Financial Evangelists

I don't know about you, but when I dream about success, I dream about ... Art Fleming.

Yeah! Ages before B-lounge hair-and-teethers like Pat Sajak and John Davidson started taking over game shows, Art carved a niche for himself in America's heart at the helm of Jeopardy!, charming contestants and audience alike with the swarthy verve he brought to even the blandest transactions ("It's 'Presidents' Birthmarks' for ten dollars!").

This stint of network stardom might have satisfied any other game-show host. But Art's not just any host. In fact, he's not on any game show, either. No. Right now, (continued overleaf)evangelists... weirdly enough, four a.m. Sunday morning on the USA Network (home of so many great bait-'n'-tackle shows), Art's briefing unseen legions of baffled, channel-hopping insomniacs on The Keys to Success, a show designed to teach those who tune in how to he happy, how to be successful, how to be--look, Ma!--just like him.

Listen: "In the next 30 minutes," says Fleming, looking beefier than he did in his game-show days but twice as dapper in his Big Bill suit, with matching Windsor and hanky puffed out of the breast pocket, (continued on page 86) "we'll investigate whether true opportunity still exists in this country today. Our documentary cameras have visited experts, authors, entrepreneurs and millionaires from all walks of life, and the overwhelming consensus is that anyone can be personally successful...now! During this half hour, we'll present specific how-to facts, plans and information that you can begin using for your own personal success!"

Finally! My own personal success! After decades of doing nothing but entertaining, coughing up the same old soggy dramas and sitcoms, my Motorola's going to take me by the hand and lead me up the Ladder of Financial Happiness and Personal Fulfillment. And not a moment too soon!

Tapping a heretofore ignored branch of the viewing public--People Who Stay Up Late and Need Money--hosts like Art and his ilk are clogging the cable box with a whole new breed of programing: TV that's good for you. TV you need! TV that wants to help you get rich in real estate! Go for your dreams! Develop a miracle memory, snag the low-down on no-down and, if there's still time, join lottery busters and make millions at Government auctions!

If you're still driving a Pinto after all this, you may as well just wrap your lips around the muzzle and fire.

But not yet. There's help. Lots of help. Just when the wholesome thrill of the Reverend Ernest Angley and friends screaming "Heal!" in strangers' faces begins to pall and the narcotic drone of the shopping shows has made long-term viewing all but unendurable, the flood of Financial Evangelists--and the human-potential spin-offs evolving from them--has sprung up to fill the void, to help keep high-production grotesqueries on the air for those whose lives are empty without them.

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It's TV for the truly jaded. Hefty blocks of cut-rate TV time purchased by successful guys and gals who could just as easily be lolling on the Riviera or snapping up Rembrandts as peddling through-the-mail success cassettes. They just do it because they want us to be as happy and fulfilled as they are. That's why they buy up time on the USA, Lifetime, Nashville, Tempo networks, any of the many also-rans in the cable field, or scoop up off hours on smaller local stations to spread the Gospel of E-Z money to those less fortunate.

Imagine! They don't want people who have money. They want people who want it. Not just folks who need to know a few things about foreclosures, either, but those of us who are emotionally blocked, who could be successes and would be, darn it, were it not for that worm of doubt, that psychic grub in the ego, that keeps us from reaching our full potential. And if they have to run the same show twice a week every week for 52 weeks to reach us, then, by God, they'll do it.

That's how much they want to help!

Look at Art Fleming. He wants to help by introducing Mary Kay Ash, a waxen, browless little woman, with all the charm of a recently embalmed Rona Barrett. That's exactly how she should look, for, as Art reminds us, she made her millions in make-up. "Mary Kay Ash started out," says our guide, "selling sponges and scrub brushes in people's homes, and today has sales in excess of $300,000,000."

