If You Don't Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails (2 page)

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If You Don't

Have Big Breasts

Put Ribbons on

Your Pigtails

Well, Gloria and her two well-rounded friends. Gloria was built like Dolly Parton with a big bleached-blond swirl of cotton candy hair. Her breasts were the specialty of the house and had the power to lure men off the street, even if they weren't hungry. She could carry six cups of coffee stacked on top of them, and never spill a drop.

Gloria and her dynamic duo had put the Fort Lee Diner on the map, and watching the twins bounce around the diner had become sport in Fort Lee. I was watching her work the front section and, in an effort to feel busy, I was wiping the barren Formica landscape in front of me with a soggy white rag.

The double aluminum doors at the far end of the diner opened and in walked my destiny. I knew he was there before I ever looked up. With his dark skin and jet-black hair, he was unlike the working-class customers who frequented the place. In his blue aviator shades, he was different, probably from a land very far away. At least across the river, I figured.

I had seen his crisp, white flat collar and rich dark suit on only one other person in mv twenty-one years—Irvin Rosenthal, the elderly owner of the Palisades Amusement Park. The Park hovered atop the cliff above our house like a blinking, flashing, whirring spaceship. During the summers of my childhood, when Mr. Rosenthal drove down Undercliff Avenue in his black limousine, all the kids of Edge water ran up to his car like chickens to the feet of a farmer's wife, each of us hoping to get more than our fair share of free ride tickets. In his finery, Mr. Rosenthal was like a king. We all knew he was rich. Besides the fact that he owned the amusement park, he just smelled different from all of us river rats.

Ramone smelled different, too, I decided, even from across the room and over the thick aroma of frying bacon and eggs. Instead of asking to sit in Gloria's station, he looked at the manager and, with a quick lift of his chin, pointed toward me, the young innocent behind the counter. He walked across the diner, strutting like a pigeon. My

eyes met his blue aviator shades. Finally^ I thought, as he took a seat at the second stool, an interesting customer.

He ordered a cup of tea, and while I banged in and out of the swinging kitchen door, he sat and sipped it, hardly moving, just watching as I worked my counter.

I loved my counter. It was my territory, and everything that went on there was under my control. There were nine stools and every third one had a setup: glass sugar container, ketchup bottle, salt and pepper shakers, and a tin filled with white napkins. Since I was stuck behind the counter face-to-face with my customers, I often served as their dinner companion. So I made the most of it and entertained them with conversation.

Ramone told me he was from the "Basque Country." I didn't know if Basque was a town in New Jersey or not, and I suppose my face gave me away. It wasn't just any place in Spain, he explained, it was the upper echelon of French-Spanish society.

He said his father, had blond hair and blue eyes, just like mine, and he liked the red ribbons on my pigtails. I smiled, spritzing the napkin tins and chrome tops of the sugar containers with Windex and shining them with a paper towel.

He left sixty-five cents on the counter and offered me a ride home. I didn't need to weigh the options—walk the five blocks to the number 8 Lemoine Avenue bus or be driven home by the man from the Basque Country. "I'm finished at ten," I blurted.

After my shift, I took the diner's concrete steps two at a time. Ramone was parked at the bottom in a buttercup-yellow Lincoln Continental, the kind with the hump on the back. I opened the door and climbed into a car very different from any I'd ever been in. The seats felt like talcum powder against my arms and smelled expensive, unlike the crunchy seats of Dad's blue station wagon.

Ten minutes later, we pulled up to the curb in front of my house. Ray—he said I could call him Ray—followed me up our front steps and into the living room. I offered him a seat on the black vinyl sofa

where my parents slept and he was quickly surrounded by a blur of ten blond-haired, blue-eyed cookie-cutter kids. I introduced Ramone Simone, from the Basque Country, to my family.

My family hated Ray on sight, especially my mom, who, contrary to her normally welcoming ways, wanted the Dark Knight out of her house as quickly as possible. "He's much older than you" is all I remember her saying after Ray left. What she didn't say screamed loudly in the silence.

