a huge and eclectic library and a seemingly insatiable desire for knowledge. When Niederhoffer went to Harvard as an undergraduate, he showed up for the very first squash practice and announced that he would someday be the best in that sport; and, sure enough, he soon beat the legendary Shariff Khan to win the US Open squash championship. That was the kind of man Niederhoffer was. He had heard of Taleb’s growing reputation in the esoteric field of options trading and summoned him to Connecticut. Taleb was in awe.
“He didn’t talk much, so I observed him,” Taleb recalls. “I spent seven hours watching him trade. Everyone else in his office was in his twenties, and he was in his fifties, and he had the most energy of them all. Then, after the markets closed, he went out to hit a thousand backhands on the tennis court.” Taleb is Greek-Orthodox Lebanese and his first language was French, and in his pronunciation the name Niederhoffer comes out as the slightly more exotic Niederhoffer. “Here was a guy living in a mansion with thousands of books, and that was my dream as a child,” Taleb went on. “He was part chevalier, part scholar. My respect for him was intense.” There was just one problem, however, and it is the key to understanding the strange path that Nassim Taleb has chosen, and the position he now holds as Wall Street’s principal dissident. Despite his envy and admiration, he did not want to be Victor Niederhoffer – not then, not now, and not even for a moment in between. For when he looked around him, at the books and the tennis court and the folk art on the walls – when he contemplated the countless millions that Niederhoffer had made over the years – he could not escape the thought that it might all have been the result of sheer dumb luck.
Taleb knew how heretical that thought was. Wall Street was dedicated to the principle that when it came to playing the markets there was such a thing as expertise, that skill and insight mattered in investing just as skill and insight mattered in surgery and golf and flying fighter jets. Those who had the foresight to grasp the role that software would play in the modern world bought Microsoft in 1985 and made a fortune. Those who understood the psychology of investment bubbles sold their tech stocks at the end of 1999 and escaped the Nasdaq crash. Warren Buffett was known as the “sage of Omaha ” because it seemed incontrovertible that if you started with nothing and ended up with billions, then you had to be smarter than everyone else: Buffett was successful for a reason. Yet how could you know, Taleb wondered, whether that reason was responsible for someone’s success, or simply a rationalization invented after the fact? George Soros seemed to be successful for a reason, too. He used to say that he followed something called the theory of reflexivity. But then, later, Soros wrote that in most situations his theory “is so feeble that it can be safely ignored.” An old trading partner of Taleb’s, a man named Jean-Manuel Rozan, once spent an entire afternoon arguing about the stock market with Soros. Soros was vehemently bearish, and he had an elaborate theory to explain why, which turned out to be entirely wrong. The stock market boomed. Two years later, Rozan ran into Soros at a tennis tournament. “Do you remember our conversation?” Rozan asked. “I recall it very well,” Soros replied. “I changed my mind, and made an absolute fortune.” He changed his mind! The truest thing about Soros seemed to be what his son Robert had once said:
My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that. But I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking, Jesus Christ, at least half of this is bullshit. I mean, you know the reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him. It has nothing to do with reason. He literally goes into a spasm, and it’s this early warning sign.
For Taleb, then, the question why someone was a success in the financial marketplace was vexing. Taleb could do the arithmetic in his head. Suppose that there were ten thousand investment managers out there, which is not an outlandish number, and that every year half of them, entirely by chance, made money and half of them, entirely by chance, lost money. And suppose that every year, the losers were tossed out and the game was replayed with those who remained. At the end of five years, there would be three hundred and thirteen people who had made money in every one of those years, and after ten years there would be nine people who had made money every single year in a row, all out of pure luck. Niederhoffer, like Buffett and Soros, was a brilliant man. He had a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. He had pioneered the idea that through close mathematical analysis of patterns in the market an investor could identify profitable anomalies. But who was to say that he wasn’t one of those lucky nine? And who was to say that in the eleventh year Niederhoffer would be one of the unlucky ones, who suddenly lost it all, who suddenly, as they say on Wall Street, “blew up”?
Taleb remembered his childhood in Lebanon and watching his country turn, as he puts it, from “paradise to hell” in six months. His family once owned vast tracts of land in northern Lebanon. All of that was gone. He remembered his grandfather, the former deputy prime minister of Lebanon and the son of a deputy prime minister of Lebanon and a man of great personal dignity, living out his days in a dowdy apartment in Athens. That was the problem with a world in which there was so much uncertainty about why things ended up the way they did: you never knew whether one day your luck would turn and it would all be washed away.
So here is what Taleb took from Niederhoffer. He saw that Niederhoffer was a serious athlete, and he decided that he would be, too. He would bicycle to work and exercise in the gym. Niederhoffer was a staunch empiricist who turned to Taleb that day in Connecticut and said to him sternly, “Everything that can be tested must be tested,” and so when Taleb started his own hedge fund, a few years later, he called it Empirica. But that is where it stopped. Nassim Taleb decided that he could not pursue an investment strategy that had any chance of blowing up.
2.
Nassim Taleb is a tall, muscular man in his early forties, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a balding head. His eyebrows are heavy and his nose is long. His skin has the olive hue of the Levant. He is a man of moods, and when his world turns dark the eyebrows come together and the eyes narrow and it is as if he were giving off an electrical charge. It is said, by some of his friends, that he looks like Salman Rushdie, although at his office his staff have pinned to the bulletin board a photograph of a mullah they swear is Taleb’s long-lost twin, while Taleb himself maintains, wholly implausibly, that he resembles Sean Connery. He lives in a four-bedroom Tudor with twenty-six Russian Orthodox icons, nineteen Roman heads, and four thousand books, and he rises at dawn to spend an hour writing. He is the author of two books, the first a technical and highly regarded work on derivatives, and the second a treatise entitled Fooled by Randomness, which is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses were to the Catholic Church. Some afternoons, he drives into the city and attends a philosophy lecture at City University. During the school year, in the evenings, he teaches a graduate course in finance at New York University, after which he can often be found at the bar at Odeon Café in Tribeca, holding forth, say, on the finer points of stochastic volatility or his veneration of the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy.
Taleb runs Empirica Capital out of an anonymous concrete office park somewhere in the woods outside Greenwich, Connecticut. His offices consist, principally, of a trading floor about the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. Taleb sits in one corner, in front of a laptop, surrounded by the rest of his team – Mark Spitznagel, the chief trader; another trader, named Danny Tosto; a programmer named Winn Martin; and a graduate student named Pallop Angsupun. Mark Spitznagel is perhaps thirty. Winn, Danny, and Pallop look as if they belong in high school. The room has an overstuffed bookshelf in one corner, and a television muted and tuned to CNBC. There are two ancient Greek heads, one next to Taleb’s computer and the other, somewhat bafflingly, on the floor, next to the door, as if it were being set out for the trash. There is almost nothing on the walls, except for a slightly battered poster for an exhibition of Greek artifacts, the snapshot of the mullah, and a small pen-and-ink drawing of the patron saint of Empirica Capital, the philosopher Karl Popper.
On a recent spring morning, the staff of Empirica were concerned with solving a thorny problem having to do with the square root of n, where n is a given number of random set of observations, and what relation n might have to a speculator’s confidence in his estimations. Taleb was up at a whiteboard by the door, his marker squeaking furiously as he scribbled possible solutions. Spitznagel and Pallop looked on intently. Spitznagel is blond and from the Midwest and does yoga: in contrast to Taleb, he exudes a certain laconic levelheadedness. In a bar, Taleb would pick a fight. Spitznagel would break it up. Pallop is of Thai extraction and is doing a PhD in financial mathematics at Princeton. He has longish black hair and a slightly quizzical air. “Pallop is very lazy,” Taleb will remark, to no one in particular, several times over the course of the day, although this is said with such affection that it suggests that laziness, in the Talebian nomenclature, is a synonym for genius. Pallop’s computer was untouched and he often turned his chair around so that he faced completely away from his desk. He was reading a book by the cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose arguments, he said a bit disappointedly, were “not really quantifiable.” The three argued back and forth about the solution. It appeared that Taleb might be wrong, but before the matter could be resolved the markets opened. Taleb returned to his desk and began to bicker with Spitznagel about what exactly would be put on the company boom box. Spitznagel plays the piano and the French horn and has appointed himself the Empirica DJ. He wanted to play Mahler, and Taleb does not like Mahler. “Mahler is not good for volatility,” Taleb complained. “Bach is good. St. Matthew’s Passion!” Taleb gestured toward Spitznagel, who was wearing a gray woolen turtleneck. “Look at him. He wants to be like von Karajan, like someone who wants to live in a castle. Technically superior to the rest of us. No chitchatting. Top skier. That’s Mark!” As Spitznagel rolled his eyes, a man whom Taleb refers to, somewhat mysteriously, as Dr. Wu wandered in. Dr. Wu works for another hedge fund, down the hall, and is said to be brilliant. He is thin and squints through black-rimmed glasses. He was asked his opinion on the square root of n but declined to answer. “Dr. Wu comes here for intellectual kicks and to borrow books and to talk music with Mark,” Taleb explained after their visitor had drifted away. He added darkly, “Dr. Wu is a Mahlerian.”
Empirica follows a very particular investment strategy. It trades options, which is to say that it deals not in stocks and bonds but with bets on stocks and bonds. Imagine, for example, that General Motors stock is trading at $50, and imagine that you are a major investor on Wall Street. An options trader comes up to you with a proposition. What if, within the next three months, he decides to sell you a share of GM at $45? How much would you charge for agreeing to buy it at that price? You would look at the history of GM and see that in a three-month period it has rarely dropped 10 percent, and obviously the trader is only going to make you buy his GM at $45 if the stock drops below that point. So you say you’ll make that promise, or sell that option, for a relatively small fee, say, a dime. You are betting on the high probability that GM stock will stay relatively calm over the next three months, and if you are right, you’ll pocket the dime as pure profit. The trader, on the other hand, is betting on the unlikely event that GM stock will drop a lot, and if that happens, his profits are potentially huge. If the trader bought a million options from you at a dime each and GM drops to $35, he’ll buy a million shares at $35 and turn around and force you to buy them at $45, making himself suddenly very rich and you substantially poorer.
That particular transaction is called, in the argot of Wall Street, an out-of-the-money option. But an option can be configured in a vast number of ways. You could sell the trader a GM option at $30, or, if you wanted to bet against GM stock going up, you could sell a GM option at $60. You could sell or buy options on bonds, on the S &P index, on foreign currencies, or mortgages, or on the relationship among any number of financial instruments of your choice; you can bet on the market booming, or the market crashing, or the market staying the same. Options allow investors to gamble heavily and turn one dollar into ten. They also allow investors to hedge their risk. The reason your pension fund may not be wiped out in the next crash is that it has protected itself by buying options. What drives the options game is the notion that the risks represented by all of these bets can be quantified; that by looking at the past behavior of GM, you can figure out the exact chance of GM hitting $45 in the next three months, and whether at $1 that option is a good or a bad investment. The process is a lot like the way insurance companies analyze actuarial statistics in order to figure out how much to charge for a life-insurance premium, and to make those calculations every investment bank has, on staff, a team of PhDs, physicists from Russia, applied mathematicians from China, and computer scientists from India. On Wall Street, those PhDs are called quants.
Nassim Taleb and his team at Empirica are quants. But they reject the quant orthodoxy, because they don’t believe that things like the stock market behave in the way that physical phenomena like mortality statistics do. Physical events, whether death rates or poker games, are the predictable function of a limited and stable set of factors, and tend to follow what statisticians call a normal distribution, a bell curve. But do the ups and downs of the market follow a bell curve? The economist Eugene Fama once studied stock prices and pointed out that if they followed a normal distribution, you’d expect a really big jump, what he specified as a movement five standard deviations from the mean, once every seven thousand years. In fact, jumps of that magnitude happen in the stock market every three or four years, because investors don’t behave with any kind of statistical orderliness. They change their mind. They do stupid things. They copy one another. They panic. Fama concluded that if you charted the ups and downs of the stock market, the graph would have a “fat tail,” meaning that at the upper and lower ends of the distribution there would be many more outlying events than statisticians used to modeling the physical world would have imagined.
In the summer of 1997, Taleb predicted that hedge funds like Long Term Capital Management were headed for trouble because they did not understand this notion of fat tails. Just a year later, LTCM sold an extraordinary number of options, because its computer models told it that the markets ought to be calming down. And what happened? The Russian government defaulted on its bonds; the markets went crazy; and in a matter of weeks LTCM was finished. Spitznagel, Taleb’s head trader, says that he recently heard one of the former top executives of LTCM give a lecture in which he defended the gamble that the fund had made. “What he said was, ‘Look, when I drive home every night in the fall I see all these leaves scattered around the base of the trees,’” Spitznagel recounts. “There is a statistical distribution that governs the way they fall, and I can be pretty accurate in figuring out what that distribution is going to be. But one day I came home and the leaves were in little piles. Does that falsify my theory that there are statistical rules governing how leaves fall? No. It was a man-made event.” In other words, the Russians, by defaulting on their bonds, did something that they were not supposed to do, a once-in-a-lifetime, rule-breaking event. But this, to Taleb, is just the point: in the markets, unlike in the physical universe, the rules of the game can be changed. Central banks can decide to default on government-backed securities.
One of Taleb’s earliest Wall Street mentors was a short-tempered Frenchman named Jean-Patrice, who dressed like a peacock and had an almost neurotic obsession with risk. Jean-Patrice would call Taleb from Regine’s at three in the morning, or take a meeting in a Paris nightclub, sipping champagne and surrounded by scantily clad women, and once Jean-Patrice asked Taleb what would happen to his positions if a plane crashed into his building. Taleb was young then and brushed him aside. It seemed absurd. But nothing, Taleb soon realized, is absurd. Taleb likes to quote David Hume: “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.” Because LTCM had never seen a black swan in Russia, it thought no Russian black swans existed. Taleb, by contrast, has constructed a trading philosophy predicated entirely on the existence of black swans, on the possibility of some random, unexpected event sweeping the markets. He never sells options, then. He only buys them. He’s never the one who can lose a great deal of money if GM stock suddenly plunges. Nor does he ever bet on the market moving in one direction or another. That would require Taleb to assume that he understands the market, and he doesn’t. He hasn’t Warren Buffett’s confidence. So he buys options on both sides, on the possibility of the market moving both up and down. And he doesn’t bet on minor fluctuations in the market. Why bother? If everyone else is vastly underestimating the possibility of rare events, then an option on GM at, say, $40 is going to be undervalued. So Taleb buys out-of-the-money options by the truckload. He buys them for hundreds of different stocks, and if they expire before he gets to use them, he simply buys more. Taleb doesn’t even invest in stocks, not for Empirica and not for his own personal account. Buying a stock, unlike buying an option, is a gamble that the future will represent an improved version of the past. And who knows whether that will be true? So all of Taleb’s personal wealth, and the hundreds of millions that Empirica has in reserve, is in Treasury bills. Few on Wall Street have taken the practice of buying options to such extremes. But if anything completely out of the ordinary happens to the stock market, if some random event sends a jolt through all of Wall Street and pushes GM to, say, $20, Nassim Taleb will not end up in a dowdy apartment in Athens. He will be rich.
Not long ago, Taleb went to a dinner in a French restaurant just north of Wall Street. The people at the dinner were all quants: men with bulging pockets and open-collared shirts and the serene and slightly detached air of those who daydream in numbers. Taleb sat at the end of the table, drinking pastis and discussing French literature. There was a chess grand master at the table, with a shock of white hair, who had once been one of Anatoly Karpov’s teachers, and another man who over the course of his career had worked, in order, at Stanford University, Exxon, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Morgan Stanley, and a boutique French investment bank. They talked about mathematics and chess and fretted about one of their party who had not yet arrived and who had the reputation, as one of the quants worriedly said, of “not being able to find the bathroom.” When the check came, it was given to a man who worked in risk management at a big Wall Street bank, and he stared at it for a long time, with a slight mixture of perplexity and amusement, as if he could not remember what it was like to deal with a mathematical problem of such banality. The men at the table were in a business that was formally about mathematics but was really about epistemology, because to sell or to buy an option requires each party to confront the question of what it is he truly knows. Taleb buys options because he is certain that, at root, he knows nothing, or, more precisely, that other people believe they know more than they do. But there were plenty of people around that table who sold options, who thought that if you were smart enough to set the price of the option properly, you could win so many of those $1 bets on General Motors that, even if the stock ever did dip below $45, you’d still come out far ahead. They believe that the world is a place where, at the end of the day, leaves fall more or less in a predictable pattern.
The distinction between these two sides is the divide that emerged between Taleb and Niederhoffer all those years ago in Connecticut. Niederhoffer’s hero is the nineteenth- century scientist Francis Galton. Niederhoffer called his eldest daughter Galt, and there is a full-length portrait of Galton in his library. Galton was a statistician and a social scientist (and a geneticist and a meteorologist), and if he was your hero, you believed that by marshaling empirical evidence, by aggregating data points, you could learn whatever it was you needed to know. Taleb’s hero, on the other hand, is Karl Popper, who said that you could not know with any certainty that a proposition was true; you could only know that it was not true. Taleb makes much of what he learned from Niederhoffer, but Niederhoffer insists that his example was wasted on Taleb. “In one of his cases, Rumpole of the Bailey talked about being tried by the bishop who doesn’t believe in God,” Niederhoffer says. “Nassim is the empiricist who doesn’t believe in empiricism.” What is it that you claim to learn from experience, if you believe that experience cannot be trusted? Today, Niederhoffer makes a lot of his money selling options, and more often than not the person to whom he sells those options is Nassim Taleb. If one of them is up a dollar one day, in other words, that dollar is likely to have come from the other. The teacher and pupil have become predator and prey.
3.
Years ago, Nassim Taleb worked at the investment bank First Boston, and one of the things that puzzled him was what he saw as the mindless industry of the trading floor. A trader was supposed to come in every morning and buy and sell things, and on the basis of how much money he made buying and selling he was given a bonus. If he went too many weeks without showing a profit, his peers would start to look at him funny, and if he went too many months without showing a profit, he would be gone. The traders were for the most part well educated and wore Savile Row suits and Ferragamo ties. They dove into the markets with a frantic urgency. They read the Wall Street Journal closely and gathered around the television to catch breaking news. “The Fed did this, the Prime Minister of Spain did that,” Taleb recalls. “The Italian Finance Minister says there will be no competitive devaluation, this number is higher than expected, Abby Cohen just said this.” It was a scene that Taleb did not understand.
“He was always so conceptual about what he was doing,” says Howard Savery, who was Taleb’s assistant at the French bank Indosuez in the 1980s. “He used to drive our floor trader (his name was Tim) crazy. Floor traders are used to precision: “Sell a hundred futures at eighty-seven.” Nassim would pick up the phone and say, “Tim, sell some.” And Tim would say, “How many?” And he would say, “Oh, a social amount.” It was like saying, “I don’t have a number in mind, I just know I want to sell.” There would be these heated arguments in French, screaming arguments. Then everyone would go out to dinner and have fun. Nassim and his group had this attitude that we’re not interested in knowing what the new trade number is. When everyone else was leaning over their desks, listening closely to the latest figures, Nassim would make a big scene of walking out of the room.”
At Empirica, then, there are no Wall Street Journals to be found. There is very little active trading, because the options that the fund owns are selected by computer. Most of those options will be useful only if the market does something dramatic, and, of course, on most days the market doesn’t. So the job of Taleb and his team is to wait and to think. They analyze the company’s trading policies, back-test various strategies, and construct ever more sophisticated computer models of options pricing. Danny, in the corner, occasionally types things into the computer. Pallop looks dreamily off into the distance. Spitznagel takes calls from traders, and toggles back and forth between screens on his computer. Taleb answers e-mails and calls one of the firm’s brokers in Chicago, affecting, as he does, the kind of Brooklyn accent that people from Brooklyn would have if they were actually from northern Lebanon: “Howyoudoin?” It is closer to a classroom than to a trading floor.
“Pallop, did you introspect?” Taleb calls out as he wanders back in from lunch. Pallop is asked what his PhD is about. “Pretty much this,” he says, waving a languid hand around the room.
“It looks like we will have to write it for him,” Taleb chimes in, “because Pollop is very lazy.”
What Empirica has done is to invert the traditional psychology of investing. You and I, if we invest conventionally in the market, have a fairly large chance of making a small amount of money in a given day from dividends or interest or the general upward trend of the market. We have almost no chance of making a large amount of money in one day, and there is a very small, but real, possibility that if the market collapses we could blow up. We accept that distribution of risks because, for fundamental reasons, it feels right. In the book that Pallop was reading by Kahneman and Tversky, for example, there is a description of a simple experiment, where a group of people were told to imagine that they had $300. They were then given a choice between (a) receiving another $100 or (b) tossing a coin, where if they won they got $200 and if they lost they got nothing. Most of us, it turns out, prefer (a) to (b). But then Kahneman and Tversky did a second experiment. They told people to imagine that they had $500 and then asked them if they would rather (c) give up $100 or (d) toss a coin and pay $200 if they lost and nothing at all if they won. Most of us now prefer (d) to (c). What is interesting about those four choices is that, from a probabilistic standpoint, they are identical. Nonetheless, we have strong preferences among them. Why? Because we’re more willing to gamble when it comes to losses, but are risk averse when it comes to our gains. That’s why we like small daily winnings in the stock market, even if that requires that we risk losing everything in a crash.
At Empirica, by contrast, every day brings a small but real possibility that they’ll make a huge amount of money in a day; no chance that they’ll blow up; and a very large possibility that they’ll lose a small amount of money. All those dollar, and fifty-cent, and nickel options that Empirica has accumulated, few of which will ever be used, soon begin to add up. By looking at a particular column on the computer screens showing Empirica’s positions, anyone at the firm can tell you precisely how much money Empirica has lost or made so far that day. At 11:30 a.m., for instance, they had recovered just 28 percent of the money they had spent that day on options. By 12:30, they had recovered 40 percent, meaning that the day was not yet half over and Empirica was already in the red to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars. The day before that, it had made back 85 percent of its money; the day before that, 48 percent; the day before that, 65 percent; and the day before that also 65 percent; and, in fact, with a few notable exceptions – like the few days when the market reopened after September 11 – Empirica has done nothing but lose money since last April. “We cannot blow up, we can only bleed to death,” Taleb says, and bleeding to death, absorbing the pain of steady losses, is precisely what human beings are hardwired to avoid. “Say you’ve got a guy who is long on Russian bonds,” Savery says. “He’s making money every day. One day, lightning strikes and he loses five times what he made. Still, on three hundred and sixty-four out of three hundred and sixty-five days he was very happily making money. It’s much harder to be the other guy, the guy losing money three hundred and sixty-four days out of three hundred and sixty-five, because you start questioning yourself. Am I ever going to make it back? Am I really right? What if it takes ten years? Will I even be sane ten years from now?” What the normal trader gets from his daily winnings is feedback, the pleasing illusion of progress. At Empirica, there is no feedback. “It’s like you’re playing the piano for ten years and you still can’t play ‘Chopsticks,’” Spitznagel say, “and the only thing you have to keep you going is the belief that one day you’ll wake up and play like Rachmaninoff.” Was it easy knowing that Niederhoffer – who represented everything they thought was wrong – was out there getting rich while they were bleeding away? Of course it wasn’t. If you watched Taleb closely that day, you could see the little ways in which the steady drip of losses takes a toll. He glanced a bit too much at the Bloomberg. He leaned forward a bit too often to see the daily loss count. He succumbs to an array of superstitious tics. If the going is good, he parks in the same space every day; he turned against Mahler because he associates Mahler with the last year’s long dry spell. “Nassim says all the time that he needs me there, and I believe him,” Spitznagel says. He is there to remind Taleb that there is a point to waiting, to help Taleb resist the very human impulse to abandon everything and stanch the pain of losing. “Mark is my cop,” Taleb says. So is Pallop: he is there to remind Taleb that Empirica has the intellectual edge.
“The key is not having the ideas but having the recipe to deal with your ideas,” Taleb says. “We don’t need moralizing. We need a set of tricks.” His trick is a protocol that stipulates precisely what has to be done in every situation. “We built the protocol, and the reason we did was to tell the guys, Don’t listen to me, listen to the protocol. Now, I have the right to change the protocol, but there is a protocol to changing the protocol. We have to be hard on ourselves to do what we do. The bias we see in Niederhoffer we see in ourselves.” At the quant dinner, Taleb devoured his roll, and as the busboy came around with more rolls Taleb shouted out, “No, no!” and blocked his plate. It was a never-ending struggle, this battle between head and heart. When the waiter came around with wine, he hastily covered the glass with his hand. When the time came to order, he asked for steak frites – “without the frites, please!” – and then immediately tried to hedge his choice by negotiating with the person next to him for a fraction of his frites.
The psychologist Walter Mischel has done a series of experiments where he puts a young child in a room and places two cookies in front of him, one small and one large. The child is told that if he wants the small cookie he need only ring a bell and the experimenter will come back into the room and give it to him. If he wants the better treat, though, he has to wait until the experimenter returns on his own, which might be anytime in the next twenty minutes. Mischel has videotapes of six-year-olds sitting in the room by themselves, staring at the cookies, trying to persuade themselves to wait. One girl starts to sing to herself. She whispers what seems to be the instructions – that she can have the big cookie if she can only wait. She closes her eyes. Then she turns her back on the cookies. Another little boy swings his legs violently back and forth, and then picks up the bell and examines it, trying to do anything but think about the cookie he could get by ringing it. The tapes document the beginnings of discipline and self-control – the techniques we learn to keep our impulses in check – and to watch all the children desperately distracting themselves is to experience the shock of recognition: that’s Nassim Taleb!
There is something else as well that helps to explain Taleb’s resolve – more than the tics and the systems and the self-denying ordinances. It happened a year or so before he went to see Niederhoffer. Taleb had been working as a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and he’d developed a persistently hoarse throat. At first, he thought nothing of it: a hoarse throat was an occupational hazard of spending every day in the pit. Finally, when he moved back to New York, he went to see a doctor, in one of those Upper East Side prewar buildings with a glamorous facade. Taleb sat in the office, staring out at the plain brick of the courtyard, reading the medical diplomas on the wall over and over, waiting and waiting for the verdict. The doctor returned and spoke in a low, grave voice: “I got the pathology report. It’s not as bad as it sounds.” But, of course, it was: he had throat cancer. Taleb’s mind shut down. He left the office. It was raining outside. He walked and walked and ended up at a medical library. There he read frantically about his disease, the rainwater forming a puddle under his feet. It made no sense. Throat cancer was the disease of someone who has spent a lifetime smoking heavily. But Taleb was young, and he barely smoked at all. His risk of getting throat cancer was something like one in a hundred thousand, almost unimaginably small. He was a black swan! The cancer is now beaten, but the memory of it is also Taleb’s secret, because once you have been a black swan – not just seen one but lived and faced death as one – it becomes easier to imagine another on the horizon.
As the day came to an end, Taleb and his team turned their attention once again to the problem of the square root of n. Taleb was back at the whiteboard. Spitznagel was looking on. Pallop was idly peeling a banana. Outside, the sun was beginning to settle behind the trees. “You do a conversion to p1 and p2,” Taleb said. His marker was once again squeaking across the whiteboard. “We say we have a Gaussian distribution, and you have the market switching from a low-volume regime to a high-volume. P21. P22. You have your igon value.” He frowned and stared at his handiwork. The markets were now closed. Empirica had lost money, which meant that somewhere off in the woods of Connecticut Niederhoffer had no doubt made money. That hurt, but if you steeled yourself and thought about the problem at hand, and kept in mind that someday the market would do something utterly unexpected because in the world we live in something utterly unexpected always happens, then the hurt was not so bad. Taleb eyed his equations on the whiteboard and arched an eyebrow. It was a very difficult problem. “Where is Dr. Wu? Should we call in Dr. Wu?”
4.
A year after Nassim Taleb came to visit him, Victor Niederhoffer blew up. He sold a very large number of options on the S &P index, taking millions of dollars from other traders in exchange for promising to buy a basket of stocks from them at current prices, if the market ever fell. It was an unhedged bet, or what was called on Wall Street a naked put, meaning that he bet everyone on one outcome: he bet in favor of the large probability of making a small amount of money, and against the small probability of losing a large amount of money – and he lost. On October 27, 1997, the market plummeted 8 percent, and all of the many, many people who had bought those options from Niederhoffer came calling all at once, demanding that he buy back their stocks at pre-crash prices. He ran through $130,000,000 – his cash reserves, his savings, his other stocks – and when his broker came and asked for still more, he didn’t have it. In a day, one of the most successful hedge funds in America was wiped out. Niederhoffer had to shut down his firm. He had to mortgage his house. He had to borrow money from his children. He had to call Sotheby’s and sell his prized silver collection – the massive nineteenth-century Brazilian “sculptural group of victory” made for the Visconde De Figueirdeo, the massive silver bowl designed in 1887 by Tiffany & Co. for the James Gordon Bennett Cup yacht race, and on and on. He stayed away from the auction. He couldn’t bear to watch.
“It was one of the worst things that has ever happened to me in my life, right up there with the death of those closest to me,” Niederhoffer said recently. It was a Saturday in March, and he was in the library of his enormous house. Two weary-looking dogs wandered in and out. He is a tall man, an athlete, thick through the upper body and trunk, with a long, imposing face and baleful, hooded eyes. He was shoeless. One collar on his shirt was twisted inward, and he looked away as he talked. “I let down my friends. I lost my business. I was a major money manager. Now I pretty much have had to start from ground zero.” He paused. “Five years have passed. The beaver builds a dam. The river washes it away, so he tries to build a better foundation, and I think I have. But I’m always mindful of the possibility of more failures.” In the distance, there was a knock on the door. It was a man named Milton Bond, an artist who had come to present Niederhoffer with a painting he had done of Moby Dick ramming the Pequod. It was in the folk-art style that Niederhoffer likes so much, and he went to meet Bond in the foyer, kneeling down in front of the painting as Bond unwrapped it. Niederhoffer has other paintings of the Pequod in his house, and paintings of the Essex, the ship on which Melville’s story was based. In his office, on a prominent wall, is a painting of the Titanic. They were, he said, his way of staying humble. “One of the reasons I’ve paid lots of attention to the Essex is that it turns out that the captain of the Essex, as soon as he got back to Nantucket, was given another job,” Niederhoffer said. “They thought he did a good job in getting back after the ship was rammed. The captain was asked, ‘How could people give you another ship?’ And he said, ‘I guess on the theory that lightning doesn’t strike twice.’ It was a fairly random thing. But then he was given the other ship, and that one foundered, too. Got stuck in the ice. At that time, he was a lost man. He wouldn’t even let them save him. They had to forcibly remove him from the ship. He spent the rest of his life as a janitor in Nantucket. He became what on Wall Street they call a ghost.” Niederhoffer was back in his study now, his lanky body stretched out, his feet up on the table, his eyes a little rheumy. “You see? I can’t afford to fail a second time. Then I’ll be a total washout. That’s the significance of the Pequod.”
A month or so before Niederhoffer blew up, Taleb had dinner with him at a restaurant in Westport, and Niederhoffer told him that he had been selling naked puts. You can imagine the two of them across the table from each other, Niederhoffer explaining that his bet was an acceptable risk, that the odds of the market going down so heavily that he would be wiped out were minuscule, and Taleb listening and shaking his head, and thinking about black swans. “I was depressed when I left him,” Taleb said. “Here is a guy who goes out and hits a thousand backhands. He plays chess like his life depends on it. Here is a guy who, whatever he wants to do when he wakes up in the morning, he ends up doing better than anyone else. Whatever he wakes up in the morning and decides to do, he did better than anyone else. I was talking to my hero…” This was the reason Taleb didn’t want to be Niederhoffer when Niederhoffer was at his height – the reason he didn’t want the silver and the house and the tennis matches with George Soros. He could see all too clearly where it all might end up. In his mind’s eye, he could envision Niederhoffer borrowing money from his children, and selling off his silver, and talking in a hollow voice about letting down his friends, and Taleb did not know if he had the strength to live with that possibility. Unlike Niederhoffer, Taleb never thought he was invincible. You couldn’t if you had watched your homeland blow up, and had been the one person in a hundred thousand who gets throat cancer, and so for Taleb there was never any alternative to the painful process of insuring himself against catastrophe.
This kind of caution does not seem heroic, of course. It seems like the joyless prudence of the accountant and the Sunday school teacher. The truth is that we are drawn to the Niederhoffers of this world because we are all, at heart, like Niederhoffer: we associate the willingness to risk great failure – and the ability to climb back from catastrophe – with courage. But in this we are wrong. That is the lesson of Taleb and Niederhoffer, and also the lesson of our volatile times. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.
In the fall of 2001, Niederhoffer sold a large number of options, betting that the markets would be quiet, and they were, until out of nowhere two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. “I was exposed. It was nip and tuck.” Niederhoffer shook his head, because there was no way to have anticipated September 11. “That was a totally unexpected event.”[1]
April 22 and 29, 2002
1.
