With a sales technique honed as a sidewalk hustler, hypnotic TV pitchman Ron Popeil made a fortune hawking such offbeat yet oddly clever contraptions as the Veg-O-Matic and Mr. Microphone.
As he pioneered, in the middle of the 20th century, what became known as the infomercial, both Popeil and his fervently promoted products became part of the pop-culture landscape.
Popeil died “suddenly and peacefully” Wednesday at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his family said in a statement. He was 86. No cause of death was given.
Infomercials, the immediate forebears of home-shopping channels and, beyond them, the content marketing techniques of the 21st century, were where Popeil, an American original who gave the world the word “Ronco” thrived.
America has always been smitten by both high-spirited inventors and yarn-spinning salesmen. Popeil was both, amplified by the airwaves into millions of homes. He was a gadget innovator like his father, yes, but a popularizer as well, a man who intuited consumers’ common-sense needs, then found accessible ways to entice them into making purchases.
He titled his 1996 memoir “Salesman of the Century,” and he was a 20th-century man to the core, a cultural descendant of both Thomas Edison and P.T. Barnum. He was a guy whose “As Seen On TV” commercials in the 1970s, from the astonishingly wireless Mr. Microphone to the Popeil Pocket Fisherman to the Rhinestone & Stud Setter, became pop-culture touchstones — because he managed to both come up with them and become their public face for the television-soaked generation we now call X.
He was CEO, sales rep and user-in-chief rolled into one. Be it the Showtime Rotisserie (“Set it and forget it”), the Food Dehydrator or aerosol cans of GLH-9 (“GLH” being short for “great-looking hair”), he was right there, barking out its virtues to us in the 1980s and 1990s as we lay in our beds and contemplated turning off the TV. He edited his own infomercials, scrawled out his own cue cards, wrote the copy for his “operators standing by.”
He would call his babies by affectionate names (The Popeil Electric Pasta-Sausage Maker became, simply, “Pasta-Sausage”), and he was known to say things like, “I created the jerky category.” Now and then he would drift into Shatner-style staccato to make his points: “A child! Can make! Homemade sausages!” he was found shouting on QVC one night in 1997.
But wait — there’s more. As 20th century as he was — a Chicago open-market barker who used TV to propel himself toward success — he also saw the possibilities that were just ahead and are now playing out in the fragmented 21st century, an era when all media blends into one big glop and advertising becomes content, then becomes advertising again.
One chief reason for Popeil’s ubiquity became evident when people decided to poke fun at him — because he chose, craftily and strategically, to always be in on the joke.
When Dan Aykroyd sent him up on “Saturday Night Live” in 1976 with the “Bass-O-Matic” commercial parody, Popeil realized it was free publicity, just as he did when “Weird Al” Yankovic recorded a parody song. Years later, Popeil guest-starred as himself on various TV shows from “The X Files” to the animated “The Simpsons” and “King of the Hill.”
Most prominently, though, he cheerfully gave away his infomercial content to moviemakers looking for something to be playing on TV in the background of their films. In this way did he extend his reputation for ubiquity — and his growing wink-nudge pop-culture brand — for free, with no effort at all. Others did the work, and he got the eyeballs.
Even after success, bankruptcy and a second chapter of success, Popeil insisted that his drive to invent was more than mercantile; it was, he said, a bit obsessive. “I have enough money today,” he told this reporter for a 1997 Associated Press profile. “But I can’t stop. If there’s a need for these things, I can’t help myself.”
In that profile, Popeil demonstrated how “GLH-9” (hair in a can) was doing on the bald spot on the back of his scalp after several hours, some of them under a shopping channel’s blistering lights. What didn’t make it into the story was that Popeil exhorted the visiting journalist: “Touch it! It even feels real.” The journalist did, and it did — sort of.
Interludes like that — in-person interactions that felt like moments in an infomercial — help explain the reverse: moments in his infomercials that felt like in-person interactions. Those were Popeil’s stock in trade. The best performers — and that cohort includes the best salespeople — can make you feel as if they’re not performing at all.
Years before he sold his company, Ronco, for $55 million in 2005, Popeil — pronounced “poh-PEEL” — insisted he had moved more than $1 billion worth of merchandise.
