Chew on this, Ms. Clinton.
That nasty stuff you sputtered about staying home and baking cookies?
We`ve got someone we`d like you to meet.
She`s 35. She`s Miss Marine World beautiful. She`s married, with five little girls, the polite kind, mind you, the kind who when they tag along with Mommy for a day say they`re ”so sorry!” when they accidentally stick their white patent leather shoe in her carrot cake and then thank her for ”the best sandwich I ever ate” even though, just moments before, they`d discovered a long curly blond hair in that turkey-and-cream-cheese and exclaimed, ”Mother, that`s not my hair, it was in the sandwich!”
And guess what she does for a living, Hillary? A big living. A $136-million-a-year living.
She bakes cookies! She yanks no fewer than 150 million of `em out of the oven every year. Here`s her recipe: She dumps $2 million worth of chocolate chips into $800,000 worth of butter mixed with $500,000 worth of sugar, $250,000 worth of flour and another $250,000 worth of pecans and walnuts and macadamia nuts each year. This is one rich cookie.
Her name, Ms. Clinton, is Mrs. Fields. She has a first name too. It`s Debbi, with a heart instead of a dot over the ”i.”
And America, or at least the haute-cookie-chomping population, loves her. Chicago, as determined during a recent day at her very high heels, definitely does.
First, from the frozen food aisle of the Jewel grocery store at Clark and Division Streets, where just last week the 5-foot-6 1/2, 113-pound Mrs. Fields was plying her adoring public with warm-going-down cookies and cookie-dough-studded ice cream, the latest addition to her ever-expanding menu of waist-expanders, just now being stocked in grocery freezers around the country.
This from Shirley Barnslater, 34, a resident of the Mark Twain Hotel on West Division Street, who was beside herself at the sight of this famous person in the flesh, squealing and shrieking right there in the frozen food aisle:
”Get outta here! You know what, I can`t pass your store without going in. Freddy, would you come over here and check this out? This is Mrs. Fields. I thought Mrs. Fields was an old lady with wrinkles and little glasses.”
No, there are no wrinkles, and there are no little glasses. Instead there are inch-long, fire-engine red fingernails, a delicate gold ankle chain, black hose, 2 1/2-inch black patent leather heels and a tight black skirt that rides 1 inch shorter than her red baker`s apron. (The short skirt is an old habit;
the nuns back at Bishop O`Dowd High School in East Oakland were forever making her kneel to check the hem on a uniform that insisted on drifting 2 inches above the mandatory no-show kneecap.)
And, from the corner of Rush and Oak Streets, where, in the red-and-white polka dot bakery that bears her name, Mrs. Fields whirled through the lunch hour feeding oatmeal-raisin-walnut cookies to a toothless lady sitting alone in the corner, coaxing construction workers to nibble on one of her Brownies
`n` Fudge ice cream bars and causing a block-long stir among the ladies-who-shop who put away their credit cards long enough to stroll in from Oak Street, slide their sunglasses down their noses and check out the real, live Mrs. Fields.
Colin Middleditch, a white-mopped boulevardier who calls himself the Mayor of Oak Street and tends to the tonsorial needs of the street as proprietor of Colin of London, a barbershop sans red-white-and-blue pole, was moved to kiss the hand of the cookie baker.
”She`s a great institution. She`s an American wonder,” he exclaimed, as the wonder whirled away.
Desperation cookies
It was like this all day. Didn`t matter to Mrs. Fields whether it was the lady shuffling through the Jewel in her bronze-colored house slippers, pink sponge rollers and chartreuse fingernails; the security guard at NBC Tower;
Jim the repairman from Lake Shore Refrigeration; the fruit vendor from State Street; the sales clerk behind the counter at Petrossian caviar ($59 for just over an ounce); the Chicago Police Department crossing guard; the senior executive vice president of JMB Realty; the little old lady who`d bruised her chin; the mother cradling a 2-month-old baby; or the doorman at the Ritz-Carlton.
Mrs. Fields could talk up a storm with all of them. Not like some millionaire cookie mogul. Just like this really nice lady from down the block who`d asked them all over, one at a time, for ice cream and cookies hot from the oven. And that, you might already have heard, is just about how her story goes.
Before she was Mrs. Fields, she was Debbi Sivyer, the youngest of five girls who grew up in a pink stucco house with a concrete yard in East Oakland. Her father was a welder in the Navy yards. Her mother stayed home. There wasn`t much money.
The future Mrs. Fields didn`t wait long to get into the kitchen. Tollhouse cookies were her claim. She did it out of desperation, she says.
”My mother`s idea of steak was fried flank steak-for about an hour. And broccoli cooked for about two hours. So I made chocolate chip cookies.” It was a novel sensation: taste.
Soon she started on jobs that made for one ”incredible resume,” just the sort of thing mortgage bankers like to peruse when they`re considering extending loans for tens of thousands of dollars.
At 13, she was the foul-line girl for the Oakland A`s. She wore short shorts and couldn`t catch a ball. At 15, she was the store elf at Mervyn`s department store. She wore tights and little elf boots with toes that turned up. At 17 she was Miss Marine World. She wore a bathing suit and skidded through the water clinging to the fins of Spock, the star dolphin.
When she was 18, she was standing at a pay phone in the Denver airport, grounded on the way home from a ski trip. Along came a ”strange guy wearing a blue polyester suit and an enormous blue tie.” She tried to pretend she was engrossed in a phone call. The guy with the tie would not go away.
