Hi, I'm Billy Mays

illy Mays is pitching me. talk­ing fast and loud so I can't get in a word, telling me about his high school football exploits in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania and how he's half Ital­ian (true), half )ewish (not true). "If I can't get it wholesale. I steal it," he says. Do-dum! Touching me on my arm to make con­tact, drawing me in, hypnotizing me. Mays tells me how he became a pitchman at the age of 24 on the Atlantic City boardwalk, selling Cinsu knives from a little stand, all the old pitchmen taking a shine to the kid with the loud voice and teaching him the tricks of the trade. "Get the crowd in closer. Belly them up to you." "Kibbitz-'Where

you from?.....Say 'I got something to show

you......Get closer." And then the hardest

part of the pitch, how to ask for money: "How much, you say? Thought youd never ask-$29.95 in a store, only $19.95 here. But here's the deal: The first five people who buy one now get it for only $10." All the people are waving their hands now, beg­ging for a blessing to be able to buy a Ginsu knife or a WashMatik or whatever. If Mays would only recognize them, they could fork over their 10 spot for a gadget they didn't know they wanted 10 minutes ago-until Billy Mays showed them the light.

"It's an art." he says, "to get people to stay in one area for 10 minutes. They're put there by me. That's the thrill of the pitch. My pitch is my music. They're mesmerized by me. I love it."

Today, at 50. Mays is the most famous pitchman in the world. His pitches are seen on TV in 57 foreign countries and dubbed in Chinese, Japanese. French, Italian, Ger­man, whatever. The media call him ubiq­uitous, with hisswept-back black hair and full black beard he touches up "by drinking only dark whiskey "-da-dum! You've seen him on TV, leaping out of the screen at three a.m., just before you doze off. snap­ping you awake with his screeching voice. "Hi. I'm Billy Mays, here for OxiClean!" or KaBOOM!. Mighty Putty, Hercules Hook, Awesome Auger. Zorbeez, whatever. Mays sells them all: gadgets that stick harder than any glue, dig up weeds, hold up a 50-pound gilt-framed mirror (assuming you have a 50-pound gilt-framed mirror)-so many gadgets you never thought you needed, never even thought existed until Mays went into his pitch. A 30-second pitch, never more than two minutes-a short con-screaming at you, "Watch this! I get so excited! I gotta tell you something! Buy it right now!" So you call the toll-free number, give a strange voice your credit-

card information and then get a package in the mail, stare at its contents-a gadget, a product-and wonder, Why did I buy this? But what the hell, it was only $19.95. It's always $19.95. That's Mays's secret.

"It's gotta be under $20." Mays says. He shrugs. "I don't know. That's the magic num­ber." It also has to be an unknown item that can't be purchased in a store, that can be seen and purchased only on TV and that appeals to a mass audience of do-it-yourselfers. Mays gets his satisfaction from sheer quan-

tity. "I want to sell billions of things," he says. And he has. which has made him rich (three Bentleys, million-dollar homes) and famous. There are websites devoted to either loving or hating Billy Mays. He shrugs again and says. "There's a fine line between love and hate." One website is dedicated to fans who want to have his baby, though most of those fans are

gay men who like so-called hairy bears. They call him "one of the hottest bears on the mar­ket" and beg to be able to "boff that bear." His haters refer to him as "an asinine piece of shit," "a public nuisance" and an asshole. One fan says Billy Mays is his idol because he's "so obnoxious that he's cool" and can sell "dick to a dyke." tap water from your own sink. A $5 bill for four easy payments of $19.95. plus shipping and handling.

"It's all about trust." says Mays. "I stay true to the pitch. I'm not a salesman. A salesman

sells a product; a pitchman sells himself. I make people believe they have to own it." He smiles and says, "Life's a pitch, then you buy."

Now Mays has his own company, Mays Promotions, which scours the earth for newly invented gadgets like. say. the double-bladed saw tipped with titanium, guaranteed not (concluded on page 158)

BILLY MAYS

(continued from page 55) to throw sparks or ignite fires—which is why he is here today, in December, in Clearwater, Florida, pitching his sparkless saw to the Clear-water Fire and Rescue Department. If this or any of his gadgets catch on—"My success rate is six out of 10. America votes, but 1 don't take it personally"—he'll find a company to invest in it, and then he'll outsource it to China, where it can be made cheaply and quickly.