“What Henry Ford was to industrial strength and genius, Ron Popeil is to the next generation of American ingenuity,” Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University once told the Associated Press. “People 100 years from now are going to be writing dissertations on him.”
Without Popeil, “there’d be no home shopping channels, no ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up’ Medic Alert gadgets, no Clapper,” John Mingo, editor of “The Whole Pop Catalog,” told USA Today in 1993.
Ronald Martin Popeil was born May 3, 1935, in the Bronx. When he was 3, his parents divorced and essentially abandoned him.
“I don’t like to talk about my family. It wasn’t very homey,” he said more than once.
Popeil and his older brother spent their early years at a boarding school in upstate New York. Relatives never visited, he later said.
His paternal grandparents claimed the brothers when Ron was about 7, and they lived with an aunt in Florida before moving to Chicago with their grandparents when Popeil was 13.
But his childhood remained unhappy. His grandparents fought constantly and his grandfather was mean, Popeil later said.
In Chicago, Popeil began discovering his family heritage while working weekends at Popeil Brothers, founded by his father and an uncle in 1939.
The father he barely knew was Samuel Popeil, a descendant of sidewalk hustlers and manufacturer of kitchenware. He also came up with such gadgets as the original Veg-O-Matic and Pocket Fisherman.
On Chicago’s gritty Maxwell Street, Popeil turned to selling his father’s inventions and found he had an affinity for it.
“Through sales I could escape from poverty and the miserable existence I had with my grandparents,” Popeil wrote in his autobiography. “I had lived for 16 years in a home without love, and now I had finally found a form of affection and a human connection through sales.”
As a teen out on his own, Popeil peddled wares in the flagship Woolworth’s downtown, doing as many as six demonstrations in an hour.
“He was mesmerizing,” Mel Korey, his first business partner, told the New Yorker in 2000. “There were secretaries who would take their lunch break at Woolworth’s to watch him because he was so good-looking.”
After dropping out of the University of Illinois after 18 months, Popeil worked the fair circuit. He claimed he cleared $1,000 a week, a fortune in the 1950s, and did it by talking 10 to 12 hours a day, almost nonstop.
When a friend told him that he could produce a commercial for about $500 at a Tampa, Florida, television station, Popeil made a two-minute spot in the mid-1950s for the Ronco Spray Gun, a high-pressure nozzle that was one of the few products he sold that he did not help create.
He bought whatever time he could find cheaply on local television stations and sales soared.
“TV made the way for me,” Popeil told Inc.com magazine in 2009. “It put me in the big world.”
A few years later, he starred in and filmed another commercial for the Chop-O-Matic — another product invented by his father.
The Chop-O-Matic was so successful that it led to the reimagined Veg-O-Matic, which was largely responsible for sales growing from $200,000 to $8.8 million in just four years, according to Popeil’s memoir. Yet he insisted his relationship with his father always remained strictly business.
The first contraption that Popeil created himself was the smokeless ashtray. After noticing the need to cover his own bald spot, he came up with a spray formula to cover thinning hair and baldness and named it GLH for “great looking hair.”
For some time, he and his father ran separate public companies that sold similar merchandise.
When his father died at 69 in 1984, his obituary in the Los Angeles Times noted that his second wife, Eloise, had been convicted of trying to have him murdered. After she served a 19-month sentence, the elder Popeil remarried her.
The younger Popeil, who was married four times, admitted to spending too much time on business.
As of 1970, he was worth about $13 million. A recession in the early 1980s affected sales and creditors forced the company to liquidate in 1984.
When Ronco’s trademarks and inventory were auctioned off a few years later, Popeil bought them back for about $2 million.
He launched his return to television in the 1990s as a born-again practitioner of the 30-minute infomercial, which had mainly been developed during his absence. Popeil sold food hydrators and pasta makers — and claimed to make more money than ever.
When he sold Ronco in 2005, he said he wanted to spend more time with his two young daughters. He also committed himself to developing what he said would be his last kitchen gadget, a deep fryer for turkeys.
Popeil is survived by his fourth wife, Robin, whom he married in 1995, and five daughters.