The point, of course, is that if he really wanted to, the eager viewer could buy his way from spongedom to Shangri-la. All it takes--give or take the cost of shipping--is $149, which gets the lucky go-getter six hours of cassettes, a "home-study" course on Investment Property with No Money Down, a pamphlet on Writing Buyer's Offers, a collection of real-estate legal forms and, just 'cause the folks in charge are feelin' Seven-Up, a free copy of More Money in Your Pocket, by the bona fide pro who's actually shelling out for this evening's extravaganza: Carleton Sheets, self-made millionaire.

First comes a handful of stirring tributes to rags-to-richers such as Wally Amos, of Famous Amos cookie fame, and Hawaiian Tropic honcho Ron Rice, a former $4000-a-year high school chemistry teacher turned millionaire tan-in-a-bottle king. And then we cut to Carleton, who's really the star of the show.

It's true. Art just can't say enough about Mr. Sheets, seen lounging on the prow of a docked yacht as though his deck chair had been lowered by a chopper. A lanky old boy from Delray Beach, Florida, Sheets boasts the absolute ne plus ultra of TV money-management credentials. As Brother Art narrates: "He began investing in real estate shortly after he was fired from a dead-end sales job."

Since then, Carleton's gone on to do more than "$19,000,000" worth of real estate. The implication is that Mary Kay and Amos got where they are by mailing in $149, but that's not important. It's the dead-end stuff we want to hear about. That's the adjective with our name on it--why else would we be up at four a.m., gawking at this jim-jim when we should be knee-deep in R.E.M. sleep and dreaming of Ginnie Maes?

No, it's the humble roots that hit home--and Art knows it. Humble roots are the ticket in video Successville. That's why Carleton marches Ken Chlopecki in front of the audience at his on-air seminar. Ken, you Midwesterners may recall, was the fellow who met what's come to be known as the Chicago Sun-Times Challenge. In a full-page ad, Carleton claimed he could train anybody to snap up a rental property with no money down--in one day! And Ken, a humble Chi-town machine-shop inspector, is the everyman Carleton took under his fiscal wing.

What a saga! Ken got his slice of the pie--a town house in suburban Bolingbrook, Illinois. And he's such an honest example of Regular Guy--hood, the kind of blue-collar towhead likely to snap a towel in a Miller Lite ad, you want it to be true. You want Ken to discover a second income, to be happy. Otherwise--who knows?--his marriage may go sour; 20 years from now, he may look just like Karl Malden or, worse yet, George Shultz.

On Keys, happily, Ken talks about how wonderfully the Sheets system worked for him. Only later do we learn, thanks to those meddling skeptics from the media, that Mr. Machine Shop admits that he still hasn't rented the place--not exactly a good omen, cash flow--wise--and has tried ten times since to scoop up other property, with nary a nibble.

But who's quibbling? It's not that anybody thinks that these TV academies share their faculties with the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. What's really important is that these fiscal wizards pump out some riveting TV. Indeed. For connoisseurs of the edgy, can't-believe-what-you're-seeing middle-of-the-night weirdness, the two or three dozen self-help extravaganzas now running--and rerunning--in the furthest reaches of your weekly listings may help some devotees recall that peak moment when they first spotted Peter Popoff, SCTV or Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on mushrooms.

Now, that's quality television.

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"After birth, death is inevitable. Everything else is negotiable!"

That's the stirring, true-blue American motto of Tony Hoffman, whose Everybody's Money Matters launched a new epoch in monetary talk shows. Mr. T., who got his start as a lecturer for get-rich-quick pioneer Al Lowry (Tony has even published his own classic in the genre, How to Negotiate Successfully in Real Estate), hatched the supremely well-timed idea of hosting a show where other masters of Finance from Scratch could hop on board and hock their wares.

As Lyndon Parker, recently recruited president of National Superstar Inc., Hoffman's parent organization, artfully explains, "After the early days, Tony was the first real innovator. He realized there were lots of people in the world who did something, who had things to talk about, whether it was real estate, raising your I.Q."--always a big concern among late-night cable fans--"expanding your memory or whatever. He got 'em packaged and got 'em on the air on his own show."