One day in 1996, a Wall Street trader named Nassim Nicholas Taleb went to see Victor Niederhoffer. Victor Niederhoffer was one of the most successful money managers in the country. He lived and worked out of a thirteen-acre compound in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and when Taleb drove up that day from his home in Larchmont he had to give his name at the gate, and then make his way down a long, curving driveway. Niederhoffer had a squash court and a tennis court and a swimming pool and a colossal, faux-alpine mansion in which virtually every square inch of space was covered with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American folk art. In those days, he played tennis regularly with the billionaire financier George Soros. He had just written a best-selling book, The Education of a Speculator, dedicated to his father, Artie Niederhoffer, a police officer from Coney Island. He had a huge and eclectic library and a seemingly insatiable desire for knowledge. When Niederhoffer went to Harvard as an undergraduate, he showed up for the very first squash practice and announced that he would someday be the best in that sport; and, sure enough, he soon beat the legendary Shariff Khan to win the US Open squash championship. That was the kind of man Niederhoffer was. He had heard of Taleb’s growing reputation in the esoteric field of options trading and summoned him to Connecticut. Taleb was in awe.
“He didn’t talk much, so I observed him,” Taleb recalls. “I spent seven hours watching him trade. Everyone else in his office was in his twenties, and he was in his fifties, and he had the most energy of them all. Then, after the markets closed, he went out to hit a thousand backhands on the tennis court.” Taleb is Greek-Orthodox Lebanese and his first language was French, and in his pronunciation the name Niederhoffer comes out as the slightly more exotic Niederhoffer. “Here was a guy living in a mansion with thousands of books, and that was my dream as a child,” Taleb went on. “He was part chevalier, part scholar. My respect for him was intense.” There was just one problem, however, and it is the key to understanding the strange path that Nassim Taleb has chosen, and the position he now holds as Wall Street’s principal dissident. Despite his envy and admiration, he did not want to be Victor Niederhoffer – not then, not now, and not even for a moment in between. For when he looked around him, at the books and the tennis court and the folk art on the walls – when he contemplated the countless millions that Niederhoffer had made over the years – he could not escape the thought that it might all have been the result of sheer dumb luck.
Taleb knew how heretical that thought was. Wall Street was dedicated to the principle that when it came to playing the markets there was such a thing as expertise, that skill and insight mattered in investing just as skill and insight mattered in surgery and golf and flying fighter jets. Those who had the foresight to grasp the role that software would play in the modern world bought Microsoft in 1985 and made a fortune. Those who understood the psychology of investment bubbles sold their tech stocks at the end of 1999 and escaped the Nasdaq crash. Warren Buffett was known as the “sage of Omaha ” because it seemed incontrovertible that if you started with nothing and ended up with billions, then you had to be smarter than everyone else: Buffett was successful for a reason. Yet how could you know, Taleb wondered, whether that reason was responsible for someone’s success, or simply a rationalization invented after the fact? George Soros seemed to be successful for a reason, too. He used to say that he followed something called the theory of reflexivity. But then, later, Soros wrote that in most situations his theory “is so feeble that it can be safely ignored.” An old trading partner of Taleb’s, a man named Jean-Manuel Rozan, once spent an entire afternoon arguing about the stock market with Soros. Soros was vehemently bearish, and he had an elaborate theory to explain why, which turned out to be entirely wrong. The stock market boomed. Two years later, Rozan ran into Soros at a tennis tournament. “Do you remember our conversation?” Rozan asked. “I recall it very well,” Soros replied. “I changed my mind, and made an absolute fortune.” He changed his mind! The truest thing about Soros seemed to be what his son Robert had once said:
My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that. But I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking, Jesus Christ, at least half of this is bullshit. I mean, you know the reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him. It has nothing to do with reason. He literally goes into a spasm, and it’s this early warning sign.
For Taleb, then, the question why someone was a success in the financial marketplace was vexing. Taleb could do the arithmetic in his head. Suppose that there were ten thousand investment managers out there, which is not an outlandish number, and that every year half of them, entirely by chance, made money and half of them, entirely by chance, lost money. And suppose that every year, the losers were tossed out and the game was replayed with those who remained. At the end of five years, there would be three hundred and thirteen people who had made money in every one of those years, and after ten years there would be nine people who had made money every single year in a row, all out of pure luck. Niederhoffer, like Buffett and Soros, was a brilliant man. He had a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. He had pioneered the idea that through close mathematical analysis of patterns in the market an investor could identify profitable anomalies. But who was to say that he wasn’t one of those lucky nine? And who was to say that in the eleventh year Niederhoffer would be one of the unlucky ones, who suddenly lost it all, who suddenly, as they say on Wall Street, “blew up”?
Taleb remembered his childhood in Lebanon and watching his country turn, as he puts it, from “paradise to hell” in six months. His family once owned vast tracts of land in northern Lebanon. All of that was gone. He remembered his grandfather, the former deputy prime minister of Lebanon and the son of a deputy prime minister of Lebanon and a man of great personal dignity, living out his days in a dowdy apartment in Athens. That was the problem with a world in which there was so much uncertainty about why things ended up the way they did: you never knew whether one day your luck would turn and it would all be washed away.
So here is what Taleb took from Niederhoffer. He saw that Niederhoffer was a serious athlete, and he decided that he would be, too. He would bicycle to work and exercise in the gym. Niederhoffer was a staunch empiricist who turned to Taleb that day in Connecticut and said to him sternly, “Everything that can be tested must be tested,” and so when Taleb started his own hedge fund, a few years later, he called it Empirica. But that is where it stopped. Nassim Taleb decided that he could not pursue an investment strategy that had any chance of blowing up.
2.
Nassim Taleb is a tall, muscular man in his early forties, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a balding head. His eyebrows are heavy and his nose is long. His skin has the olive hue of the Levant. He is a man of moods, and when his world turns dark the eyebrows come together and the eyes narrow and it is as if he were giving off an electrical charge. It is said, by some of his friends, that he looks like Salman Rushdie, although at his office his staff have pinned to the bulletin board a photograph of a mullah they swear is Taleb’s long-lost twin, while Taleb himself maintains, wholly implausibly, that he resembles Sean Connery. He lives in a four-bedroom Tudor with twenty-six Russian Orthodox icons, nineteen Roman heads, and four thousand books, and he rises at dawn to spend an hour writing. He is the author of two books, the first a technical and highly regarded work on derivatives, and the second a treatise entitled Fooled by Randomness, which is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses were to the Catholic Church. Some afternoons, he drives into the city and attends a philosophy lecture at City University. During the school year, in the evenings, he teaches a graduate course in finance at New York University, after which he can often be found at the bar at Odeon Café in Tribeca, holding forth, say, on the finer points of stochastic volatility or his veneration of the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy.
Taleb runs Empirica Capital out of an anonymous concrete office park somewhere in the woods outside Greenwich, Connecticut. His offices consist, principally, of a trading floor about the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. Taleb sits in one corner, in front of a laptop, surrounded by the rest of his team – Mark Spitznagel, the chief trader; another trader, named Danny Tosto; a programmer named Winn Martin; and a graduate student named Pallop Angsupun. Mark Spitznagel is perhaps thirty. Winn, Danny, and Pallop look as if they belong in high school. The room has an overstuffed bookshelf in one corner, and a television muted and tuned to CNBC. There are two ancient Greek heads, one next to Taleb’s computer and the other, somewhat bafflingly, on the floor, next to the door, as if it were being set out for the trash. There is almost nothing on the walls, except for a slightly battered poster for an exhibition of Greek artifacts, the snapshot of the mullah, and a small pen-and-ink drawing of the patron saint of Empirica Capital, the philosopher Karl Popper.
On a recent spring morning, the staff of Empirica were concerned with solving a thorny problem having to do with the square root of n, where n is a given number of random set of observations, and what relation n might have to a speculator’s confidence in his estimations. Taleb was up at a whiteboard by the door, his marker squeaking furiously as he scribbled possible solutions. Spitznagel and Pallop looked on intently. Spitznagel is blond and from the Midwest and does yoga: in contrast to Taleb, he exudes a certain laconic levelheadedness. In a bar, Taleb would pick a fight. Spitznagel would break it up. Pallop is of Thai extraction and is doing a PhD in financial mathematics at Princeton. He has longish black hair and a slightly quizzical air. “Pallop is very lazy,” Taleb will remark, to no one in particular, several times over the course of the day, although this is said with such affection that it suggests that laziness, in the Talebian nomenclature, is a synonym for genius. Pallop’s computer was untouched and he often turned his chair around so that he faced completely away from his desk. He was reading a book by the cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose arguments, he said a bit disappointedly, were “not really quantifiable.” The three argued back and forth about the solution. It appeared that Taleb might be wrong, but before the matter could be resolved the markets opened. Taleb returned to his desk and began to bicker with Spitznagel about what exactly would be put on the company boom box. Spitznagel plays the piano and the French horn and has appointed himself the Empirica DJ. He wanted to play Mahler, and Taleb does not like Mahler. “Mahler is not good for volatility,” Taleb complained. “Bach is good. St. Matthew’s Passion!” Taleb gestured toward Spitznagel, who was wearing a gray woolen turtleneck. “Look at him. He wants to be like von Karajan, like someone who wants to live in a castle. Technically superior to the rest of us. No chitchatting. Top skier. That’s Mark!” As Spitznagel rolled his eyes, a man whom Taleb refers to, somewhat mysteriously, as Dr. Wu wandered in. Dr. Wu works for another hedge fund, down the hall, and is said to be brilliant. He is thin and squints through black-rimmed glasses. He was asked his opinion on the square root of n but declined to answer. “Dr. Wu comes here for intellectual kicks and to borrow books and to talk music with Mark,” Taleb explained after their visitor had drifted away. He added darkly, “Dr. Wu is a Mahlerian.”
Empirica follows a very particular investment strategy. It trades options, which is to say that it deals not in stocks and bonds but with bets on stocks and bonds. Imagine, for example, that General Motors stock is trading at $50, and imagine that you are a major investor on Wall Street. An options trader comes up to you with a proposition. What if, within the next three months, he decides to sell you a share of GM at $45? How much would you charge for agreeing to buy it at that price? You would look at the history of GM and see that in a three-month period it has rarely dropped 10 percent, and obviously the trader is only going to make you buy his GM at $45 if the stock drops below that point. So you say you’ll make that promise, or sell that option, for a relatively small fee, say, a dime. You are betting on the high probability that GM stock will stay relatively calm over the next three months, and if you are right, you’ll pocket the dime as pure profit. The trader, on the other hand, is betting on the unlikely event that GM stock will drop a lot, and if that happens, his profits are potentially huge. If the trader bought a million options from you at a dime each and GM drops to $35, he’ll buy a million shares at $35 and turn around and force you to buy them at $45, making himself suddenly very rich and you substantially poorer.
That particular transaction is called, in the argot of Wall Street, an out-of-the-money option. But an option can be configured in a vast number of ways. You could sell the trader a GM option at $30, or, if you wanted to bet against GM stock going up, you could sell a GM option at $60. You could sell or buy options on bonds, on the S &P index, on foreign currencies, or mortgages, or on the relationship among any number of financial instruments of your choice; you can bet on the market booming, or the market crashing, or the market staying the same. Options allow investors to gamble heavily and turn one dollar into ten. They also allow investors to hedge their risk. The reason your pension fund may not be wiped out in the next crash is that it has protected itself by buying options. What drives the options game is the notion that the risks represented by all of these bets can be quantified; that by looking at the past behavior of GM, you can figure out the exact chance of GM hitting $45 in the next three months, and whether at $1 that option is a good or a bad investment. The process is a lot like the way insurance companies analyze actuarial statistics in order to figure out how much to charge for a life-insurance premium, and to make those calculations every investment bank has, on staff, a team of PhDs, physicists from Russia, applied mathematicians from China, and computer scientists from India. On Wall Street, those PhDs are called quants.
Nassim Taleb and his team at Empirica are quants. But they reject the quant orthodoxy, because they don’t believe that things like the stock market behave in the way that physical phenomena like mortality statistics do. Physical events, whether death rates or poker games, are the predictable function of a limited and stable set of factors, and tend to follow what statisticians call a normal distribution, a bell curve. But do the ups and downs of the market follow a bell curve? The economist Eugene Fama once studied stock prices and pointed out that if they followed a normal distribution, you’d expect a really big jump, what he specified as a movement five standard deviations from the mean, once every seven thousand years. In fact, jumps of that magnitude happen in the stock market every three or four years, because investors don’t behave with any kind of statistical orderliness. They change their mind. They do stupid things. They copy one another. They panic. Fama concluded that if you charted the ups and downs of the stock market, the graph would have a “fat tail,” meaning that at the upper and lower ends of the distribution there would be many more outlying events than statisticians used to modeling the physical world would have imagined.
In the summer of 1997, Taleb predicted that hedge funds like Long Term Capital Management were headed for trouble because they did not understand this notion of fat tails. Just a year later, LTCM sold an extraordinary number of options, because its computer models told it that the markets ought to be calming down. And what happened? The Russian government defaulted on its bonds; the markets went crazy; and in a matter of weeks LTCM was finished. Spitznagel, Taleb’s head trader, says that he recently heard one of the former top executives of LTCM give a lecture in which he defended the gamble that the fund had made. “What he said was, ‘Look, when I drive home every night in the fall I see all these leaves scattered around the base of the trees,’” Spitznagel recounts. “There is a statistical distribution that governs the way they fall, and I can be pretty accurate in figuring out what that distribution is going to be. But one day I came home and the leaves were in little piles. Does that falsify my theory that there are statistical rules governing how leaves fall? No. It was a man-made event.” In other words, the Russians, by defaulting on their bonds, did something that they were not supposed to do, a once-in-a-lifetime, rule-breaking event. But this, to Taleb, is just the point: in the markets, unlike in the physical universe, the rules of the game can be changed. Central banks can decide to default on government-backed securities.
One of Taleb’s earliest Wall Street mentors was a short-tempered Frenchman named Jean-Patrice, who dressed like a peacock and had an almost neurotic obsession with risk. Jean-Patrice would call Taleb from Regine’s at three in the morning, or take a meeting in a Paris nightclub, sipping champagne and surrounded by scantily clad women, and once Jean-Patrice asked Taleb what would happen to his positions if a plane crashed into his building. Taleb was young then and brushed him aside. It seemed absurd. But nothing, Taleb soon realized, is absurd. Taleb likes to quote David Hume: “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.” Because LTCM had never seen a black swan in Russia, it thought no Russian black swans existed. Taleb, by contrast, has constructed a trading philosophy predicated entirely on the existence of black swans, on the possibility of some random, unexpected event sweeping the markets. He never sells options, then. He only buys them. He’s never the one who can lose a great deal of money if GM stock suddenly plunges. Nor does he ever bet on the market moving in one direction or another. That would require Taleb to assume that he understands the market, and he doesn’t. He hasn’t Warren Buffett’s confidence. So he buys options on both sides, on the possibility of the market moving both up and down. And he doesn’t bet on minor fluctuations in the market. Why bother? If everyone else is vastly underestimating the possibility of rare events, then an option on GM at, say, $40 is going to be undervalued. So Taleb buys out-of-the-money options by the truckload. He buys them for hundreds of different stocks, and if they expire before he gets to use them, he simply buys more. Taleb doesn’t even invest in stocks, not for Empirica and not for his own personal account. Buying a stock, unlike buying an option, is a gamble that the future will represent an improved version of the past. And who knows whether that will be true? So all of Taleb’s personal wealth, and the hundreds of millions that Empirica has in reserve, is in Treasury bills. Few on Wall Street have taken the practice of buying options to such extremes. But if anything completely out of the ordinary happens to the stock market, if some random event sends a jolt through all of Wall Street and pushes GM to, say, $20, Nassim Taleb will not end up in a dowdy apartment in Athens. He will be rich.
Not long ago, Taleb went to a dinner in a French restaurant just north of Wall Street. The people at the dinner were all quants: men with bulging pockets and open-collared shirts and the serene and slightly detached air of those who daydream in numbers. Taleb sat at the end of the table, drinking pastis and discussing French literature. There was a chess grand master at the table, with a shock of white hair, who had once been one of Anatoly Karpov’s teachers, and another man who over the course of his career had worked, in order, at Stanford University, Exxon, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Morgan Stanley, and a boutique French investment bank. They talked about mathematics and chess and fretted about one of their party who had not yet arrived and who had the reputation, as one of the quants worriedly said, of “not being able to find the bathroom.” When the check came, it was given to a man who worked in risk management at a big Wall Street bank, and he stared at it for a long time, with a slight mixture of perplexity and amusement, as if he could not remember what it was like to deal with a mathematical problem of such banality. The men at the table were in a business that was formally about mathematics but was really about epistemology, because to sell or to buy an option requires each party to confront the question of what it is he truly knows. Taleb buys options because he is certain that, at root, he knows nothing, or, more precisely, that other people believe they know more than they do. But there were plenty of people around that table who sold options, who thought that if you were smart enough to set the price of the option properly, you could win so many of those $1 bets on General Motors that, even if the stock ever did dip below $45, you’d still come out far ahead. They believe that the world is a place where, at the end of the day, leaves fall more or less in a predictable pattern.
The distinction between these two sides is the divide that emerged between Taleb and Niederhoffer all those years ago in Connecticut. Niederhoffer’s hero is the nineteenth- century scientist Francis Galton. Niederhoffer called his eldest daughter Galt, and there is a full-length portrait of Galton in his library. Galton was a statistician and a social scientist (and a geneticist and a meteorologist), and if he was your hero, you believed that by marshaling empirical evidence, by aggregating data points, you could learn whatever it was you needed to know. Taleb’s hero, on the other hand, is Karl Popper, who said that you could not know with any certainty that a proposition was true; you could only know that it was not true. Taleb makes much of what he learned from Niederhoffer, but Niederhoffer insists that his example was wasted on Taleb. “In one of his cases, Rumpole of the Bailey talked about being tried by the bishop who doesn’t believe in God,” Niederhoffer says. “Nassim is the empiricist who doesn’t believe in empiricism.” What is it that you claim to learn from experience, if you believe that experience cannot be trusted? Today, Niederhoffer makes a lot of his money selling options, and more often than not the person to whom he sells those options is Nassim Taleb. If one of them is up a dollar one day, in other words, that dollar is likely to have come from the other. The teacher and pupil have become predator and prey.
3.
Years ago, Nassim Taleb worked at the investment bank First Boston, and one of the things that puzzled him was what he saw as the mindless industry of the trading floor. A trader was supposed to come in every morning and buy and sell things, and on the basis of how much money he made buying and selling he was given a bonus. If he went too many weeks without showing a profit, his peers would start to look at him funny, and if he went too many months without showing a profit, he would be gone. The traders were for the most part well educated and wore Savile Row suits and Ferragamo ties. They dove into the markets with a frantic urgency. They read the Wall Street Journal closely and gathered around the television to catch breaking news. “The Fed did this, the Prime Minister of Spain did that,” Taleb recalls. “The Italian Finance Minister says there will be no competitive devaluation, this number is higher than expected, Abby Cohen just said this.” It was a scene that Taleb did not understand.
“He was always so conceptual about what he was doing,” says Howard Savery, who was Taleb’s assistant at the French bank Indosuez in the 1980s. “He used to drive our floor trader (his name was Tim) crazy. Floor traders are used to precision: “Sell a hundred futures at eighty-seven.” Nassim would pick up the phone and say, “Tim, sell some.” And Tim would say, “How many?” And he would say, “Oh, a social amount.” It was like saying, “I don’t have a number in mind, I just know I want to sell.” There would be these heated arguments in French, screaming arguments. Then everyone would go out to dinner and have fun. Nassim and his group had this attitude that we’re not interested in knowing what the new trade number is. When everyone else was leaning over their desks, listening closely to the latest figures, Nassim would make a big scene of walking out of the room.”
At Empirica, then, there are no Wall Street Journals to be found. There is very little active trading, because the options that the fund owns are selected by computer. Most of those options will be useful only if the market does something dramatic, and, of course, on most days the market doesn’t. So the job of Taleb and his team is to wait and to think. They analyze the company’s trading policies, back-test various strategies, and construct ever more sophisticated computer models of options pricing. Danny, in the corner, occasionally types things into the computer. Pallop looks dreamily off into the distance. Spitznagel takes calls from traders, and toggles back and forth between screens on his computer. Taleb answers e-mails and calls one of the firm’s brokers in Chicago, affecting, as he does, the kind of Brooklyn accent that people from Brooklyn would have if they were actually from northern Lebanon: “Howyoudoin?” It is closer to a classroom than to a trading floor.
“Pallop, did you introspect?” Taleb calls out as he wanders back in from lunch. Pallop is asked what his PhD is about. “Pretty much this,” he says, waving a languid hand around the room.
“It looks like we will have to write it for him,” Taleb chimes in, “because Pollop is very lazy.”
What Empirica has done is to invert the traditional psychology of investing. You and I, if we invest conventionally in the market, have a fairly large chance of making a small amount of money in a given day from dividends or interest or the general upward trend of the market. We have almost no chance of making a large amount of money in one day, and there is a very small, but real, possibility that if the market collapses we could blow up. We accept that distribution of risks because, for fundamental reasons, it feels right. In the book that Pallop was reading by Kahneman and Tversky, for example, there is a description of a simple experiment, where a group of people were told to imagine that they had $300. They were then given a choice between (a) receiving another $100 or (b) tossing a coin, where if they won they got $200 and if they lost they got nothing. Most of us, it turns out, prefer (a) to (b). But then Kahneman and Tversky did a second experiment. They told people to imagine that they had $500 and then asked them if they would rather (c) give up $100 or (d) toss a coin and pay $200 if they lost and nothing at all if they won. Most of us now prefer (d) to (c). What is interesting about those four choices is that, from a probabilistic standpoint, they are identical. Nonetheless, we have strong preferences among them. Why? Because we’re more willing to gamble when it comes to losses, but are risk averse when it comes to our gains. That’s why we like small daily winnings in the stock market, even if that requires that we risk losing everything in a crash.
At Empirica, by contrast, every day brings a small but real possibility that they’ll make a huge amount of money in a day; no chance that they’ll blow up; and a very large possibility that they’ll lose a small amount of money. All those dollar, and fifty-cent, and nickel options that Empirica has accumulated, few of which will ever be used, soon begin to add up. By looking at a particular column on the computer screens showing Empirica’s positions, anyone at the firm can tell you precisely how much money Empirica has lost or made so far that day. At 11:30 a.m., for instance, they had recovered just 28 percent of the money they had spent that day on options. By 12:30, they had recovered 40 percent, meaning that the day was not yet half over and Empirica was already in the red to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars. The day before that, it had made back 85 percent of its money; the day before that, 48 percent; the day before that, 65 percent; and the day before that also 65 percent; and, in fact, with a few notable exceptions – like the few days when the market reopened after September 11 – Empirica has done nothing but lose money since last April. “We cannot blow up, we can only bleed to death,” Taleb says, and bleeding to death, absorbing the pain of steady losses, is precisely what human beings are hardwired to avoid. “Say you’ve got a guy who is long on Russian bonds,” Savery says. “He’s making money every day. One day, lightning strikes and he loses five times what he made. Still, on three hundred and sixty-four out of three hundred and sixty-five days he was very happily making money. It’s much harder to be the other guy, the guy losing money three hundred and sixty-four days out of three hundred and sixty-five, because you start questioning yourself. Am I ever going to make it back? Am I really right? What if it takes ten years? Will I even be sane ten years from now?” What the normal trader gets from his daily winnings is feedback, the pleasing illusion of progress. At Empirica, there is no feedback. “It’s like you’re playing the piano for ten years and you still can’t play ‘Chopsticks,’” Spitznagel say, “and the only thing you have to keep you going is the belief that one day you’ll wake up and play like Rachmaninoff.” Was it easy knowing that Niederhoffer – who represented everything they thought was wrong – was out there getting rich while they were bleeding away? Of course it wasn’t. If you watched Taleb closely that day, you could see the little ways in which the steady drip of losses takes a toll. He glanced a bit too much at the Bloomberg. He leaned forward a bit too often to see the daily loss count. He succumbs to an array of superstitious tics. If the going is good, he parks in the same space every day; he turned against Mahler because he associates Mahler with the last year’s long dry spell. “Nassim says all the time that he needs me there, and I believe him,” Spitznagel says. He is there to remind Taleb that there is a point to waiting, to help Taleb resist the very human impulse to abandon everything and stanch the pain of losing. “Mark is my cop,” Taleb says. So is Pallop: he is there to remind Taleb that Empirica has the intellectual edge.
“The key is not having the ideas but having the recipe to deal with your ideas,” Taleb says. “We don’t need moralizing. We need a set of tricks.” His trick is a protocol that stipulates precisely what has to be done in every situation. “We built the protocol, and the reason we did was to tell the guys, Don’t listen to me, listen to the protocol. Now, I have the right to change the protocol, but there is a protocol to changing the protocol. We have to be hard on ourselves to do what we do. The bias we see in Niederhoffer we see in ourselves.” At the quant dinner, Taleb devoured his roll, and as the busboy came around with more rolls Taleb shouted out, “No, no!” and blocked his plate. It was a never-ending struggle, this battle between head and heart. When the waiter came around with wine, he hastily covered the glass with his hand. When the time came to order, he asked for steak frites – “without the frites, please!” – and then immediately tried to hedge his choice by negotiating with the person next to him for a fraction of his frites.
The psychologist Walter Mischel has done a series of experiments where he puts a young child in a room and places two cookies in front of him, one small and one large. The child is told that if he wants the small cookie he need only ring a bell and the experimenter will come back into the room and give it to him. If he wants the better treat, though, he has to wait until the experimenter returns on his own, which might be anytime in the next twenty minutes. Mischel has videotapes of six-year-olds sitting in the room by themselves, staring at the cookies, trying to persuade themselves to wait. One girl starts to sing to herself. She whispers what seems to be the instructions – that she can have the big cookie if she can only wait. She closes her eyes. Then she turns her back on the cookies. Another little boy swings his legs violently back and forth, and then picks up the bell and examines it, trying to do anything but think about the cookie he could get by ringing it. The tapes document the beginnings of discipline and self-control – the techniques we learn to keep our impulses in check – and to watch all the children desperately distracting themselves is to experience the shock of recognition: that’s Nassim Taleb!
There is something else as well that helps to explain Taleb’s resolve – more than the tics and the systems and the self-denying ordinances. It happened a year or so before he went to see Niederhoffer. Taleb had been working as a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and he’d developed a persistently hoarse throat. At first, he thought nothing of it: a hoarse throat was an occupational hazard of spending every day in the pit. Finally, when he moved back to New York, he went to see a doctor, in one of those Upper East Side prewar buildings with a glamorous facade. Taleb sat in the office, staring out at the plain brick of the courtyard, reading the medical diplomas on the wall over and over, waiting and waiting for the verdict. The doctor returned and spoke in a low, grave voice: “I got the pathology report. It’s not as bad as it sounds.” But, of course, it was: he had throat cancer. Taleb’s mind shut down. He left the office. It was raining outside. He walked and walked and ended up at a medical library. There he read frantically about his disease, the rainwater forming a puddle under his feet. It made no sense. Throat cancer was the disease of someone who has spent a lifetime smoking heavily. But Taleb was young, and he barely smoked at all. His risk of getting throat cancer was something like one in a hundred thousand, almost unimaginably small. He was a black swan! The cancer is now beaten, but the memory of it is also Taleb’s secret, because once you have been a black swan – not just seen one but lived and faced death as one – it becomes easier to imagine another on the horizon.
As the day came to an end, Taleb and his team turned their attention once again to the problem of the square root of n. Taleb was back at the whiteboard. Spitznagel was looking on. Pallop was idly peeling a banana. Outside, the sun was beginning to settle behind the trees. “You do a conversion to p1 and p2,” Taleb said. His marker was once again squeaking across the whiteboard. “We say we have a Gaussian distribution, and you have the market switching from a low-volume regime to a high-volume. P21. P22. You have your igon value.” He frowned and stared at his handiwork. The markets were now closed. Empirica had lost money, which meant that somewhere off in the woods of Connecticut Niederhoffer had no doubt made money. That hurt, but if you steeled yourself and thought about the problem at hand, and kept in mind that someday the market would do something utterly unexpected because in the world we live in something utterly unexpected always happens, then the hurt was not so bad. Taleb eyed his equations on the whiteboard and arched an eyebrow. It was a very difficult problem. “Where is Dr. Wu? Should we call in Dr. Wu?”
4.
A year after Nassim Taleb came to visit him, Victor Niederhoffer blew up. He sold a very large number of options on the S &P index, taking millions of dollars from other traders in exchange for promising to buy a basket of stocks from them at current prices, if the market ever fell. It was an unhedged bet, or what was called on Wall Street a naked put, meaning that he bet everyone on one outcome: he bet in favor of the large probability of making a small amount of money, and against the small probability of losing a large amount of money – and he lost. On October 27, 1997, the market plummeted 8 percent, and all of the many, many people who had bought those options from Niederhoffer came calling all at once, demanding that he buy back their stocks at pre-crash prices. He ran through $130,000,000 – his cash reserves, his savings, his other stocks – and when his broker came and asked for still more, he didn’t have it. In a day, one of the most successful hedge funds in America was wiped out. Niederhoffer had to shut down his firm. He had to mortgage his house. He had to borrow money from his children. He had to call Sotheby’s and sell his prized silver collection – the massive nineteenth-century Brazilian “sculptural group of victory” made for the Visconde De Figueirdeo, the massive silver bowl designed in 1887 by Tiffany & Co. for the James Gordon Bennett Cup yacht race, and on and on. He stayed away from the auction. He couldn’t bear to watch.
“It was one of the worst things that has ever happened to me in my life, right up there with the death of those closest to me,” Niederhoffer said recently. It was a Saturday in March, and he was in the library of his enormous house. Two weary-looking dogs wandered in and out. He is a tall man, an athlete, thick through the upper body and trunk, with a long, imposing face and baleful, hooded eyes. He was shoeless. One collar on his shirt was twisted inward, and he looked away as he talked. “I let down my friends. I lost my business. I was a major money manager. Now I pretty much have had to start from ground zero.” He paused. “Five years have passed. The beaver builds a dam. The river washes it away, so he tries to build a better foundation, and I think I have. But I’m always mindful of the possibility of more failures.” In the distance, there was a knock on the door. It was a man named Milton Bond, an artist who had come to present Niederhoffer with a painting he had done of Moby Dick ramming the Pequod. It was in the folk-art style that Niederhoffer likes so much, and he went to meet Bond in the foyer, kneeling down in front of the painting as Bond unwrapped it. Niederhoffer has other paintings of the Pequod in his house, and paintings of the Essex, the ship on which Melville’s story was based. In his office, on a prominent wall, is a painting of the Titanic. They were, he said, his way of staying humble. “One of the reasons I’ve paid lots of attention to the Essex is that it turns out that the captain of the Essex, as soon as he got back to Nantucket, was given another job,” Niederhoffer said. “They thought he did a good job in getting back after the ship was rammed. The captain was asked, ‘How could people give you another ship?’ And he said, ‘I guess on the theory that lightning doesn’t strike twice.’ It was a fairly random thing. But then he was given the other ship, and that one foundered, too. Got stuck in the ice. At that time, he was a lost man. He wouldn’t even let them save him. They had to forcibly remove him from the ship. He spent the rest of his life as a janitor in Nantucket. He became what on Wall Street they call a ghost.” Niederhoffer was back in his study now, his lanky body stretched out, his feet up on the table, his eyes a little rheumy. “You see? I can’t afford to fail a second time. Then I’ll be a total washout. That’s the significance of the Pequod.”
A month or so before Niederhoffer blew up, Taleb had dinner with him at a restaurant in Westport, and Niederhoffer told him that he had been selling naked puts. You can imagine the two of them across the table from each other, Niederhoffer explaining that his bet was an acceptable risk, that the odds of the market going down so heavily that he would be wiped out were minuscule, and Taleb listening and shaking his head, and thinking about black swans. “I was depressed when I left him,” Taleb said. “Here is a guy who goes out and hits a thousand backhands. He plays chess like his life depends on it. Here is a guy who, whatever he wants to do when he wakes up in the morning, he ends up doing better than anyone else. Whatever he wakes up in the morning and decides to do, he did better than anyone else. I was talking to my hero…” This was the reason Taleb didn’t want to be Niederhoffer when Niederhoffer was at his height – the reason he didn’t want the silver and the house and the tennis matches with George Soros. He could see all too clearly where it all might end up. In his mind’s eye, he could envision Niederhoffer borrowing money from his children, and selling off his silver, and talking in a hollow voice about letting down his friends, and Taleb did not know if he had the strength to live with that possibility. Unlike Niederhoffer, Taleb never thought he was invincible. You couldn’t if you had watched your homeland blow up, and had been the one person in a hundred thousand who gets throat cancer, and so for Taleb there was never any alternative to the painful process of insuring himself against catastrophe.
This kind of caution does not seem heroic, of course. It seems like the joyless prudence of the accountant and the Sunday school teacher. The truth is that we are drawn to the Niederhoffers of this world because we are all, at heart, like Niederhoffer: we associate the willingness to risk great failure – and the ability to climb back from catastrophe – with courage. But in this we are wrong. That is the lesson of Taleb and Niederhoffer, and also the lesson of our volatile times. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.
In the fall of 2001, Niederhoffer sold a large number of options, betting that the markets would be quiet, and they were, until out of nowhere two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. “I was exposed. It was nip and tuck.” Niederhoffer shook his head, because there was no way to have anticipated September 11. “That was a totally unexpected event.”[1]
April 22 and 29, 2002
True Colors
HAIR DYE AND THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF POSTWAR AMERICA
1.
