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After A Return to Love, the books all but tumbled out of her: A Woman’s Worth (spirituality as it relates to women), Illuminata (spirituality as it relates to prayer), Enchanted Love (spirituality as it relates to relationships), Healing the Soul of America (spirituality as it relates to politics), Emma and Mommy Talk to God (spirituality as it relates to children), Everyday Grace (spirituality as it relates to daily living, which essentially brought her publishing career full circle to A Return to Love), and so on. Through all this, Williamson continued her barnstorming lectures at an impressive pace; for someone who preaches that “enlightenment is not a weekend seminar,” she certainly does enough of them. These, too, have been recycled as audiotapes and CDs, like 2004’s Letting Go and Becoming, and a series of Marianne Williamson on . . . any number of touchy-feely topics.
Williamson must realize that for a fair segment of today’s marketplace, fiscal well-being outshines sheer spirituality. As she has broadened her outreach, she has incorporated material designed to target more conventionally success-minded readers—albeit still couched in a New Agey patois (no doubt so that her core followers won’t feel she “sold out”). Thus, a new $69.95 video series promises to help buyers “develop a prosperity consciousness,” unlock their “capacity for personal and professional success,” and “view every new experience as an opportunity for growth.”
Even for some industry insiders, the unswerving fidelity of Williamson’s sizable base constituency can be puzzling, since her books are so repetitive, and she spends so much time blithely stating the obvious: “A sense of separateness dissolves in the presence of real intimacy,” Williamson tells audiences. Or, “The reason we feel powerless is simply because we’re not expressing our power.” Or, “The challenge is to create on Earth as it is in Heaven.”4 Now and then she’ll burst forth with poesy that reduces to far less than meets the eye: “The rest we seek we will not find from sleeping, but only from waking.” There’s this, on money: “Money is energy, and energy is infinite in the universe.” And on the unity of all being: “We think that because we dwell inside our bodies that we are separate from other people who dwell inside theirs. Because our consciousness is tied to the physical manifestation of reality, we are tied to the belief in separation. When we begin to see each other through what the metaphysician calls the third eye, we begin to know each other on a level that is beyond what our physical eyes can see.” Of course, once you open the door to realities the eye cannot see—well, what possibilities, if any, does that exclude? Such lines, like so much of SHAM, have that whiff of contrived profundity that obscure modern poets often employ to mask the odor of dubious sense. Here’s another: “An idea doesn’t leave its source. So what I think about you, I will not be able to escape thinking about myself, and what I do to you, I will not be able to escape experiencing myself.”
But the final, fatal flaw in Williamson’s dialectic is its attempt simultaneously to sell idyllic notions of community and unconstrained personal development. Plainly, these cannot coexist unless all of the individual members of any given society just happen to aspire to the very same goals. And lest we forget, Williamson is a staunch one-world cheerleader, so this accidental brotherhood of men and women would have to apply among individuals not just in America but also across international borders. “Each and every person knows what the next step is for them,” she says, acknowledging that each of us wants something different out of life, sometimes radically so. And yet how does she expect all of those “next steps for them” to resolve neatly into the level of global harmony she extols? One supposes that is where the miracles and angels come in.
Or perhaps Williamson is well aware that her ideas break down in the end, but she’s just having such a jolly time on her way to the bank. As long ago as A Return to Love she wrote, “Don’t go to work to make money; go to work to spread joy. Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and the Maserati will get here when it’s supposed to.” For Williamson, the Maserati got there and then some.
NOTABLE FOR:
Her homeland-security program: On her Web site, Williamson advises followers to “pray for angels to surround the country” and form a “mystical shield” around “every airplane, every nuclear facility, the Golden Gate Bridge, etc.”
SUZE ORMAN: THE GENDER OF MONEY?
At first blush, Suze Orman might seem out of place in this crowd—and even unjustly miscast as a SHAM cleric. Whereas others mentioned here are mostly teaching you to feel better about you, Orman imparts specific skills having to do with a less airy concern: money. And that’s precisely what makes her so interesting. Orman epitomizes the new breed of self-helpers who aim to enhance legitimacy and distance themselves from their SHAM lineage by focusing at least in part on something external to the psyche itself. This is what Andrew Weil—author of 8 Weeks to Optimum Health and The Healthy Kitchen, among many other books—has done so successfully with health and medicine. Orman has sold more than six million books, two of which, The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom and The Courage to Be Rich, were New York Times number one best sellers. The latter book still holds the all-time QVC record for most books sold in an hour, at a jaw-dropping 35,000. She hosts an eponymous personal-finance show on CNBC that 113,000 American households regard as staple viewing. She’s a financial adviser to The Oprah Winfrey Show as well as a columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine. She has the obligatory Web site, and even if the links don’t always work, it’s comprehensive and helpful—to Orman as well as her fans. Not unlike some other SHAM artists, she uses her site to collect data for possible future ventures. At this writing, a box on the site’s main page solicits feedback from “those of you who are 25 to 35 years old” regarding what Orman’s next book should cover; in today’s fickle consumer climate, it never hurts to be able to go directly to the market and ask it what it wants to be sold. Orman also features the usual spin-offs to her core products, in this case step-by-step guidebooks, day planners, calendars, and financial “kits” that include pro forma wills, trusts, and miscellaneous other do-it-yourself (or at least start-it-yourself) forms.