While the firemen cut through metal doors with his saw. Mays sits in the shade on this sunny morning, pitching me. In between pilches. Mays is not much like his TV image. He's soft-spoken, a little shy, a little wary, look­ing at me for a split second before he answers a question, as if it's a trap. (Some consumers complain his products don't clean and don't stick as Mays claims they do. They ask for their money back, and Mays sends them a personal check.) He's a little cynical, too, the way a carny barker behaves toward the rubes, and a little cornball, like a baggy-pants comic who knows how corny his jokes are even as he losses them off. "Are you married or just happy?" Da-dum!

"I'm not a star," Mays says. "When I have to perform, I perform. When I'm done, I'm done." Mays is modest. He says he's not an inventor like Ron Popeil, the first of the great TV pitchmen, though Mays does claim he has "taken over Ron Popeil's baton." Popeil is a college professor to Mays's carni­val barker. Popeil invents things, then stands before a live TV audience in his suit and tie and lectures them about his product, how it works, how it will change their lives, using infomercials that last 30 minutes, an hour, sometimes even longer. Popeil is the master of the long con. "I just see other people's vision," says Mays, "like the Smart Faucet. And my new chamois." Mays once sold a chamois on TV that was, he says, "knocked off the air by this other guy's chamois. Now I'm gonna lake back my business. Pitchmen are very competitive." Mays is the most com­petitive pitchman extant. He always has to be the big dog. It's an easy game for keep­ing score. Money and quantity: How much money did he bring in in an hour, and how-many items did he sell?

Mays is pitching me again, leaning in close, tapping my arm, talking loud and fast, telling me how, after he made his bones in Atlantic City, he hit the road for 15 years and worked the home shows in big tents, which is a lot easier than the board­walk because there's a captive audience looking to buy something. He got his big break in 1995 in Pittsburgh while selling the WashMatik. An old guy named Max Appel was watching Mays draw in a crowd, his two assistants taking in money hand over fist and Mays pitching "like a machine,' never leaving his booth for hours, not even to piss. "I was killing." Mays says, "just pound­ing the old guy trying to compete." He kept drawing away the old guy's crowd until the old guy was finally done. "His voice was shot, his crowd gone, his microphone broke, and he's out of the show. I felt sorry for him," Mays says. "I was wearing a fancy headset with hidden speakers, and he had a cheap RadioShack mike. I went over to him and told him I would help him out sell-

ing his Orange Glo because I know how it can be. I lost my voice at times too. Some­thing clicked between us, and eventually I became the spokesman for Orange Glo."

The rest is history. Mays took Orange Glo International from a little-known Denver-based outfit to an internationally known enter­prise that was one of the top privately owned companies in the world from 1999 to 2001, making more than $400 million in sales a year, according to Inc. magazine. This success brought Mays to the attention of the Home Shopping Network thanks to a tall, lanky Eng­lishman named Anthony "Sully Sullivan, now Mays's partner in Mays Promotions.

Mays calls out, "Sully! Come over and talk to this guy. Tell him how it happened." Sul­livan ambles over and sits down. Mays gets up to leave. "Listen to Sully," he says. "He knows." Now Sullivan begins pitching me, just like Mays only less physical, not so loud and less aggressive, more conspiratorial, a master of words. In fact, so many words are spilling out so quickly I'm exhausted just listening to Sullivan tell me he was a surfer dude from Devon, England, a quaint village of thatched-roofed homes, until he went to London and became a pitchman, surfing and, with a cockney accent, pitch­ing products like the V-Slicer "that'll make tomato slices so thin a tomato will last a whole summer." Or the Rolling Ruler. Or the Rotato, which "conforms to the undu­lating terrain of every fruit and vegetable, big or small—the Rotato peels them all."