The E.M.M. set, your basic K mart Goes Conversational, features a desk shaped like a flying V. On the right hunkers Tony, whose silvery spit curls, glossy canines and sloping shoulders somehow lend him the éclat of a happy mole. (continued on page 126)Financial Evangelists(continued from page 86) Leftward sits the ever-loyal Bob Braun. Bob, blessed with a resemblance to Fred MacMurray so uncanny that scads of viewers routinely call their local outlet to see if it's true that Chip's dad has hit hard times and switched to cable, has the prestige post of Tony's full-time enthuser.

It's Bob's earnest, hearty voice-over that introduces every E.M.M. installment. Against a montage of Thoroughbreds, Chris-Crafts, mile-long limos and the like, he pops the Big Questions: "Do you dream of being independently wealthy? Enjoying the good life? Traveling to exotic places? Living in a luxurious home?" Cut to a quick shot of some Sun Belt Taj Mahal mit swimming hole. "If these are things you'd like to do, you need to be part of Everybody's Money Matters."

It's a grand concept. Tony, see, boasts his own troupe of guru entrepreneurs--among them, Russ Whitney, "the Rehab Man," Danielle Durant, "the Memory Lady," and Joe Land, former foreclosure stud turned subliminal-tape ace, whose stirring Program Yourself for Success stands out as Tony's most successful show to date. And it's Land's unique pitch that shows where self-help TV's really going.

"Tell you what," Land told me in an hourlong jaw from his Albuquerque H.Q., "the fact that most people aren't wealthy proves the most convincing evidence they can't be. That's how some people think. That's what we're up against!"

It's a tough battle; but, doggone it, Joe tried the darned tapes himself, and they really work. Just listening to Joe on the phone, you could get a cauliflower ear from all that confidence. "I was in the closet with this subliminals thing," he confides. "But I decided I believed enough in these things, and if I believe in something, I'm unstoppable. Those fellows with the other seminars put the cart before the horse. They have all the techniques before people get the guts, the imagination, the confidence to pull themselves up to the five percent of the population who are secure financially. I was frustrated because I knew 95 percent of the people who bought my material would never do anything with it. Why? Because they could not overcome fear!"

That's Joe Land talking. Joe Land. Of course, now that he's out of real estate and into ego building, maybe he'll change his name. Maybe he'll go with Joe Confidence. Or just Joe Ego. Why not?

There's simply not enough space on the page to capture what this fellow can teach you about the human mind on TV. The image that lingers is Joe's audio-visual aid. Your Improvement Promoters are all big on audio-visual aids, especially overhead projectors, which tend to lend the seminars a cozy, high school civics feel that makes you want to pass a dirty note to the redhead next to you.

"Your subconscious mind," Joe announces, "that's your storage room. That's your data room. That's where everything you've ever heard, seen, tasted, felt, smelled, said, done is--in that room. Picture your conscious mind as the guard standing at the door of that room. Now the guard is in charge and he makes all the decisions. He does all the talking. You are not aware of what's happening in 88 percent of your mind. The only part of your mind that you are aware of is the 12 percent that's the conscious mind."

And there it is! The perfect image--just over Joe's shoulder. That stately guard, with one of those giganto furry Buckingham Palace hats. And behind him, the Big Room. Where all our desires are.

Joe, God love him, appears to be passing off the notion of the Noble Savage as his own little pensée. It's a kookie approach for a onetime four-for-a-dollar burger-stand operator from Clovis. Then again, Rousseau himself might have appreciated Joe. "When you were born," Joe declares--he's really wrestled with this!--"that whole process, the room and the guard, was squeaky clean. Nothing in there! And your parents were the first thing, the first ones in charge of putting something in there. And guess what your parents' favorite word for you was in the first ten years of your life? What would you think? No. No. Is no a negative word? Folks, no is the epitome of a negative word."