In sum, the onetime $400-a-week waitress has built an empire, the Suze Orman Financial Co., that generates $40 million a year—$4 million of which, Orman admits, is pure profit. She estimates her personal net worth at $20 million. As the writer Maria Halkias declared in the Dallas Morning News, “Suze Orman is a brand.” For the promotional tour for Orman’s latest book, her publisher chartered the same forty-five-foot MCI Renaissance bus normally reserved for rock stars like Ozzy Osbourne, done up in a glossy red that would’ve served Revlon well as a billboard announcing some hot new lipstick shade.
Orman’s unique “trade dress” resides in her holistic blending of financial wisdom with an appeal to a “higher level” of consciousness and emotion. At seminars, she’ll hold up a dollar bill and, referring to the eye in the pyramid engraved on its back, she’ll say, “The eye represents spirituality, the third eye, and there’s an aspect of money that is very emotional and spiritual. It’s on a one-dollar bill because we need to be one with our money.”
People didn’t tend to say things like that where Suze Orman grew up, on Chicago’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” South Side. As a child, she hardly seemed destined to become the head of a multimillion-dollar financial empire. (Nor did she seem likely to be a regular on the lecture circuit, particularly given the serious speech impediment she had as a child.) Her father was a small-business owner whose entrepreneurial track record reads like the answer to “What’s the opposite of the Midas touch?” Morry Orman ran a takeout chicken shack that burned down when Suze—or, in those days, Susie—was fourteen. His subsequent try at a boardinghouse fell to earth along with a tenant who’d slipped on a broken staircase. The man filed suit, and Morry lost his shirt.
Left with little of a material nature, Orman focused on her spiritual side. In her first brokerage job, at Merrill Lynch, she supplemented the usual stock charts and corporate financials by using a crystal to help her assess a give
n stock’s prospects. (She now says she realizes that she was the crystal.) After she founded her own financial-planning firm, she had clients deposit their checks under a statue of Ganesh, a Hindu deity and Remover of All Obstacles.
Orman took herself national in 1990, joining forces with the writer James Jorgensen (It’s Never Too Late to Get Rich) to create a 900 number for dispensing financial advice over the phone. Orman’s solo breakout began with the 1995 book You’ve Earned It, Don’t Lose It, which showcased her ability to speak a fiscal language friendly to women. But it was her 1998 follow-up, The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, that made Orman a SHAM superstar. The book remained on the New York Times best-seller list for almost a full year, and was the number one nonfiction best seller on Publishers Weekly’s 1998 hardcover list.
Orman has never married—a bit odd for a woman who spends so much time talking about balance in life. She does show balance in other areas. When touring to promote a book or some other business cause, sometimes she’ll take the bus, sometimes she’ll just hop on the Learjet. She has an unusual ability to (convincingly) play rich and poor at the same time, and is one of the few ultrarich SHAM figures who can talk about her fondness for eating at McDonald’s without provoking cynical groans among her listeners.
Orman gets a great deal of mileage out of her seminars, workshops, and speeches (at $35,000 an hour). Personawise, she’s been called a “fiscal Dr. Laura,” and for sheer messianic, in-your-face intensity, it’s hard to think of someone more deserving of the label. There is the famous Orman Death Stare, which moved one member of a Suze chat group to note that Orman’s face looks “like someone highlighted it and selected bold print.”5 But her intensity is leavened by an irrepressible perkiness and a sometimes-maddening optimism, as when she’ll tell interviewers, seeming honestly to mean it, “I love getting stuck in traffic!”
Orman’s rhetorical flourish can have her sounding vaguely like a political candidate making stump speeches—a candidate with a hell of a sense of self. “Having talked to literally tens of thousands of people,” she will declaim during an interview, “I can say that what is good for America—and not just what is good theoretically, or for some financial wizards, but what is good literally—is not having credit card debt, not leasing a car, and not having mortgage debt.” She will urge other “ivory tower” investment advisers to “get out there and talk to people, like I do. People don’t have any money to invest. Invest what?” She can also sound pretty proletarian for someone whose livelihood is so directly linked to the fruits of the capitalist system. “It was not 9/11 that killed this economy,” she was saying during sold-out speeches the following year. “The ones doing it are Enron, Merrill Lynch, Arthur Andersen, Kmart . . .”
From a marketing standpoint, Orman’s genius is her ability to examine money from an intensely female perspective that conceives financial issues in emotional terms. She uses much the same language to talk about financial vigilance that one might use to talk about raising kids (“Your money will work for you when you give it energy, time, and understanding”) or sustaining an important intimate relationship (“Money will respond when you treat it as a cherished friend—never fearing it, pushing it away, pretending it doesn’t exist or turning away from its needs, never clutching so hard it hurts”). Some of her patter is so derivative of SHAM boilerplate that you can easily imagine almost any other guru using it in almost any other setting merely by substituting a key word here and there: “Financial freedom is when you have power over your fears and anxieties instead of the other way around,” says Orman. The basic line works equally well if you replace financial freedom with such words as happiness, security, a good marriage, or any other number of subjects. Or you could replace financial freedom with succesful parenting, and fears and anxieties with anger and frustration, and . . . voilà! Instant child-rearing formula!