Ray waited outside the diner every night and gave me a ride home. I guess you could say we were dating, though I didn't think of the rides that way. He told me he was a big real estate developer and built houses in every town in New Jersey except mine. I also learned that he was fifteen years older than I and was divorced with three daughters. To me, this all added to the intrigue.

A few months later, Ray said a smart girl like me should be living in the Big City, and to get me started, he offered to pay for a week at the Barbizon Hotel for Women. To my mother's dismay, I jumped at his offer and packed up a few belongings.

I carried my suitcase down from the third floor. I had packed only my black ribbed sweater, two pleated skirts, my navy-blue pea-coat, and my new pair of pajamas. Mom was standing next to the living room radiator sorting socks.

"Now, Barbara,'' she said, pushing my bangs away from my eyes and looking out the front door toward the street. "Don't you be fooled by that fancy car!"

T know, I know, Mom," I said, giving her a quick peck on the cheek and a one-armed hug.

"And remember, if you change your mind, you can always come home."

With that, I hurried down the steps and climbed into Ray's big Lincoln with the yellow leather seats. I felt the same mixture of fear and excitement I did every time the Cyclone clicked toward

the top of the big hill. I didn't say a word as Ray revved the car's engine and turned onto Hilliard Avenue, but I did take one last look back at the house sitting beneath the L of the Palisades Amusement Park sign.

Ray gave me some money to go buy myself a "real New York outfit." I bought a purple one—a stretchy lavender lace top, lavender corduroy bellbottoms with six lavender buttons on the hip, and a pair of lace-up. knee-high, lavender suede boots. I walked out of Blooming-dale's all purple and paraded up Lexington Avenue singing, "Hey there! Georgy Girl, swinging down the street so fancy free ..." I knew I was lookin' good and needed only two more things to stay in New York: a job and an apartment.

The next morning. I put on my new outfit and applied for a receptionist's position with the Giffuni Brothers company on Eighty-third and First. Thelma, my interviewer, explained that the Giffuni Brothers were two wealthy landlords who owned a dozen apartment buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She said I'd be in charge of greeting every tenant who called with: "Good morning, Giffuni Brothers."

By the end of the day, I had landed the receptionist's position and by the end of the week I had used the Village Voice want ads to find an apartment three blocks away from the office and two girls to share the rent. I moved myself out of the Barbizon Hotel.

My Giffuni Brothers stint introduced me to Manhattan real estate. I wore my purple outfit eight days a week and probably said, "Good morning, Giffuni Brothers" eight hundred times a day. But after a few months of "Good morning, Giffuni Brothers," I eagerly gave Ray my "no overhead" spiel about running at a profit by the second Sunday of every month, and he gave me the $1,000 to start a real estate company. We became partners and named it Corcoran-Simone. My old boss, Joseph Giffuni, said if I could find a tenant for one of his apartments, he'd pay me a whole month's

rent as a commission. He showed me the list of apartments they had for rent, and I picked Apartment 3K, the cheapest one-bedroom on the list.

I created my makeshift Corcoran-Simone office on the sofa one of my roommates had borrowed from her parents. My newly installed pink Princess phone sat silent on the double-tiered mahogany end table, as I stared bleary-eyed at the Sunday New York Times classified section. According to my count, there were exactly 1,246 one-bedroom apartments advertised. The ads were five or six lines long and the apartments were all priced between $320 and $380 a month. I noticed the best ads among the lot were the splashy ones with the bigger, bolder headlines like: "FABULOUS 3!" "RIV VU 1 BR." "TRIPLE MINT!!!" followed by a long list of superlatives.

I worked out the numbers on my steno pad, and realized that the big ads were a lot bigger than my budget. I decided to keep my ad to four lines or less in order to make Ray's $1,000 last a whole month. But how, I wondered, could I make my little ad stand out among the biggies and how was I going to draw someone's eye?

Stretching my neck and looking up from the paper, I thought about my job at the Fort Lee Diner. Ah, Gloria! Now she had a gimmick. On my first day at the diner, I saw Gloria had assets Fd never have, and that night went home to fret to my mother: "And when we weren't busy, Mom, my counter was plain empty. Even when Gloria's station was completely filled, men were still asking to sit with Gloria and not me."