Joe's come a long way from No Money Down Land. Before, he just wanted to make us rich. Now he wants to replace Mom and Dad. A big job! "Studies reveal"--the successoids are big on "studies," and somewhere out there a busload of research seems to be going on to find out just what makes all us Regular Joes and Joanies blow it--"that the average parent, for every positive thing they say to their children, they say 25 negative things."

Joe pulls out a mini tape player and shows how he plugged himself in and listened to ten or 12 hours of subliminal input a day. The first tape--there are 12 altogether, for $349, with optional Stop Smoking or Weight Loss cassettes thrown in for an extra $35 each--Joe recommends is Stopping Procrastination. "This particular tape works faster than any of the other tapes," he chuckles. "I always start people on the procrastination tape. People honestly can't listen to it in the evening, because it keeps 'em up all night long cleaning the garage in the wintertime."

But the best part--beyond the 30-day, money-back, satisfaction-guaranteed guarantee--is that for 15 measly greenbacks on top of the $349, you can cash in on the coming subliminals boom, get in on the ground floor, mind control--wise, and become a distributor. "Every now 'n' then," sighs Joe, slightly overcome but fighting it, being a man, "a product comes along that creates such an excitement in the customers who use it that they can't help but bubble over and tell everybody they meet about what's happening to them. And that kind of product is perfect for a multilevel marketing plan. Now, don't mistake multilevel with the illegal pyramid schemes, because there's a great big difference."

And what, the waffling customer wants to know, might that great big difference be? "Multilevel's now being taught in the Harvard Business School." If that's not prima facie enough, then keep this in mind: "Both Stanford University and The Wall Street Journal say that over 50 percent of the retail products that are sold in this country by the mid-Nineties will be sold in a multilevel marketing plan. It's," says Joe, "just a plan where the customer becomes a dealer and he sells to another customer and makes that customer a dealer, and they make money from several of those downline in their organization." Now, that sounds simple enough.

Of course, we don't really know what Joe's got socked away under those wave noises. Tape number five could be telling us, "Murder Catholic girls and bake them in dumplings." It's a question of faith. But, hey, Joe looks honest. (Even though he did let out over the phone--kind of confidentially--that most people who pay the extra $15 for distributing won't do a darn thing with it.) And besides, he's not the only Superstar willing to spill a bean or two in public. Our friend Lyndon Parker--president Parker, former IRS prosecutor and hot-shot Philadelphia lawyer--was kind enough to invite us out to Superstar Central, the earth-tone Westlake Village industrial park near Los Angeles that the financial kings call home.

"These guys don't know how to run a business" is Lyndon's assessment of the Tony Hoffman gang. No more, no less.

A tiny, broad-shouldered fellow with the swagger of a courtroom Mickey Rooney, Lyndon plainly gets a kick out of pricking the Superstar myth. "They're entrepreneurs," he chuckles. "They know how to make it, but they don't know how to keep it. I put the company into Chapter (continued on page 138)Financial Evangelists(continued from page 126) 11 last year. We needed the protection. You're talking about guys who found a pot of gold. They're grossing a lot of money, but their expenses are outrageous. They simply saturated the seminar business and got out five months too late. They'd incurred expenses that had to be paid--at least a million, a million-two--so they had to take from one end of the business to cover another, and before you know it, it snowballed."

Boy, oh, boy! You could get the bends listening to this stuff. I mean, here's Lyndon, parked in the corner office above this jumbo room full of girls hunched over their desks, answering phones--a framed cover of Tony's blockbuster How to Negotiate Successfully in Real Estate mounted like a crucifix just below the ceiling behind him--and he's spouting this...heresy.

"They figured, Hey, we're great negotiators," he says affectionately of Tony and Bob. "They believed their own story." On it goes, a saga of mangled financial strategy, squandered resources, Corporate Keystone Copdom that, weirdly enough, has to make you like the E.M.M. team even more. Sure, they're nuts--all they can do is...make money!

