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—voila!—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.