"Barbara Ann, you've got a great personality," Mom said, as she balanced Baby Florence on her hip and hung a sheet on the line. "You're going to have to learn to use what you've got. Since you don't have big breasts, why don't you tie some ribbons on your pigtails and just be as sweet as you are."

And that's how Ray found me two years later, wearing ribbons on my pigtails and offering a cheerful alternative to the big-

I masted, tiny-waisted, blond-bombshell Fort Lee sensation. I considered it a personal victory when a customer walked into the diner and asked to sit with "Pigtails." The simple gimmick pulled them to my counter and my sweet-talking kept them coming back.

Sitting alone in my apartment with the New York Times spread open on my lap, I thought about Mom's advice for competing with Gloria's superlatives, and I knew I needed an attention-grabber for Apartment 3K. How. I asked myself, can I put ribbons on a typical one-bedroom in four lines or less and make it stand out from the other 1,246 apartments!

I took a deep breath and picked up my pink Princess phone. "Hello, Mr. Giffuni,'' I began. "I've been thinking about your one-bedroom on the third floor, and I think I have a way to rent it for twenty dollars more each month." I had his attention. I told him how Apartment 3K's living room was like every other living room in every other apartment in every other building in New York and convinced him that if he put up a wall separating the living room from the dining alcove, he'd really have something different! Mr. Giffuni hesitated, giving it some thought, and then said he'd have the wall installed that week. I phoned my ad into the paper.

The following Sunday, my first four-line ad (bold print counted for two lines) appeared in the New York Times:

1 BR + DEN $340

Barbara Corcoran, 212-355-3550

It wasn't a big ad like the others, but it sure offered something more. Why would anyone settle for a one-bedroom, when for the same price you could get a one-bedroom with a den?

That Sunday, the calls began. And on Monday I rented my first apartment.

Barbara Corcoran

MOM'S LESSON #1: If you don't have big breasts, put ribbons on your pigtails.

THE LESSON LEARNED ABOUT USING WHAT YOU'VE GOT

I didn't have a big chest, but I did have a nice personality, a great smile, and the gift of gab. All I needed was my mother's cue to begin using them to my advantage. That was my first lesson in sales.

Although the apartment I advertised wasn't any bigger than the hundreds of others advertised that Sunday, my ad caught attention because it offered something extra—one more room. My "1 BR + DEN" ad enabled the customer to focus on the perceived benefit of more space, and the overwhelming response to the ad gave me a lot more bang for my advertising buck.

Good salesmanship is nothing more than maximizing the positive and minimizing the negative. Although your competition might offer something you can't match, that doesn't matter. What matters is that you identify and play up what you've got.

1959. Edge water, New Jersey.

One Monday night, Dad came to the dinner table and announced, "I'm happy to tell you kids that today I quit my job, and I'm starting my own business!" Dad looked really excited. "I won't be working for Mr. Stein as his press foreman anymore !" he continued. "And I'm naming my company Tre-Press Preparations.' "

We all listened as Dad laid out his business plan, ten wide-eyed kids and one very wide-eyed mother.

"From now on I'll be known as c Edwin W. Corcoran, the president of Pre-Press Preparations,'" Dad continued. "And I'll also be the company's one-man sales force, but I'll use a pseudo-name for calling my customers." Ellen asked what a "sudo-name" was, and Dad demonstrated with a would-be sales call: "Hello there. This is Paul Peterson of Pre-Press Preparations calling. ..." I could see red blotches begin to form in the V of Mom's blue housedress, a well-known warning signal in our house.

Dad explained how his new company would design and make cardboard boxes. He picked up the Mueller Dairies milk carton from the table, and said, "For instance, if Mr. Mueller hired me, I would decide how big his carton should be, I'd pick the colors, and I'd even draw the cows! I'd also find the right factory to make the cartons. Yep, I'd do it all!"

Within the week, Paul Peterson sold his first client on a job to design a belt buckle box, and President Edwin W. Corcoran asked my brother Tommy and me to sit at his new drafting table and draw buckle designs with his new black Enco drafting pen. We drew six different belt buckles, Dad cut them out, rubber-cemented them onto his white cardboard box prototype, and sent them to press.