Just like Dave Del Dotto, the ex-Modesto dry-waller whose Go for Your Dreams is the hottest act out of Hawaii since Don Ho. Advicewise, Dave's Cash Flow System is all over town. Government loans, sheriff's auctions, 35 Ways to Buy Foreclosures with No Money Down, How to Apply for Over $100,000 of Unsecured Credit Cards--that kind of stuff.

In fact, although he looks like a tanned and blow-dried kind of guy--a man at home in any condo--Dave's apparently quite a donnish fellow, having devoted, as he says, seven years of his life to completing the multivolume, 1400-page, 12-cassette opus he sells for the remarkably low price of $289.

What sets Del Dotto apart, though, is more than that impressive oeuvre; it's the wondrous ur-telethon feel he's given his production. "My Impossible Dream," as a recent episode is titled, opens with a medium shot of Dave staring off over the sea wall, out at the waves crashing against the rocks. This is, presumably, Dave's dream home in Kona, Hawaii.

"I've made that dream a reality," Dave declares, indicating all this: the swollen palms, the rocks, the big chunk of Oahu just beyond the ropes that run behind his perch. Of course, we never really see Dave's house. What he's done is sort of stick a couch out here, right on the lip of the beach. It's pretty impressive, Dave's couch--big, fluffy, overstuffed, with happy white pillows. And the way he's just plopped it out here, in the wild, lends the entire show a sort of Sam Beckett--y, Oahu Goes Existential feel. Just Dave, the waves, the couch.

"Now it's time for a great feature of our show," he says. "I just love this! I'd like to introduce, right now, the beautiful Bonet and the Kid Samson Band!"

After Bonet's number (and, no kidding, if you close your eyes, you really can pretend it's a telethon; Kid Samson and the boys are just like the greats who show up on the local feed on the Labor Day classic, long about three a.m., when Jerry's back in the greenroom with a can of 10W40, greasing his hair down for the home stretch), Dave does a sort of nutty cha-cha from his existential couch over to the stage for a Hollywood cuddle.

"Thank you, Bonet, that was beautiful! We'll be right back after this...."

And then--this is the charm, the magic, the triumph of motivational television--Dave in polka dots on the beach cuts to Dave in a business suit in the studio. Fantastic! Out of his cha-cha mode and back to biz. Dave is his own commercial. "I used only three ingredients to achieve my dreams and goals," he's explaining now, "and you can do it the same way I did!"

Wondrous as this is, Dave eventually weighs in with the heavy ammo. Holding up volume one of his Cash Flow System, "Creative Financing," he asks a rhetorical question: "Now what do you see, ladies and gentlemen, when you see this book? Ladies and gentlemen, I don't see books and tapes when I see these things. What I see is people. When I look at volume one, I always think about Chad."

Dave goes a tad misty-eyed as he describes how Chad sat in the front row at his L.A. seminar. He listened so intently. "And, ladies and gentlemen, he purchased my Cash Flow System. And he wrote me a letter a few months later...."

Well, what can I say? I've watched this bit of docudrama maybe eight, nine times, and I'm still weepy. "By the way, ladies and gentlemen,"--Dave's really on here--"the reason I think about Chad buying 1400 pages of written material is"--monstro pause for maximum effect--"Chad was blind!"

Cr-r-r-unch! Before we can live this one down, Dave cuts mercilessly to an old Cash Flow Expo. Here, he gets right in Chad's face and has him describe how he did it. And Chad's terrific. A natural. He's not one of those wobbly blind guys like Stevie Wonder. He's just this regular kid--no equilibrium problems whatsoever--with the nice Princeton, the flyaway collar, the works. Everything you'd look for in a Young Republican.

"You bought a house using 'Creative Financing'?" asks Dave.

"Sure have," Chad bounces back. "It was a foreclosure property. I borrowed the money from an aunt of mine."