During the Depression – long before she became one of the most famous copywriters of her day – Shirley Polykoff met a man named George Halperin. He was the son of an Orthodox rabbi from Reading, Pennsylvania, and soon after they began courting he took her home for Passover to meet his family. They ate roast chicken, tzimmes, and sponge cake, and Polykoff hit it off with Rabbi Halperin, who was warm and funny. George’s mother was another story. She was Old World Orthodox, with severe, tightly pulled back hair; no one was good enough for her son.
“How’d I do, George?” Shirley asked as soon as they got in the car for the drive home. “Did your mother like me?”
He was evasive. “My sister Mildred thought you were great.”
“That’s nice, George,” she said. “But what did your mother say?”
There was a pause. “She says you paint your hair.” Another pause. “Well, do you?”
Shirley Polykoff was humiliated. In her mind she could hear her future mother-in-law: Fahrbt zi der huer? Oder fahrbt zi nisht? Does she color her hair? Or doesn’t she?
The answer, of course, was that she did. Shirley Polykoff always dyed her hair, even in the days when the only women who went blond were chorus girls and hookers. At home in Brooklyn, starting when she was fifteen, she would go to Mr. Nicholas’s beauty salon, one flight up, and he would “lighten the back” until all traces of her natural brown were gone. She thought she ought to be a blonde – or, to be more precise, she thought that the decision about whether she could be a blonde was rightfully hers, and not God’s. Shirley dressed in deep oranges and deep reds and creamy beiges and royal hues. She wore purple suede and aqua silk, and was the kind of person who might take a couture jacket home and embroider some new detail on it. Once, in the days when she had her own advertising agency, she was on her way to Memphis to make a presentation to Maybelline and her taxi broke down in the middle of the expressway. She jumped out and flagged down a Pepsi-Cola truck, and the truck driver told her he had picked her up because he’d never seen anyone quite like her before. “Shirley would wear three outfits, all at once, and each one of them would look great,” Dick Huebner, who was her creative director, says. She was flamboyant and brilliant and vain in an irresistible way, and it was her conviction that none of those qualities went with brown hair. The kind of person she spent her life turning herself into did not go with brown hair. Shirley’s parents were Hyman Polykoff, small-time necktie merchant, and Rose Polykoff, housewife and mother, of East New York and Flatbush, by way of the Ukraine. Shirley ended up on Park Avenue at Eighty-second. “If you asked my mother ‘Are you proud to be Jewish?’ she would have said yes,” her daughter, Alix Nelson Frick, says. “She wasn’t trying to pass. But she believed in the dream, and the dream was that you could acquire all the accouterments of the established affluent class, which included a certain breeding and a certain kind of look. Her idea was that you should be whatever you want to be, including being a blonde.”
In 1956, when Shirley Polykoff was a junior copywriter at Foote, Cone & Belding, she was given the Clairol account. The product the company was launching was Miss Clairol, the first hair-color bath that made it possible to lighten, tint, condition, and shampoo at home, in a single step – to take, say, Topaz (for a champagne blond) or Moon Gold (for a medium ash), apply it in a peroxide solution directly to the hair, and get results in twenty minutes. When the Clairol sales team demonstrated their new product at the International Beauty Show, in the old Statler Hotel, across from Madison Square Garden, thousands of assembled beauticians jammed the hall and watched, openmouthed, demonstration after demonstration. “They were astonished,” recalls Bruce Gelb, who ran Clairol for years, along with his father, Lawrence, and his brother Richard. “This was to the world of hair color what computers were to the world of adding machines. The sales guys had to bring buckets of water and do the rinsing off in front of everyone, because the hairdressers in the crowd were convinced we were doing something to the models behind the scenes.”
Miss Clairol gave American women the ability, for the first time, to color their hair quickly and easily at home. But there was still the stigma – the prospect of the disapproving mother-in-law. Shirley Polykoff knew immediately what she wanted to say, because if she believed that a woman had a right to be a blonde, she also believed that a woman ought to be able to exercise that right with discretion. “Does she or doesn’t she?” she wrote, translating from the Yiddish to the English. “Only her hairdresser knows for sure.” Clairol bought thirteen ad pages in Life in the fall of 1956, and Miss Clairol took off like a bird. That was the beginning. For Nice ’n Easy, Clairol’s breakthrough shampoo-in hair color, she wrote, “The closer he gets, the better you look.” For Lady Clairol, the cream-and-bleach combination that brought silver and platinum shades to Middle America, she wrote, “Is it true blondes have more fun?” and then, even more memorably, “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” (In the summer of 1962, just before The Feminine Mystique was published, Betty Friedan was, in the words of her biographer, so “bewitched” by that phrase that she bleached her hair.) Shirley Polykoff wrote the lines; Clairol perfected the product. And from the fifties to the seventies, when Polykoff gave up the account, the number of American women coloring their hair rose from 7 percent to more than 40 percent.
Today, when women go from brown to blond to red to black and back again without blinking, we think of hair-color products the way we think of lipstick. On drugstore shelves there are bottles and bottles of hair-color products with names like Hydrience and Excellence and Preference and Natural Instincts and Loving Care and Nice ’n Easy, and so on, each in dozens of different shades. Feria, the new, youth-oriented brand from L’Oréal, comes in Chocolate Cherry and Champagne Cocktail – colors that don’t ask “Does she or doesn’t she?” but blithely assume “Yes, she does.” Hair dye is now a billion-dollar-a-year commodity.
Yet there was a time, not so long ago – between, roughly speaking, the start of Eisenhower’s administration and the end of Carter’s – when hair color meant something. Lines like “Does she or doesn’t she?” or the famous 1973 slogan for L’Oréal’s Preference – “Because I’m worth it” – were as instantly memorable as “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” or “Things go better with Coke.” They lingered long after advertising usually does and entered the language; they somehow managed to take on meanings well outside their stated intention. Between the fifties and the seventies, women entered the workplace, fought for social emancipation, got the Pill, and changed what they did with their hair. To examine the hair-color campaigns of the period is to see, quite unexpectedly, all these things as bound up together, the profound with the seemingly trivial. In writing the history of women in the postwar era, did we forget something important? Did we leave out hair?
2.
When the “Does she or doesn’t she?” campaign first ran, in 1956, most advertisements that were aimed at women tended to be high glamour – “cherries in the snow, fire and ice,” as Bruce Gelb puts it. But Shirley Polykoff insisted that the models for the Miss Clairol campaign be more like the girl next door – “Shirtwaist types instead of glamour gowns,” she wrote in her original memo to Clairol. “Cashmere-sweater-over-the-shoulder types. Like larger-than-life portraits of the proverbial girl on the block who’s a little prettier than your wife and lives in a house slightly nicer than yours.” The model had to be a Doris Day type – not a Jayne Mansfield – because the idea was to make hair color as respectable and mainstream as possible. One of the earliest “Does she or doesn’t she?” television commercials featured a housewife in the kitchen preparing hors d’oeuvres for a party. She is slender and pretty and wearing a black cocktail dress and an apron. Her husband comes in, kisses her on the lips, approvingly pats her very blond hair, then holds the kitchen door for her as she takes the tray of hors d’oeuvres out for her guests. It is an exquisitely choreographed domestic tableau, down to the little dip the housewife performs as she hits the kitchen light switch with her elbow on her way out the door. In one of the early print ads – which were shot by Richard Avedon and then by Irving Penn – a woman with strawberry-blond hair is lying on the grass, holding a dandelion between her fingers, and lying next to her is a girl of about eight or nine. What’s striking is that the little girl’s hair is the same shade of blond as her mother’s. The “Does she or doesn’t she?” print ads always included a child with the mother to undercut the sexual undertones of the slogan – to make it clear that mothers were using Miss Clairol, and not just “fast” women – and, most of all, to provide a precise color match. Who could ever guess, given the comparison, that Mom’s shade came out of a bottle?
The Polykoff campaigns were a sensation. Letters poured in to Clairol. “Thank you for changing my life,” read one, which was circulated around the company and used as the theme for a national sales meeting. “My boyfriend, Harold, and I were keeping company for five years but he never wanted to set a date. This made me very nervous. I am twenty-eight and my mother kept saying soon it would be too late for me.” Then, the letter writer said, she saw a Clairol ad in the subway. She dyed her hair blond, and “that is how I am in Bermuda now on my honeymoon with Harold.” Polykoff was sent a copy with a memo: “It’s almost too good to be true!” With her sentimental idyll of blond mother and child, Shirley Polykoff had created something iconic.
“My mother wanted to be that woman in the picture,” Polykoff’s daughter, Frick, says. “She was wedded to the notion of that suburban, tastefully dressed, well-coddled matron who was an adornment to her husband, a loving mother, a long-suffering wife, a person who never overshadowed him. She wanted the blond child. In fact, I was blond as a kid, but when I was about thirteen my hair got darker and my mother started bleaching it.” Of course – and this is the contradiction central to those early Clairol campaigns – Shirley Polykoff wasn’t really that kind of woman at all. She always had a career. She never moved to the suburbs. “She maintained that women were supposed to be feminine, and not too dogmatic and not overshadow their husband, but she greatly overshadowed my father, who was a very pure, unaggressive, intellectual type,” Frick says. “She was very flamboyant, very emotional, very dominating.”
One of the stories Polykoff told about herself repeatedly – and that even appeared after her death in her New York Times obituary – was that she felt that a woman never ought to make more than her husband, and that only after George’s death, in the early sixties, would she let Foote, Cone & Belding raise her salary to its deserved level. “That’s part of the legend, but it isn’t the truth,” Frick says. “The ideal was always as vividly real to her as whatever actual parallel reality she might be living. She never wavered in her belief in that dream, even if you would point out to her some of the fallacies of that dream, or the weaknesses, or the internal contradictions, or the fact that she herself didn’t really live her life that way.” For Shirley Polykoff, the color of her hair was a kind of useful fiction, a way of bridging the contradiction between the kind of woman she was and the kind of woman she felt she ought to be. It was a way of having it all. She wanted to look and feel like Doris Day without having to be Doris Day. In twenty-seven years of marriage, during which she bore two children, she spent exactly two weeks as a housewife, every day of which was a domestic and culinary disaster. “Listen, sweetie,” an exasperated George finally told her. “You make a lousy little woman in the kitchen.” She went back to work the following Monday.
This notion of the useful fiction – of looking the part without being the part – had a particular resonance for the America of Shirley Polykoff’s generation. As a teenager, Shirley Polykoff tried to get a position as a clerk at an insurance agency and failed. Then she tried again, at another firm, applying as Shirley Miller. This time, she got the job. Her husband, George, also knew the value of appearances. The week Polykoff first met him, she was dazzled by his worldly sophistication, his knowledge of out-of-the-way places in Europe, his exquisite taste in fine food and wine. The second week, she learned that his expertise was all show, derived from reading the Times. The truth was that George had started his career loading boxes in the basement of Macy’s by day and studying law at night. He was a faker, just as, in a certain sense, she was, because to be Jewish – or Irish or Italian or African-American or, for that matter, a woman of the fifties caught up in the first faint stirrings of feminism – was to be compelled to fake it in a thousand small ways, to pass as one thing when, deep inside, you were something else. “That’s the kind of pressure that comes from the immigrants’ arriving and thinking that they don’t look right, that they are kind of funny-looking and maybe shorter than everyone else, and their clothes aren’t expensive,” Frick says. “That’s why many of them began to sew, so they could imitate the patterns of the day. You were making yourself over. You were turning yourself into an American.” Frick, who is also in advertising (she’s the chairman of Spier NY), is a forcefully intelligent woman, who speaks of her mother with honesty and affection. “There were all those phrases that came to fruition at that time – you know, ‘clothes make the man’ and ‘first impressions count.’” So the question “Does she or doesn’t she?” wasn’t just about how no one could ever really know what you were doing. It was about how no one could ever really know who you were. It really meant not “Does she?” but “Is she?” It really meant “Is she a contented homemaker or a feminist, a Jew or a Gentile – or isn’t she?”
3.
In 1973, Ilon Specht was working as a copywriter at the McCann-Erickson advertising agency, in New York. She was a twenty-three-year-old college dropout from California. She was rebellious, unconventional, and independent, and she had come East to work on Madison Avenue, because that’s where people like that went to work back then. “It was a different business in those days,” Susan Schermer, a longtime friend of Specht’s, says. “It was the seventies. People were wearing feathers to work.” At her previous agency, while she was still in her teens, Specht had written a famous television commercial for the Peace Corps. (Single shot. No cuts. A young couple lying on the beach. “It’s a big, wide wonderful world” is playing on a radio. Voice-over recites a series of horrible facts about less fortunate parts of the world: in the Middle East half the children die before their sixth birthday, and so forth. A news broadcast is announced as the song ends, and the woman on the beach changes the station.)
“Ilon? Omigod! She was one of the craziest people I ever worked with,” Ira Madris, another colleague from those years, recalls, using the word crazy as the highest of compliments. “And brilliant. And dogmatic. And highly creative. We all believed back then that having a certain degree of neurosis made you interesting. Ilon had a degree of neurosis that made her very interesting.”
At McCann, Ilon Specht was working with L’Oréal, a French company that was trying to challenge Clairol’s dominance in the American hair-color market. L’Oréal had originally wanted to do a series of comparison spots, presenting research proving that their new product – Preference – was technologically superior to Nice ’n Easy because it delivered a more natural, translucent color. But at the last minute the campaign was killed because the research hadn’t been done in the United States. At McCann, there was panic. “We were four weeks before air date and we had nothing – nada,” Michael Sennott, a staffer who was also working on the account, says. The creative team locked itself away: Specht, Madris – who was the art director on the account – and a handful of others. “We were sitting in this big office,” Specht recalls. “And everyone was discussing what the ad should be. They wanted to do something with a woman sitting by a window, and the wind blowing through the curtains. You know, one of those fake places with big, glamorous curtains. The woman was a complete object. I don’t think she even spoke. They just didn’t get it. We were in there for hours.”
Ilon Specht has long, thick black hair, held in a loose knot at the top of her head, and lipstick the color of maraschino cherries. She talks fast and loud, and swivels in her chair as she speaks, and when people walk by her office they sometimes bang on her door, as if the best way to get her attention is to be as loud and emphatic as she is. Reminiscing not long ago about the seventies, she spoke about the strangeness of corporate clients in shiny suits who would say that all the women in the office looked like models. She spoke about what it meant to be young in a business dominated by older men, and about what it felt like to write a line of copy that used the word woman and have someone cross it out and write girl.
“I was a twenty-three-year-old girl – a woman,” she said. “What would my state of mind have been? I could just see that they had this traditional view of women, and my feeling was that I’m not writing an ad about looking good for men, which is what it seems to me that they were doing. I just thought, Fuck you. I sat down and did it, in five minutes. It was very personal. I can recite to you the whole commercial, because I was so angry when I wrote it.”
Specht sat stock still and lowered her voice: “I use the most expensive hair color in the world. Preference, by L’Oréal. It’s not that I care about money. It’s that I care about my hair. It’s not just the color. I expect great color. What’s worth more to me is the way my hair feels. Smooth and silky but with body. It feels good against my neck. Actually, I don’t mind spending more for L’Oréal. Because I’m” – and here Specht took her fist and struck her chest – “worth it.”
The power of the commercial was originally thought to lie in its subtle justification of the fact that Preference cost ten cents more than Nice ’n Easy. But it quickly became obvious that the last line was the one that counted. On the strength of “Because I’m worth it,” Preference began stealing market share from Clairol. In the 1980s, Preference surpassed Nice ’n Easy as the leading hair-color brand in the country, and in 1997 L’Oréal took the phrase and made it the slogan for the whole company. An astonishing 71 percent of American women can now identify that phrase as the L’Oréal signature, which, for a slogan – as opposed to a brand name – is almost without precedent.
4.
From the very beginning, the Preference campaign was unusual. Polykoff’s Clairol spots had male voice-overs. In the L’Oréal ads, the model herself spoke, directly and personally. Polykoff’s commercials were “other-directed” – they were about what the group was saying (“Does she or doesn’t she?”) or what a husband might think (“The closer he gets, the better you look”). Specht’s line was what a woman says to herself. Even in the choice of models, the two campaigns diverged. Polykoff wanted fresh, girl-next-door types. McCann and L’Oréal wanted models who somehow embodied the complicated mixture of strength and vulnerability implied by “Because I’m worth it.” In the late seventies, Meredith Baxter Birney was the brand spokeswoman. At that time, she was playing a recently divorced mom going to law school on the TV drama Family. McCann scheduled her spots during Dallas and other shows featuring so-called silk blouse women – women of strength and independence. Then came Cybill Shepherd, at the height of her run as the brash, independent Maddie on Moonlighting, in the eighties. She, in turn, was followed by Heather Locklear, the tough and sexy star of the 1990s hit Melrose Place . All the L’Oréal spokeswomen are blondes, but blondes of a particular type. In his brilliant 1995 book, Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self, the Canadian anthropologist Grant McCracken argued for something he calls the “blondness periodic table,” in which blondes are divided into six categories: the bombshell blonde (Mae West, Marilyn Monroe), the sunny blonde (Doris Day, Goldie Hawn), the brassy blonde (Candice Bergen), the dangerous blonde (Sharon Stone), the society blonde (C. Z. Guest), and the cool blonde (Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly). L’Oréal’s innovation was to carve out a niche for itself in between the sunny blondes – the “simple, mild, and innocent” blondes – and the smart, bold, brassy blondes, who, in McCracken’s words, “do not mediate their feelings or modulate their voices.”
This is not an easy sensibility to capture. Countless actresses have auditioned for L’Oréal over the years and been turned down. “There was one casting we did with Brigitte Bardot,” Ira Madris recalls (this was for another L’Oréal product), “and Brigitte, being who she is, had the damnedest time saying that line. There was something inside of her that didn’t believe it. It didn’t have any conviction.” Of course it didn’t: Bardot is bombshell, not sassy. Clairol made a run at the Preference sensibility for itself, hiring Linda Evans in the eighties as the pitchwoman for Ultress, the brand aimed at Preference’s upscale positioning. This didn’t work, either. Evans, who played the adoring wife of Blake Carrington on Dynasty, was too sunny. (“The hardest thing she did on that show,” Michael Sennott says, perhaps a bit unfairly, “was rearrange the flowers.”)
Even if you got the blonde right, though, there was still the matter of the slogan. For a Miss Clairol campaign in the seventies, Polykoff wrote a series of spots with the tag line “This I do for me.” But “This I do for me” was at best a halfhearted approximation of “Because I’m worth it” – particularly for a brand that had spent its first twenty years saying something entirely different. “My mother thought there was something too brazen about ‘I’m worth it,’” Frick told me. “She was always concerned with what people around her might think. She could never have come out with that bald-faced an equation between hair color and self-esteem.”
The truth is that Polykoff’s sensibility – which found freedom in assimilation – had been overtaken by events. In one of Polykoff’s “Is it true blondes have more fun?” commercials for Lady Clairol in the sixties, for example, there is a moment that by 1973 must have been painful to watch. A young woman, radiantly blond, is by a lake, being swung around in the air by a darkly handsome young man. His arms are around her waist. Her arms are around his neck, her shoes off, her face aglow. The voice-over is male, deep and sonorous. “Chances are,” the voice says, “she’d have gotten the young man anyhow, but you’ll never convince her of that.” Here was the downside to Shirley Polykoff’s world. You could get what you wanted by faking it, but then you would never know whether it was you or the bit of fakery that made the difference. You ran the risk of losing sight of who you really were. Shirley Polykoff knew that the all-American life was worth it, and that “he” – the handsome man by the lake, or the reluctant boyfriend who finally whisks you off to Bermuda – was worth it. But, by the end of the sixties, women wanted to know that they were worth it, too.
5.
Why are Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht important? That seems like a question that can easily be answered in the details of their campaigns. They were brilliant copywriters, who managed in the space of a phrase to capture the particular feminist sensibilities of the day. They are an example of a strange moment in American social history when hair dye somehow got tangled up in the politics of assimilation and feminism and self-esteem. But in a certain way their stories are about much more: they are about the relationship we have to the products we buy, and about the slow realization among advertisers that unless they understood the psychological particulars of that relationship – unless they could dignify the transactions of everyday life by granting them meaning – they could not hope to reach the modern consumer. Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht perfected a certain genre of advertising that did just this, and one way to understand the Madison Avenue revolution of the postwar era is as a collective attempt to define and extend that genre. The revolution was led by a handful of social scientists, chief among whom was an elegant, Viennese-trained psychologist by the name of Herta Herzog. What did Herta Herzog know? She knew – or, at least, she thought she knew – the theory behind the success of slogans like “Does she or doesn’t she?” and “Because I’m worth it,” and that makes Herta Herzog, in the end, every bit as important as Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht.
Herzog worked at a small advertising agency called Jack Tinker & Partners, and people who were in the business in those days speak of Tinker the way baseball fans talk about the 1927 Yankees. Tinker was the brainchild of the legendary adman Marion Harper, who came to believe that the agency he was running, McCann- Erickson, was too big and unwieldy to be able to consider things properly. His solution was to pluck a handful of the very best and brightest from McCann and set them up, first in the Waldorf Towers (in the suite directly below the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s and directly above General Douglas MacArthur’s) and then, more permanently, in the Dorset Hotel, on West Fifty-fourth Street, overlooking the Museum of Modern Art. The Tinker Group rented the penthouse, complete with a huge terrace, Venetian-tiled floors, a double-height living room, an antique French polished-pewter bar, a marble fireplace, spectacular skyline views, and a rotating exhibit of modern art (hung by the partners for motivational purposes), with everything – walls, carpets, ceilings, furnishings – a bright, dazzling white. It was supposed to be a think tank, but Tinker was so successful so fast that clients were soon lined up outside the door. When Buick wanted a name for its new luxury coupe, the Tinker Group came up with Riviera. When Bulova wanted a name for its new quartz watch, Tinker suggested Accutron. Tinker also worked with Coca-Cola and Exxon and Westinghouse and countless others, whose names – according to the strict standards of secrecy observed by the group – they would not divulge. Tinker started with four partners and a single phone. But by the end of the sixties it had taken over eight floors of the Dorset.
What distinguished Tinker was its particular reliance on the methodology known as motivational research, which was brought to Madison Avenue in the 1940s by a cadre of European intellectuals trained at the University of Vienna. Advertising research up until that point had been concerned with counting heads – with recording who was buying what. But the motivational researchers were concerned with why: Why do people buy what they do? What motivates them when they shop? The researchers devised surveys, with hundreds of questions, based on Freudian dynamic psychology. They used hypnosis, the Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration Study, role-playing, and Rorschach blots, and they invented what we now call the focus group. There was Paul Lazarsfeld, one of the giants of twentieth-century sociology, who devised something called the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer, a little device with buttons to record precisely the emotional responses of research subjects. There was Hans Zeisel, who had been a patient of Alfred Adler’s in Vienna and went to work at McCann-Erickson. There was Ernest Dichter, who had studied under Lazarsfeld at the Psychological Institute in Vienna and who did consulting for hundreds of the major corporations of the day. And there was Tinker’s Herta Herzog, perhaps the most accomplished motivational researcher of all, who trained dozens of interviewers in the Viennese method and sent them out to analyze the psyche of the American consumer.
“For Puerto Rican rum once, Herta wanted to do a study of why people drink, to tap into that below-the-surface kind of thing,” Rena Bartos, a former advertising executive who worked with Herta in the early days, recalls. “We would invite someone out to drink and they would order whatever they normally order, and we would administer a psychological test. Then we’d do it again at the very end of the discussion, after the drinks. The point was to see how people’s personality was altered under the influence of alcohol.” Herzog helped choose the name of Oasis cigarettes, because her psychological research suggested that the name – with its connotations of cool, bubbling springs – would have the greatest appeal to the orally fixated smoker.
“Herta was graceful and gentle and articulate,” Herbert Krugman, who worked closely with Herzog in those years, says. “She had enormous insights. Alka-Seltzer was a client of ours, and they were discussing new approaches for the next commercial. She said, ‘You show a hand dropping an Alka-Seltzer tablet into a glass of water. Why not show the hand dropping two? You’ll double sales.’ And that’s just what happened. Herta was the gray eminence. Everybody worshipped her.”
After retiring from Tinker, Herzog moved back to Europe, first to Germany and then to Austria, her homeland. She wrote an analysis of the TV show Dallas for the academic journal Society. She taught college courses on communications theory. She conducted a study on the Holocaust for the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, in Jerusalem. Today, she lives in the mountain village of Leutasch, half an hour’s hard drive up into the Alps from Innsbruck, in a white picture-book cottage with a sharply pitched roof. She is a small woman, slender and composed, her once dark hair now streaked with gray. She speaks in short, clipped, precise sentences, in flawless, though heavily accented, English. If you put her in a room with Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht, the two of them would talk and talk and wave their long, bejeweled fingers in the air, and she would sit unobtrusively in the corner and listen. “Marion Harper hired me to do qualitative research – the qualitative interview, which was the specialty that had been developed in Vienna at the Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle,” Herzog told me. “It was interviewing not with direct questions and answers but where you open some subject of the discussion relevant to the topic and then let it go. You have the interviewer not talk but simply help the person with little questions like ‘And anything else?’ As an interviewer, you are not supposed to influence me. You are merely trying to help me. It was a lot like the psychoanalytic method.” Herzog was sitting, ramrod straight, in a chair in her living room. She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a heavy brown sweater to protect her against the Alpine chill. Behind her was row upon row of bookshelves, filled with the books of a postwar literary and intellectual life: Mailer in German, Reisman in English. Open and facedown on a long couch perpendicular to her chair was the latest issue of the psychoanalytic journal Psyche. “Later on, I added all kinds of psychological things to the process, such as word-association tests, or figure drawings with a story. Suppose you are my respondent and the subject is soap. I’ve already talked to you about soap. What you see in it. Why you buy it. What you like about it. Dislike about it. Then at the end of the interview I say, ‘Please draw me a figure – anything you want – and after the figure is drawn tell me a story about the figure.’”
When Herzog asked her subjects to draw a figure at the end of an interview, she was trying to extract some kind of narrative from them, something that would shed light on their unstated desires. She was conducting, as she says, a psychoanalytic session. But she wouldn’t ask about hair-color products in order to find out about you, the way a psychoanalyst might; she would ask about you in order to learn about hair-color products. She saw that the psychoanalytic interview could go both ways. You could use the techniques of healing to figure out the secrets of selling. “Does she or doesn’t she?” and “Because I’m worth it” did the same thing: they not only carried a powerful and redemptive message, but – and this was their real triumph – they succeeded in attaching that message to a five-dollar bottle of hair dye. The lasting contribution of motivational research to Madison Avenue was to prove that you could do this for just about anything – that the products and the commercial messages with which we surround ourselves are as much a part of the psychological furniture of our lives as the relationships and emotions and experiences that are normally the subject of psychoanalytic inquiry.
“There is one thing we did at Tinker that I remember well,” Herzog told me, returning to the theme of one of her, and Tinker’s, coups. “I found out that people were using Alka-Seltzer for stomach upset, but also for headaches,” Herzog said. “We learned that the stomach ache was the kind of ache where many people tended to say ‘It was my fault.’ Alka-Seltzer had been mostly advertised in those days as a cure for overeating, and overeating is something you have done. But the headache is quite different. It is something imposed on you.” This was, to Herzog, the classic psychological insight. It revealed Alka-Seltzer users to be divided into two apparently incompatible camps – the culprit and the victim – and it suggested that the company had been wooing one at the expense of the other. More important, it suggested that advertisers, with the right choice of words, could resolve that psychological dilemma with one or, better yet, two little white tablets. Herzog allowed herself a small smile. “So I said the nice thing would be if you could find something that combines these two elements. The copywriter came up with ‘the blahs.’” Herzog repeated the phrase, the blahs, because it was so beautiful. “The blahs was not one thing or the other – it was not the stomach or the head. It was both.”
6.
This notion of household products as psychological furniture is, when you think about it, a radical idea. When we give an account of how we got to where we are, we’re inclined to credit the philosophical over the physical, and the products of art over the products of commerce. In the list of sixties social heroes, there are musicians and poets and civil-rights activists and sports figures. Herzog’s implication is that such a high-minded list is incomplete. What, say, of Vidal Sassoon? In the same period, he gave the world the Shape, the Acute Angle, and the One-Eyed Ungaro. In the old “cosmology of cosmetology,” McCracken writes, “the client counted only as a plinth… the conveyor of the cut.” But Sassoon made individualization the hallmark of the haircut, liberating women’s hair from the hair styles of the times – from, as McCracken puts it, those “preposterous bits of rococo shrubbery that took their substance from permanents, their form from rollers, and their rigidity from hair spray.” In the Herzogian world view, the reasons we might give to dismiss Sassoon’s revolution – that all he was dispensing was a haircut, that it took just half an hour, that it affects only the way you look, that you will need another like it in a month – are the very reasons that Sassoon is important. If a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?
“Because I’m worth it” and “Does she or doesn’t she?” were powerful, then, precisely because they were commercials, for commercials come with products attached, and products offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation. “We discovered in the first few years of the ‘Because I’m worth it’ campaign that we were getting more than our fair share of new users to the category – women who were just beginning to color their hair,” Sennott told me. “And within that group we were getting those undergoing life changes, which usually meant divorce. We had far more women who were getting divorced than Clairol had. Their children had grown, and something had happened, and they were reinventing themselves.” They felt different, and Ilon Specht gave them the means to look different – and do we really know which came first, or even how to separate the two? They changed their lives and their hair. But it wasn’t one thing or the other. It was both.
7.
In the midnineties, the spokesperson for Clairol’s Nice ’n Easy was Julia Louis-Dreyfus, better known as Elaine from Seinfeld. In the Clairol tradition, she is the girl next door – a postmodern Doris Day. But the spots themselves could not be less like the original Polykoff campaigns for Miss Clairol. In the best of them, Louis-Dreyfus says to the dark-haired woman in front of her on a city bus, “You know, you’d look great as a blonde.” Louis-Dreyfus then shampoos in Nice ’n Easy Shade 104 right then and there, to the gasps and cheers of the other passengers. It is Shirley Polykoff turned upside down: funny, not serious; public, not covert.
L’Oréal, too, has changed. Meredith Baxter Birney said “Because I’m worth it” with an earnestness appropriate to the line. By the time Cybill Shepherd became the brand spokeswoman, in the eighties, it was almost flip – a nod to the materialism of the times – and today, with Heather Locklear, the spots have a lush, indulgent feel. “New Preference by L’Oréal,” she says in one of the current commercials. “Pass it on. You’re worth it.” The “because” – which gave Ilon Specht’s original punch line such emphasis – is gone. The forceful I’m has been replaced by you’re. The Clairol and L’Oréal campaigns have converged. According to the Spectra marketing firm, there are almost exactly as many Preference users as Nice ’n Easy users who earn between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand dollars a year, listen to religious radio, rent their apartments, watch the Weather Channel, bought more than six books last year, are fans of professional football, and belong to a union.
But it is a tribute to Ilon Specht and Shirley Polykoff’s legacy that there is still a real difference between the two brands. It’s not that there are Clairol women or L’Oréal women. It’s something a little subtler. As Herzog knew, all of us, when it comes to constructing our sense of self, borrow bits and pieces, ideas and phrases, rituals and products from the world around us – over-the-counter ethnicities that shape, in some small but meaningful way, our identities. Our religion matters, the music we listen to matters, the clothes we wear matter, the food we eat matters – and our brand of hair dye matters, too. Carol Hamilton, L’Oréal’s vice president of marketing, says she can walk into a hair-color focus group and instantly distinguish the Clairol users from the L’Oréal users. “The L’Oréal user always exhibits a greater air of confidence, and she usually looks better – not just her hair color, but she always has spent a little more time putting on her makeup, styling her hair,” Hamilton told me. “Her clothing is a little bit more fashion-forward. Absolutely, I can tell the difference.” Jeanne Matson, Hamilton’s counterpart at Clairol, says she can do the same thing. “Oh, yes,” Matson told me. “There’s no doubt. The Clairol woman would represent more the American-beauty icon, more naturalness. But it’s more of a beauty for me, as opposed to a beauty for the external world. L’Oréal users tend to be a bit more aloof. There is a certain warmth you see in the Clairol people. They interact with each other more. They’ll say, ‘I use Shade 101.’ And someone else will say, ‘Ah, I do, too!’ There is this big exchange.”
These are not exactly the brand personalities laid down by Polykoff and Specht, because this is 1999, and not 1956 or 1973. The complexities of Polykoff’s artifice have been muted. Specht’s anger has turned to glamour. We have been left with just a few bars of the original melody. But even that is enough to ensure that “Because I’m worth it” will never be confused with “Does she or doesn’t she?” Specht says, “It meant I know you don’t think I’m worth it, because that’s what it was with the guys in the room. They were going to take a woman and make her the object. I was defensive and defiant. I thought, I’ll fight you. Don’t you tell me what I am. You’ve been telling me what I am for generations.” As she said fight, she extended the middle finger of her right hand. Shirley Polykoff would never have given anyone the finger. She was too busy exulting in the possibilities for self-invention in her America – a land where a single woman could dye her hair and end up lying on a beach with a ring on her finger. At her retirement party, in 1973, Polykoff reminded the assembled executives of Clairol and of Foote, Cone & Belding about the avalanche of mail that arrived after their early campaigns: “Remember that letter from the girl who got to a Bermuda honeymoon by becoming a blonde?”
Everybody did.
