What the Dog Saw [9]
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