Now, there's an investment strategy. But never mind. Chad just prattles on about the 47 thou with which he reinstated the loan, the $10,000 he returned to his aunt and--drum roll, please--the 14 grand he pocketed for himself. You'd think the kid was reading a TelePrompTer. That's how smooth he is. But--my mistake!--he's blind. He's blind, and he still has the low-down on no-down.

What we have here is the fiscal equivalent of Oral Roberts' snatching that old lady's crutches, tossing them to the crowd, laying on hands and stepping back to watch her do a jig for Jesus. After that, who could resist that toll-free 800 number when it flashed on the screen? Could you?

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Big Picture--wise, it's one of the great ironies of American Entertainment--hood that the more sophisticated the exploitable technology--a cable box in every home!--the cruder the entrepreneurs who crop up to use it. There's a real penny-a-toss, side-show feel to the Next Wave of Financial Evangelists, the ones who've cropped up since the first flurry of No Money Downers, that makes just tuning in the equivalent of lifting a tent flap to see the bearded lady or the Siamese twins.

Which means something. Such standard-issue real-estate slaves as, say, Ed Beckley, the Millionaire Maker, are on the ropes. Ed has apparently been plagued by returns--the bane of the Success Kit industry. You've got to sock about 20 percent of your profits into escrow, according to pros, to pay for the not-satisfied-within-30-days crowd.

Although still preaching Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch's right to Divine Prosperity, the new breed has all but eschewed real estate altogether. Face it: Real estate has gone the way of disco and est. Today, here at the Avant-Garde Branch of Successdom, not only don't you have to worry about buying and selling homes, you don't even have to live in one. You can work out of a shack. Who cares? With the Latest Trend in Success Tips, you...hardly...even...have to speak!

I mean, what does it take to win at lotto? To save a couple of silver dollars? To fire a Spud Gun? It takes nothing. And for the first time, loads of people with exactly that are turning to their cable stations for a course in miracles. Money miracles. They're here--under the tent--staring slack-jawed at Lottery Busters!, Get Rich with Coins, Cossman Secrets....

Even if you think you don't know E. Joseph Cossman, you do. Unlike the battery of other fiscal wizards, E. Joe has actually done something the world has heard about. He's made his mark. He's the man who invented the Ant Farm!

And that's not all! By way of filling us in on his American Institute of Success, E. Joe invites the supplicant into the Cossman Game Room. "Mr. Cossman"--that's how he's referred to most of the show, even when he talks about himself--cuts a most striking figure. Stiff-necked, Mr. C. seems spawned from the unlikely coupling of Eliot Ness and Mister Rogers. He's got the Eliot Ness crime-fighting 'do--a steel-wool sweep with a part that starts somewhere south of his left ear--and, more important, the Ness demeanor, especially when he's holding his Spud Gun, as he is now, aiming the muzzle at the audience. Like Mister Rogers, Mr. Cossman ends his sentences with a question. You know what I mean: "Can you say franchise?"

Right off the top, though, the Cossman playhouse is great. Shelves stacked with trophies and talismans of his own high-prestige business triumphs. Fly Cake's another Cossman winner--a "solid insecticide" shaped like a Dunkin' Donut that kills flies on contact. All this, plus miniature flags, mementos and photos. (Is this Cossman and the young Hemingway? Cossman and Freud? It's hard to tell from this far away, and there's so much to look at.)

And now, two minutes into the show, our man's shifting back to his Robert Stack mode. He's standing there, cocking an eye at the camera, gun in one hand, fresh-peeled Idaho in the other.

"A few months ago, somebody asked me, 'Joe, how can I find a job that will pay me $2000 a month and in three years allow me to work up to $100,000 a year?' My reply to that person was, 'Hire yourself. Give yourself a monthly salary of $5000 and in three years walk away with $1,000,000.' Now, would that sound like wishful thinking to you...?

"Well, let me give you a few examples of how I did that," he declares, his words a staccato monotone with a coal-country bottom. "Some time ago, I found the tooling for this Spud Gun advertised in a trade magazine. What is a Spud Gun? It's a little toy pistol and it shoots potato pellets from an ordinary potato. Perfectly harmless, because the nibs of the potato are 98 percent water and will not harm a child....