His opening line: ”Hi, I`m neither a murderer or a rapist, and I`d love to talk to you.” His credentials: From his briefcase he pulled photocopies of articles about him in Time and Newsweek. He was some kind of financial whiz kid from Stanford. Not yet 30, he was already big with the Fortune 100 crowd. Unimpressed, she was more than a little relieved when her plane`s departure was announced. He wanted her number. She said it was in the book. The phone rang at 7:30 the next morning. It was him. It was also him at 8, 8:30 and 9. Mrs. Sivyer woke her daughter at the 9 o`clock call. This guy, Randy Fields, was persistent.
Less than a year later, Mrs. Sivyer`s daughter was Mrs. Fields.
The final blow
Then came the hard part. As she puts it: ”Randy`s approach to information is not unlike what happens when an aardvark discovers he`s on an ant hill. One colossal snort and it`s history.”
When you`re that kind of smart, all kinds of people want to pick your brain. So Mr. Fields was wined and dined by moneymakers all across the country, and Mrs. Fields came too. Only she hadn`t gone to college, and she didn`t have much to talk about with people who lived on big estates with all kinds of servants running around. It was no secret to her that she was considered ”a blond nothing of a wife who tagged along wherever he went,”
she says.
The final blow came in the New Jersey home of Sandy Lewis, the arbitrageur who had overseen the American Express acquisition of Shearson Loeb Rhoades. Before dinner, Lewis pelted her with questions. Finally, in an exasperated tone, he asked, ”What do you intend to do with your life?” A nervous wreck, Mrs. Fields blurted: ”Well, I`m mostly trying to get orientated.” Lewis stood up, grabbed a dictionary from one of the ceiling-high book cases and threw it in his guest`s lap. ”The word,” he said,
”is oriented. There is no such word as orientated. Learn to use the English language.”
”I owe my life to the world `orientated,` ” says Mrs. Fields now.
She went back to California, hell-bent on breaking out of the blond-nothing-of-a-wife role. She decided cookies would be her ticket out. Chocolate chip cookies. The very ones she`d been improving upon since she was 13 years old, when she set aside money from her Oakland A`s job to buy butter instead of margarine for the family tollhouse cookies.
What a dumb idea, said everyone except her husband. Even the banker who gave the Fieldses their first loan for a storefront in an old market in Palo Alto took Mr. Fields aside and whispered conspiratorially that when the business went under, the loss of the $50,000 down payment would be a
”terrific tax shelter.”
The beginning of a legend
That was 15 years, 741 stores and more than 5,000 employees ago.
The very first morning, business was not brisk at Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chippery. No one came in the door. So by noon, Mrs. Fields called a neighbor, asked her to keep an eye on the cash register and took to the streets with a tray of cookies. No one wanted free cookies, so she started begging them to try just one. They tried. They liked. They bought. By the end of the day, Mrs. Fields counted $50 from cookie sales in her till.
So began the legend of the lady who gave away her cookies. The more she gave away, the more the business grew. Find that in the economics books.
But then, this is not a CEO who gets her ideas from books. She gets them in the kitchen of her home in Woodland, Utah, just outside Park City, where the Fieldses moved their family and their company in 1980 because it seemed a healthier place than California to raise a brood. Saturday is experiment time, when she and the girls pull out the mixing bowls and measuring cups, whipping up even the occasional flops-malted milk ball cookies, a flop in point-that never make it out the kitchen door.
And she gets ideas in the middle of the night. Admittedly stricken with a ”sickness for details,” it is not unusual for Mrs. Fields to hit the phones once her girls are tucked in bed. Tim Malson, the company`s Chicago-based regional director of operations, says he has gone to sleep with everything under control only to awake at 5 a.m. and find 14 phone-mail messages from Mrs. F. He`s not complaining.
”Debbi`s our corporate culture. She`s our spirit. She`s a tireless worker. Last month in Denver, we were both there 15, 16 hours making sandwiches” in one of the newer Mrs. Fields bakeries, Malson says. ”There`s this mystique about her. The first time I met her at a meeting in Park City, she just lit up the room. It`s her energy. People come up to me all the time, pull me aside and ask, `Is she always like this?` She is.”
Take the job interview at Mrs. Fields. Don`t worry about sending your suit to the cleaner-just remember to practice warbling in the shower. They make you sing ”Happy Birthday.” Loudly.
It is not an experience you`ll soon forget, says Malson, who experienced it five years ago when he came to Mrs. Fields from a company that stuck to the standard three-piece-suit-and-power-tie school of thinking.
”I`m sitting there in my three-piece suit, all ready to go. They tell me to put the apron on, go out and sample (pass out free) cookies. Within 10 minutes of my interview I was singing, standing in the middle of Stratford Square (in Bloomingdale), sampling Debra`s Specials, if you will.
”With Mrs. Fields, the overriding rule is, `Have fun.` Stop and think about it. If you can`t have fun selling a chocolate chip cookie to a kid, you can`t have fun.”
Without a doubt, the lady who wrote the rule is sticking to it. She`s still out working her sidewalks. Having the time of her life. Giving away whatever it takes to make a cookie lover a customer. She sees someone strolling by with a box of cookies from somewhere else. She makes a cookie trade, hers for theirs, right there on the spot. And throws in three extras to boot. ”See if you stop at the competition again!” she teases.
There`s no sign that this cookie is about to crumble, say industry analysts who track Mrs. Fields and remain impressed at her attention to detail and her husband`s attention to strategy. They`re gaining ground as they load their ice cream into freezer cases, their bakeries into supermarkets and their cookie dough onto United Airlines` overseas flights (where the buttery smell wafting from the galley ovens is sure to distract you from any inflight turbulence). Come October, they`re introducing this: Mrs. Fields cookie dough- to-go.
Hey, Hillary, you`re missing out on some fun, cookie.