“Well,” she said, with what we can only imagine was a certain sweet vindication, “I wrote it.”
March 22, 1999
1.
During the Depression – long before she became one of the most famous copywriters of her day – Shirley Polykoff met a man named George Halperin. He was the son of an Orthodox rabbi from Reading, Pennsylvania, and soon after they began courting he took her home for Passover to meet his family. They ate roast chicken, tzimmes, and sponge cake, and Polykoff hit it off with Rabbi Halperin, who was warm and funny. George’s mother was another story. She was Old World Orthodox, with severe, tightly pulled back hair; no one was good enough for her son.
“How’d I do, George?” Shirley asked as soon as they got in the car for the drive home. “Did your mother like me?”
He was evasive. “My sister Mildred thought you were great.”
“That’s nice, George,” she said. “But what did your mother say?”
There was a pause. “She says you paint your hair.” Another pause. “Well, do you?”
Shirley Polykoff was humiliated. In her mind she could hear her future mother-in-law: Fahrbt zi der huer? Oder fahrbt zi nisht? Does she color her hair? Or doesn’t she?
The answer, of course, was that she did. Shirley Polykoff always dyed her hair, even in the days when the only women who went blond were chorus girls and hookers. At home in Brooklyn, starting when she was fifteen, she would go to Mr. Nicholas’s beauty salon, one flight up, and he would “lighten the back” until all traces of her natural brown were gone. She thought she ought to be a blonde – or, to be more precise, she thought that the decision about whether she could be a blonde was rightfully hers, and not God’s. Shirley dressed in deep oranges and deep reds and creamy beiges and royal hues. She wore purple suede and aqua silk, and was the kind of person who might take a couture jacket home and embroider some new detail on it. Once, in the days when she had her own advertising agency, she was on her way to Memphis to make a presentation to Maybelline and her taxi broke down in the middle of the expressway. She jumped out and flagged down a Pepsi-Cola truck, and the truck driver told her he had picked her up because he’d never seen anyone quite like her before. “Shirley would wear three outfits, all at once, and each one of them would look great,” Dick Huebner, who was her creative director, says. She was flamboyant and brilliant and vain in an irresistible way, and it was her conviction that none of those qualities went with brown hair. The kind of person she spent her life turning herself into did not go with brown hair. Shirley’s parents were Hyman Polykoff, small-time necktie merchant, and Rose Polykoff, housewife and mother, of East New York and Flatbush, by way of the Ukraine. Shirley ended up on Park Avenue at Eighty-second. “If you asked my mother ‘Are you proud to be Jewish?’ she would have said yes,” her daughter, Alix Nelson Frick, says. “She wasn’t trying to pass. But she believed in the dream, and the dream was that you could acquire all the accouterments of the established affluent class, which included a certain breeding and a certain kind of look. Her idea was that you should be whatever you want to be, including being a blonde.”
In 1956, when Shirley Polykoff was a junior copywriter at Foote, Cone & Belding, she was given the Clairol account. The product the company was launching was Miss Clairol, the first hair-color bath that made it possible to lighten, tint, condition, and shampoo at home, in a single step – to take, say, Topaz (for a champagne blond) or Moon Gold (for a medium ash), apply it in a peroxide solution directly to the hair, and get results in twenty minutes. When the Clairol sales team demonstrated their new product at the International Beauty Show, in the old Statler Hotel, across from Madison Square Garden, thousands of assembled beauticians jammed the hall and watched, openmouthed, demonstration after demonstration. “They were astonished,” recalls Bruce Gelb, who ran Clairol for years, along with his father, Lawrence, and his brother Richard. “This was to the world of hair color what computers were to the world of adding machines. The sales guys had to bring buckets of water and do the rinsing off in front of everyone, because the hairdressers in the crowd were convinced we were doing something to the models behind the scenes.”
Miss Clairol gave American women the ability, for the first time, to color their hair quickly and easily at home. But there was still the stigma – the prospect of the disapproving mother-in-law. Shirley Polykoff knew immediately what she wanted to say, because if she believed that a woman had a right to be a blonde, she also believed that a woman ought to be able to exercise that right with discretion. “Does she or doesn’t she?” she wrote, translating from the Yiddish to the English. “Only her hairdresser knows for sure.” Clairol bought thirteen ad pages in Life in the fall of 1956, and Miss Clairol took off like a bird. That was the beginning. For Nice ’n Easy, Clairol’s breakthrough shampoo-in hair color, she wrote, “The closer he gets, the better you look.” For Lady Clairol, the cream-and-bleach combination that brought silver and platinum shades to Middle America, she wrote, “Is it true blondes have more fun?” and then, even more memorably, “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” (In the summer of 1962, just before The Feminine Mystique was published, Betty Friedan was, in the words of her biographer, so “bewitched” by that phrase that she bleached her hair.) Shirley Polykoff wrote the lines; Clairol perfected the product. And from the fifties to the seventies, when Polykoff gave up the account, the number of American women coloring their hair rose from 7 percent to more than 40 percent.
Today, when women go from brown to blond to red to black and back again without blinking, we think of hair-color products the way we think of lipstick. On drugstore shelves there are bottles and bottles of hair-color products with names like Hydrience and Excellence and Preference and Natural Instincts and Loving Care and Nice ’n Easy, and so on, each in dozens of different shades. Feria, the new, youth-oriented brand from L’Oréal, comes in Chocolate Cherry and Champagne Cocktail – colors that don’t ask “Does she or doesn’t she?” but blithely assume “Yes, she does.” Hair dye is now a billion-dollar-a-year commodity.
Yet there was a time, not so long ago – between, roughly speaking, the start of Eisenhower’s administration and the end of Carter’s – when hair color meant something. Lines like “Does she or doesn’t she?” or the famous 1973 slogan for L’Oréal’s Preference – “Because I’m worth it” – were as instantly memorable as “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” or “Things go better with Coke.” They lingered long after advertising usually does and entered the language; they somehow managed to take on meanings well outside their stated intention. Between the fifties and the seventies, women entered the workplace, fought for social emancipation, got the Pill, and changed what they did with their hair. To examine the hair-color campaigns of the period is to see, quite unexpectedly, all these things as bound up together, the profound with the seemingly trivial. In writing the history of women in the postwar era, did we forget something important? Did we leave out hair?
2.
When the “Does she or doesn’t she?” campaign first ran, in 1956, most advertisements that were aimed at women tended to be high glamour – “cherries in the snow, fire and ice,” as Bruce Gelb puts it. But Shirley Polykoff insisted that the models for the Miss Clairol campaign be more like the girl next door – “Shirtwaist types instead of glamour gowns,” she wrote in her original memo to Clairol. “Cashmere-sweater-over-the-shoulder types. Like larger-than-life portraits of the proverbial girl on the block who’s a little prettier than your wife and lives in a house slightly nicer than yours.” The model had to be a Doris Day type – not a Jayne Mansfield – because the idea was to make hair color as respectable and mainstream as possible. One of the earliest “Does she or doesn’t she?” television commercials featured a housewife in the kitchen preparing hors d’oeuvres for a party. She is slender and pretty and wearing a black cocktail dress and an apron. Her husband comes in, kisses her on the lips, approvingly pats her very blond hair, then holds the kitchen door for her as she takes the tray of hors d’oeuvres out for her guests. It is an exquisitely choreographed domestic tableau, down to the little dip the housewife performs as she hits the kitchen light switch with her elbow on her way out the door. In one of the early print ads – which were shot by Richard Avedon and then by Irving Penn – a woman with strawberry-blond hair is lying on the grass, holding a dandelion between her fingers, and lying next to her is a girl of about eight or nine. What’s striking is that the little girl’s hair is the same shade of blond as her mother’s. The “Does she or doesn’t she?” print ads always included a child with the mother to undercut the sexual undertones of the slogan – to make it clear that mothers were using Miss Clairol, and not just “fast” women – and, most of all, to provide a precise color match. Who could ever guess, given the comparison, that Mom’s shade came out of a bottle?
The Polykoff campaigns were a sensation. Letters poured in to Clairol. “Thank you for changing my life,” read one, which was circulated around the company and used as the theme for a national sales meeting. “My boyfriend, Harold, and I were keeping company for five years but he never wanted to set a date. This made me very nervous. I am twenty-eight and my mother kept saying soon it would be too late for me.” Then, the letter writer said, she saw a Clairol ad in the subway. She dyed her hair blond, and “that is how I am in Bermuda now on my honeymoon with Harold.” Polykoff was sent a copy with a memo: “It’s almost too good to be true!” With her sentimental idyll of blond mother and child, Shirley Polykoff had created something iconic.
“My mother wanted to be that woman in the picture,” Polykoff’s daughter, Frick, says. “She was wedded to the notion of that suburban, tastefully dressed, well-coddled matron who was an adornment to her husband, a loving mother, a long-suffering wife, a person who never overshadowed him. She wanted the blond child. In fact, I was blond as a kid, but when I was about thirteen my hair got darker and my mother started bleaching it.” Of course – and this is the contradiction central to those early Clairol campaigns – Shirley Polykoff wasn’t really that kind of woman at all. She always had a career. She never moved to the suburbs. “She maintained that women were supposed to be feminine, and not too dogmatic and not overshadow their husband, but she greatly overshadowed my father, who was a very pure, unaggressive, intellectual type,” Frick says. “She was very flamboyant, very emotional, very dominating.”
One of the stories Polykoff told about herself repeatedly – and that even appeared after her death in her New York Times obituary – was that she felt that a woman never ought to make more than her husband, and that only after George’s death, in the early sixties, would she let Foote, Cone & Belding raise her salary to its deserved level. “That’s part of the legend, but it isn’t the truth,” Frick says. “The ideal was always as vividly real to her as whatever actual parallel reality she might be living. She never wavered in her belief in that dream, even if you would point out to her some of the fallacies of that dream, or the weaknesses, or the internal contradictions, or the fact that she herself didn’t really live her life that way.” For Shirley Polykoff, the color of her hair was a kind of useful fiction, a way of bridging the contradiction between the kind of woman she was and the kind of woman she felt she ought to be. It was a way of having it all. She wanted to look and feel like Doris Day without having to be Doris Day. In twenty-seven years of marriage, during which she bore two children, she spent exactly two weeks as a housewife, every day of which was a domestic and culinary disaster. “Listen, sweetie,” an exasperated George finally told her. “You make a lousy little woman in the kitchen.” She went back to work the following Monday.
This notion of the useful fiction – of looking the part without being the part – had a particular resonance for the America of Shirley Polykoff’s generation. As a teenager, Shirley Polykoff tried to get a position as a clerk at an insurance agency and failed. Then she tried again, at another firm, applying as Shirley Miller. This time, she got the job. Her husband, George, also knew the value of appearances. The week Polykoff first met him, she was dazzled by his worldly sophistication, his knowledge of out-of-the-way places in Europe, his exquisite taste in fine food and wine. The second week, she learned that his expertise was all show, derived from reading the Times. The truth was that George had started his career loading boxes in the basement of Macy’s by day and studying law at night. He was a faker, just as, in a certain sense, she was, because to be Jewish – or Irish or Italian or African-American or, for that matter, a woman of the fifties caught up in the first faint stirrings of feminism – was to be compelled to fake it in a thousand small ways, to pass as one thing when, deep inside, you were something else. “That’s the kind of pressure that comes from the immigrants’ arriving and thinking that they don’t look right, that they are kind of funny-looking and maybe shorter than everyone else, and their clothes aren’t expensive,” Frick says. “That’s why many of them began to sew, so they could imitate the patterns of the day. You were making yourself over. You were turning yourself into an American.” Frick, who is also in advertising (she’s the chairman of Spier NY), is a forcefully intelligent woman, who speaks of her mother with honesty and affection. “There were all those phrases that came to fruition at that time – you know, ‘clothes make the man’ and ‘first impressions count.’” So the question “Does she or doesn’t she?” wasn’t just about how no one could ever really know what you were doing. It was about how no one could ever really know who you were. It really meant not “Does she?” but “Is she?” It really meant “Is she a contented homemaker or a feminist, a Jew or a Gentile – or isn’t she?”
3.
In 1973, Ilon Specht was working as a copywriter at the McCann-Erickson advertising agency, in New York. She was a twenty-three-year-old college dropout from California. She was rebellious, unconventional, and independent, and she had come East to work on Madison Avenue, because that’s where people like that went to work back then. “It was a different business in those days,” Susan Schermer, a longtime friend of Specht’s, says. “It was the seventies. People were wearing feathers to work.” At her previous agency, while she was still in her teens, Specht had written a famous television commercial for the Peace Corps. (Single shot. No cuts. A young couple lying on the beach. “It’s a big, wide wonderful world” is playing on a radio. Voice-over recites a series of horrible facts about less fortunate parts of the world: in the Middle East half the children die before their sixth birthday, and so forth. A news broadcast is announced as the song ends, and the woman on the beach changes the station.)
“Ilon? Omigod! She was one of the craziest people I ever worked with,” Ira Madris, another colleague from those years, recalls, using the word crazy as the highest of compliments. “And brilliant. And dogmatic. And highly creative. We all believed back then that having a certain degree of neurosis made you interesting. Ilon had a degree of neurosis that made her very interesting.”
At McCann, Ilon Specht was working with L’Oréal, a French company that was trying to challenge Clairol’s dominance in the American hair-color market. L’Oréal had originally wanted to do a series of comparison spots, presenting research proving that their new product – Preference – was technologically superior to Nice ’n Easy because it delivered a more natural, translucent color. But at the last minute the campaign was killed because the research hadn’t been done in the United States. At McCann, there was panic. “We were four weeks before air date and we had nothing – nada,” Michael Sennott, a staffer who was also working on the account, says. The creative team locked itself away: Specht, Madris – who was the art director on the account – and a handful of others. “We were sitting in this big office,” Specht recalls. “And everyone was discussing what the ad should be. They wanted to do something with a woman sitting by a window, and the wind blowing through the curtains. You know, one of those fake places with big, glamorous curtains. The woman was a complete object. I don’t think she even spoke. They just didn’t get it. We were in there for hours.”
Ilon Specht has long, thick black hair, held in a loose knot at the top of her head, and lipstick the color of maraschino cherries. She talks fast and loud, and swivels in her chair as she speaks, and when people walk by her office they sometimes bang on her door, as if the best way to get her attention is to be as loud and emphatic as she is. Reminiscing not long ago about the seventies, she spoke about the strangeness of corporate clients in shiny suits who would say that all the women in the office looked like models. She spoke about what it meant to be young in a business dominated by older men, and about what it felt like to write a line of copy that used the word woman and have someone cross it out and write girl.
“I was a twenty-three-year-old girl – a woman,” she said. “What would my state of mind have been? I could just see that they had this traditional view of women, and my feeling was that I’m not writing an ad about looking good for men, which is what it seems to me that they were doing. I just thought, Fuck you. I sat down and did it, in five minutes. It was very personal. I can recite to you the whole commercial, because I was so angry when I wrote it.”
Specht sat stock still and lowered her voice: “I use the most expensive hair color in the world. Preference, by L’Oréal. It’s not that I care about money. It’s that I care about my hair. It’s not just the color. I expect great color. What’s worth more to me is the way my hair feels. Smooth and silky but with body. It feels good against my neck. Actually, I don’t mind spending more for L’Oréal. Because I’m” – and here Specht took her fist and struck her chest – “worth it.”
The power of the commercial was originally thought to lie in its subtle justification of the fact that Preference cost ten cents more than Nice ’n Easy. But it quickly became obvious that the last line was the one that counted. On the strength of “Because I’m worth it,” Preference began stealing market share from Clairol. In the 1980s, Preference surpassed Nice ’n Easy as the leading hair-color brand in the country, and in 1997 L’Oréal took the phrase and made it the slogan for the whole company. An astonishing 71 percent of American women can now identify that phrase as the L’Oréal signature, which, for a slogan – as opposed to a brand name – is almost without precedent.
4.
From the very beginning, the Preference campaign was unusual. Polykoff’s Clairol spots had male voice-overs. In the L’Oréal ads, the model herself spoke, directly and personally. Polykoff’s commercials were “other-directed” – they were about what the group was saying (“Does she or doesn’t she?”) or what a husband might think (“The closer he gets, the better you look”). Specht’s line was what a woman says to herself. Even in the choice of models, the two campaigns diverged. Polykoff wanted fresh, girl-next-door types. McCann and L’Oréal wanted models who somehow embodied the complicated mixture of strength and vulnerability implied by “Because I’m worth it.” In the late seventies, Meredith Baxter Birney was the brand spokeswoman. At that time, she was playing a recently divorced mom going to law school on the TV drama Family. McCann scheduled her spots during Dallas and other shows featuring so-called silk blouse women – women of strength and independence. Then came Cybill Shepherd, at the height of her run as the brash, independent Maddie on Moonlighting, in the eighties. She, in turn, was followed by Heather Locklear, the tough and sexy star of the 1990s hit Melrose Place . All the L’Oréal spokeswomen are blondes, but blondes of a particular type. In his brilliant 1995 book, Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self, the Canadian anthropologist Grant McCracken argued for something he calls the “blondness periodic table,” in which blondes are divided into six categories: the bombshell blonde (Mae West, Marilyn Monroe), the sunny blonde (Doris Day, Goldie Hawn), the brassy blonde (Candice Bergen), the dangerous blonde (Sharon Stone), the society blonde (C. Z. Guest), and the cool blonde (Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly). L’Oréal’s innovation was to carve out a niche for itself in between the sunny blondes – the “simple, mild, and innocent” blondes – and the smart, bold, brassy blondes, who, in McCracken’s words, “do not mediate their feelings or modulate their voices.”
This is not an easy sensibility to capture. Countless actresses have auditioned for L’Oréal over the years and been turned down. “There was one casting we did with Brigitte Bardot,” Ira Madris recalls (this was for another L’Oréal product), “and Brigitte, being who she is, had the damnedest time saying that line. There was something inside of her that didn’t believe it. It didn’t have any conviction.” Of course it didn’t: Bardot is bombshell, not sassy. Clairol made a run at the Preference sensibility for itself, hiring Linda Evans in the eighties as the pitchwoman for Ultress, the brand aimed at Preference’s upscale positioning. This didn’t work, either. Evans, who played the adoring wife of Blake Carrington on Dynasty, was too sunny. (“The hardest thing she did on that show,” Michael Sennott says, perhaps a bit unfairly, “was rearrange the flowers.”)
Even if you got the blonde right, though, there was still the matter of the slogan. For a Miss Clairol campaign in the seventies, Polykoff wrote a series of spots with the tag line “This I do for me.” But “This I do for me” was at best a halfhearted approximation of “Because I’m worth it” – particularly for a brand that had spent its first twenty years saying something entirely different. “My mother thought there was something too brazen about ‘I’m worth it,’” Frick told me. “She was always concerned with what people around her might think. She could never have come out with that bald-faced an equation between hair color and self-esteem.”
The truth is that Polykoff’s sensibility – which found freedom in assimilation – had been overtaken by events. In one of Polykoff’s “Is it true blondes have more fun?” commercials for Lady Clairol in the sixties, for example, there is a moment that by 1973 must have been painful to watch. A young woman, radiantly blond, is by a lake, being swung around in the air by a darkly handsome young man. His arms are around her waist. Her arms are around his neck, her shoes off, her face aglow. The voice-over is male, deep and sonorous. “Chances are,” the voice says, “she’d have gotten the young man anyhow, but you’ll never convince her of that.” Here was the downside to Shirley Polykoff’s world. You could get what you wanted by faking it, but then you would never know whether it was you or the bit of fakery that made the difference. You ran the risk of losing sight of who you really were. Shirley Polykoff knew that the all-American life was worth it, and that “he” – the handsome man by the lake, or the reluctant boyfriend who finally whisks you off to Bermuda – was worth it. But, by the end of the sixties, women wanted to know that they were worth it, too.
5.
Why are Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht important? That seems like a question that can easily be answered in the details of their campaigns. They were brilliant copywriters, who managed in the space of a phrase to capture the particular feminist sensibilities of the day. They are an example of a strange moment in American social history when hair dye somehow got tangled up in the politics of assimilation and feminism and self-esteem. But in a certain way their stories are about much more: they are about the relationship we have to the products we buy, and about the slow realization among advertisers that unless they understood the psychological particulars of that relationship – unless they could dignify the transactions of everyday life by granting them meaning – they could not hope to reach the modern consumer. Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht perfected a certain genre of advertising that did just this, and one way to understand the Madison Avenue revolution of the postwar era is as a collective attempt to define and extend that genre. The revolution was led by a handful of social scientists, chief among whom was an elegant, Viennese-trained psychologist by the name of Herta Herzog. What did Herta Herzog know? She knew – or, at least, she thought she knew – the theory behind the success of slogans like “Does she or doesn’t she?” and “Because I’m worth it,” and that makes Herta Herzog, in the end, every bit as important as Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht.
Herzog worked at a small advertising agency called Jack Tinker & Partners, and people who were in the business in those days speak of Tinker the way baseball fans talk about the 1927 Yankees. Tinker was the brainchild of the legendary adman Marion Harper, who came to believe that the agency he was running, McCann- Erickson, was too big and unwieldy to be able to consider things properly. His solution was to pluck a handful of the very best and brightest from McCann and set them up, first in the Waldorf Towers (in the suite directly below the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s and directly above General Douglas MacArthur’s) and then, more permanently, in the Dorset Hotel, on West Fifty-fourth Street, overlooking the Museum of Modern Art. The Tinker Group rented the penthouse, complete with a huge terrace, Venetian-tiled floors, a double-height living room, an antique French polished-pewter bar, a marble fireplace, spectacular skyline views, and a rotating exhibit of modern art (hung by the partners for motivational purposes), with everything – walls, carpets, ceilings, furnishings – a bright, dazzling white. It was supposed to be a think tank, but Tinker was so successful so fast that clients were soon lined up outside the door. When Buick wanted a name for its new luxury coupe, the Tinker Group came up with Riviera. When Bulova wanted a name for its new quartz watch, Tinker suggested Accutron. Tinker also worked with Coca-Cola and Exxon and Westinghouse and countless others, whose names – according to the strict standards of secrecy observed by the group – they would not divulge. Tinker started with four partners and a single phone. But by the end of the sixties it had taken over eight floors of the Dorset.
What distinguished Tinker was its particular reliance on the methodology known as motivational research, which was brought to Madison Avenue in the 1940s by a cadre of European intellectuals trained at the University of Vienna. Advertising research up until that point had been concerned with counting heads – with recording who was buying what. But the motivational researchers were concerned with why: Why do people buy what they do? What motivates them when they shop? The researchers devised surveys, with hundreds of questions, based on Freudian dynamic psychology. They used hypnosis, the Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration Study, role-playing, and Rorschach blots, and they invented what we now call the focus group. There was Paul Lazarsfeld, one of the giants of twentieth-century sociology, who devised something called the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer, a little device with buttons to record precisely the emotional responses of research subjects. There was Hans Zeisel, who had been a patient of Alfred Adler’s in Vienna and went to work at McCann-Erickson. There was Ernest Dichter, who had studied under Lazarsfeld at the Psychological Institute in Vienna and who did consulting for hundreds of the major corporations of the day. And there was Tinker’s Herta Herzog, perhaps the most accomplished motivational researcher of all, who trained dozens of interviewers in the Viennese method and sent them out to analyze the psyche of the American consumer.
“For Puerto Rican rum once, Herta wanted to do a study of why people drink, to tap into that below-the-surface kind of thing,” Rena Bartos, a former advertising executive who worked with Herta in the early days, recalls. “We would invite someone out to drink and they would order whatever they normally order, and we would administer a psychological test. Then we’d do it again at the very end of the discussion, after the drinks. The point was to see how people’s personality was altered under the influence of alcohol.” Herzog helped choose the name of Oasis cigarettes, because her psychological research suggested that the name – with its connotations of cool, bubbling springs – would have the greatest appeal to the orally fixated smoker.
“Herta was graceful and gentle and articulate,” Herbert Krugman, who worked closely with Herzog in those years, says. “She had enormous insights. Alka-Seltzer was a client of ours, and they were discussing new approaches for the next commercial. She said, ‘You show a hand dropping an Alka-Seltzer tablet into a glass of water. Why not show the hand dropping two? You’ll double sales.’ And that’s just what happened. Herta was the gray eminence. Everybody worshipped her.”
After retiring from Tinker, Herzog moved back to Europe, first to Germany and then to Austria, her homeland. She wrote an analysis of the TV show Dallas for the academic journal Society. She taught college courses on communications theory. She conducted a study on the Holocaust for the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, in Jerusalem. Today, she lives in the mountain village of Leutasch, half an hour’s hard drive up into the Alps from Innsbruck, in a white picture-book cottage with a sharply pitched roof. She is a small woman, slender and composed, her once dark hair now streaked with gray. She speaks in short, clipped, precise sentences, in flawless, though heavily accented, English. If you put her in a room with Shirley Polykoff and Ilon Specht, the two of them would talk and talk and wave their long, bejeweled fingers in the air, and she would sit unobtrusively in the corner and listen. “Marion Harper hired me to do qualitative research – the qualitative interview, which was the specialty that had been developed in Vienna at the Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle,” Herzog told me. “It was interviewing not with direct questions and answers but where you open some subject of the discussion relevant to the topic and then let it go. You have the interviewer not talk but simply help the person with little questions like ‘And anything else?’ As an interviewer, you are not supposed to influence me. You are merely trying to help me. It was a lot like the psychoanalytic method.” Herzog was sitting, ramrod straight, in a chair in her living room. She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a heavy brown sweater to protect her against the Alpine chill. Behind her was row upon row of bookshelves, filled with the books of a postwar literary and intellectual life: Mailer in German, Reisman in English. Open and facedown on a long couch perpendicular to her chair was the latest issue of the psychoanalytic journal Psyche. “Later on, I added all kinds of psychological things to the process, such as word-association tests, or figure drawings with a story. Suppose you are my respondent and the subject is soap. I’ve already talked to you about soap. What you see in it. Why you buy it. What you like about it. Dislike about it. Then at the end of the interview I say, ‘Please draw me a figure – anything you want – and after the figure is drawn tell me a story about the figure.’”
When Herzog asked her subjects to draw a figure at the end of an interview, she was trying to extract some kind of narrative from them, something that would shed light on their unstated desires. She was conducting, as she says, a psychoanalytic session. But she wouldn’t ask about hair-color products in order to find out about you, the way a psychoanalyst might; she would ask about you in order to learn about hair-color products. She saw that the psychoanalytic interview could go both ways. You could use the techniques of healing to figure out the secrets of selling. “Does she or doesn’t she?” and “Because I’m worth it” did the same thing: they not only carried a powerful and redemptive message, but – and this was their real triumph – they succeeded in attaching that message to a five-dollar bottle of hair dye. The lasting contribution of motivational research to Madison Avenue was to prove that you could do this for just about anything – that the products and the commercial messages with which we surround ourselves are as much a part of the psychological furniture of our lives as the relationships and emotions and experiences that are normally the subject of psychoanalytic inquiry.
“There is one thing we did at Tinker that I remember well,” Herzog told me, returning to the theme of one of her, and Tinker’s, coups. “I found out that people were using Alka-Seltzer for stomach upset, but also for headaches,” Herzog said. “We learned that the stomach ache was the kind of ache where many people tended to say ‘It was my fault.’ Alka-Seltzer had been mostly advertised in those days as a cure for overeating, and overeating is something you have done. But the headache is quite different. It is something imposed on you.” This was, to Herzog, the classic psychological insight. It revealed Alka-Seltzer users to be divided into two apparently incompatible camps – the culprit and the victim – and it suggested that the company had been wooing one at the expense of the other. More important, it suggested that advertisers, with the right choice of words, could resolve that psychological dilemma with one or, better yet, two little white tablets. Herzog allowed herself a small smile. “So I said the nice thing would be if you could find something that combines these two elements. The copywriter came up with ‘the blahs.’” Herzog repeated the phrase, the blahs, because it was so beautiful. “The blahs was not one thing or the other – it was not the stomach or the head. It was both.”
6.
This notion of household products as psychological furniture is, when you think about it, a radical idea. When we give an account of how we got to where we are, we’re inclined to credit the philosophical over the physical, and the products of art over the products of commerce. In the list of sixties social heroes, there are musicians and poets and civil-rights activists and sports figures. Herzog’s implication is that such a high-minded list is incomplete. What, say, of Vidal Sassoon? In the same period, he gave the world the Shape, the Acute Angle, and the One-Eyed Ungaro. In the old “cosmology of cosmetology,” McCracken writes, “the client counted only as a plinth… the conveyor of the cut.” But Sassoon made individualization the hallmark of the haircut, liberating women’s hair from the hair styles of the times – from, as McCracken puts it, those “preposterous bits of rococo shrubbery that took their substance from permanents, their form from rollers, and their rigidity from hair spray.” In the Herzogian world view, the reasons we might give to dismiss Sassoon’s revolution – that all he was dispensing was a haircut, that it took just half an hour, that it affects only the way you look, that you will need another like it in a month – are the very reasons that Sassoon is important. If a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?
“Because I’m worth it” and “Does she or doesn’t she?” were powerful, then, precisely because they were commercials, for commercials come with products attached, and products offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation. “We discovered in the first few years of the ‘Because I’m worth it’ campaign that we were getting more than our fair share of new users to the category – women who were just beginning to color their hair,” Sennott told me. “And within that group we were getting those undergoing life changes, which usually meant divorce. We had far more women who were getting divorced than Clairol had. Their children had grown, and something had happened, and they were reinventing themselves.” They felt different, and Ilon Specht gave them the means to look different – and do we really know which came first, or even how to separate the two? They changed their lives and their hair. But it wasn’t one thing or the other. It was both.
7.
In the midnineties, the spokesperson for Clairol’s Nice ’n Easy was Julia Louis-Dreyfus, better known as Elaine from Seinfeld. In the Clairol tradition, she is the girl next door – a postmodern Doris Day. But the spots themselves could not be less like the original Polykoff campaigns for Miss Clairol. In the best of them, Louis-Dreyfus says to the dark-haired woman in front of her on a city bus, “You know, you’d look great as a blonde.” Louis-Dreyfus then shampoos in Nice ’n Easy Shade 104 right then and there, to the gasps and cheers of the other passengers. It is Shirley Polykoff turned upside down: funny, not serious; public, not covert.
L’Oréal, too, has changed. Meredith Baxter Birney said “Because I’m worth it” with an earnestness appropriate to the line. By the time Cybill Shepherd became the brand spokeswoman, in the eighties, it was almost flip – a nod to the materialism of the times – and today, with Heather Locklear, the spots have a lush, indulgent feel. “New Preference by L’Oréal,” she says in one of the current commercials. “Pass it on. You’re worth it.” The “because” – which gave Ilon Specht’s original punch line such emphasis – is gone. The forceful I’m has been replaced by you’re. The Clairol and L’Oréal campaigns have converged. According to the Spectra marketing firm, there are almost exactly as many Preference users as Nice ’n Easy users who earn between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand dollars a year, listen to religious radio, rent their apartments, watch the Weather Channel, bought more than six books last year, are fans of professional football, and belong to a union.
But it is a tribute to Ilon Specht and Shirley Polykoff’s legacy that there is still a real difference between the two brands. It’s not that there are Clairol women or L’Oréal women. It’s something a little subtler. As Herzog knew, all of us, when it comes to constructing our sense of self, borrow bits and pieces, ideas and phrases, rituals and products from the world around us – over-the-counter ethnicities that shape, in some small but meaningful way, our identities. Our religion matters, the music we listen to matters, the clothes we wear matter, the food we eat matters – and our brand of hair dye matters, too. Carol Hamilton, L’Oréal’s vice president of marketing, says she can walk into a hair-color focus group and instantly distinguish the Clairol users from the L’Oréal users. “The L’Oréal user always exhibits a greater air of confidence, and she usually looks better – not just her hair color, but she always has spent a little more time putting on her makeup, styling her hair,” Hamilton told me. “Her clothing is a little bit more fashion-forward. Absolutely, I can tell the difference.” Jeanne Matson, Hamilton’s counterpart at Clairol, says she can do the same thing. “Oh, yes,” Matson told me. “There’s no doubt. The Clairol woman would represent more the American-beauty icon, more naturalness. But it’s more of a beauty for me, as opposed to a beauty for the external world. L’Oréal users tend to be a bit more aloof. There is a certain warmth you see in the Clairol people. They interact with each other more. They’ll say, ‘I use Shade 101.’ And someone else will say, ‘Ah, I do, too!’ There is this big exchange.”
These are not exactly the brand personalities laid down by Polykoff and Specht, because this is 1999, and not 1956 or 1973. The complexities of Polykoff’s artifice have been muted. Specht’s anger has turned to glamour. We have been left with just a few bars of the original melody. But even that is enough to ensure that “Because I’m worth it” will never be confused with “Does she or doesn’t she?” Specht says, “It meant I know you don’t think I’m worth it, because that’s what it was with the guys in the room. They were going to take a woman and make her the object. I was defensive and defiant. I thought, I’ll fight you. Don’t you tell me what I am. You’ve been telling me what I am for generations.” As she said fight, she extended the middle finger of her right hand. Shirley Polykoff would never have given anyone the finger. She was too busy exulting in the possibilities for self-invention in her America – a land where a single woman could dye her hair and end up lying on a beach with a ring on her finger. At her retirement party, in 1973, Polykoff reminded the assembled executives of Clairol and of Foote, Cone & Belding about the avalanche of mail that arrived after their early campaigns: “Remember that letter from the girl who got to a Bermuda honeymoon by becoming a blonde?”