"I made a total of over $200,000 on an investment of $500. Just by reading a trade magazine. Now, could you do that?" he asks in a Mister Rogers singsong. "Sure you could!"

Could you do that? Sure! What you do, see, is leaf through magazines, weed through classifieds. That kind of thing. Mr. Cossman discovered the doughnut insecticide in the classified section of his daily newspaper. Turns out a couple of guys in chemical warfare back in World War Two were assigned to put an end to the fly problem in the South Pacific. What they came up with was Fly Cake. "In three years, I sold 8,000,000 Fly Cake," he tells us. Not Fly Cakes, mind you, Fly Cake. In the singular. That's how E. Joe C. pronounces it.

E. Joe made another fortune in Rebuff--a mailman's dog repellent, originally called Halt, that he repackaged and marketed to the tune of 300,000 at $2.98 each. "On my word of honor, I never met the manufacturer, I never visited his factory. All I did was send him labels and he did the drop-shipping for me," he adds, nailing down that hidden appeal for all the anonymous, low-budge agoraphobiacs in the viewing audience.

"Now, could you do something like that?" It's Mister Rogers again, taking over his being. "With my direction, you certainly could."

Punching another button on the channel selector will get you Gail Howard, the Lottery Queen, who wastes no time marching her kind of people--Lottery Busters!--past the droopy, confused, it-shoulda-been-me stares of her fans in Lotto Land. Lottery Busters!, another get-rich-from-your-sofa show, offers the very best in Cable Financial Pleasure.

First up is Manuel Garcete, a shy little fellow dressed in Salvation Army castoffs. His eyes glow veiny red; check out that crawl: Manuel Garcete...who won the $13,700,000 jackpot in the New York state lottery. He's one of gail howard's lottery busters. The camera guys hold on Manuel, the winning envelope plastered across his chest like an X-ray shield.

"You could be Manuel" is the implied message in that opening cameo. But before even that bit of colorfulness can sink in, here's a 6'11", 86-pound, Dumbolobed fellow saying, "I played the lottery for quite a few years without any luck--then I started to use Gail's system, and I began to win."

At first, of course, exactly what it is he won is a little foggy--but we do know for sure it wasn't a free appointment to have his ears pinned back. But, wait, this guy's telling us he won the Australian Gold Lotto. And Gail--she's relentless!--wastes no time at all before flashing the third testimonial, with Wanda and Max Harrell, a couple of crusty Canadian lottery winners.

"Stay tuned," booms the announcer, "for the most important half hour on television!" There follows a shot of Gail herself, seated on a wrap-around white sectional between Joel Nadel, publisher of the Lottery Buster newsletter and Gail's prompter, as well as a pair of young, blond and inappropriately upscale kids called the Morrises, Debra and Craig.

Gail herself, to borrow that computer chestnut, is user-friendly. TV-friendly, if you like. A hearty peroxide blonde, Gail's poured her torso into a sensible dress for the occasion. Not six inches to her right, slouched on that pearly sectional, sits Nadel. His crawl says, Publisher Lottery Busters. Gail's, of course, says, winner of 72 lotteries in 12 months. Old Joel, a thin-lipped, wire-rimmed-glasses guy, very much in the Larry King mold, appears to be there as his client's handler, keeping the busty platinum blonde from just staring off into the middle distance. No doubt she was hot once, back in her beer-garden days. But now, well, we don't love her for her curves, we love her for her clusters. Her number clusters, as a matter of fact. See, Gail, we learn, put in time as a stockbroker and later on as a commodities-futures trader.

"So, you were a mathematician then?" Deb's a real terrier when she gets going.

But nothing fazes our Gail. She's handled tougher ones than that. "I do use math," she explains, pronouncing the word as if it were some déclassé antibiotic, something you would ingest to defuse a pesky venereal wart but certainly not for public discourse. "Charting and technical analysis is a little bit different."