In 1994 Sullivan went to a home show in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, where he had heard of "the legendary pitchman Billy Bucket," as Mays was then known, who sold WashMatiks. "It was instant friction," says Sullivan. "I told Billy I sold WashMatiks in England. He said, 'Wanna show me how to do it?" I said, 'I sell differently than you.' Billy said, 'This is how we do it, kid. Wel­come to America.' I don't shout like Billy. I talk quickly because my British accent plays in the States. Billy's more deliberate, physi­cal, with his beard and blue work shirt, a lot of hand actions—oh, he's an artist."

Over the next few months Mays and Sul­livan bumped into each other a lot at home shows. They forged a friendship grudgingly at first, then with more respect for each other's artistry. "We would compare how much money we had made at the end of a day," says Sully. "If I was ahead for a day, he had to beat me the next day. Billy always had to be top joint."

Then one Halloween Sullivan was invited to sell a new mop on the Home Shopping Network. He soon got the producers to put Mays on the show, too. The first time Mays began his shouting pitch on TV the co-host stepped back in fear. He said, "You don't need lo shout—you got a mike." But Mays kept shouting, selling his Zap A Spot cleaner, 'just aim and spray and walk away."

"Billy and me, we were owning it," says Sullivan. "We were on every day, pitching. We slept and ate in the green room and went on-screen every 20 minutes, 24 hours a day for days without sleep. We were finally at the party. We knew through TV we could infect the market."

Mays returns. He stops and listens to Sul­livan for a minute with a thin smile. Then he says, "They had a star on the water closet for

me. They had to explain it to [HSN owner] Barry Diller. They began calling it the Billv Mays Network. They'd call me 24.7. I'd be at the beach with my family, and they'd tell me to get to the studio. They needed money; they needed me to pitch. 1 always showed up and pitched whatever they had."

"We were both on lire," says Sullivan. "I began to write our copy. 'It's the while knight in shining armor, powered by the air you breathe and activated by the water you drink." "

"Makes your whites whiter, your brights brighter," adds Mays. "Mother nature-approved, without the damaging side effects of chlorine."

Sully says, "It was the first time we weren't competing."

Suddenly Mays and Sullivan start talking back in forth in a form of gibberish. Their gibberish is animated and means .something to them but not to me. When they stop. Mays says, "We were talking carny." 1 ask why. Mays says, "Sully wanted to tell you something, but I wasn't sure he should." What?

Sullivan says, "Did you see where Orange Glo was just sold for more than $300 mil­lion? Well, Billy made Orange Glo. There's no one out there like Billy on TV today. He's an artist. And after all Billy did for Orange Clio, you'd think they'd toss him a million. But they gave him nothing."

Sullivan says the days of the old-time pitchman are fading fast. Soon he and Mays will be anachronisms, wiped out by the Internet. The problem is that once Mays makes a product known on TV, it almost immediately pops up on the Inter­net at a cheaper price. Then Mays needs a new product. It's an ever-quickening cycle. Mays pitches, the product gets hot, three months later it's on eBay, and Mays has to find a new product.

Late in the afternoon, as the sun begins to set over the Gulf of Mexico on Clearwa-ter Beach, Mays is autographing some pho­tos of himself by his car. I ask him if he ever meets little kids who say they want to grow up to be like Billy Mays. Mays grumbles, "If I do, I crush them."

He walks onto the pier stretching into the gulf. Mays is holding an object: three silver rings attached to each other by an elastic cord. It looks like a giant cock ring. I ask Sul­livan, "What's the gimmick?" Sullivan smiles. "You catch on quick. It's the Spin Gym," he says. "You can put it in your pocket."

Mays is now shouting at passersby, trying to draw a crowd. "Gome on over here!" he says. "I'll show you how it works." A girl with huge breasts straining against her T-shirt comes over. "I wanna show you a new prod­uct," Mays says. The girl says, "I'm shy." Mays says, "So am I." Then he gives her a demon­stration, talking all the while. "You wind it up and start pulling! You get a full workout for your shoulders, your arms, your chest." The girl blushes. Mays says, "This powerhouse-gym fits in the palm of your hand." The girl pulls and tugs on the rings, then walks away.

Mays grabs a couple and pulls them into his pilch. "Where you from?" he says. They tell him Iceland. Mays says, "My mother was from Iceland; my father was from Guba. I'm an ice cube." Da-dum!