To her credit, Orman recognized that a less hard-boiled approach to money would be more comfortable and less intimidating to an audience that so often had felt left out of financial planning. “Nobody was really talking to women about that,” says Christina Diekman, a financial planner with New England Financial Services. “And the people who were talking to them were talking down to them.” Orman, through the years, has solidified her grip on her core audience (which does include some men) by connecting money matters to the larger scheme of things. There was nothing haphazard about the second clause in the title of Orman’s sixth straight best-selling book, 2003’s The Laws of Money, the Lessons of Life.
And the advice itself? A fair amount of it tends to be oversimplified feel-good patter. Consider Law 1 in The Laws of Money, the Lessons of Life: “Truth creates money, lies destroy it.” Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Like it or not, many people have made a pile of money by lying—some of them in Orman’s own movement—while many people (like, presumably, Orman’s own hardworking father) have gone honestly, ethically broke.
But the line sounds so good. It’s something people want to be true, hope to be true. So it resonates with her buyers.
In the mold of such predecessors as the financial writer Jane Bryant Quinn and the beauty-queen-cum-consumer-advocate Bess Myerson, Orman does give honest-to-goodness financial tips: Cut expenses. Pay off credit-card and mortgage debt. Don’t obsess over your 401(k) (an offering she cynically describes as “a very nice thing for the corporations to get out of funding their employee retirement plans”). Accumulate an eight-month emergency war chest before you even think of other investments. When you do invest, pick the known (e.g., your house) before the unknown (e.g., that hot new company you’ve been hearing about, which Martha Stewart and everyone else of any status or savvy had already crossed off the list six months ago). She says she keeps almost all her money in municipal bonds and money-market funds.
Suze Orman has achieved extraordinary influence by positioning herself as an objective observer dispensing unbiased millennial advice on money management. By simultaneously putting out the vibe that she’s “one of us,” she has ingratiated herself with millions of women around the world. This gives her a gilt-edged platform for selling product—and in Orman’s case, it’s not just the usual books and tapes and coffee mugs: It’s her very own financial instruments.
“Suze’s Choice” long-term-care insurance is issued through GE Financial and sold on her Web site and QVC. Orman gets a commission for each plan that’s sold. She has shrugged off questions about a possible conflict of interest, explaining that she’s been warning her fans for years of the need to protect themselves against sudden, catastrophic medical costs. She has been issuing such warnings, but one may wonder: How long were the plans for the insurance in the works? How far ahead was Orman thinking when she began giving the advice? A more basic question is: Does her plan really offer the most bang for the buck? Not necessarily, according to the National Advisory Council for Long Term Care Insurance. The council says the “one company for all” approach is not a smart move in the long-term-care insurance game, certainly not for all comers.
Suze’s Choice embodies a worrisome trend wherein some of SHAM’s most influential leaders exploit their accrued credibility via products that supposedly are the answers to the problems the gurus have been building up in people’s minds. Now that Orman is so deeply invested in her product, would she be more apt to spin it in a favorable light, regardless of any changes in the financial marketplace that occur as time goes by?
Time will tell. It’ll be interesting to see whether Orman herself does.
NOTABLE FOR:
Boasting that “people love me ’cause I tell it like it is. You get financial advisers who tell you to keep your stocks, but they can’t tell you the truth because they own those damn companies.” See above remarks about her Suze’s Choice insurance.
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DR. PHIL MCGRAW: ABSOLUTE POWER
Sometimes it’s hard to see your face without a mirror.
—Dr. Phil McGraw
And now Dr. Phil’s latest book, Here’s Some More
Advice I Pulled Out of My Ass.
—David Letterman
You probably know the script already, but it goes something like this: On April 16, 1996, at the height of the first mad-cow scare, a talk-show diva says the threat of disease “has just stopped [her] cold from eating another burger.” Millions of grossed-out housewives rethink their dinner menus, and the price of ground beef plummets.1 Down on the range, a billionaire Texas cattleman persuades his buddies that the smart-mouthed celebrity has run afoul of his state’s novel “food disparagement” law. There follows a $12 million lawsuit, which requires the woman’s presence in Amarillo, Texas. Looking for every advantage in unfamiliar territory, she reaches out to a company with a national reputation in jury analysis and witness preparation, Irving, Texas–based Courtroom Sciences Inc. (CSI), whose clients include most major airlines, three major television networks, and about half of the Fortune 100. One of CSI’s cofounders is a burly, six-foot-four-inch lapsed psychologist who, a decade earlier, walked away from a successful private practice because, as he told it, “I had no patience for my patients.” The talk-show host and the burned-out shrink hit it off immediately, and he spends much of the next year working with her one-on-one, “helping her be who she is on the witness stand.” In February 1998 she wins the six-week trial and gives the shrink a Texas-sized chunk of the credit.