Nothing really perks Gail up. She doesn't smile, she doesn't frown. She just sort of responds. But the important thing is she knows her number clusters. Right up front, she's ready to dispense a few of those hard-won lotto tips, but not before our pal Joel gets the ball rolling. Joel wants people to know that, despite what they read in USA Today, those big headlines about $13,000,000 U.S. winners are so much hog swaddle. "Most people don't realize that what the states do is pay you out over a 20-year period with a small amount of money each year that builds up eventually to that, so they're really buying an annuity for you in your name. But nobody gets a check for $13,000,000 when they win, but [in] the international lotteries, you do get it and they have methods for doing it on a tax-free basis.

"Something like 87 percent of all winning numbers are numbers which have appeared sometime during the last ten games as winners," says Joel. That's the kind of insider info you can take to the bank. But not until one diminutive immigrant, a saffron gentleman who bows humbly in the presence of the Blonde Lotto Goddess, asks his question does Gail's evangelical zeal ooze to the surface. "I've tried a couple of times to win something, and I never win anything. So I give up. What kind of hope is there for me?"

And here Gail really shines. Here the evangelical impulse that--cynics, go ahead and scoff--we've seen so clearly in the work of E. Joe Cossman, Dave Del Dotto, the entire advice-dispensing gaggle of guys in the know comes to the fore once again. Gail has plainly taken to the airwaves out of concern for fellow humans, especially luckless little guys like the one who just asked that question. Just because she works in some grim math lab cranking out pick-six strategies does not mean Gail doesn't have a heart.

Au contraire! Just listen to the woman: "Oh, there's hope for you! There's hope for you. It's people like you, you're the reason I write all these publications."

"Of course," points out Joel, "all these large odds, like one in 500,000, are before you've enhanced your winning percentage by 500 percent utilizing some of Gail's system, which obviously brings the odds down to much more manageable levels."

"Is a knowledge of math and memorizing formulas necessary to work your system?" asks another hopeful.

"Absolutely not!" Gail is finally smiling! "I've done all the work for you!"

But then, they all have, haven't they? That's why we love them. Why we need them. It doesn't matter if it's Rehab Housing (with Russ Whitney, who projects his canceled checks on the overhead so that everyone knows he's on the up-and-up) or Get Rich with Coins, where the host, Keith Degreen, J.D., fights off apoplexy every time his guest expert, Mr. Sperduti, the Coin Man, tells him how much some unassuming little 50-cent piece would be worth now if he'd picked it up back in '56 and stashed it in his sock drawer. Degreen just can't keep his regrets to himself. "Tell me that's not enough to make a guy pull his hair out!" he exclaims. Or, "Gosh, you could just run out and slit your throat when you think about it. A $60 investment, and the return is $14,000!"

And it's going to get better. Although nobody has come out and announced it yet, the buzz is that before, say, Ed Meese goes back to Oakland, around the end of '88, there's going to be a whole new network devoted to--Success! To Human Potential! One whole slot on your dial devoted to Confidence. Sales Tips. Government Auctions. Winning at Canasta. Making Millions in Chinchilla Skins. Secret Fiscal Tips of the Incas.

Square business! Joe Land told me personally that he's building his own studio in Albuquerque. And word is Ed Beckley, the giggly Millionaire Maker himself, has threatened to bounce back bigger than ever with the Success Channel, a cable outlet for nothing but motivational shows.

For now, though, we'll just have to hang on, grabbing incentive where we can, sending off for endless cassettes and secret plans until the day we can just slap on the Sony, set the dial and drift off for hour after uninterrupted hour of Motivation. Inspiration. Bliss. TV that helps America do what America does best: sit in front of the TV and feel like it ought to be doing something else.

"'I start people on the procrastination tape. It keeps 'em up all night long cleaning the garage.'"

"On it goes, a saga of mangled financial strategy, squandered resources, Corporate Keystone Copdom...."