Everybody did.
“Well,” she said, with what we can only imagine was a certain sweet vindication, “I wrote it.”
March 22, 1999
John Rock’s Error
WHAT THE INVENTOR OF THE BIRTH CONTROL PILL DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT WOMEN’S HEALTH
1.
John Rock was christened in 1890 at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and married by Cardinal William O’Connell, of Boston. He had five children and nineteen grandchildren. A crucifix hung above his desk, and nearly every day of his adult life he attended the 7 a.m. Mass at St. Mary’s in Brookline. Rock, his friends would say, was in love with his church. He was also one of the inventors of the birth-control pill, and it was his conviction that his faith and his vocation were perfectly compatible. To anyone who disagreed he would simply repeat the words spoken to him as a child by his hometown priest: “John, always stick to your conscience. Never let anyone else keep it for you. And I mean anyone else.” Even when Monsignor Francis W. Carney, of Cleveland, called him a “moral rapist,” and when Frederick Good, the longtime head of obstetrics at Boston City Hospital, went to Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing to have Rock excommunicated, Rock was unmoved. “You should be afraid to meet your Maker,” one angry woman wrote to him, soon after the Pill was approved. “My dear madam,” Rock wrote back, “in my faith, we are taught that the Lord is with us always. When my time comes, there will be no need for introductions.”
In the years immediately after the Pill was approved by the FDA, in 1960, Rock was everywhere. He appeared in interviews and documentaries on CBS and NBC, in Time, Newsweek, Life, The Saturday Evening Post. He toured the country tirelessly. He wrote a widely discussed book, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle over Birth Control, which was translated into French, German, and Dutch. Rock was six feet three and rail-thin, with impeccable manners; he held doors open for his patients and addressed them as “Mrs.” or “Miss.” His mere association with the Pill helped make it seem respectable. “He was a man of great dignity,” Dr. Sheldon J. Segal, of the Population Council, recalls. “Even if the occasion called for an open collar, you’d never find him without an ascot. He had the shock of white hair to go along with that. And posture, straight as an arrow, even to his last year.” At Harvard Medical School, he was a giant, teaching obstetrics for more than three decades. He was a pioneer in in-vitro fertilization and the freezing of sperm cells, and was the first to extract an intact fertilized egg. The Pill was his crowning achievement. His two collaborators, Gregory Pincus and Min-Cheuh Chang, worked out the mechanism. He shepherded the drug through its clinical trials. “It was his name and his reputation that gave ultimate validity to the claims that the pill would protect women against unwanted pregnancy,” Loretta McLaughlin writes in her marvelous 1982 biography of Rock. Not long before the Pill’s approval, Rock traveled to Washington to testify before the FDA about the drug’s safety. The agency examiner, Pasquale DeFelice, was a Catholic obstetrician from Georgetown University, and at one point, the story goes, DeFelice suggested the unthinkable – that the Catholic Church would never approve of the birth-control pill. “I can still see Rock standing there, his face composed, his eyes riveted on DeFelice,” a colleague recalled years later, “and then, in a voice that would congeal your soul, he said, ‘Young man, don’t you sell my church short.’”
In the end, of course, John Rock’s church disappointed him. In 1968, in the encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” Pope Paul VI outlawed oral contraceptives and all other “artificial” methods of birth control. The passion and urgency that animated the birth-control debates of the sixties are now a memory. John Rock still matters, though, for the simple reason that in the course of reconciling his church and his work he made an error. It was not a deliberate error. It became manifest only after his death, and through scientific advances he could not have anticipated. But because that mistake shaped the way he thought about the Pill – about what it was, and how it worked, and most of all what it meant – and because John Rock was one of those responsible for the way the Pill came into the world, his error has colored the way people have thought about contraception ever since.
John Rock believed that the Pill was a “natural” method of birth control. By that, he didn’t mean that it felt natural, because it obviously didn’t for many women, particularly not in its earliest days, when the doses of hormone were many times as high as they are today. He meant that it worked by natural means. Women can get pregnant only during a certain interval each month, because after ovulation their bodies produce a surge of the hormone progesterone. Progesterone – one of a class of hormones known as progestin – prepares the uterus for implantation and stops the ovaries from releasing new eggs; it favors gestation. “It is progesterone, in the healthy woman, that prevents ovulation and establishes the pre- and postmenstrual ‘safe’ period,” Rock wrote. When a woman is pregnant, her body produces a stream of progestin in part for the same reason, so that another egg can’t be released and threaten the pregnancy already under way. Progestin, in other words, is nature’s contraceptive. And what was the Pill? Progestin in tablet form. When a woman was on the Pill, of course, these hormones weren’t coming in a sudden surge after ovulation and weren’t limited to certain times in her cycle. They were being given in a steady dose, so that ovulation was permanently shut down. They were also being given with an additional dose of estrogen, which holds the endometrium together and – as we’ve come to learn – helps maintain other tissues as well. But to Rock, the timing and combination of hormones wasn’t the issue. The key fact was that the Pill’s ingredients duplicated what could be found in the body naturally. And in that naturalness he saw enormous theological significance.
In 1951, for example, Pope Pius XII had sanctioned the rhythm method for Catholics because he deemed it a “natural” method of regulating procreation: it didn’t kill the sperm, like a spermicide, or frustrate the normal process of procreation, like a diaphragm, or mutilate the organs, like sterilization. Rock knew all about the rhythm method. In the 1930s, at the Free Hospital for Women, in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had started the country’s first rhythm clinic for educating Catholic couples in natural contraception. But how did the rhythm method work? It worked by limiting sex to the safe period that progestin created. And how did the Pill work? It worked by using progestin to extend the safe period to the entire month. It didn’t mutilate the reproductive organs, or damage any natural process. “Indeed,” Rock wrote, oral contraceptives “may be characterized as a ‘pill-established safe period,’ and would seem to carry the same moral implications” as the rhythm method. The Pill was, to Rock, no more than “an adjunct to nature.”
In 1958, Pope Pius XII approved the Pill for Catholics, so long as its contraceptive effects were “indirect” – that is, so long as it was intended only as a remedy for conditions like painful menses or “a disease of the uterus.” That ruling emboldened Rock still further. Short-term use of the Pill, he knew, could regulate the cycle of women whose periods had previously been unpredictable. Since a regular menstrual cycle was necessary for the successful use of the rhythm method – and since the rhythm method was sanctioned by the Church – shouldn’t it be permissible for women with an irregular menstrual cycle to use the Pill in order to facilitate the use of rhythm? And if that was true, why not take the logic one step further? As the federal judge John T. Noonan writes in Contraception, his history of the Catholic position on birth control:
If it was lawful to suppress ovulation to achieve a regularity necessary for successfully sterile intercourse, why was it not lawful to suppress ovulation without appeal to rhythm? If pregnancy could be prevented by pill plus rhythm, why not by pill alone? In each case suppression of ovulation was used as a means. How was a moral difference made by the addition of rhythm?
These arguments, as arcane as they may seem, were central to the development of oral contraception. It was John Rock and Gregory Pincus who decided that the Pill ought to be taken over a four-week cycle – a woman would spend three weeks on the Pill and the fourth week off the drug (or on a placebo), to allow for menstruation. There was and is no medical reason for this. A typical woman of childbearing age has a menstrual cycle of around twenty-eight days, determined by the cascades of hormones released by her ovaries. As first estrogen and then a combination of estrogen and progestin flood the uterus, its lining becomes thick and swollen, preparing for the implantation of a fertilized egg. If the egg is not fertilized, hormone levels plunge and cause the lining – the endometrium – to be sloughed off in a menstrual bleed. When a woman is on the Pill, however, no egg is released, because the Pill suppresses ovulation. The fluxes of estrogen and progestin that cause the lining of the uterus to grow are dramatically reduced, because the Pill slows down the ovaries. Pincus and Rock knew that the effect of the Pill’s hormones on the endometrium was so modest that women could conceivably go for months without having to menstruate. “In view of the ability of this compound to prevent menstrual bleeding as long as it is taken,” Pincus acknowledged in 1958, “a cycle of any desired length could presumably be produced.” But he and Rock decided to cut the hormones off after three weeks and trigger a menstrual period because they believed that women would find the continuation of their monthly bleeding reassuring. More to the point, if Rock wanted to demonstrate that the Pill was no more than a natural variant of the rhythm method, he couldn’t very well do away with the monthly menses. Rhythm required “regularity,” and so the Pill had to produce regularity as well.
It has often been said of the Pill that no other drug has ever been so instantly recognizable by its packaging: that small, round plastic dial pack. But what was the dial pack if not the physical embodiment of the twenty-eight-day cycle? It was, in the words of its inventor, meant to fit into a case “indistinguishable” from a woman’s cosmetics compact, so that it might be carried “without giving a visual clue as to matters which are of no concern to others.” Today, the Pill is still often sold in dial packs and taken in twenty-eight-day cycles. It remains, in other words, a drug shaped by the dictates of the Catholic Church – by John Rock’s desire to make this new method of birth control seem as natural as possible. This was John Rock’s error. He was consumed by the idea of the natural. But what he thought was natural wasn’t so natural after all, and the Pill he ushered into the world turned out to be something other than what he thought it was. In John Rock’s mind the dictates of religion and the principles of science got mixed up, and only now are we beginning to untangle them.
2.
In 1986, a young scientist named Beverly Strassmann traveled to Africa to live with the Dogon tribe of Mali. Her research site was the village of Sangui in the Sahel, about 120 miles south of Timbuktu. The Sahel is thorn savannah, green in the rainy season and semi-arid the rest of the year. The Dogon grow millet, sorghum, and onions, raise livestock, and live in adobe houses on the Bandiagara escarpment. They use no contraception. Many of them have held on to their ancestral customs and religious beliefs. Dogon farmers, in many respects, live much as people of that region have lived since antiquity. Strassmann wanted to construct a precise reproductive profile of the women in the tribe, in order to understand what female biology might have been like in the millennia that preceded the modern age. In a way, Strassmann was trying to answer the same question about female biology that John Rock and the Catholic Church had struggled with in the early sixties: what is natural? Only, her sense of natural was not theological but evolutionary. In the era during which natural selection established the basic patterns of human biology – the natural history of our species – how often did women have children? How often did they menstruate? When did they reach puberty and menopause? What impact did breast-feeding have on ovulation? These questions had been studied before, but never so thoroughly that anthropologists felt they knew the answers with any certainty.
Strassmann, who teaches at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is a slender, soft-spoken woman with red hair, and she recalls her time in Mali with a certain wry humor. The house she stayed in while in Sangui had been used as a shelter for sheep before she came and was turned into a pigsty after she left. A small brown snake lived in her latrine, and would curl up in a camouflaged coil on the seat she sat on while bathing. The villagers, she says, were of two minds: was it a deadly snake – Kere me jongolo, literally, “My bite cannot be healed” – or a harmless mouse snake? (It turned out to be the latter.) Once, one of her neighbors and best friends in the tribe roasted her a rat as a special treat. “I told him that white people aren’t allowed to eat rat because rat is our totem,” Strassmann says. “I can still see it. Bloated and charred. Stretched by its paws. Whiskers singed. To say nothing of the tail.” Strassmann meant to live in Sangui for eighteen months, but her experiences there were so profound and exhilarating that she stayed for two and a half years. “I felt incredibly privileged,” she says. “I just couldn’t tear myself away.”
Part of Strassmann’s work focused on the Dogon’s practice of segregating menstruating women in special huts on the fringes of the village. In Sangui, there were two menstrual huts – dark, cramped, one-room adobe structures, with boards for beds. Each accommodated three women, and when the rooms were full, latecomers were forced to stay outside on the rocks. “It’s not a place where people kick back and enjoy themselves,” Strassmann says. “It’s simply a nighttime hangout. They get there at dusk, and get up early in the morning and draw their water.” Strassmann took urine samples from the women using the hut, to confirm that they were menstruating. Then she made a list of all the women in the village, and for her entire time in Mali – 736 consecutive nights – she kept track of everyone who visited the hut. Among the Dogon, she found a woman on average has her first period at the age of sixteen and gives birth eight or nine times. From menarche, the onset of menstruation, to the age of twenty, she averages seven periods a year. Over the next decade and a half, from the age of twenty to the age of thirty-four, she spends so much time either pregnant or breast-feeding (which, among the Dogon, suppresses ovulation for an average of twenty months) that she averages only slightly more than one period per year. Then, from the age of thirty-five until menopause, at around fifty, as her fertility rapidly declines, she averages four menses a year. All told, Dogon women menstruate about a hundred times in their lives. (Those who survive early childhood typically live into their seventh or eighth decade.) By contrast, the average for contemporary Western women is somewhere between three hundred and fifty and four hundred times.
Strassmann’s office is in the basement of a converted stable next to the Natural History Museum on the University of Michigan campus. Behind her desk is a row of battered filing cabinets, and as she was talking, she turned and pulled out a series of yellowed charts. Each page listed, on the left, the first names and identification numbers of the Sangui women. Across the top was a time line, broken into thirty-day blocks. Every menses of every woman was marked with an X. In the village, Strassmann explained, there were two women who were sterile, and, because they couldn’t get pregnant, they were regulars at the menstrual hut. She flipped through the pages until she found them. “Look, she had twenty-nine menses over two years, and the other had twenty-three.” Next to each of their names was a solid line of x’s. “Here’s a woman approaching menopause,” Strassmann went on, running her finger down the page. “She’s cycling but is a little bit erratic. Here’s another woman of prime childbearing age. Two periods. Then pregnant. I never saw her again at the menstrual hut. This woman here didn’t go to the menstrual hut for twenty months after giving birth, because she was breast-feeding. Two periods. Got pregnant. Then she miscarried, had a few periods, then got pregnant again. This woman had three menses in the study period.” There weren’t a lot of x’s on Strassmann’s sheets. Most of the boxes were blank. She flipped back through her sheets to the two anomalous women who were menstruating every month. “If this were a menstrual chart of undergraduates here at the University of Michigan, all the rows would be like this.”
Strassmann does not claim that her statistics apply to every preindustrial society. But she believes – and other anthropological work backs her up – that the number of lifetime menses isn’t greatly affected by differences in diet or climate or method of subsistence (foraging versus agriculture, say). The more significant factors, Strassmann says, are things like the prevalence of wet-nursing or sterility. But overall she believes that the basic pattern of late menarche, many pregnancies, and long menstrual-free stretches caused by intensive breast-feeding was virtually universal up until the “demographic transition” of a hundred years ago from high to low fertility. In other words, what we think of as normal – frequent menses – is in evolutionary terms abnormal. “It’s a pity that gynecologists think that women have to menstruate every month,” Strassmann went on. “They just don’t understand the real biology of menstruation.”
To Strassmann and others in the field of evolutionary medicine, this shift from a hundred to four hundred lifetime menses is enormously significant. It means that women’s bodies are being subjected to changes and stresses that they were not necessarily designed by evolution to handle. In a brilliant and provocative book, Is Menstruation Obsolete?, Drs. Elsimar Coutinho and Sheldon S. Segal, two of the world’s most prominent contraceptive researchers, argue that this recent move to what they call “incessant ovulation” has become a serious problem for women’s health. It doesn’t mean that women are always better off the less they menstruate. There are times – particularly in the context of certain medical conditions – when women ought to be concerned if they aren’t menstruating: In obese women, a failure to menstruate can signal an increased risk of uterine cancer. In female athletes, a failure to menstruate can signal an increased risk of osteoporosis. But for most women, Coutinho and Segal say, incessant ovulation serves no purpose except to increase the occurence of abdominal pain, mood shifts, migraines, endometriosis, fibroids, and anemia – the last of which, they point out, is “one of the most serious health problems in the world.”
Most serious of all is the greatly increased risk of some cancers. Cancer, after all, occurs because as cells divide and reproduce they sometimes make mistakes that cripple the cells’ defenses against runaway growth. That’s one of the reasons that our risk of cancer generally increases as we age: our cells have more time to make mistakes. But this also means that any change promoting cell division has the potential to increase cancer risk, and ovulation appears to be one of those changes. Whenever a woman ovulates, an egg literally bursts through the walls of her ovaries. To heal that puncture, the cells of the ovary wall have to divide and reproduce. Every time a woman gets pregnant and bears a child, her lifetime risk of ovarian cancer drops 10 percent. Why? Possibly because, between nine months of pregnancy and the suppression of ovulation associated with breast-feeding, she stops ovulating for twelve months – and saves her ovarian walls from twelve bouts of cell division. The argument is similar for endometrial cancer. When a woman is menstruating, the estrogen that flows through her uterus stimulates the growth of the uterine lining, causing a flurry of potentially dangerous cell division. Women who do not menstruate frequently spare the endometrium that risk. Ovarian and endometrial cancer are characteristically modern diseases, consequences, in part, of a century in which women have come to menstruate four hundred times in a lifetime.
In this sense, the Pill really does have a natural effect. By blocking the release of new eggs, the progestin in oral contraceptives reduces the rounds of ovarian cell division. Progestin also counters the surges of estrogen in the endometrium, restraining cell division there. A woman who takes the Pill for ten years cuts her ovarian-cancer risk by around 70 percent and her endometrial-cancer risk by around 60 percent. But here natural means something different from what Rock meant. He assumed that the Pill was natural because it was an unobtrusive variant of the body’s own processes. In fact, as more recent research suggests, the Pill is really only natural in so far as it’s radical – rescuing the ovaries and endometrium from modernity. That Rock insisted on a twenty-eight-day cycle for his pill is evidence of just how deep his misunderstanding was: the real promise of the Pill was not that it could preserve the menstrual rhythms of the twentieth century but that it could disrupt them.
Today, a growing movement of reproductive specialists has begun to campaign loudly against the standard twenty-eight-day pill regimen. The drug company Organon has come out with a new oral contraceptive, called Mircette, that cuts the seven-day placebo interval to two days. Patricia Sulak, a medical researcher at Texas A &M University, has shown that most women can probably stay on the Pill, straight through, for six to twelve weeks before they experience breakthrough bleeding or spotting. More recently, Sulak has documented precisely what the cost of the Pill’s monthly “off” week is. In a paper in the February issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, she and her colleagues documented something that will come as no surprise to most women on the Pill: during the placebo week, the number of users experiencing pelvic pain, bloating, and swelling more than triples, breast tenderness more than doubles, and headaches increase by almost 50 percent. In other words, some women on the Pill continue to experience the kinds of side effects associated with normal menstruation. Sulak’s paper is a short, dry, academic work, of the sort intended for a narrow professional audience. But it is impossible to read it without being struck by the consequences of John Rock’s desire to please his Church. In the past forty years, millions of women around the world have been given the Pill in such a way as to maximize their pain and suffering. And to what end? To pretend that the Pill was no more than a pharmaceutical version of the rhythm method?
3.
In 1980 and 1981, Malcolm Pike, a medical statistician at the University of Southern California, traveled to Japan for six months to study at the Atomic Bomb Casualties Commission. Pike wasn’t interested in the effects of the bomb. He wanted to examine the medical records that the commission had been painstakingly assembling on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was investigating a question that would ultimately do as much to complicate our understanding of the Pill as Strassmann’s research would a decade later: why did Japanese women have breast-cancer rates six times lower than American women?
In the late forties, the World Health Organization began to collect and publish comparative health statistics from around the world, and the breast-cancer disparity between Japan and America had come to obsess cancer specialists. The obvious answer – that Japanese women were somehow genetically protected against breast cancer – didn’t make sense, because once Japanese women moved to the United States they began to get breast cancer almost as often as American women did. As a result, many experts at the time assumed that the culprit had to be some unknown toxic chemical or virus unique to the West. Brian Henderson, a colleague of Pike’s at USC and his regular collaborator, says that when he entered the field in 1970, “the whole viral- and chemical-carcinogenesis idea was huge – it dominated the literature.” As he recalls, “Breast cancer fell into this large, unknown box that said it was something to do with the environment – and that word environment meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. They might be talking about diet or smoking or pesticides.”
Henderson and Pike, however, became fascinated by a number of statistical peculiarities. For one thing, the rate of increase in breast-cancer risk rises sharply throughout women’s thirties and forties and then, at menopause, it starts to slow down. If a cancer is caused by some toxic outside agent, you’d expect that rate to rise steadily with each advancing year, as the number of mutations and genetic mistakes steadily accumulates. Breast cancer, by contrast, looked as if it were being driven by something specific to a woman’s reproductive years. What was more, younger women who had had their ovaries removed had a markedly lower risk of breast cancer; when their bodies weren’t producing estrogen and progestin every month, they got far fewer tumors. Pike and Henderson became convinced that breast cancer was linked to a process of cell division similar to that of ovarian and endometrial cancer. The female breast, after all, is just as sensitive to the level of hormones in a woman’s body as the reproductive system. When the breast is exposed to estrogen, the cells of the terminal-duct lobular unit – where most breast cancer arises – undergo a flurry of division. And during the mid-to-late stage of the menstrual cycle, when the ovaries start producing large amounts of progestin, the pace of cell division in that region doubles.
It made intuitive sense, then, that a woman’s risk of breast cancer would be linked to the amount of estrogen and progestin her breasts have been exposed to during her lifetime. How old a woman is at menarche should make a big difference, because the beginning of puberty results in a hormonal surge through a woman’s body, and the breast cells of an adolescent appear to be highly susceptible to the errors that result in cancer. (For more complicated reasons, bearing children turns out to be protective against breast cancer, perhaps because in the last two trimesters of pregnancy the cells of the breast mature and become much more resistant to mutations.) How old a woman is at menopause should matter, and so should how much estrogen and progestin her ovaries actually produce, and even how much she weighs after menopause, because fat cells turn other hormones into estrogen.
Pike went to Hiroshima to test the cell-division theory. With other researchers at the medical archive, he looked first at the age when Japanese women got their period. A Japanese woman born at the turn of the century had her first period at sixteen and a half. American women born at the same time had their first period at fourteen. That difference alone, by their calculation, was sufficient to explain 40 percent of the gap between American and Japanese breast-cancer rates. “They had collected amazing records from the women of that area,” Pike said. “You could follow precisely the change in age of menarche over the century. You could even see the effects of the Second World War. The age of menarche of Japanese girls went up right at that point because of poor nutrition and other hardships. And then it started to go back down after the war. That’s what convinced me that the data were wonderful.”
Pike, Henderson, and their colleagues then folded in the other risk factors. Age at menopause, age at first pregnancy, and number of children weren’t sufficiently different between the two countries to matter. But weight was. The average post-menopausal Japanese woman weighed a hundred pounds; the average American woman weighed a hundred and forty-five pounds. That fact explained another 25 percent of the difference. Finally, the researchers analyzed blood samples from women in rural Japan and China, and found that their ovaries – possibly because of their extremely low-fat diet – were producing about 75 percent the amount of estrogen that American women were producing. Those three factors, added together, seemed to explain the breast-cancer gap. They also appeared to explain why the rates of breast cancer among Asian women began to increase when they came to America: on an American diet, they started to menstruate earlier, gained more weight, and produced more estrogen. The talk of chemicals and toxins and power lines and smog was set aside. “When people say that what we understand about breast cancer explains only a small amount of the problem, that it is somehow a mystery, it’s absolute nonsense,” Pike says flatly. He is a South African in his sixties, with graying hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. Along with Henderson, he is an eminent figure in cancer research, but no one would ever accuse him of being tentative in his pronouncements. “We understand breast cancer extraordinarily well. We understand it as well as we understand cigarettes and lung cancer.”
What Pike discovered in Japan led him to think about the Pill, because a tablet that suppressed ovulation – and the monthly tides of estrogen and progestin that come with it – obviously had the potential to be a powerful anti-breast-cancer drug. But the breast was a little different from the reproductive organs. Progestin prevented ovarian cancer because it suppressed ovulation. It was good for preventing endometrial cancer because it countered the stimulating effects of estrogen. But in breast cells, Pike believed, progestin wasn’t the solution; it was one of the hormones that caused cell division. This is one explanation for why, after years of studying the Pill, researchers have concluded that it has no effect one way or the other on breast cancer: whatever beneficial effect results from what the Pill does is canceled out by how it does it. John Rock touted the fact that the Pill used progestin, because progestin was the body’s own contraceptive. But Pike saw nothing “natural” about subjecting the breast to that heavy a dose of progestin. In his view, the amount of progestin and estrogen needed to make an effective contraceptive was much greater than the amount needed to keep the reproductive system healthy – and that excess was unnecessarily raising the risk of breast cancer. A truly natural Pill might be one that found a way to suppress ovulation without using progestin. Throughout the 1980s, Pike recalls, this was his obsession. “We were all trying to work out how the hell we could fix the Pill. We thought about it day and night.”
4.
Pike’s proposed solution is a class of drugs known as GnRHAs, which has been around for many years. GnRHAs disrupt the signals that the pituitary gland sends when it is attempting to order the manufacture of sex hormones. It’s a circuit breaker. “We’ve got substantial experience with this drug,” Pike says. Men suffering from prostate cancer are sometimes given a GnRHA to temporarily halt the production of testosterone, which can exacerbate their tumors. Girls suffering from what’s called precocious puberty – puberty at seven or eight, or even younger – are sometimes given the drug to forestall sexual maturity. If you give GnRHA to women of childbearing age, it stops their ovaries from producing estrogen and progestin. If the conventional Pill works by convincing the body that it is, well, a little bit pregnant, Pike’s pill would work by convincing the body that it was menopausal.
In the form Pike wants to use it, GnRHA will come in a clear glass bottle the size of a saltshaker, with a white plastic mister on top. It will be inhaled nasally. It breaks down in the body very quickly. A morning dose simply makes a woman menopausal for a while. Menopause, of course, has its risks. Women need estrogen to keep their hearts and bones strong. They also need progestin to keep the uterus healthy. So Pike intends to add back just enough of each hormone to solve these problems, but much less than women now receive on the Pill. Ideally, Pike says, the estrogen dose would be adjustable: women would try various levels until they found one that suited them. The progestin would come in four twelve-day stretches a year. When someone on Pike’s regimen stopped the progestin, she would have one of four annual menses.
Pike and an oncologist named Darcy Spicer have joined forces with another oncologist, John Daniels, in a startup called Balance Pharmaceuticals. The firm operates out of a small white industrial strip mall next to the freeway in Santa Monica. One of the tenants is a paint store, another looks like some sort of export company. Balance’s offices are housed in an oversized garage with a big overhead door and concrete floors. There is a tiny reception area, a little coffee table and a couch, and a warren of desks, bookshelves, filing cabinets, and computers. Balance is testing its formulation on a small group of women at high risk for breast cancer, and if the results continue to be encouraging, it will one day file for FDA approval.
“When I met Darcy Spicer a couple of years ago,” Pike said recently, as he sat at a conference table deep in the Balance garage, “he said, ‘Why don’t we just try it out? By taking mammograms, we should be able to see changes in the breasts of women on this drug, even if we add back a little estrogen to avoid side effects.’ So we did a study, and we found that there were huge changes.” Pike pulled out a paper he and Spicer had published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, showing breast X-rays of three young women. “These are the mammograms of the women before they start,” he said. Amid the grainy black outlines of the breast were large white fibrous clumps – clumps that Pike and Spicer believe are indicators of the kind of relentless cell division that increases breast-cancer risk. Next to those X-rays were three mammograms of the same women taken after a year on the GnRHA regimen. The clumps were almost entirely gone. “This to us represents that we have actually stopped the activity inside the breasts,” Pike went on. “White is a proxy for cell proliferation. We’re slowing down the breast.”
Pike stood up from the table and turned to a sketch pad on an easel behind him. He quickly wrote a series of numbers on the paper. “Suppose a woman reaches menarche at fifteen and menopause at fifty. That’s thirty-five years of stimulating the breast. If you cut that time in half, you will change her risk not by half but by half raised to the power of 4.5.” He was working with a statistical model he had developed to calculate breast-cancer risk. “That’s one-twenty-third. Your risk of breast cancer will be one-twenty-third of what it would be otherwise. It won’t be zero. You can’t get to zero. If you use this for ten years, your risk will be cut by at least half. If you use it for five years, your risk will be cut by at least a third. It’s as if your breast were to be five years younger, or ten years younger – forever.” The regimen, he says, should also provide protection against ovarian cancer.
Pike gave the sense that he had made this little speech many times before, to colleagues, to his family and friends – and to investors. He knew by now how strange and unbelievable what he was saying sounded. Here he was, in a cold, cramped garage in the industrial section of Santa Monica, arguing that he knew how to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of women around the world. And he wanted to do that by making young women menopausal through a chemical regimen sniffed every morning out of a bottle. This was, to say the least, a bold idea. Could he strike the right balance between the hormone levels women need to stay healthy and those that ultimately make them sick? Was progestin really so important in breast cancer? There are cancer specialists who remain skeptical. And, most of all, what would women think? John Rock, at least, had lent the cause of birth control his Old World manners and distinguished white hair and appeals from theology; he took pains to make the Pill seem like the least radical of interventions – nature’s contraceptive, something that could be slipped inside a woman’s purse and pass without notice. Pike was going to take the whole forty-year mythology of natural and sweep it aside. “Women are going to think, I’m being manipulated here. And it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to think.” Pike’s South African accent gets a little stronger as he becomes more animated. “But the modern way of living represents an extraordinary change in female biology. Women are going out and becoming lawyers, doctors, presidents of countries. They need to understand that what we are trying to do isn’t abnormal. It’s just as normal as when someone hundreds of years ago had menarche at seventeen and had five babies and had three hundred fewer menstrual cycles than most women have today. The world is not the world it was. And some of the risks that go with the benefits of a woman getting educated and not getting pregnant all the time are breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and we need to deal with it. I have three daughters. The earliest grandchild I had was when one of them was thirty-one. That’s the way many women are now. They ovulate from twelve or thirteen until their early thirties. Twenty years of uninterrupted ovulation before their first child! That’s a brand-new phenomenon!”
5.
John Rock’s long battle on behalf of his birth-control pill forced the Church to take notice. In the spring of 1963, just after Rock’s book was published, a meeting was held at the Vatican between high officials of the Catholic Church and Donald B. Straus, the chairman of Planned Parenthood. That summit was followed by another, on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. In the summer of 1964, on the eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist, Pope Paul VI announced that he would ask a committee of Church officials to reexamine the Vatican’s position on contraception. The group met first at the Collegio San Jose, in Rome, and it was clear that a majority of the committee were in favor of approving the Pill. Committee reports leaked to the National Catholic Register confirmed that Rock’s case appeared to be winning. Rock was elated. Newsweek put him on its cover, and ran a picture of the Pope inside. “Not since the Copernicans suggested in the sixteenth century that the sun was the center of the planetary system has the Roman Catholic Church found itself on such a perilous collision course with a new body of knowledge,” the article concluded. Paul VI, however, was unmoved. He stalled, delaying a verdict for months, and then years. Some said he fell under the sway of conservative elements within the Vatican. In the interim, theologians began exposing the holes in Rock’s arguments. The rhythm method “ ‘prevents’ conception by abstinence, that is, by the non-performance of the conjugal act during the fertile period,” the Catholic journal America concluded in a 1964 editorial. “The Pill prevents conception by suppressing ovulation and by thus abolishing the fertile period. No amount of word juggling can make abstinence from sexual relations and the suppression of ovulation one and the same thing.” On July 29, 1968, in the “Humanae Vitae” encyclical, the Pope broke his silence, declaring all “artificial” methods of contraception to be against the teachings of the Church.
In hindsight, it is possible to see the opportunity that Rock missed. If he had known what we know now and had talked about the Pill not as a contraceptive but as a cancer drug – not as a drug to prevent life but as one that would save life – the Church might well have said yes. Hadn’t Pius XII already approved the Pill for therapeutic purposes? Rock would only have had to think of the Pill as Pike thinks of it: as a drug whose contraceptive aspects are merely a means of attracting users, of getting, as Pike put it, “people who are young to take a lot of stuff they wouldn’t otherwise take.”
But Rock did not live long enough to understand how things might have been. What he witnessed, instead, was the terrible time at the end of the sixties when the Pill suddenly stood accused – wrongly – of causing blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks. Between the midseventies and the early eighties, the number of women in the United States using the Pill fell by half. Harvard Medical School, meanwhile, took over Rock’s Reproductive Clinic and pushed him out. His Harvard pension paid him only seventy-five dollars a year. He had almost no money in the bank and had to sell his house in Brookline. In 1971, Rock left Boston and retreated to a farmhouse in the hills of New Hampshire. He swam in the stream behind the house. He listened to John Philip Sousa marches. In the evening, he would sit in the living room with a pitcher of martinis. In 1983, he gave his last public interview, and it was as if the memory of his achievements were now so painful that he had blotted it out.
He was asked what the most gratifying time of his life was. “Right now,” the inventor of the Pill answered, incredibly. He was sitting by the fire in a crisp white shirt and tie, reading The Origin, Irving Stone’s fictional account of the life of Darwin. “It frequently occurs to me, gosh, what a lucky guy I am. I have no responsibilities, and I have everything I want. I take a dose of equanimity every twenty minutes. I will not be disturbed about things.”
Once, John Rock had gone to seven-o’clock Mass every morning and kept a crucifix above his desk. His interviewer, the writer Sara Davidson, moved her chair closer to his and asked him whether he still believed in an afterlife.
