Diamonique is Kathy Levine’s best friend.
This may not be immediately apparent here, in Marshall Field’s downtown store, where Levine roams the wide aisles with the panache of the lunchtime department-store haunter she was in her previous life.
“Shape up, girls. Posture, posture,” she jokes with the women behind the Lauder cosmetics counter before helping herself to a little makeup refresher.
But Levine (pronounced le-VIN) has ridden her ability to hawk–everything from mock diamonds bearing a French-esque trade name to patterned sweaters to her own sparkling personality–to a surprising and burgeoning celebrity.
As QVC’s best-known host, lauded for her mom-next-door good humor and Popeilian pitchmanship in publications as diverse as Entertainment Weekly, the National Enquirer and The Wall Street Journal, Levine is a totem for a more sedentary brand of shopping, one involving a telephone, a television and a credit card. So accompanying her to Field’s for a story is a little like taking an ATM company executive out to wait in line for a bank teller.
But even amid merchandise that you can touch and try on before purchase, her instincts honed by nine years at cable’s QVC, the leading television home-shopping outlet, shine through.
Walk with her past the Field’s jewelry counters and hear her pronounce, “Here’s the CZ. Nice stuff.”
CZ, or cubic zirconium, is the non-QVC term for Diamonique, the network’s flagship product and one that Levine on air can practically embarrass you into buying: It’s exponentially cheaper than the real thing, after all, and you needn’t worry about insuring it.
Her own ears offer endorsement. They’re bebaubled with a pair of hefty Diamonique studs. “Eight carats total weight,” she says. “They’re known affectionately as `the killers.’ “
Listen to her in the fine china department as she sells a pair of Field’s customers on the idea of lending her their loaded shopping bags for a photograph. “I have an honest face,” she cajoles.
Upon returning the bag, she tells one of them, an Indiana man, “Thank you for your blind faith. Don’t do it again.” It’s a message the man’s wife has already delivered.
Hear her defend her brand of shopping amid a second-floor display of seemingly every conceivable variation on the sweater concept. “You walk into a place like this, you’re overwhelmed,” she says. “At least in our store, we tell you there’s going to be an hour of sweaters. Let’s see if there’s a salesperson.”
And watch her walk into a dressing room to try on a pair of dressy black shorts and come out trailing a fan, a dentist from Buffalo in town for a convention who was shocked to find herself sharing intimate space with one of home shopping’s first celebrities.
“Did you buy my book?” Levine asks her, selling even here, in someone else’s marketplace.
Nothing to hide
It’s the book that brings her to Chicago, an upbeat autobiography-cum-advice tome called “It’s Better to Laugh . . . Life, Good Luck, Bad Hair Days, and QVC” (Pocket Books, $23).
In it, she tells of her upbringing in Allentown, Pa., where she was the daughter of a periodontist (dad) and a fashion coordinator (mom), a “not-so-beautiful, not-so-brilliant, smart-ass Jewish girl,” she writes (with help from co-writer Jane Scovell).
After college, she taught Spanish, failed at that, then stumbled through a succession of other jobs that didn’t pique her interest. In 1986, she was working in sales for a Philadelphia hotel (and constantly sneaking off to Bonwit Teller) when a friend told her about a new company in nearby West Chester.
Mishearing her friend, she wrote to “QBC” and got a call anyway. They were hiring telephone operators, but Levine talked her way into an audition for an on-air spot. She had to sell a telephone and a pencil.
“Imagine how Alexander Graham Bell’s mother felt when he informed her he wasn’t going to be a doctor,” she said. ” `Oy, oy, oy,’ she cried. But aren’t we glad he skipped medicine and invented the telephone.”
She reeled off a list of uses for the phone, then did something similar for a pencil. “If you get angry, you can break a pencil in two; it makes you feel so much better,” she said. “Then you can give the extra piece to a friend, making you resourceful.” She snapped her pencil.
“I simply gave the sizzle,” she writes.
Levine survived a training course, and became one of the original hosts of a network that has surpassed the older Home Shopping Network and in 1994 posted $1.4 billion in sales.
Gossip and advice
Levine’s book shares such mild gossip as where and how she lost her virginity (tip for concerned parents: Don’t let your daughters spend semesters in Europe); why she left her husband and how they’ve managed to remain friends; and how she feels about the “mumzer doctor” she dated immediately after the marital split. She even spills the beans on her 5-year relationship with fellow QVC host Steve Bryant.
Along with a life story, there’s life advice. Levine, who battles to resist green-room cookies and to stay “on the sunny side of 160 pounds,” lets us know that she has decided it’s better to be healthy and comfortable than a perfect size 8. “People should get off it,” she writes. “Trim is for hedges.”
She urges women to “keep their own accounts, save for the future and stay out of credit card debt.”
She educates, via a section in the back, middle America on the meaning of the Yiddishisms she frequently uses on air. “Kathy’s Glossary of Yiddish Words” explains, for example, that “mumzer” means “bastard.”
In general, the book is an extension of her on-air personality, which she describes in Field’s shoe department as showing “all of my warts to America. That’s what they like. If I have to hiccup, I let her rip.
“We have better salespeople, but with me they’re guaranteed something funny.”
QVC hosts have a particularly intimate relationship with their viewers, she says. “You could watch Barbara Walters for 25 years, and enjoy her work, but when is her birthday? What is her dog’s name?” Levine turned 44 Sept. 14 and her schnauzer is named Chelsea.
Barbara Walters probably won’t discuss plastic surgery with you, either. In cosmetics, Levine picks up a new perfume, takes a whiff. “It’s vanilla-based. I love vanilla. I probably could have been a nose,” she says, using the term for professional sniffers. “I certainly had one. But I left most of it on the plastic surgeon’s table,” an experience the book, of course, details.
It’s show biz
Upon arrival in Chicago, Levine discovered she and her luggage were on separate flights. So over and above doing the interview, she’s actually shopping for a fresh outfit to wear to an early evening book signing.
She looks for shoes, tries on a bulky pair, but decides “these are sort of ugly. I feel like Schultz on `Hogan’s Heroes.’ “
She buys a $10, tide-me-over black turtleneck, looks at a pair of knit leggings, but says “when you’ve got a rear end like mine, you don’t want knit.”
Instead, she buys the Liz Claiborne shorts, though she mock frets that it’ll look bad because QVC “doesn’t do Liz Claiborne.”
“OK, we caught a sale,” she says, “$53.97, from $78.”
(“I like service so I usually go full retail,” she confides later. “That’s an ethnic oxymoron: Jewish girl goes retail.”)
Cherry Twine, the saleswoman who sells her the shorts, asks, “And you’re the host of what again?”
“Good Morning America,” says Levine, deadpan.
It’s an assignment she wouldn’t mind. As being a host on QVC goes, Levine is on top. Three to four on-air hours a day, a couple of more spent meeting with vendors and researching products have come to be a pretty comfortable routine. And “the average host makes between 50 and 100,000 (dollars),” she says, clearly implying that she is above average.
But she’s also interested in seeing where this fame thing will take her. She says she has been approached to do a Ricki-Jenny-Rolanda-like talk show but would have none of that.
“I’d be more interested in a Regis-Kathie Lee format,” she says. “And my initials are K.L., so she’d better watch out.
“But my dream is to do a sitcom where you sell everything on the set.”
At retail.