“Of course I don’t,” Rock answered abruptly. Though he didn’t explain why, his reasons aren’t hard to imagine. The Church could not square the requirements of its faith with the results of his science, and if the Church couldn’t reconcile them, how could Rock be expected to? John Rock always stuck to his conscience, and in the end his conscience forced him away from the thing he loved most. This was not John Rock’s error. Nor was it his Church’s. It was the fault of the haphazard nature of science, which all too often produces progress in advance of understanding. If the order of events in the discovery of what was natural had been reversed, his world, and our world, too, would have been a different place.
“Heaven and Hell, Rome, all the Church stuff – that’s for the solace of the multitude,” Rock said. He had only a year to live. “I was an ardent practicing Catholic for a long time, and I really believed it all then, you see.”[2]
March 13, 2000
1.
John Rock was christened in 1890 at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and married by Cardinal William O’Connell, of Boston. He had five children and nineteen grandchildren. A crucifix hung above his desk, and nearly every day of his adult life he attended the 7 a.m. Mass at St. Mary’s in Brookline. Rock, his friends would say, was in love with his church. He was also one of the inventors of the birth-control pill, and it was his conviction that his faith and his vocation were perfectly compatible. To anyone who disagreed he would simply repeat the words spoken to him as a child by his hometown priest: “John, always stick to your conscience. Never let anyone else keep it for you. And I mean anyone else.” Even when Monsignor Francis W. Carney, of Cleveland, called him a “moral rapist,” and when Frederick Good, the longtime head of obstetrics at Boston City Hospital, went to Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing to have Rock excommunicated, Rock was unmoved. “You should be afraid to meet your Maker,” one angry woman wrote to him, soon after the Pill was approved. “My dear madam,” Rock wrote back, “in my faith, we are taught that the Lord is with us always. When my time comes, there will be no need for introductions.”
In the years immediately after the Pill was approved by the FDA, in 1960, Rock was everywhere. He appeared in interviews and documentaries on CBS and NBC, in Time, Newsweek, Life, The Saturday Evening Post. He toured the country tirelessly. He wrote a widely discussed book, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle over Birth Control, which was translated into French, German, and Dutch. Rock was six feet three and rail-thin, with impeccable manners; he held doors open for his patients and addressed them as “Mrs.” or “Miss.” His mere association with the Pill helped make it seem respectable. “He was a man of great dignity,” Dr. Sheldon J. Segal, of the Population Council, recalls. “Even if the occasion called for an open collar, you’d never find him without an ascot. He had the shock of white hair to go along with that. And posture, straight as an arrow, even to his last year.” At Harvard Medical School, he was a giant, teaching obstetrics for more than three decades. He was a pioneer in in-vitro fertilization and the freezing of sperm cells, and was the first to extract an intact fertilized egg. The Pill was his crowning achievement. His two collaborators, Gregory Pincus and Min-Cheuh Chang, worked out the mechanism. He shepherded the drug through its clinical trials. “It was his name and his reputation that gave ultimate validity to the claims that the pill would protect women against unwanted pregnancy,” Loretta McLaughlin writes in her marvelous 1982 biography of Rock. Not long before the Pill’s approval, Rock traveled to Washington to testify before the FDA about the drug’s safety. The agency examiner, Pasquale DeFelice, was a Catholic obstetrician from Georgetown University, and at one point, the story goes, DeFelice suggested the unthinkable – that the Catholic Church would never approve of the birth-control pill. “I can still see Rock standing there, his face composed, his eyes riveted on DeFelice,” a colleague recalled years later, “and then, in a voice that would congeal your soul, he said, ‘Young man, don’t you sell my church short.’”
In the end, of course, John Rock’s church disappointed him. In 1968, in the encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” Pope Paul VI outlawed oral contraceptives and all other “artificial” methods of birth control. The passion and urgency that animated the birth-control debates of the sixties are now a memory. John Rock still matters, though, for the simple reason that in the course of reconciling his church and his work he made an error. It was not a deliberate error. It became manifest only after his death, and through scientific advances he could not have anticipated. But because that mistake shaped the way he thought about the Pill – about what it was, and how it worked, and most of all what it meant – and because John Rock was one of those responsible for the way the Pill came into the world, his error has colored the way people have thought about contraception ever since.
John Rock believed that the Pill was a “natural” method of birth control. By that, he didn’t mean that it felt natural, because it obviously didn’t for many women, particularly not in its earliest days, when the doses of hormone were many times as high as they are today. He meant that it worked by natural means. Women can get pregnant only during a certain interval each month, because after ovulation their bodies produce a surge of the hormone progesterone. Progesterone – one of a class of hormones known as progestin – prepares the uterus for implantation and stops the ovaries from releasing new eggs; it favors gestation. “It is progesterone, in the healthy woman, that prevents ovulation and establishes the pre- and postmenstrual ‘safe’ period,” Rock wrote. When a woman is pregnant, her body produces a stream of progestin in part for the same reason, so that another egg can’t be released and threaten the pregnancy already under way. Progestin, in other words, is nature’s contraceptive. And what was the Pill? Progestin in tablet form. When a woman was on the Pill, of course, these hormones weren’t coming in a sudden surge after ovulation and weren’t limited to certain times in her cycle. They were being given in a steady dose, so that ovulation was permanently shut down. They were also being given with an additional dose of estrogen, which holds the endometrium together and – as we’ve come to learn – helps maintain other tissues as well. But to Rock, the timing and combination of hormones wasn’t the issue. The key fact was that the Pill’s ingredients duplicated what could be found in the body naturally. And in that naturalness he saw enormous theological significance.
In 1951, for example, Pope Pius XII had sanctioned the rhythm method for Catholics because he deemed it a “natural” method of regulating procreation: it didn’t kill the sperm, like a spermicide, or frustrate the normal process of procreation, like a diaphragm, or mutilate the organs, like sterilization. Rock knew all about the rhythm method. In the 1930s, at the Free Hospital for Women, in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had started the country’s first rhythm clinic for educating Catholic couples in natural contraception. But how did the rhythm method work? It worked by limiting sex to the safe period that progestin created. And how did the Pill work? It worked by using progestin to extend the safe period to the entire month. It didn’t mutilate the reproductive organs, or damage any natural process. “Indeed,” Rock wrote, oral contraceptives “may be characterized as a ‘pill-established safe period,’ and would seem to carry the same moral implications” as the rhythm method. The Pill was, to Rock, no more than “an adjunct to nature.”
In 1958, Pope Pius XII approved the Pill for Catholics, so long as its contraceptive effects were “indirect” – that is, so long as it was intended only as a remedy for conditions like painful menses or “a disease of the uterus.” That ruling emboldened Rock still further. Short-term use of the Pill, he knew, could regulate the cycle of women whose periods had previously been unpredictable. Since a regular menstrual cycle was necessary for the successful use of the rhythm method – and since the rhythm method was sanctioned by the Church – shouldn’t it be permissible for women with an irregular menstrual cycle to use the Pill in order to facilitate the use of rhythm? And if that was true, why not take the logic one step further? As the federal judge John T. Noonan writes in Contraception, his history of the Catholic position on birth control:
If it was lawful to suppress ovulation to achieve a regularity necessary for successfully sterile intercourse, why was it not lawful to suppress ovulation without appeal to rhythm? If pregnancy could be prevented by pill plus rhythm, why not by pill alone? In each case suppression of ovulation was used as a means. How was a moral difference made by the addition of rhythm?
These arguments, as arcane as they may seem, were central to the development of oral contraception. It was John Rock and Gregory Pincus who decided that the Pill ought to be taken over a four-week cycle – a woman would spend three weeks on the Pill and the fourth week off the drug (or on a placebo), to allow for menstruation. There was and is no medical reason for this. A typical woman of childbearing age has a menstrual cycle of around twenty-eight days, determined by the cascades of hormones released by her ovaries. As first estrogen and then a combination of estrogen and progestin flood the uterus, its lining becomes thick and swollen, preparing for the implantation of a fertilized egg. If the egg is not fertilized, hormone levels plunge and cause the lining – the endometrium – to be sloughed off in a menstrual bleed. When a woman is on the Pill, however, no egg is released, because the Pill suppresses ovulation. The fluxes of estrogen and progestin that cause the lining of the uterus to grow are dramatically reduced, because the Pill slows down the ovaries. Pincus and Rock knew that the effect of the Pill’s hormones on the endometrium was so modest that women could conceivably go for months without having to menstruate. “In view of the ability of this compound to prevent menstrual bleeding as long as it is taken,” Pincus acknowledged in 1958, “a cycle of any desired length could presumably be produced.” But he and Rock decided to cut the hormones off after three weeks and trigger a menstrual period because they believed that women would find the continuation of their monthly bleeding reassuring. More to the point, if Rock wanted to demonstrate that the Pill was no more than a natural variant of the rhythm method, he couldn’t very well do away with the monthly menses. Rhythm required “regularity,” and so the Pill had to produce regularity as well.
It has often been said of the Pill that no other drug has ever been so instantly recognizable by its packaging: that small, round plastic dial pack. But what was the dial pack if not the physical embodiment of the twenty-eight-day cycle? It was, in the words of its inventor, meant to fit into a case “indistinguishable” from a woman’s cosmetics compact, so that it might be carried “without giving a visual clue as to matters which are of no concern to others.” Today, the Pill is still often sold in dial packs and taken in twenty-eight-day cycles. It remains, in other words, a drug shaped by the dictates of the Catholic Church – by John Rock’s desire to make this new method of birth control seem as natural as possible. This was John Rock’s error. He was consumed by the idea of the natural. But what he thought was natural wasn’t so natural after all, and the Pill he ushered into the world turned out to be something other than what he thought it was. In John Rock’s mind the dictates of religion and the principles of science got mixed up, and only now are we beginning to untangle them.
2.
In 1986, a young scientist named Beverly Strassmann traveled to Africa to live with the Dogon tribe of Mali. Her research site was the village of Sangui in the Sahel, about 120 miles south of Timbuktu. The Sahel is thorn savannah, green in the rainy season and semi-arid the rest of the year. The Dogon grow millet, sorghum, and onions, raise livestock, and live in adobe houses on the Bandiagara escarpment. They use no contraception. Many of them have held on to their ancestral customs and religious beliefs. Dogon farmers, in many respects, live much as people of that region have lived since antiquity. Strassmann wanted to construct a precise reproductive profile of the women in the tribe, in order to understand what female biology might have been like in the millennia that preceded the modern age. In a way, Strassmann was trying to answer the same question about female biology that John Rock and the Catholic Church had struggled with in the early sixties: what is natural? Only, her sense of natural was not theological but evolutionary. In the era during which natural selection established the basic patterns of human biology – the natural history of our species – how often did women have children? How often did they menstruate? When did they reach puberty and menopause? What impact did breast-feeding have on ovulation? These questions had been studied before, but never so thoroughly that anthropologists felt they knew the answers with any certainty.
Strassmann, who teaches at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is a slender, soft-spoken woman with red hair, and she recalls her time in Mali with a certain wry humor. The house she stayed in while in Sangui had been used as a shelter for sheep before she came and was turned into a pigsty after she left. A small brown snake lived in her latrine, and would curl up in a camouflaged coil on the seat she sat on while bathing. The villagers, she says, were of two minds: was it a deadly snake – Kere me jongolo, literally, “My bite cannot be healed” – or a harmless mouse snake? (It turned out to be the latter.) Once, one of her neighbors and best friends in the tribe roasted her a rat as a special treat. “I told him that white people aren’t allowed to eat rat because rat is our totem,” Strassmann says. “I can still see it. Bloated and charred. Stretched by its paws. Whiskers singed. To say nothing of the tail.” Strassmann meant to live in Sangui for eighteen months, but her experiences there were so profound and exhilarating that she stayed for two and a half years. “I felt incredibly privileged,” she says. “I just couldn’t tear myself away.”
Part of Strassmann’s work focused on the Dogon’s practice of segregating menstruating women in special huts on the fringes of the village. In Sangui, there were two menstrual huts – dark, cramped, one-room adobe structures, with boards for beds. Each accommodated three women, and when the rooms were full, latecomers were forced to stay outside on the rocks. “It’s not a place where people kick back and enjoy themselves,” Strassmann says. “It’s simply a nighttime hangout. They get there at dusk, and get up early in the morning and draw their water.” Strassmann took urine samples from the women using the hut, to confirm that they were menstruating. Then she made a list of all the women in the village, and for her entire time in Mali – 736 consecutive nights – she kept track of everyone who visited the hut. Among the Dogon, she found a woman on average has her first period at the age of sixteen and gives birth eight or nine times. From menarche, the onset of menstruation, to the age of twenty, she averages seven periods a year. Over the next decade and a half, from the age of twenty to the age of thirty-four, she spends so much time either pregnant or breast-feeding (which, among the Dogon, suppresses ovulation for an average of twenty months) that she averages only slightly more than one period per year. Then, from the age of thirty-five until menopause, at around fifty, as her fertility rapidly declines, she averages four menses a year. All told, Dogon women menstruate about a hundred times in their lives. (Those who survive early childhood typically live into their seventh or eighth decade.) By contrast, the average for contemporary Western women is somewhere between three hundred and fifty and four hundred times.
Strassmann’s office is in the basement of a converted stable next to the Natural History Museum on the University of Michigan campus. Behind her desk is a row of battered filing cabinets, and as she was talking, she turned and pulled out a series of yellowed charts. Each page listed, on the left, the first names and identification numbers of the Sangui women. Across the top was a time line, broken into thirty-day blocks. Every menses of every woman was marked with an X. In the village, Strassmann explained, there were two women who were sterile, and, because they couldn’t get pregnant, they were regulars at the menstrual hut. She flipped through the pages until she found them. “Look, she had twenty-nine menses over two years, and the other had twenty-three.” Next to each of their names was a solid line of x’s. “Here’s a woman approaching menopause,” Strassmann went on, running her finger down the page. “She’s cycling but is a little bit erratic. Here’s another woman of prime childbearing age. Two periods. Then pregnant. I never saw her again at the menstrual hut. This woman here didn’t go to the menstrual hut for twenty months after giving birth, because she was breast-feeding. Two periods. Got pregnant. Then she miscarried, had a few periods, then got pregnant again. This woman had three menses in the study period.” There weren’t a lot of x’s on Strassmann’s sheets. Most of the boxes were blank. She flipped back through her sheets to the two anomalous women who were menstruating every month. “If this were a menstrual chart of undergraduates here at the University of Michigan, all the rows would be like this.”
Strassmann does not claim that her statistics apply to every preindustrial society. But she believes – and other anthropological work backs her up – that the number of lifetime menses isn’t greatly affected by differences in diet or climate or method of subsistence (foraging versus agriculture, say). The more significant factors, Strassmann says, are things like the prevalence of wet-nursing or sterility. But overall she believes that the basic pattern of late menarche, many pregnancies, and long menstrual-free stretches caused by intensive breast-feeding was virtually universal up until the “demographic transition” of a hundred years ago from high to low fertility. In other words, what we think of as normal – frequent menses – is in evolutionary terms abnormal. “It’s a pity that gynecologists think that women have to menstruate every month,” Strassmann went on. “They just don’t understand the real biology of menstruation.”
To Strassmann and others in the field of evolutionary medicine, this shift from a hundred to four hundred lifetime menses is enormously significant. It means that women’s bodies are being subjected to changes and stresses that they were not necessarily designed by evolution to handle. In a brilliant and provocative book, Is Menstruation Obsolete?, Drs. Elsimar Coutinho and Sheldon S. Segal, two of the world’s most prominent contraceptive researchers, argue that this recent move to what they call “incessant ovulation” has become a serious problem for women’s health. It doesn’t mean that women are always better off the less they menstruate. There are times – particularly in the context of certain medical conditions – when women ought to be concerned if they aren’t menstruating: In obese women, a failure to menstruate can signal an increased risk of uterine cancer. In female athletes, a failure to menstruate can signal an increased risk of osteoporosis. But for most women, Coutinho and Segal say, incessant ovulation serves no purpose except to increase the occurence of abdominal pain, mood shifts, migraines, endometriosis, fibroids, and anemia – the last of which, they point out, is “one of the most serious health problems in the world.”
Most serious of all is the greatly increased risk of some cancers. Cancer, after all, occurs because as cells divide and reproduce they sometimes make mistakes that cripple the cells’ defenses against runaway growth. That’s one of the reasons that our risk of cancer generally increases as we age: our cells have more time to make mistakes. But this also means that any change promoting cell division has the potential to increase cancer risk, and ovulation appears to be one of those changes. Whenever a woman ovulates, an egg literally bursts through the walls of her ovaries. To heal that puncture, the cells of the ovary wall have to divide and reproduce. Every time a woman gets pregnant and bears a child, her lifetime risk of ovarian cancer drops 10 percent. Why? Possibly because, between nine months of pregnancy and the suppression of ovulation associated with breast-feeding, she stops ovulating for twelve months – and saves her ovarian walls from twelve bouts of cell division. The argument is similar for endometrial cancer. When a woman is menstruating, the estrogen that flows through her uterus stimulates the growth of the uterine lining, causing a flurry of potentially dangerous cell division. Women who do not menstruate frequently spare the endometrium that risk. Ovarian and endometrial cancer are characteristically modern diseases, consequences, in part, of a century in which women have come to menstruate four hundred times in a lifetime.
In this sense, the Pill really does have a natural effect. By blocking the release of new eggs, the progestin in oral contraceptives reduces the rounds of ovarian cell division. Progestin also counters the surges of estrogen in the endometrium, restraining cell division there. A woman who takes the Pill for ten years cuts her ovarian-cancer risk by around 70 percent and her endometrial-cancer risk by around 60 percent. But here natural means something different from what Rock meant. He assumed that the Pill was natural because it was an unobtrusive variant of the body’s own processes. In fact, as more recent research suggests, the Pill is really only natural in so far as it’s radical – rescuing the ovaries and endometrium from modernity. That Rock insisted on a twenty-eight-day cycle for his pill is evidence of just how deep his misunderstanding was: the real promise of the Pill was not that it could preserve the menstrual rhythms of the twentieth century but that it could disrupt them.
Today, a growing movement of reproductive specialists has begun to campaign loudly against the standard twenty-eight-day pill regimen. The drug company Organon has come out with a new oral contraceptive, called Mircette, that cuts the seven-day placebo interval to two days. Patricia Sulak, a medical researcher at Texas A &M University, has shown that most women can probably stay on the Pill, straight through, for six to twelve weeks before they experience breakthrough bleeding or spotting. More recently, Sulak has documented precisely what the cost of the Pill’s monthly “off” week is. In a paper in the February issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, she and her colleagues documented something that will come as no surprise to most women on the Pill: during the placebo week, the number of users experiencing pelvic pain, bloating, and swelling more than triples, breast tenderness more than doubles, and headaches increase by almost 50 percent. In other words, some women on the Pill continue to experience the kinds of side effects associated with normal menstruation. Sulak’s paper is a short, dry, academic work, of the sort intended for a narrow professional audience. But it is impossible to read it without being struck by the consequences of John Rock’s desire to please his Church. In the past forty years, millions of women around the world have been given the Pill in such a way as to maximize their pain and suffering. And to what end? To pretend that the Pill was no more than a pharmaceutical version of the rhythm method?
3.
In 1980 and 1981, Malcolm Pike, a medical statistician at the University of Southern California, traveled to Japan for six months to study at the Atomic Bomb Casualties Commission. Pike wasn’t interested in the effects of the bomb. He wanted to examine the medical records that the commission had been painstakingly assembling on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was investigating a question that would ultimately do as much to complicate our understanding of the Pill as Strassmann’s research would a decade later: why did Japanese women have breast-cancer rates six times lower than American women?
In the late forties, the World Health Organization began to collect and publish comparative health statistics from around the world, and the breast-cancer disparity between Japan and America had come to obsess cancer specialists. The obvious answer – that Japanese women were somehow genetically protected against breast cancer – didn’t make sense, because once Japanese women moved to the United States they began to get breast cancer almost as often as American women did. As a result, many experts at the time assumed that the culprit had to be some unknown toxic chemical or virus unique to the West. Brian Henderson, a colleague of Pike’s at USC and his regular collaborator, says that when he entered the field in 1970, “the whole viral- and chemical-carcinogenesis idea was huge – it dominated the literature.” As he recalls, “Breast cancer fell into this large, unknown box that said it was something to do with the environment – and that word environment meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. They might be talking about diet or smoking or pesticides.”
Henderson and Pike, however, became fascinated by a number of statistical peculiarities. For one thing, the rate of increase in breast-cancer risk rises sharply throughout women’s thirties and forties and then, at menopause, it starts to slow down. If a cancer is caused by some toxic outside agent, you’d expect that rate to rise steadily with each advancing year, as the number of mutations and genetic mistakes steadily accumulates. Breast cancer, by contrast, looked as if it were being driven by something specific to a woman’s reproductive years. What was more, younger women who had had their ovaries removed had a markedly lower risk of breast cancer; when their bodies weren’t producing estrogen and progestin every month, they got far fewer tumors. Pike and Henderson became convinced that breast cancer was linked to a process of cell division similar to that of ovarian and endometrial cancer. The female breast, after all, is just as sensitive to the level of hormones in a woman’s body as the reproductive system. When the breast is exposed to estrogen, the cells of the terminal-duct lobular unit – where most breast cancer arises – undergo a flurry of division. And during the mid-to-late stage of the menstrual cycle, when the ovaries start producing large amounts of progestin, the pace of cell division in that region doubles.
It made intuitive sense, then, that a woman’s risk of breast cancer would be linked to the amount of estrogen and progestin her breasts have been exposed to during her lifetime. How old a woman is at menarche should make a big difference, because the beginning of puberty results in a hormonal surge through a woman’s body, and the breast cells of an adolescent appear to be highly susceptible to the errors that result in cancer. (For more complicated reasons, bearing children turns out to be protective against breast cancer, perhaps because in the last two trimesters of pregnancy the cells of the breast mature and become much more resistant to mutations.) How old a woman is at menopause should matter, and so should how much estrogen and progestin her ovaries actually produce, and even how much she weighs after menopause, because fat cells turn other hormones into estrogen.
Pike went to Hiroshima to test the cell-division theory. With other researchers at the medical archive, he looked first at the age when Japanese women got their period. A Japanese woman born at the turn of the century had her first period at sixteen and a half. American women born at the same time had their first period at fourteen. That difference alone, by their calculation, was sufficient to explain 40 percent of the gap between American and Japanese breast-cancer rates. “They had collected amazing records from the women of that area,” Pike said. “You could follow precisely the change in age of menarche over the century. You could even see the effects of the Second World War. The age of menarche of Japanese girls went up right at that point because of poor nutrition and other hardships. And then it started to go back down after the war. That’s what convinced me that the data were wonderful.”
Pike, Henderson, and their colleagues then folded in the other risk factors. Age at menopause, age at first pregnancy, and number of children weren’t sufficiently different between the two countries to matter. But weight was. The average post-menopausal Japanese woman weighed a hundred pounds; the average American woman weighed a hundred and forty-five pounds. That fact explained another 25 percent of the difference. Finally, the researchers analyzed blood samples from women in rural Japan and China, and found that their ovaries – possibly because of their extremely low-fat diet – were producing about 75 percent the amount of estrogen that American women were producing. Those three factors, added together, seemed to explain the breast-cancer gap. They also appeared to explain why the rates of breast cancer among Asian women began to increase when they came to America: on an American diet, they started to menstruate earlier, gained more weight, and produced more estrogen. The talk of chemicals and toxins and power lines and smog was set aside. “When people say that what we understand about breast cancer explains only a small amount of the problem, that it is somehow a mystery, it’s absolute nonsense,” Pike says flatly. He is a South African in his sixties, with graying hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. Along with Henderson, he is an eminent figure in cancer research, but no one would ever accuse him of being tentative in his pronouncements. “We understand breast cancer extraordinarily well. We understand it as well as we understand cigarettes and lung cancer.”
What Pike discovered in Japan led him to think about the Pill, because a tablet that suppressed ovulation – and the monthly tides of estrogen and progestin that come with it – obviously had the potential to be a powerful anti-breast-cancer drug. But the breast was a little different from the reproductive organs. Progestin prevented ovarian cancer because it suppressed ovulation. It was good for preventing endometrial cancer because it countered the stimulating effects of estrogen. But in breast cells, Pike believed, progestin wasn’t the solution; it was one of the hormones that caused cell division. This is one explanation for why, after years of studying the Pill, researchers have concluded that it has no effect one way or the other on breast cancer: whatever beneficial effect results from what the Pill does is canceled out by how it does it. John Rock touted the fact that the Pill used progestin, because progestin was the body’s own contraceptive. But Pike saw nothing “natural” about subjecting the breast to that heavy a dose of progestin. In his view, the amount of progestin and estrogen needed to make an effective contraceptive was much greater than the amount needed to keep the reproductive system healthy – and that excess was unnecessarily raising the risk of breast cancer. A truly natural Pill might be one that found a way to suppress ovulation without using progestin. Throughout the 1980s, Pike recalls, this was his obsession. “We were all trying to work out how the hell we could fix the Pill. We thought about it day and night.”
4.
Pike’s proposed solution is a class of drugs known as GnRHAs, which has been around for many years. GnRHAs disrupt the signals that the pituitary gland sends when it is attempting to order the manufacture of sex hormones. It’s a circuit breaker. “We’ve got substantial experience with this drug,” Pike says. Men suffering from prostate cancer are sometimes given a GnRHA to temporarily halt the production of testosterone, which can exacerbate their tumors. Girls suffering from what’s called precocious puberty – puberty at seven or eight, or even younger – are sometimes given the drug to forestall sexual maturity. If you give GnRHA to women of childbearing age, it stops their ovaries from producing estrogen and progestin. If the conventional Pill works by convincing the body that it is, well, a little bit pregnant, Pike’s pill would work by convincing the body that it was menopausal.
In the form Pike wants to use it, GnRHA will come in a clear glass bottle the size of a saltshaker, with a white plastic mister on top. It will be inhaled nasally. It breaks down in the body very quickly. A morning dose simply makes a woman menopausal for a while. Menopause, of course, has its risks. Women need estrogen to keep their hearts and bones strong. They also need progestin to keep the uterus healthy. So Pike intends to add back just enough of each hormone to solve these problems, but much less than women now receive on the Pill. Ideally, Pike says, the estrogen dose would be adjustable: women would try various levels until they found one that suited them. The progestin would come in four twelve-day stretches a year. When someone on Pike’s regimen stopped the progestin, she would have one of four annual menses.
Pike and an oncologist named Darcy Spicer have joined forces with another oncologist, John Daniels, in a startup called Balance Pharmaceuticals. The firm operates out of a small white industrial strip mall next to the freeway in Santa Monica. One of the tenants is a paint store, another looks like some sort of export company. Balance’s offices are housed in an oversized garage with a big overhead door and concrete floors. There is a tiny reception area, a little coffee table and a couch, and a warren of desks, bookshelves, filing cabinets, and computers. Balance is testing its formulation on a small group of women at high risk for breast cancer, and if the results continue to be encouraging, it will one day file for FDA approval.
“When I met Darcy Spicer a couple of years ago,” Pike said recently, as he sat at a conference table deep in the Balance garage, “he said, ‘Why don’t we just try it out? By taking mammograms, we should be able to see changes in the breasts of women on this drug, even if we add back a little estrogen to avoid side effects.’ So we did a study, and we found that there were huge changes.” Pike pulled out a paper he and Spicer had published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, showing breast X-rays of three young women. “These are the mammograms of the women before they start,” he said. Amid the grainy black outlines of the breast were large white fibrous clumps – clumps that Pike and Spicer believe are indicators of the kind of relentless cell division that increases breast-cancer risk. Next to those X-rays were three mammograms of the same women taken after a year on the GnRHA regimen. The clumps were almost entirely gone. “This to us represents that we have actually stopped the activity inside the breasts,” Pike went on. “White is a proxy for cell proliferation. We’re slowing down the breast.”
Pike stood up from the table and turned to a sketch pad on an easel behind him. He quickly wrote a series of numbers on the paper. “Suppose a woman reaches menarche at fifteen and menopause at fifty. That’s thirty-five years of stimulating the breast. If you cut that time in half, you will change her risk not by half but by half raised to the power of 4.5.” He was working with a statistical model he had developed to calculate breast-cancer risk. “That’s one-twenty-third. Your risk of breast cancer will be one-twenty-third of what it would be otherwise. It won’t be zero. You can’t get to zero. If you use this for ten years, your risk will be cut by at least half. If you use it for five years, your risk will be cut by at least a third. It’s as if your breast were to be five years younger, or ten years younger – forever.” The regimen, he says, should also provide protection against ovarian cancer.
Pike gave the sense that he had made this little speech many times before, to colleagues, to his family and friends – and to investors. He knew by now how strange and unbelievable what he was saying sounded. Here he was, in a cold, cramped garage in the industrial section of Santa Monica, arguing that he knew how to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of women around the world. And he wanted to do that by making young women menopausal through a chemical regimen sniffed every morning out of a bottle. This was, to say the least, a bold idea. Could he strike the right balance between the hormone levels women need to stay healthy and those that ultimately make them sick? Was progestin really so important in breast cancer? There are cancer specialists who remain skeptical. And, most of all, what would women think? John Rock, at least, had lent the cause of birth control his Old World manners and distinguished white hair and appeals from theology; he took pains to make the Pill seem like the least radical of interventions – nature’s contraceptive, something that could be slipped inside a woman’s purse and pass without notice. Pike was going to take the whole forty-year mythology of natural and sweep it aside. “Women are going to think, I’m being manipulated here. And it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to think.” Pike’s South African accent gets a little stronger as he becomes more animated. “But the modern way of living represents an extraordinary change in female biology. Women are going out and becoming lawyers, doctors, presidents of countries. They need to understand that what we are trying to do isn’t abnormal. It’s just as normal as when someone hundreds of years ago had menarche at seventeen and had five babies and had three hundred fewer menstrual cycles than most women have today. The world is not the world it was. And some of the risks that go with the benefits of a woman getting educated and not getting pregnant all the time are breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and we need to deal with it. I have three daughters. The earliest grandchild I had was when one of them was thirty-one. That’s the way many women are now. They ovulate from twelve or thirteen until their early thirties. Twenty years of uninterrupted ovulation before their first child! That’s a brand-new phenomenon!”
5.
John Rock’s long battle on behalf of his birth-control pill forced the Church to take notice. In the spring of 1963, just after Rock’s book was published, a meeting was held at the Vatican between high officials of the Catholic Church and Donald B. Straus, the chairman of Planned Parenthood. That summit was followed by another, on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. In the summer of 1964, on the eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist, Pope Paul VI announced that he would ask a committee of Church officials to reexamine the Vatican’s position on contraception. The group met first at the Collegio San Jose, in Rome, and it was clear that a majority of the committee were in favor of approving the Pill. Committee reports leaked to the National Catholic Register confirmed that Rock’s case appeared to be winning. Rock was elated. Newsweek put him on its cover, and ran a picture of the Pope inside. “Not since the Copernicans suggested in the sixteenth century that the sun was the center of the planetary system has the Roman Catholic Church found itself on such a perilous collision course with a new body of knowledge,” the article concluded. Paul VI, however, was unmoved. He stalled, delaying a verdict for months, and then years. Some said he fell under the sway of conservative elements within the Vatican. In the interim, theologians began exposing the holes in Rock’s arguments. The rhythm method “ ‘prevents’ conception by abstinence, that is, by the non-performance of the conjugal act during the fertile period,” the Catholic journal America concluded in a 1964 editorial. “The Pill prevents conception by suppressing ovulation and by thus abolishing the fertile period. No amount of word juggling can make abstinence from sexual relations and the suppression of ovulation one and the same thing.” On July 29, 1968, in the “Humanae Vitae” encyclical, the Pope broke his silence, declaring all “artificial” methods of contraception to be against the teachings of the Church.
In hindsight, it is possible to see the opportunity that Rock missed. If he had known what we know now and had talked about the Pill not as a contraceptive but as a cancer drug – not as a drug to prevent life but as one that would save life – the Church might well have said yes. Hadn’t Pius XII already approved the Pill for therapeutic purposes? Rock would only have had to think of the Pill as Pike thinks of it: as a drug whose contraceptive aspects are merely a means of attracting users, of getting, as Pike put it, “people who are young to take a lot of stuff they wouldn’t otherwise take.”
But Rock did not live long enough to understand how things might have been. What he witnessed, instead, was the terrible time at the end of the sixties when the Pill suddenly stood accused – wrongly – of causing blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks. Between the midseventies and the early eighties, the number of women in the United States using the Pill fell by half. Harvard Medical School, meanwhile, took over Rock’s Reproductive Clinic and pushed him out. His Harvard pension paid him only seventy-five dollars a year. He had almost no money in the bank and had to sell his house in Brookline. In 1971, Rock left Boston and retreated to a farmhouse in the hills of New Hampshire. He swam in the stream behind the house. He listened to John Philip Sousa marches. In the evening, he would sit in the living room with a pitcher of martinis. In 1983, he gave his last public interview, and it was as if the memory of his achievements were now so painful that he had blotted it out.
He was asked what the most gratifying time of his life was. “Right now,” the inventor of the Pill answered, incredibly. He was sitting by the fire in a crisp white shirt and tie, reading The Origin, Irving Stone’s fictional account of the life of Darwin. “It frequently occurs to me, gosh, what a lucky guy I am. I have no responsibilities, and I have everything I want. I take a dose of equanimity every twenty minutes. I will not be disturbed about things.”
Once, John Rock had gone to seven-o’clock Mass every morning and kept a crucifix above his desk. His interviewer, the writer Sara Davidson, moved her chair closer to his and asked him whether he still believed in an afterlife.
“Of course I don’t,” Rock answered abruptly. Though he didn’t explain why, his reasons aren’t hard to imagine. The Church could not square the requirements of its faith with the results of his science, and if the Church couldn’t reconcile them, how could Rock be expected to? John Rock always stuck to his conscience, and in the end his conscience forced him away from the thing he loved most. This was not John Rock’s error. Nor was it his Church’s. It was the fault of the haphazard nature of science, which all too often produces progress in advance of understanding. If the order of events in the discovery of what was natural had been reversed, his world, and our world, too, would have been a different place.
“Heaven and Hell, Rome, all the Church stuff – that’s for the solace of the multitude,” Rock said. He had only a year to live. “I was an ardent practicing Catholic for a long time, and I really believed it all then, you see.”[2]
March 13, 2000
What the Dog Saw
CESAR MILLAN AND THE MOVEMENTS OF MASTERY
1.
In the case of Sugar v. Forman, Cesar Millan knew none of the facts before arriving at the scene of the crime. That is the way Cesar prefers it. His job was to reconcile Forman with Sugar, and, since Sugar was a good deal less adept in making her case than Forman, whatever he learned beforehand might bias him in favor of the aggrieved party.
The Forman residence was in a trailer park in Mission Hills, just north of Los Angeles. Dark wood paneling, leather couches, deep-pile carpeting. The air-conditioning was on, even though it was one of those ridiculously pristine Southern California days. Lynda Forman was in her sixties, possibly older, a handsome woman with a winning sense of humor. Her husband, Ray, was in a wheelchair, and looked vaguely ex-military. Cesar sat across from them, in black jeans and a blue shirt, his posture characteristically perfect.
“So how can I help?” he said.
“You can help our monster turn into a sweet, lovable dog,” Lynda replied. It was clear that she had been thinking about how to describe Sugar to Cesar for a long time. “She’s ninety percent bad, ten percent the love… She sleeps with us at night. She cuddles.” Sugar meant a lot to Lynda. “But she grabs anything in sight that she can get, and tries to destroy it. My husband is disabled, and she destroys his room. She tears clothes. She’s torn our carpet. She bothers my grandchildren. If I open the door, she will run.” Lynda pushed back her sleeves and exposed her forearms. They were covered in so many bites and scratches and scars and scabs that it was as if she had been tortured. “But I love her. What can I say?”
Cesar looked at her arms and blinked. “Wow.”
Cesar is not a tall man. He is built like a soccer player. He is in his midthirties, and has large, wide eyes, olive skin, and white teeth. He crawled across the border from Mexico fourteen years ago, but his English is exceptional, except when he gets excited and starts dropping his articles – which almost never happens, because he rarely gets excited. He saw the arms and he said, “Wow,” but it was a “wow” in the same calm tone of voice as “So how can I help?”
Cesar began to ask questions. Did Sugar urinate in the house? She did. She had a particularly destructive relationship with newspapers, television remotes, and plastic cups. Cesar asked about walks. Did Sugar travel, or did she track – and when he said track he did an astonishing impersonation of a dog sniffing. Sugar tracked. What about discipline?
“Sometimes I put her in a crate,” Lynda said. “And it’s only for a fifteen-minute period. Then she lays down and she’s fine. I don’t know how to give discipline. Ask my kids.”
“Did your parents discipline you?”
“I didn’t need discipline. I was perfect.”
“So you had no rules… What about using physical touch with Sugar?”
“I have used it. It bothers me.”
“What about the bites?”
“I can see it in the head. She gives me that look.”
“She’s reminding you who rules the roost.”
“Then she will lick me for half an hour where she has bit me.”
“She’s not apologizing. Dogs lick each other’s wounds to heal the pack, you know.”
Lynda looked a little lost. “I thought she was saying sorry.”
“If she was sorry,” Cesar said softly, “she wouldn’t do it in the first place.”
It was time for the defendant. Lynda’s granddaughter, Carly, came in, holding a beagle as if it were a baby. Sugar was cute, but she had a mean, feral look in her eyes. Carly put Sugar on the carpet, and Sugar swaggered over to Cesar, sniffing his shoes. In front of her, Cesar placed a newspaper, a plastic cup, and a television remote.
Sugar grabbed the newspaper. Cesar snatched it back. Sugar picked up the newspaper again. She jumped on the couch. Cesar took his hand and “bit” Sugar on the shoulder, firmly and calmly. “My hand is the mouth,” he explained. “My fingers are the teeth.” Sugar jumped down. Cesar stood, and firmly and fluidly held Sugar down for an instant. Sugar struggled, briefly, then relaxed. Cesar backed off. Sugar lunged at the remote. Cesar looked at her and said, simply and briefly, “Sh-h-h.” Sugar hesitated. She went for the plastic cup. Cesar said, “Sh-h-h.” She dropped it. Cesar motioned for Lynda to bring a jar of treats into the room. He placed it in the middle of the floor and hovered over it. Sugar looked at the treats and then at Cesar. She began sniffing, inching closer, but an invisible boundary now stood between her and the prize. She circled and circled but never came closer than three feet. She looked as if she were about to jump on the couch. Cesar shifted his weight, and blocked her. He took a step toward her. She backed up, head lowered, into the furthest corner of the room. She sank down on her haunches, then placed her head flat on the ground. Cesar took the treats, the remote, the plastic cup, and the newspaper and placed them inches from her lowered nose. Sugar, the onetime terror of Mission Hills, closed her eyes in surrender.
“She has no rules in the outside world, no boundaries,” Cesar said, finally. “You practice exercise and affection. But you’re not practicing exercise, discipline, and affection. When we love someone, we fulfill everything about them. That’s loving. And you’re not loving your dog.” He stood up. He looked around.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
Lynda staggered into the kitchen. In five minutes, her monster had turned into an angel. “Unbelievable,” she said.
2.
Cesar Millan runs the Dog Psychology Center out of a converted auto mechanic’s shop in the industrial zone of South-Central Los Angeles. The center is situated at the end of a long narrow alley, off a busy street lined with bleak warehouses and garages. Behind a high green chain-link fence is a large concrete yard, and everywhere around the yard there are dogs. Dogs basking in the sun. Dogs splashing in a pool. Dogs lying on picnic tables. Cesar takes in people’s problem dogs; he keeps them for a minimum of two weeks, integrating them into the pack. He has no formal training. He learned what he knows growing up in Mexico on his grandfather’s farm in Sinaloa. As a child, he was called el Perrero, “the dog boy,” watching and studying until he felt that he could put himself inside the mind of a dog. In the mornings, Cesar takes the pack on a four-hour walk in the Santa Monica mountains: Cesar in front, the dogs behind him; the pit bulls and the Rottweilers and the German shepherds with backpacks, so that when the little dogs get tired Cesar can load them up on the big dogs’ backs. Then they come back and eat. Exercise, then food. Work, then reward.
“I have forty-seven dogs right now,” Cesar said. He opened the door, and they came running over, a jumble of dogs, big and small. Cesar pointed to a bloodhound. “He was aggressive with humans, really aggressive,” he said. In a corner of the compound, a Wheaton terrier had just been given a bath. “She’s stayed here six months because she could not trust men,” Cesar explained. “She was beat up severely.” He idly scratched a big German shepherd. “My girlfriend here, Beauty. If you were to see the relationship between her and her owner.” He shook his head. “A very sick relationship. A Fatal Attraction kind of thing. Beauty sees her and she starts scratching her and biting her, and the owner is, like, ‘I love you, too.’ That one killed a dog. That one killed a dog, too. Those two guys came from New Orleans. They attacked humans. That pit bull over there with a tennis ball killed a Labrador in Beverly Hills. And look at this one – one eye. Lost the eye in a dogfight. But look at him now.” Now he was nuzzling a French bulldog. He was happy, and so was the Labrador killer from Beverly Hills, who was stretched out in the sun, and so was the aggressive-toward-humans bloodhound, who was lingering by a picnic table with his tongue hanging out. Cesar stood in the midst of all the dogs, his back straight and his shoulders square. It was a prison yard. But it was the most peaceful prison yard in all of California. “The whole point is that everybody has to stay calm, submissive, no matter what,” he said. “What you are witnessing right now is a group of dogs who all have the same state of mind.”
Cesar Millan is the host of Dog Whisperer, on the National Geographic television channel. In every episode, he arrives amid canine chaos and leaves behind peace. He is the teacher we all had in grade school who could walk into a classroom filled with rambunctious kids and get everyone to calm down and behave. But what did that teacher have? If you’d asked us back then, we might have said that we behaved for Mr. Exley because Mr. Exley had lots of rules and was really strict. But the truth is that we behaved for Mr. DeBock as well, and he wasn’t strict at all. What we really mean is that both of them had that indefinable thing called presence – and if you are going to teach a classroom full of headstrong ten-year-olds, or run a company, or command an army, or walk into a trailer home in Mission Hills where a beagle named Sugar is terrorizing its owners, you have to have presence or you’re lost.
Behind the Dog Psychology Center, between the back fence and the walls of the adjoining buildings, Cesar has built a dog run – a stretch of grass and dirt as long as a city block. “This is our Chuck E. Cheese,” Cesar said. The dogs saw Cesar approaching the back gate, and they ran, expectantly, toward him, piling through the narrow door in a hodgepodge of whiskers and wagging tails. Cesar had a bag over his shoulder, filled with tennis balls, and a long orange plastic ball scoop in his right hand. He reached into the bag with the scoop, grabbed a tennis ball, and flung it in a smooth practiced motion off the wall of an adjoining warehouse. A dozen dogs set off in ragged pursuit. Cesar wheeled and threw another ball, in the opposite direction, and then a third, and then a fourth, until there were so many balls in the air and on the ground that the pack had turned into a yelping, howling, leaping, charging frenzy. Woof. Woof, woof, woof. Woof.
“The game should be played five or ten minutes, maybe fifteen minutes,” Cesar said. “You begin. You end. And you don’t ask, ‘Please stop.’ You demand that it stop.” With that, Cesar gathered himself, stood stock still, and let out a short whistle: not a casual whistle but a whistle of authority. Suddenly, there was absolute quiet. All forty-seven dogs stopped charging and jumping and stood as still as Cesar, their heads erect, eyes trained on their ringleader. Cesar nodded, almost imperceptibly, toward the enclosure, and all forty-seven dogs turned and filed happily back through the gate.
3.
In the fall of 2005, Cesar filmed an episode of Dog Whisperer at the Los Angeles home of a couple named Patrice and Scott. They had a Korean jindo named JonBee, a stray that they had found and adopted. Outside, and on walks, JonBee was well behaved and affectionate. Inside the house, he was a terror, turning viciously on Scott whenever he tried to get the dog to submit.
“Help us tame the wild beast,” Scott says to Cesar. “We’ve had two trainers come out, one of whom was doing this domination thing, where he would put JonBee on his back and would hold him until he submits. It went on for a good twenty minutes. This dog never let up. But, as soon as he let go, JonBee bit him four times… The guy was bleeding, both hands and his arms. I had another trainer come out, too, and they said, ‘You’ve got to get rid of this dog.’”
Cesar goes outside to meet JonBee. He walks down a few steps to the backyard. Cesar crouches down next to the dog. “The owner was a little concerned about me coming here by myself,” he says. “To tell you the truth, I feel more comfortable with aggressive dogs than insecure dogs, or fearful dogs, or panicky dogs. These are actually the guys who put me on the map.”
JonBee comes up and sniffs him. Cesar puts a leash on him. JonBee eyes Cesar nervously and starts to poke around. Cesar then walks JonBee into the living room. Scott puts a muzzle on him. Cesar tries to get the dog to lie on its side – and all hell breaks loose. JonBee turns and snaps and squirms and spins and jumps and lunges and struggles. His muzzle falls off. He bites Cesar. He twists his body up into the air, in a cold, vicious fury. The struggle between the two goes on and on. Patrice covers her face. Cesar asks her to leave the room. He is standing up, leash extended. He looks like a wrangler, taming a particularly ornery rattlesnake. Sweat is streaming down his face. Finally, Cesar gets the dog to sit, then to lie down, and then, somehow, to lie on its side. JonBee slumps, defeated. Cesar massages JonBee’s stomach. “That’s all we wanted,” he says.
What happened between Cesar and JonBee? One explanation is that they had a fight, alpha male versus alpha male. But fights don’t come out of nowhere. JonBee was clearly reacting to something in Cesar. Before he fought, he sniffed and explored and watched Cesar – the last of which is most important, because everything we know about dogs suggests that, in a way that is true of almost no other animals, dogs are students of human movement.
The anthropologist Brian Hare has done experiments with dogs, for example, where he puts a piece of food under one of two cups, placed several feet apart. The dog knows that there is food to be had, but has no idea which of the cups holds the prize. Then Hare points at the right cup, taps on it, looks directly at it. What happens? The dog goes to the right cup virtually every time. Yet when Hare did the same experiment with chimpanzees – an animal that shares 98.6 percent of our genes – the chimps couldn’t get it right. A dog will look at you for help, and a chimp won’t.
“Primates are very good at using the cues of the same species,” Hare explained. “So if we were able to do a similar game, and it was a chimp or another primate giving a social cue, they might do better. But they are not good at using human cues when you are trying to cooperate with them. They don’t get it: ‘Why would you ever tell me where the food is?’ The key specialization of dogs, though, is that dogs pay attention to humans, when humans are doing something very human, which is sharing information about something that someone else might actually want.” Dogs aren’t smarter than chimps; they just have a different attitude toward people. “Dogs are really interested in humans,” Hare went on. “ Interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball.”
A dog cares, deeply, which way your body is leaning. Forward or backward? Forward can be seen as aggressive; backward – even a quarter of an inch – means nonthreatening. It means you’ve relinquished what ethologists call an intention movement to proceed forward. Cock your head, even slightly, to the side, and a dog is disarmed. Look at him straight on and he’ll read it like a red flag. Standing straight, with your shoulders squared, rather than slumped, can mean the difference between whether your dog obeys a command or ignores it. Breathing even and deeply – rather than holding your breath – can mean the difference between defusing a tense situation and igniting it. “I think they are looking at our eyes and where our eyes are looking, and what our eyes look like,” the ethologist Patricia McConnell, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says. “A rounded eye with a dilated pupil is a sign of high arousal and aggression in a dog. I believe they pay a tremendous amount of attention to how relaxed our face is and how relaxed our facial muscles are, because that’s a big cue for them with each other. Is the jaw relaxed? Is the mouth slightly open? And then the arms. They pay a tremendous amount of attention to where our arms go.”
In the book The Other End of the Leash, McConnell decodes one of the most common of all human-dog interactions – the meeting between two leashed animals on a walk. To us, it’s about one dog sizing up another. To her, it’s about two dogs sizing up each other after first sizing up their respective owners. The owners “are often anxious about how well the dogs will get along,” she writes, “and if you watch them instead of the dogs, you’ll often notice that the humans will hold their breath and round their eyes and mouths in an ‘on alert’ expression. Since these behaviors are expressions of offensive aggression in canine culture, I suspect that the humans are unwittingly signaling tension. If you exaggerate this by tightening the leash, as many owners do, you can actually cause the dogs to attack each other. Think of it: the dogs are in a tense social encounter, surrounded by support from their own pack, with the humans forming a tense, staring, breathless circle around them. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen dogs shift their eyes toward their owner’s frozen faces, and then launch growling at the other dog.”
When Cesar walked down the stairs of Patrice and Scott’s home, then, and crouched down in the backyard, JonBee looked at him, intently. And what he saw was someone who moved in a very particular way. Cesar is fluid. “He’s beautifully organized intraphysically,” Karen Bradley, who heads the graduate dance program at the University of Maryland, said when she first saw tapes of Cesar in action. “That lower-unit organization – I wonder whether he was a soccer player.” Movement experts like Bradley use something called Laban Movement Analysis to make sense of movement, describing, for instance, how people shift their weight, or how fluid and symmetrical they are when they move, or what kind of effort it involves. Is it direct or indirect – that is, what kind of attention does the movement convey? Is it quick or slow? Is it strong or light – that is, what is its intention? Is it bound or free – that is, how much precision is involved? If you want to emphasize a point, you might bring your hand down across your body in a single, smooth motion. But how you make that motion greatly affects how your point will be interpreted by your audience. Ideally, your hand would come down in an explosive, bound movement – that is, with accelerating force, ending abruptly and precisely – and your head and shoulders would descend simultaneously, so posture and gesture would be in harmony. Suppose, though, that your head and shoulders moved upward as your hand came down, or your hand came down in a free, implosive manner – that is, with a kind of a vague, decelerating force. Now your movement suggests that you are making a point on which we all agree, which is the opposite of your intention. Combinations of posture and gesture are called phrasing, and the great communicators are those who match their phrasing with their communicative intentions – who understand, for instance, that emphasis requires them to be bound and explosive. To Bradley, Cesar had beautiful phrasing.
There he is, talking to Patrice and Scott. He has his hands in front of him, in what Laban analysts call the sagittal plane – that is, the area directly in front of and behind the torso. He then leans forward for emphasis. But as he does, he lowers his hands to waist level, and draws them toward his body, to counterbalance the intrusion of his posture. And, when he leans backward again, the hands rise up, to fill the empty space. It’s not the kind of thing you’d ever notice. But, when it’s pointed out, its emotional meaning is unmistakable. It is respectful and reassuring. It communicates without being intrusive. Bradley was watching Cesar with the sound off, and there was one sequence she returned to again and again, in which Cesar was talking to a family, and his right hand swung down in a graceful arc across his chest. “He’s dancing,” Bradley said. “Look at that. It’s gorgeous. It’s such a gorgeous little dance.
“The thing is, his phrases are of mixed length,” she went on. “Some of them are long. Some of them are very short. Some of them are explosive phrases, loaded up in the beginning and then trailing off. Some of them are impactive – building up, and then coming to a sense of impact at the end. What they are is appropriate to the task. That’s what I mean by versatile.”
Movement analysts tend to like watching, say, Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan; they had great phrasing. George W. Bush does not. During this year’s State of the Union address, Bush spent the entire speech swaying metronomically, straight down through his lower torso, a movement underscored, unfortunately, by the presence of a large vertical banner behind him. “Each shift ended with this focus that channels toward a particular place in the audience,” Bradley said. She mimed, perfectly, the Bush gaze – the squinty, fixated look he reserves for moments of great solemnity – and gently swayed back and forth. “It’s a little primitive, a little regressed.” The combination of the look, the sway, and the gaze was, to her mind, distinctly adolescent. When people say of Bush that he seems eternally boyish, this is in part what they’re referring to. He moves like a boy, which is fine, except that, unlike such movement masters as Reagan and Clinton, he can’t stop moving like a boy when the occasion demands a more grown-up response.
“Mostly what we see in the normal population is undifferentiated phrasing,” Bradley said. “And then you have people who are clearly preferential in their phrases, like my husband. He’s Mr. Horizontal. When he’s talking in a meeting, he’s back. He’s open. He just goes into this, this same long thing” – she leaned back, and spread her arms out wide and slowed her speech – “and it doesn’t change very much. He works with people who understand him, fortunately.” She laughed. “When we meet someone like this” – she nodded at Cesar, on the television screen – “what do we do? We give them their own TV series. Seriously. We reward them. We are drawn to them, because we can trust that we can get the message. It’s not going to be hidden. It contributes to a feeling of authenticity.”
4.
Back to JonBee, from the beginning – only this time with the sound off. Cesar walks down the stairs. It’s not the same Cesar who whistled and brought forty-seven dogs to attention. This occasion calls for subtlety. “Did you see the way he walks? He drops his hands. They’re close to his side.” The analyst this time was Suzi Tortora, the author of The Dancing Dialogue. Tortora is a New York dance-movement psychotherapist, a tall, lithe woman with long dark hair and beautiful phrasing. She was in her office on lower Broadway, a large, empty, paneled room. “He’s very vertical,” Tortora said. “His legs are right under his torso. He’s not taking up any space. And he slows down his gait. He’s telling the dog, ‘I’m here by myself. I’m not going to rush. I haven’t introduced myself yet. Here I am. You can feel me.’” Cesar crouches down next to JonBee. His body is perfectly symmetrical, the center of gravity low. He looks stable, as though you couldn’t knock him over, which conveys a sense of calm.
JonBee was investigating Cesar, squirming nervously. When JonBee got too jumpy, Cesar would correct him, with a tug on the leash. Because Cesar was talking and the correction was so subtle, it was easy to miss. Stop. Rewind. Play. “Do you see how rhythmic it is?” Tortora said. “He pulls. He waits. He pulls. He waits. He pulls. He waits. The phrasing is so lovely. It’s predictable. To a dog that is all over the place, he’s bringing a rhythm. But it isn’t a panicked rhythm. It has a moderate tempo to it. There was room to wander. And it’s not attack, attack. It wasn’t long and sustained. It was quick and light. I would bet that with dogs like this, where people are so afraid of them being aggressive and so defensive around them, there is a lot of aggressive strength directed at them. There is no aggression here. He’s using strength without it being aggressive.”
Cesar moves into the living room. The fight begins. “Look how he involves the dog,” Tortora said. “He’s letting the dog lead. He’s giving the dog room.” This was not a Secret Service agent wrestling an assailant to the ground. Cesar had his body vertical, and his hand high above JonBee holding the leash, and, as JonBee turned and snapped and squirmed and spun and jumped and lunged and struggled, Cesar seemed to be moving along with him, providing a loose structure for his aggression. It may have looked like a fight, but Cesar wasn’t fighting. And what was JonBee doing? Child psychologists talk about the idea of regulation. If you expose healthy babies, repeatedly, to a very loud noise, eventually they will be able to fall asleep. They’ll become habituated to the noise: the first time the noise is disruptive, but, by the second or third time, they’ve learned to handle the disruption, and block it out. They’ve regulated themselves. Children throwing tantrums are said to be in a state of dysregulation. They’ve been knocked off kilter in some way, and cannot bring themselves back to baseline. JonBee was dysregulated. He wasn’t fighting; he was throwing a tantrum. And Cesar was the understanding parent. When JonBee paused, to catch his breath, Cesar paused with him. When JonBee bit Cesar, Cesar brought his finger to his mouth, instinctively, but in a smooth and fluid and calm motion that betrayed no anxiety. “Timing is a big part of Cesar’s repertoire,” Tortora went on. “His movements right now aren’t complex. There aren’t a lot of efforts together at one time. His range of movement qualities is limited. Look at how he’s narrowing. Now he’s enclosing.” As JonBee calmed down, Cesar began caressing him. His touch was firm but not aggressive; not so strong as to be abusive and not so light as to be insubstantial and irritating. Using the language of movement – the plainest and most transparent of all languages – Cesar was telling JonBee that he was safe. Now JonBee was lying on his side, mouth relaxed, tongue out. “Look at that, look at the dog’s face,” Tortora said. This was not defeat; this was relief.
Later, when Cesar tried to show Scott how to placate JonBee, Scott couldn’t do it, and Cesar made him stop. “You’re still nervous,” Cesar told him. “You are still unsure. That’s how you become a target.” It isn’t as easy as it sounds to calm a dog. “There, there” in a soothing voice, accompanied by a nice belly scratch, wasn’t enough for JonBee, because he was reading gesture and posture and symmetry and the precise meaning of touch. He was looking for clarity and consistency. Scott didn’t have it. “Look at the tension and aggression in his face,” Tortora said, when the camera turned to Scott. It was true. Scott had a long and craggy face, with high, wide cheekbones and pronounced lips, and his movements were taut and twitchy. “There’s a bombardment of actions, quickness combined with tension, a quality in how he is using his eyes and focus – a darting,” Tortora said. “He gesticulates in a way that is complex. There is a lot going on. So many different qualities of movement happening at the same time. It leads those who watch him to get distracted.” Scott is a character actor, with a list of credits going back thirty years. The tension and aggression in his manner made him interesting and complicated – which works for Hollywood but doesn’t work for a troubled dog. Scott said he loved JonBee, but the quality of his movement did not match his emotions.
For a number of years, Tortora has worked with Eric (not his real name), an autistic boy with severe language and communication problems. Tortora videotaped some of their sessions, and in one, four months after they started to work together, Eric is standing in the middle of Tortora’s studio in Cold Spring, New York, a beautiful dark-haired three-and-a-half-year-old wearing only a diaper. His mother is sitting to the side, against the wall. In the background, you can hear the sound track to Riverdance, which happens to be Eric’s favorite album. Eric is having a tantrum.
He gets up and runs toward the stereo. Then he runs back and throws himself down on his stomach, arms and legs flailing. Tortora throws herself down on the ground, just as he did. He sits up. She sits up. He twists. She twists. He squirms. She squirms. “When Eric is running around, I didn’t say, ‘Let’s put on quiet music.’ I can’t turn him off, because he can’t turn off,” Tortora said. “He can’t go from zero to sixty and then back down to zero. With a typical child, you might say, ‘Take a deep breath. Reason with me’ – and that might work. But not with children like this. They are in their world by themselves. I have to go in there and meet them and bring them back out.”
Tortora sits up on her knees, and faces Eric. His legs are moving in every direction, and she takes his feet in her hands. Slowly, and subtly, she begins to move his legs in time with the music. Eric gets up and runs to the corner of the room and back again. Tortora gets up and mirrors his action, but this time she moves more fluidly and gracefully than he did. She takes his feet again. This time, she moves Eric’s entire torso, opening the pelvis in a contralateral twist. “I’m standing above him, looking directly at him. I am very symmetrical. So I’m saying to him, ‘I’m stable. I’m here. I’m calm.’ I’m holding him at the knees and giving him sensory input. It’s firm and clear. Touch is an incredible tool. It’s another way to speak.”
She starts to rock his knees from side to side. Eric begins to calm down. He begins to make slight adjustments to the music. His legs move more freely, more lyrically. His movement is starting to get organized. He goes back into his mother’s arms. He’s still upset, but his cry has softened. Tortora sits and faces him – stable, symmetrical, direct eye contact.
His mother says, “You need a tissue?”
Eric nods.
Tortora brings him a tissue. Eric’s mother says that she needs a tissue. Eric gives his tissue to his mother.
“Can we dance?” Tortora asks him.
“OK,” he says in a small voice.
It was impossible to see Tortora with Eric and not think of Cesar with JonBee: here was the same extraordinary energy and intelligence and personal force marshaled on behalf of the helpless, the same calm in the face of chaos, and, perhaps most surprising, the same gentleness. When we talk about people with presence, we often assume that they have a strong personality – that they sweep us all up in their own personal whirlwind. Our model is the Pied Piper, who played his irresistible tune and every child in Hamelin blindly followed. But Cesar Millan and Suzi Tortora play different tunes, in different situations. And they don’t turn their back, and expect others to follow. Cesar let JonBee lead; Tortora’s approaches to Eric were dictated by Eric. Presence is not just versatile; it’s also reactive. Certain people, we say, “command our attention,” but the verb is all wrong. There is no commanding, only soliciting. The dogs in the dog run wanted someone to tell them when to start and stop; they were refugees from anarchy and disorder. Eric wanted to enjoy Riverdance. It was his favorite music. Tortora did not say, “Let us dance.” She asked, “Can we dance?”
Then Tortora gets a drum and starts to play. Eric’s mother stands up and starts to circle the room, in an Irish step dance. Eric is lying on the ground, and slowly his feet start to tap in time with the music. He gets up. He walks to the corner of the room, disappears behind a partition, and then reenters, triumphant. He begins to dance, playing an imaginary flute as he circles the room.
5.
When Cesar was twenty-one, he traveled from his hometown to Tijuana, and a “coyote” took him across the border for a hundred dollars. They waited in a hole, up to their chests in water, and then ran over the mudflats, through a junkyard, and across a freeway. A taxi took him to San Diego. After a month on the streets, grimy and dirty, he walked into a dog-grooming salon and got a job, working with the difficult cases and sleeping in the offices at night. He moved to Los Angeles, and took a day job detailing limousines while he ran his dog-psychology business out of a white Chevy Astrovan. When he was twenty-three, he fell in love with an American girl named Illusion. She was seventeen, small, dark, and very beautiful. A year later, they got married.
“Cesar was a machoistic, egocentric person who thought the world revolved around him,” Illusion recalled, of their first few years together. “His view was that marriage was where a man tells a woman what to do. Never give affection. Never give compassion or understanding. Marriage is about keeping the man happy, and that’s where it ends.”
Early in their marriage, Illusion got sick, and was in the hospital for three weeks. “Cesar visited once, for less than two hours,” she said. “I thought to myself, This relationship is not working out. He just wanted to be with his dogs.” They had a new baby and no money. They separated. Illusion told Cesar that she would divorce him if he didn’t get into therapy. He agreed, reluctantly. “The therapist’s name was Wilma,” Illusion went on. “ She was a strong African American woman. She said, ‘You want your wife to take care of you, to clean the house. Well, she wants something, too. She wants your affection and love.’” Illusion remembers Cesar scribbling furiously on a pad. “He wrote that down. He said, ‘That’s it! It’s like the dogs. They need exercise, discipline, and affection.’” Illusion laughed. “I looked at him, upset, because why the hell are you talking about your dogs when you should be talking about us?”
“I was fighting it,” Cesar said. “Two women against me, blah, blah, blah. I had to get rid of the fight in my mind. That was very difficult. But that’s when the lightbulb came on. Women have their own psychology.”
Cesar could calm a stray off the street, yet, at least in the beginning, he did not grasp the simplest of truths about his own wife. “Cesar related to dogs because he didn’t feel connected to people,” Illusion said. “His dogs were his way of feeling like he belonged in the world, because he wasn’t people-friendly. And it was hard for him to get out of that.” In Mexico, on his grandfather’s farm, dogs were dogs and humans were humans: each knew its place. But in America, dogs were treated like children, and owners had shaken up the hierarchy of human and animal. Sugar’s problem was Lynda. JonBee’s problem was Scott. Cesar calls that epiphany in the therapist’s office the most important moment in his life, because it was the moment when he understood that to succeed in the world he could not be just a dog whisperer. He needed to be a people whisperer.
For his show, Cesar once took a case involving a Chihuahua named Bandit. Bandit had a large, rapper-style diamond-encrusted necklace around his neck spelling “Stud.” His owner was Lori, a voluptuous woman with an oval face and large, pleading eyes. Bandit was out of control, terrorizing guests and menacing other dogs. Three trainers had failed to get him under control.
Lori was on the couch in her living room as she spoke to Cesar. Bandit was sitting in her lap. Her teenage son, Tyler, was sitting next to her.
“About two weeks after his first visit with the vet, he started to lose a lot of hair,” Lori said. “They said that he had Demodex mange.” Bandit had been sold to her as a show-quality dog, she recounted, but she had the bloodline checked and learned that he had come from a puppy mill. “He didn’t have any human contact,” she went on. “So for three months he was getting dipped every week to try to get rid of the symptoms.” As she spoke, her hands gently encased Bandit. “He would hide inside my shirt and lay his head right by my heart, and stay there.” Her eyes were moist. “He was right here on my chest.”
“So your husband cooperated?” Cesar asked. He was focused on Lori, not on Bandit. This is what the new Cesar understood that the old Cesar did not.
“He was our baby. He was in need of being nurtured and helped and he was so scared all the time.”
“Do you still feel the need of feeling sorry about him?”
“Yeah. He’s so cute.”
Cesar seemed puzzled. He didn’t know why Lori would still feel sorry for her dog.
Lori tried to explain. “He’s so small and he’s helpless.”
“But do you believe that he feels helpless?”
Lori still had her hands over the dog, stroking him. Tyler was looking at Cesar, and then at his mother, and then down at Bandit. Bandit tensed. Tyler reached over to touch the dog, and Bandit leaped out of Lori’s arms and attacked him, barking and snapping and growling. Tyler, startled, jumped back. Lori, alarmed, reached out, and – this was the critical thing – put her hands around Bandit in a worried, caressing motion, and lifted him back into her lap. It happened in an instant.
Cesar stood up. “Give me the space,” he said, gesturing for Tyler to move aside. “Enough dogs attacking humans, and humans not really blocking him, so he is only becoming more narcissistic. It is all about him. He owns you.” Cesar was about as angry as he ever gets. “It seems like you are favoring the dog, and hopefully that is not the truth… If Tyler kicked the dog, you would correct him. The dog is biting your son, and you are not correcting hard enough.” Cesar was in emphatic mode now, his phrasing sure and unambiguous. “I don’t understand why you are not putting two and two together.”
Bandit was nervous. He started to back up on the couch. He started to bark. Cesar gave him a look out of the corner of his eye. Bandit shrank. Cesar kept talking. Bandit came at Cesar. Cesar stood up. “I have to touch,” he said, and he gave Bandit a sharp nudge with his elbow. Lori looked horrifed.
Cesar laughed, incredulously. “You are saying that it is fair for him to touch us but not fair for us to touch him?” he asked. Lori leaned forward to object. “You don’t like that, do you?” Cesar said, in his frustration speaking to the whole room now. “It’s not going to work. This is a case that is not going to work, because the owner doesn’t want to allow what you normally do with your kids… The hardest part for me is that the father or mother chooses the dog instead of the son. That’s hard for me. I love dogs. I’m the dog whisperer. You follow what I’m saying? But I would never choose a dog over my son.”
He stopped. He had had enough of talking. There was too much talking anyhow. People saying “I love you” with a touch that didn’t mean “I love you.” People saying “There, there” with gestures that did not soothe. People saying “I’m your mother” while reaching out to a Chihuahua instead of their own flesh and blood. Tyler looked stricken. Lori shifted nervously in her seat. Bandit growled. Cesar turned to the dog and said “Sh-h-h.” And everyone was still.
May 22, 2006
1.
In the case of Sugar v. Forman, Cesar Millan knew none of the facts before arriving at the scene of the crime. That is the way Cesar prefers it. His job was to reconcile Forman with Sugar, and, since Sugar was a good deal less adept in making her case than Forman, whatever he learned beforehand might bias him in favor of the aggrieved party.
The Forman residence was in a trailer park in Mission Hills, just north of Los Angeles. Dark wood paneling, leather couches, deep-pile carpeting. The air-conditioning was on, even though it was one of those ridiculously pristine Southern California days. Lynda Forman was in her sixties, possibly older, a handsome woman with a winning sense of humor. Her husband, Ray, was in a wheelchair, and looked vaguely ex-military. Cesar sat across from them, in black jeans and a blue shirt, his posture characteristically perfect.
“So how can I help?” he said.
“You can help our monster turn into a sweet, lovable dog,” Lynda replied. It was clear that she had been thinking about how to describe Sugar to Cesar for a long time. “She’s ninety percent bad, ten percent the love… She sleeps with us at night. She cuddles.” Sugar meant a lot to Lynda. “But she grabs anything in sight that she can get, and tries to destroy it. My husband is disabled, and she destroys his room. She tears clothes. She’s torn our carpet. She bothers my grandchildren. If I open the door, she will run.” Lynda pushed back her sleeves and exposed her forearms. They were covered in so many bites and scratches and scars and scabs that it was as if she had been tortured. “But I love her. What can I say?”
Cesar looked at her arms and blinked. “Wow.”
Cesar is not a tall man. He is built like a soccer player. He is in his midthirties, and has large, wide eyes, olive skin, and white teeth. He crawled across the border from Mexico fourteen years ago, but his English is exceptional, except when he gets excited and starts dropping his articles – which almost never happens, because he rarely gets excited. He saw the arms and he said, “Wow,” but it was a “wow” in the same calm tone of voice as “So how can I help?”
Cesar began to ask questions. Did Sugar urinate in the house? She did. She had a particularly destructive relationship with newspapers, television remotes, and plastic cups. Cesar asked about walks. Did Sugar travel, or did she track – and when he said track he did an astonishing impersonation of a dog sniffing. Sugar tracked. What about discipline?
“Sometimes I put her in a crate,” Lynda said. “And it’s only for a fifteen-minute period. Then she lays down and she’s fine. I don’t know how to give discipline. Ask my kids.”
“Did your parents discipline you?”
“I didn’t need discipline. I was perfect.”
“So you had no rules… What about using physical touch with Sugar?”
“I have used it. It bothers me.”
“What about the bites?”
“I can see it in the head. She gives me that look.”
“She’s reminding you who rules the roost.”
“Then she will lick me for half an hour where she has bit me.”
“She’s not apologizing. Dogs lick each other’s wounds to heal the pack, you know.”
Lynda looked a little lost. “I thought she was saying sorry.”
“If she was sorry,” Cesar said softly, “she wouldn’t do it in the first place.”
It was time for the defendant. Lynda’s granddaughter, Carly, came in, holding a beagle as if it were a baby. Sugar was cute, but she had a mean, feral look in her eyes. Carly put Sugar on the carpet, and Sugar swaggered over to Cesar, sniffing his shoes. In front of her, Cesar placed a newspaper, a plastic cup, and a television remote.
Sugar grabbed the newspaper. Cesar snatched it back. Sugar picked up the newspaper again. She jumped on the couch. Cesar took his hand and “bit” Sugar on the shoulder, firmly and calmly. “My hand is the mouth,” he explained. “My fingers are the teeth.” Sugar jumped down. Cesar stood, and firmly and fluidly held Sugar down for an instant. Sugar struggled, briefly, then relaxed. Cesar backed off. Sugar lunged at the remote. Cesar looked at her and said, simply and briefly, “Sh-h-h.” Sugar hesitated. She went for the plastic cup. Cesar said, “Sh-h-h.” She dropped it. Cesar motioned for Lynda to bring a jar of treats into the room. He placed it in the middle of the floor and hovered over it. Sugar looked at the treats and then at Cesar. She began sniffing, inching closer, but an invisible boundary now stood between her and the prize. She circled and circled but never came closer than three feet. She looked as if she were about to jump on the couch. Cesar shifted his weight, and blocked her. He took a step toward her. She backed up, head lowered, into the furthest corner of the room. She sank down on her haunches, then placed her head flat on the ground. Cesar took the treats, the remote, the plastic cup, and the newspaper and placed them inches from her lowered nose. Sugar, the onetime terror of Mission Hills, closed her eyes in surrender.
“She has no rules in the outside world, no boundaries,” Cesar said, finally. “You practice exercise and affection. But you’re not practicing exercise, discipline, and affection. When we love someone, we fulfill everything about them. That’s loving. And you’re not loving your dog.” He stood up. He looked around.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
Lynda staggered into the kitchen. In five minutes, her monster had turned into an angel. “Unbelievable,” she said.
2.
Cesar Millan runs the Dog Psychology Center out of a converted auto mechanic’s shop in the industrial zone of South-Central Los Angeles. The center is situated at the end of a long narrow alley, off a busy street lined with bleak warehouses and garages. Behind a high green chain-link fence is a large concrete yard, and everywhere around the yard there are dogs. Dogs basking in the sun. Dogs splashing in a pool. Dogs lying on picnic tables. Cesar takes in people’s problem dogs; he keeps them for a minimum of two weeks, integrating them into the pack. He has no formal training. He learned what he knows growing up in Mexico on his grandfather’s farm in Sinaloa. As a child, he was called el Perrero, “the dog boy,” watching and studying until he felt that he could put himself inside the mind of a dog. In the mornings, Cesar takes the pack on a four-hour walk in the Santa Monica mountains: Cesar in front, the dogs behind him; the pit bulls and the Rottweilers and the German shepherds with backpacks, so that when the little dogs get tired Cesar can load them up on the big dogs’ backs. Then they come back and eat. Exercise, then food. Work, then reward.
“I have forty-seven dogs right now,” Cesar said. He opened the door, and they came running over, a jumble of dogs, big and small. Cesar pointed to a bloodhound. “He was aggressive with humans, really aggressive,” he said. In a corner of the compound, a Wheaton terrier had just been given a bath. “She’s stayed here six months because she could not trust men,” Cesar explained. “She was beat up severely.” He idly scratched a big German shepherd. “My girlfriend here, Beauty. If you were to see the relationship between her and her owner.” He shook his head. “A very sick relationship. A Fatal Attraction kind of thing. Beauty sees her and she starts scratching her and biting her, and the owner is, like, ‘I love you, too.’ That one killed a dog. That one killed a dog, too. Those two guys came from New Orleans. They attacked humans. That pit bull over there with a tennis ball killed a Labrador in Beverly Hills. And look at this one – one eye. Lost the eye in a dogfight. But look at him now.” Now he was nuzzling a French bulldog. He was happy, and so was the Labrador killer from Beverly Hills, who was stretched out in the sun, and so was the aggressive-toward-humans bloodhound, who was lingering by a picnic table with his tongue hanging out. Cesar stood in the midst of all the dogs, his back straight and his shoulders square. It was a prison yard. But it was the most peaceful prison yard in all of California. “The whole point is that everybody has to stay calm, submissive, no matter what,” he said. “What you are witnessing right now is a group of dogs who all have the same state of mind.”
Cesar Millan is the host of Dog Whisperer, on the National Geographic television channel. In every episode, he arrives amid canine chaos and leaves behind peace. He is the teacher we all had in grade school who could walk into a classroom filled with rambunctious kids and get everyone to calm down and behave. But what did that teacher have? If you’d asked us back then, we might have said that we behaved for Mr. Exley because Mr. Exley had lots of rules and was really strict. But the truth is that we behaved for Mr. DeBock as well, and he wasn’t strict at all. What we really mean is that both of them had that indefinable thing called presence – and if you are going to teach a classroom full of headstrong ten-year-olds, or run a company, or command an army, or walk into a trailer home in Mission Hills where a beagle named Sugar is terrorizing its owners, you have to have presence or you’re lost.
Behind the Dog Psychology Center, between the back fence and the walls of the adjoining buildings, Cesar has built a dog run – a stretch of grass and dirt as long as a city block. “This is our Chuck E. Cheese,” Cesar said. The dogs saw Cesar approaching the back gate, and they ran, expectantly, toward him, piling through the narrow door in a hodgepodge of whiskers and wagging tails. Cesar had a bag over his shoulder, filled with tennis balls, and a long orange plastic ball scoop in his right hand. He reached into the bag with the scoop, grabbed a tennis ball, and flung it in a smooth practiced motion off the wall of an adjoining warehouse. A dozen dogs set off in ragged pursuit. Cesar wheeled and threw another ball, in the opposite direction, and then a third, and then a fourth, until there were so many balls in the air and on the ground that the pack had turned into a yelping, howling, leaping, charging frenzy. Woof. Woof, woof, woof. Woof.
“The game should be played five or ten minutes, maybe fifteen minutes,” Cesar said. “You begin. You end. And you don’t ask, ‘Please stop.’ You demand that it stop.” With that, Cesar gathered himself, stood stock still, and let out a short whistle: not a casual whistle but a whistle of authority. Suddenly, there was absolute quiet. All forty-seven dogs stopped charging and jumping and stood as still as Cesar, their heads erect, eyes trained on their ringleader. Cesar nodded, almost imperceptibly, toward the enclosure, and all forty-seven dogs turned and filed happily back through the gate.
3.
In the fall of 2005, Cesar filmed an episode of Dog Whisperer at the Los Angeles home of a couple named Patrice and Scott. They had a Korean jindo named JonBee, a stray that they had found and adopted. Outside, and on walks, JonBee was well behaved and affectionate. Inside the house, he was a terror, turning viciously on Scott whenever he tried to get the dog to submit.
“Help us tame the wild beast,” Scott says to Cesar. “We’ve had two trainers come out, one of whom was doing this domination thing, where he would put JonBee on his back and would hold him until he submits. It went on for a good twenty minutes. This dog never let up. But, as soon as he let go, JonBee bit him four times… The guy was bleeding, both hands and his arms. I had another trainer come out, too, and they said, ‘You’ve got to get rid of this dog.’”
Cesar goes outside to meet JonBee. He walks down a few steps to the backyard. Cesar crouches down next to the dog. “The owner was a little concerned about me coming here by myself,” he says. “To tell you the truth, I feel more comfortable with aggressive dogs than insecure dogs, or fearful dogs, or panicky dogs. These are actually the guys who put me on the map.”
JonBee comes up and sniffs him. Cesar puts a leash on him. JonBee eyes Cesar nervously and starts to poke around. Cesar then walks JonBee into the living room. Scott puts a muzzle on him. Cesar tries to get the dog to lie on its side – and all hell breaks loose. JonBee turns and snaps and squirms and spins and jumps and lunges and struggles. His muzzle falls off. He bites Cesar. He twists his body up into the air, in a cold, vicious fury. The struggle between the two goes on and on. Patrice covers her face. Cesar asks her to leave the room. He is standing up, leash extended. He looks like a wrangler, taming a particularly ornery rattlesnake. Sweat is streaming down his face. Finally, Cesar gets the dog to sit, then to lie down, and then, somehow, to lie on its side. JonBee slumps, defeated. Cesar massages JonBee’s stomach. “That’s all we wanted,” he says.
What happened between Cesar and JonBee? One explanation is that they had a fight, alpha male versus alpha male. But fights don’t come out of nowhere. JonBee was clearly reacting to something in Cesar. Before he fought, he sniffed and explored and watched Cesar – the last of which is most important, because everything we know about dogs suggests that, in a way that is true of almost no other animals, dogs are students of human movement.
The anthropologist Brian Hare has done experiments with dogs, for example, where he puts a piece of food under one of two cups, placed several feet apart. The dog knows that there is food to be had, but has no idea which of the cups holds the prize. Then Hare points at the right cup, taps on it, looks directly at it. What happens? The dog goes to the right cup virtually every time. Yet when Hare did the same experiment with chimpanzees – an animal that shares 98.6 percent of our genes – the chimps couldn’t get it right. A dog will look at you for help, and a chimp won’t.
“Primates are very good at using the cues of the same species,” Hare explained. “So if we were able to do a similar game, and it was a chimp or another primate giving a social cue, they might do better. But they are not good at using human cues when you are trying to cooperate with them. They don’t get it: ‘Why would you ever tell me where the food is?’ The key specialization of dogs, though, is that dogs pay attention to humans, when humans are doing something very human, which is sharing information about something that someone else might actually want.” Dogs aren’t smarter than chimps; they just have a different attitude toward people. “Dogs are really interested in humans,” Hare went on. “ Interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball.”
A dog cares, deeply, which way your body is leaning. Forward or backward? Forward can be seen as aggressive; backward – even a quarter of an inch – means nonthreatening. It means you’ve relinquished what ethologists call an intention movement to proceed forward. Cock your head, even slightly, to the side, and a dog is disarmed. Look at him straight on and he’ll read it like a red flag. Standing straight, with your shoulders squared, rather than slumped, can mean the difference between whether your dog obeys a command or ignores it. Breathing even and deeply – rather than holding your breath – can mean the difference between defusing a tense situation and igniting it. “I think they are looking at our eyes and where our eyes are looking, and what our eyes look like,” the ethologist Patricia McConnell, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says. “A rounded eye with a dilated pupil is a sign of high arousal and aggression in a dog. I believe they pay a tremendous amount of attention to how relaxed our face is and how relaxed our facial muscles are, because that’s a big cue for them with each other. Is the jaw relaxed? Is the mouth slightly open? And then the arms. They pay a tremendous amount of attention to where our arms go.”
In the book The Other End of the Leash, McConnell decodes one of the most common of all human-dog interactions – the meeting between two leashed animals on a walk. To us, it’s about one dog sizing up another. To her, it’s about two dogs sizing up each other after first sizing up their respective owners. The owners “are often anxious about how well the dogs will get along,” she writes, “and if you watch them instead of the dogs, you’ll often notice that the humans will hold their breath and round their eyes and mouths in an ‘on alert’ expression. Since these behaviors are expressions of offensive aggression in canine culture, I suspect that the humans are unwittingly signaling tension. If you exaggerate this by tightening the leash, as many owners do, you can actually cause the dogs to attack each other. Think of it: the dogs are in a tense social encounter, surrounded by support from their own pack, with the humans forming a tense, staring, breathless circle around them. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen dogs shift their eyes toward their owner’s frozen faces, and then launch growling at the other dog.”
When Cesar walked down the stairs of Patrice and Scott’s home, then, and crouched down in the backyard, JonBee looked at him, intently. And what he saw was someone who moved in a very particular way. Cesar is fluid. “He’s beautifully organized intraphysically,” Karen Bradley, who heads the graduate dance program at the University of Maryland, said when she first saw tapes of Cesar in action. “That lower-unit organization – I wonder whether he was a soccer player.” Movement experts like Bradley use something called Laban Movement Analysis to make sense of movement, describing, for instance, how people shift their weight, or how fluid and symmetrical they are when they move, or what kind of effort it involves. Is it direct or indirect – that is, what kind of attention does the movement convey? Is it quick or slow? Is it strong or light – that is, what is its intention? Is it bound or free – that is, how much precision is involved? If you want to emphasize a point, you might bring your hand down across your body in a single, smooth motion. But how you make that motion greatly affects how your point will be interpreted by your audience. Ideally, your hand would come down in an explosive, bound movement – that is, with accelerating force, ending abruptly and precisely – and your head and shoulders would descend simultaneously, so posture and gesture would be in harmony. Suppose, though, that your head and shoulders moved upward as your hand came down, or your hand came down in a free, implosive manner – that is, with a kind of a vague, decelerating force. Now your movement suggests that you are making a point on which we all agree, which is the opposite of your intention. Combinations of posture and gesture are called phrasing, and the great communicators are those who match their phrasing with their communicative intentions – who understand, for instance, that emphasis requires them to be bound and explosive. To Bradley, Cesar had beautiful phrasing.
There he is, talking to Patrice and Scott. He has his hands in front of him, in what Laban analysts call the sagittal plane – that is, the area directly in front of and behind the torso. He then leans forward for emphasis. But as he does, he lowers his hands to waist level, and draws them toward his body, to counterbalance the intrusion of his posture. And, when he leans backward again, the hands rise up, to fill the empty space. It’s not the kind of thing you’d ever notice. But, when it’s pointed out, its emotional meaning is unmistakable. It is respectful and reassuring. It communicates without being intrusive. Bradley was watching Cesar with the sound off, and there was one sequence she returned to again and again, in which Cesar was talking to a family, and his right hand swung down in a graceful arc across his chest. “He’s dancing,” Bradley said. “Look at that. It’s gorgeous. It’s such a gorgeous little dance.
“The thing is, his phrases are of mixed length,” she went on. “Some of them are long. Some of them are very short. Some of them are explosive phrases, loaded up in the beginning and then trailing off. Some of them are impactive – building up, and then coming to a sense of impact at the end. What they are is appropriate to the task. That’s what I mean by versatile.”
Movement analysts tend to like watching, say, Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan; they had great phrasing. George W. Bush does not. During this year’s State of the Union address, Bush spent the entire speech swaying metronomically, straight down through his lower torso, a movement underscored, unfortunately, by the presence of a large vertical banner behind him. “Each shift ended with this focus that channels toward a particular place in the audience,” Bradley said. She mimed, perfectly, the Bush gaze – the squinty, fixated look he reserves for moments of great solemnity – and gently swayed back and forth. “It’s a little primitive, a little regressed.” The combination of the look, the sway, and the gaze was, to her mind, distinctly adolescent. When people say of Bush that he seems eternally boyish, this is in part what they’re referring to. He moves like a boy, which is fine, except that, unlike such movement masters as Reagan and Clinton, he can’t stop moving like a boy when the occasion demands a more grown-up response.
“Mostly what we see in the normal population is undifferentiated phrasing,” Bradley said. “And then you have people who are clearly preferential in their phrases, like my husband. He’s Mr. Horizontal. When he’s talking in a meeting, he’s back. He’s open. He just goes into this, this same long thing” – she leaned back, and spread her arms out wide and slowed her speech – “and it doesn’t change very much. He works with people who understand him, fortunately.” She laughed. “When we meet someone like this” – she nodded at Cesar, on the television screen – “what do we do? We give them their own TV series. Seriously. We reward them. We are drawn to them, because we can trust that we can get the message. It’s not going to be hidden. It contributes to a feeling of authenticity.”
4.
Back to JonBee, from the beginning – only this time with the sound off. Cesar walks down the stairs. It’s not the same Cesar who whistled and brought forty-seven dogs to attention. This occasion calls for subtlety. “Did you see the way he walks? He drops his hands. They’re close to his side.” The analyst this time was Suzi Tortora, the author of The Dancing Dialogue. Tortora is a New York dance-movement psychotherapist, a tall, lithe woman with long dark hair and beautiful phrasing. She was in her office on lower Broadway, a large, empty, paneled room. “He’s very vertical,” Tortora said. “His legs are right under his torso. He’s not taking up any space. And he slows down his gait. He’s telling the dog, ‘I’m here by myself. I’m not going to rush. I haven’t introduced myself yet. Here I am. You can feel me.’” Cesar crouches down next to JonBee. His body is perfectly symmetrical, the center of gravity low. He looks stable, as though you couldn’t knock him over, which conveys a sense of calm.
JonBee was investigating Cesar, squirming nervously. When JonBee got too jumpy, Cesar would correct him, with a tug on the leash. Because Cesar was talking and the correction was so subtle, it was easy to miss. Stop. Rewind. Play. “Do you see how rhythmic it is?” Tortora said. “He pulls. He waits. He pulls. He waits. He pulls. He waits. The phrasing is so lovely. It’s predictable. To a dog that is all over the place, he’s bringing a rhythm. But it isn’t a panicked rhythm. It has a moderate tempo to it. There was room to wander. And it’s not attack, attack. It wasn’t long and sustained. It was quick and light. I would bet that with dogs like this, where people are so afraid of them being aggressive and so defensive around them, there is a lot of aggressive strength directed at them. There is no aggression here. He’s using strength without it being aggressive.”
Cesar moves into the living room. The fight begins. “Look how he involves the dog,” Tortora said. “He’s letting the dog lead. He’s giving the dog room.” This was not a Secret Service agent wrestling an assailant to the ground. Cesar had his body vertical, and his hand high above JonBee holding the leash, and, as JonBee turned and snapped and squirmed and spun and jumped and lunged and struggled, Cesar seemed to be moving along with him, providing a loose structure for his aggression. It may have looked like a fight, but Cesar wasn’t fighting. And what was JonBee doing? Child psychologists talk about the idea of regulation. If you expose healthy babies, repeatedly, to a very loud noise, eventually they will be able to fall asleep. They’ll become habituated to the noise: the first time the noise is disruptive, but, by the second or third time, they’ve learned to handle the disruption, and block it out. They’ve regulated themselves. Children throwing tantrums are said to be in a state of dysregulation. They’ve been knocked off kilter in some way, and cannot bring themselves back to baseline. JonBee was dysregulated. He wasn’t fighting; he was throwing a tantrum. And Cesar was the understanding parent. When JonBee paused, to catch his breath, Cesar paused with him. When JonBee bit Cesar, Cesar brought his finger to his mouth, instinctively, but in a smooth and fluid and calm motion that betrayed no anxiety. “Timing is a big part of Cesar’s repertoire,” Tortora went on. “His movements right now aren’t complex. There aren’t a lot of efforts together at one time. His range of movement qualities is limited. Look at how he’s narrowing. Now he’s enclosing.” As JonBee calmed down, Cesar began caressing him. His touch was firm but not aggressive; not so strong as to be abusive and not so light as to be insubstantial and irritating. Using the language of movement – the plainest and most transparent of all languages – Cesar was telling JonBee that he was safe. Now JonBee was lying on his side, mouth relaxed, tongue out. “Look at that, look at the dog’s face,” Tortora said. This was not defeat; this was relief.
Later, when Cesar tried to show Scott how to placate JonBee, Scott couldn’t do it, and Cesar made him stop. “You’re still nervous,” Cesar told him. “You are still unsure. That’s how you become a target.” It isn’t as easy as it sounds to calm a dog. “There, there” in a soothing voice, accompanied by a nice belly scratch, wasn’t enough for JonBee, because he was reading gesture and posture and symmetry and the precise meaning of touch. He was looking for clarity and consistency. Scott didn’t have it. “Look at the tension and aggression in his face,” Tortora said, when the camera turned to Scott. It was true. Scott had a long and craggy face, with high, wide cheekbones and pronounced lips, and his movements were taut and twitchy. “There’s a bombardment of actions, quickness combined with tension, a quality in how he is using his eyes and focus – a darting,” Tortora said. “He gesticulates in a way that is complex. There is a lot going on. So many different qualities of movement happening at the same time. It leads those who watch him to get distracted.” Scott is a character actor, with a list of credits going back thirty years. The tension and aggression in his manner made him interesting and complicated – which works for Hollywood but doesn’t work for a troubled dog. Scott said he loved JonBee, but the quality of his movement did not match his emotions.
For a number of years, Tortora has worked with Eric (not his real name), an autistic boy with severe language and communication problems. Tortora videotaped some of their sessions, and in one, four months after they started to work together, Eric is standing in the middle of Tortora’s studio in Cold Spring, New York, a beautiful dark-haired three-and-a-half-year-old wearing only a diaper. His mother is sitting to the side, against the wall. In the background, you can hear the sound track to Riverdance, which happens to be Eric’s favorite album. Eric is having a tantrum.
He gets up and runs toward the stereo. Then he runs back and throws himself down on his stomach, arms and legs flailing. Tortora throws herself down on the ground, just as he did. He sits up. She sits up. He twists. She twists. He squirms. She squirms. “When Eric is running around, I didn’t say, ‘Let’s put on quiet music.’ I can’t turn him off, because he can’t turn off,” Tortora said. “He can’t go from zero to sixty and then back down to zero. With a typical child, you might say, ‘Take a deep breath. Reason with me’ – and that might work. But not with children like this. They are in their world by themselves. I have to go in there and meet them and bring them back out.”
Tortora sits up on her knees, and faces Eric. His legs are moving in every direction, and she takes his feet in her hands. Slowly, and subtly, she begins to move his legs in time with the music. Eric gets up and runs to the corner of the room and back again. Tortora gets up and mirrors his action, but this time she moves more fluidly and gracefully than he did. She takes his feet again. This time, she moves Eric’s entire torso, opening the pelvis in a contralateral twist. “I’m standing above him, looking directly at him. I am very symmetrical. So I’m saying to him, ‘I’m stable. I’m here. I’m calm.’ I’m holding him at the knees and giving him sensory input. It’s firm and clear. Touch is an incredible tool. It’s another way to speak.”
She starts to rock his knees from side to side. Eric begins to calm down. He begins to make slight adjustments to the music. His legs move more freely, more lyrically. His movement is starting to get organized. He goes back into his mother’s arms. He’s still upset, but his cry has softened. Tortora sits and faces him – stable, symmetrical, direct eye contact.
His mother says, “You need a tissue?”
Eric nods.
Tortora brings him a tissue. Eric’s mother says that she needs a tissue. Eric gives his tissue to his mother.
“Can we dance?” Tortora asks him.
“OK,” he says in a small voice.
It was impossible to see Tortora with Eric and not think of Cesar with JonBee: here was the same extraordinary energy and intelligence and personal force marshaled on behalf of the helpless, the same calm in the face of chaos, and, perhaps most surprising, the same gentleness. When we talk about people with presence, we often assume that they have a strong personality – that they sweep us all up in their own personal whirlwind. Our model is the Pied Piper, who played his irresistible tune and every child in Hamelin blindly followed. But Cesar Millan and Suzi Tortora play different tunes, in different situations. And they don’t turn their back, and expect others to follow. Cesar let JonBee lead; Tortora’s approaches to Eric were dictated by Eric. Presence is not just versatile; it’s also reactive. Certain people, we say, “command our attention,” but the verb is all wrong. There is no commanding, only soliciting. The dogs in the dog run wanted someone to tell them when to start and stop; they were refugees from anarchy and disorder. Eric wanted to enjoy Riverdance. It was his favorite music. Tortora did not say, “Let us dance.” She asked, “Can we dance?”
Then Tortora gets a drum and starts to play. Eric’s mother stands up and starts to circle the room, in an Irish step dance. Eric is lying on the ground, and slowly his feet start to tap in time with the music. He gets up. He walks to the corner of the room, disappears behind a partition, and then reenters, triumphant. He begins to dance, playing an imaginary flute as he circles the room.
5.
When Cesar was twenty-one, he traveled from his hometown to Tijuana, and a “coyote” took him across the border for a hundred dollars. They waited in a hole, up to their chests in water, and then ran over the mudflats, through a junkyard, and across a freeway. A taxi took him to San Diego. After a month on the streets, grimy and dirty, he walked into a dog-grooming salon and got a job, working with the difficult cases and sleeping in the offices at night. He moved to Los Angeles, and took a day job detailing limousines while he ran his dog-psychology business out of a white Chevy Astrovan. When he was twenty-three, he fell in love with an American girl named Illusion. She was seventeen, small, dark, and very beautiful. A year later, they got married.
“Cesar was a machoistic, egocentric person who thought the world revolved around him,” Illusion recalled, of their first few years together. “His view was that marriage was where a man tells a woman what to do. Never give affection. Never give compassion or understanding. Marriage is about keeping the man happy, and that’s where it ends.”
Early in their marriage, Illusion got sick, and was in the hospital for three weeks. “Cesar visited once, for less than two hours,” she said. “I thought to myself, This relationship is not working out. He just wanted to be with his dogs.” They had a new baby and no money. They separated. Illusion told Cesar that she would divorce him if he didn’t get into therapy. He agreed, reluctantly. “The therapist’s name was Wilma,” Illusion went on. “ She was a strong African American woman. She said, ‘You want your wife to take care of you, to clean the house. Well, she wants something, too. She wants your affection and love.’” Illusion remembers Cesar scribbling furiously on a pad. “He wrote that down. He said, ‘That’s it! It’s like the dogs. They need exercise, discipline, and affection.’” Illusion laughed. “I looked at him, upset, because why the hell are you talking about your dogs when you should be talking about us?”
“I was fighting it,” Cesar said. “Two women against me, blah, blah, blah. I had to get rid of the fight in my mind. That was very difficult. But that’s when the lightbulb came on. Women have their own psychology.”
Cesar could calm a stray off the street, yet, at least in the beginning, he did not grasp the simplest of truths about his own wife. “Cesar related to dogs because he didn’t feel connected to people,” Illusion said. “His dogs were his way of feeling like he belonged in the world, because he wasn’t people-friendly. And it was hard for him to get out of that.” In Mexico, on his grandfather’s farm, dogs were dogs and humans were humans: each knew its place. But in America, dogs were treated like children, and owners had shaken up the hierarchy of human and animal. Sugar’s problem was Lynda. JonBee’s problem was Scott. Cesar calls that epiphany in the therapist’s office the most important moment in his life, because it was the moment when he understood that to succeed in the world he could not be just a dog whisperer. He needed to be a people whisperer.
For his show, Cesar once took a case involving a Chihuahua named Bandit. Bandit had a large, rapper-style diamond-encrusted necklace around his neck spelling “Stud.” His owner was Lori, a voluptuous woman with an oval face and large, pleading eyes. Bandit was out of control, terrorizing guests and menacing other dogs. Three trainers had failed to get him under control.
Lori was on the couch in her living room as she spoke to Cesar. Bandit was sitting in her lap. Her teenage son, Tyler, was sitting next to her.
“About two weeks after his first visit with the vet, he started to lose a lot of hair,” Lori said. “They said that he had Demodex mange.” Bandit had been sold to her as a show-quality dog, she recounted, but she had the bloodline checked and learned that he had come from a puppy mill. “He didn’t have any human contact,” she went on. “So for three months he was getting dipped every week to try to get rid of the symptoms.” As she spoke, her hands gently encased Bandit. “He would hide inside my shirt and lay his head right by my heart, and stay there.” Her eyes were moist. “He was right here on my chest.”
“So your husband cooperated?” Cesar asked. He was focused on Lori, not on Bandit. This is what the new Cesar understood that the old Cesar did not.
“He was our baby. He was in need of being nurtured and helped and he was so scared all the time.”
“Do you still feel the need of feeling sorry about him?”
“Yeah. He’s so cute.”
Cesar seemed puzzled. He didn’t know why Lori would still feel sorry for her dog.
Lori tried to explain. “He’s so small and he’s helpless.”
“But do you believe that he feels helpless?”
Lori still had her hands over the dog, stroking him. Tyler was looking at Cesar, and then at his mother, and then down at Bandit. Bandit tensed. Tyler reached over to touch the dog, and Bandit leaped out of Lori’s arms and attacked him, barking and snapping and growling. Tyler, startled, jumped back. Lori, alarmed, reached out, and – this was the critical thing – put her hands around Bandit in a worried, caressing motion, and lifted him back into her lap. It happened in an instant.
Cesar stood up. “Give me the space,” he said, gesturing for Tyler to move aside. “Enough dogs attacking humans, and humans not really blocking him, so he is only becoming more narcissistic. It is all about him. He owns you.” Cesar was about as angry as he ever gets. “It seems like you are favoring the dog, and hopefully that is not the truth… If Tyler kicked the dog, you would correct him. The dog is biting your son, and you are not correcting hard enough.” Cesar was in emphatic mode now, his phrasing sure and unambiguous. “I don’t understand why you are not putting two and two together.”
Bandit was nervous. He started to back up on the couch. He started to bark. Cesar gave him a look out of the corner of his eye. Bandit shrank. Cesar kept talking. Bandit came at Cesar. Cesar stood up. “I have to touch,” he said, and he gave Bandit a sharp nudge with his elbow. Lori looked horrifed.
Cesar laughed, incredulously. “You are saying that it is fair for him to touch us but not fair for us to touch him?” he asked. Lori leaned forward to object. “You don’t like that, do you?” Cesar said, in his frustration speaking to the whole room now. “It’s not going to work. This is a case that is not going to work, because the owner doesn’t want to allow what you normally do with your kids… The hardest part for me is that the father or mother chooses the dog instead of the son. That’s hard for me. I love dogs. I’m the dog whisperer. You follow what I’m saying? But I would never choose a dog over my son.”
He stopped. He had had enough of talking. There was too much talking anyhow. People saying “I love you” with a touch that didn’t mean “I love you.” People saying “There, there” with gestures that did not soothe. People saying “I’m your mother” while reaching out to a Chihuahua instead of their own flesh and blood. Tyler looked stricken. Lori shifted nervously in her seat. Bandit growled. Cesar turned to the dog and said “Sh-h-h.” And everyone was still.
May 22, 2006
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