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Title: The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette
Details: Copyright 2015, Penguin Books
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): ""Whenever you have something intended as innocent fun for children, you can count on adults to turn it into an obsessive, grotesquely over-commercialized 'hobby' with the same whimsy content as the Bataan Death March."
-- Columnist Dave Barry on Beanie Babies, The Miami Herald, 1998
There has never been a craze like Beanie Babies. The $5 beanbag animals with names like Seaweed the Otter and Gigi the Poodle drove millions of Americans into a greed-fueled frenzy as they chased the rarest Beanie Babies, whose values escalated weekly in the late 1990s.
A single Beanie Baby sold for $10,000, and on eBay the animals comprised 10 percent of all sales. Suburban moms stalked UPS trucks to get the latest models, a retired soap opera star lost his kids' six-figure college funds investing in them, and a New Jersey father sold three million copies of a self-published price guide that predicted what each animals would be worth in ten years. More than any other consumer good in history, Beanie Babies were carried to the height of success by a collective belief that their values would always rise.
Just a strange as the mass hysteria was the man behind it. From the day he started in the toy industry, after dropping out of college, Ty Warner devoted all his energy to creating what he hoped would be the most perfect stuffed animals the world had ever seen. Sometimes called the "Steve Jobs of plush" by his employees, he obsessed over every detail of every animal. He had no marketing budget and no connections, but he had something more valuable-- an intuitive grasp of human psychology that would make him the richest man in the history of toys.
Through first-ever interviews with former Ty Inc. employees, Warner's sister, and the two ex-girlfriends who were by his side as he achieved the American dream, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble tells the inspiring yet tragic story of one of the most enigmatic self-made tycoons. Bestselling author Zac Bissonnette uncovers Warner's highly original approach to product development, sales, and marketing that enabled the acquisition of plush animals to activate the same endorphins chased by stock speculators and gamblers.
Starting with a few Beanie-crazed housewives on a cul-de-sac in Naperville, Illinois, Beanie Babies became the first viral craze of the Internet era. Bissonnette traces their rise from the beginning of the official website-- one of the first corporate websites to aggressively engage consumers-- to the day when "rare" models became as worthless as quickly as they'd once been deemed priceless. He also explores the big questions: Why did grown men and women lose their minds over stuffed animals? Was it something unique about the last years of the American century-- or just the weirdest version of the irrational episodes chasing what one dealer remembers as "the most spectacular dream ever sold.""
Why I Wanted to Read It: I've been really wanting to read this book for over a year and had first heard about it years ago. I'm fascinated the history of toys, in particular what they tell us about the era in which they exist.
The gold standard for this is Forever Barbie, cultural critic MG Lord's 1994 masterpiece skillfully (and massively entertainingly) dissecting the doll and its history and what it means and meant to generations of children (and adults).
On a far smaller, poorly-executed-but-still-massively-entertaining scale, the Netflix documentary series The Toys That Made Us captures some of this fascinating energy.
How I Liked It: I mentioned in my first review of this year, Orange is the New Black, that even non-fiction is telling a story and the important thing to me is that it is a good story, as in, that it's interesting.
But an important element I left out was the fact with non-fiction, how do you tell the story is true or at least "true-ish" as that memoir was? Can you separate a good story and still acknowledge that it might, well, just be that? As in, not entirely true, although it might be presented as fact?
First, let's look at the author.
I have to admit, for the story I was hoping to read about Beanie Babies, this is... not exactly the author from his bio blurb that I'd necessarily choose to tell it. Bissonnette boasts "two acclaimed bestsellers before his twenty-fourth birthday", the titles of which sounds like perhaps an Arrested Development visual gag: Debt-Free U and How to Be Richer, Smarter, and Better-Looking Than Your Parents. I haven't read either one of them, but from the publisher's website information, neither title is a parody of the genre, unfortunately.
Solely from that bio, this would be an author if I wanted someone to tell me their favorite cryptocurrency, not the cultural background that led to this bizarre phenomenon in the closing decade of the twentieth century.
The book begins promisingly with the 1998 Ty Inc. holiday party, and one party attendant in particular not sharing the joyous, optimistic mood of the crowd (Ty Warner looking out at the crowd of 250 employees exclaimed "Wow! I've never been in a room with so many millionaires!"). Ty Warner's longtime girlfriend/fiancee Faith McGowan was still lamenting his lack of commitment to their relationship and planning to sell her company holiday present (a special employee-only bear) to a dealer for thousands of dollars, a much-needed nest egg for McGowan. For if Warner decided that night to go home and change the locks, she and her young daughters would be homeless. It's a nice ominous little story that helps sets the mood of the book.
From there, the author muses on his own personal memories of Beanie Babies, and how he came to write this book. The first chapter is him attending 2012 Toy Fair and trying to score an interview with Warner, making an appearance at the Ty Inc booth. The author waits hours to meet him and Warner is polite and even friendly, but unwilling to help with the book the author is writing, saying that other people could tell the story of his company better than he could, and that he'd only remember the good and not the bad.
The author segues nicely from the impressive Ty booth at Toy Fair, to the lower level where he meets up with the man who gave Warner his first job in plush, former CEO of Dakin, Harold Nizamian. Nizamian, "who once ran a $200 million toy business, watched his empire crumble just as Warner's was ascending" (pg 15) and at the time of the book, in his early eighties and with sales and finances at his own company Timeless-Toys Inc sputtering, he confided to the author he was struggling to find the $3000 he needed to fill a retail order of hand puppets. Quite a difference from the lushness of the Ty booth (and Warner's appearance) and it's supposed to be.
From there, we get a background on plush, on Dakin, and then it's more or less a straightforward biography of Ty Warner, and by extension his company, and his most successful product, including the craze and hard downfall and the aftermath.
There are stopovers at the history of eBay, the Franklin Mint, and a then-recent visit with Beanie collectors still hanging on then over a decade and a half past the craze. But mostly, it's Ty Warner.
Born to a rich family with an abusive, neglectful mother plagued by paranoid schizophrenia, Warner's father was by accounts a manic salesman (who according to Ty Warner's younger sister, not only sexually abused her, but physically abused the children at the behest of his troubled wife) who eventually helped get him a job at Dakin. Warner's relationship with his father was bizarre and "strained" and purportedly included Warner seducing women his father dated to prove... something? Warner, once an aspiring actor, took to developing his own flair (for lack of a better term) as a salesman. He eventually left Dakin, disgruntled, depressed, and wanting to start his own business.
Along the way, he met Patricia "Patti" Roche, a neighbor taking classes at the nearby community college. He asked to use the college library for some research for patent and development ideas for his burgeoning company, and she was taken in by his ideas and ambition. They started spending a lot of time together as friends and Warner told her about a vision he had about working in plush again. His father dropped dead of a heart attack, and though accounts differ (his sister said he waited five days to tell her and in that time pilfered through his father's valuable antiques; Warner told the press his inheritance was $50,000, Roche said she found documents for a $200,000 savings account that he told her he'd gotten from his father), he had the money to start up a plush business with Roche.
From there, Warner, Roche, and a few others struck out on their own and within six months of founding Ty Inc, the relationship between Roche and Warner turned romantic and chaotic. They eventually burned out but Roche remained a huge part of the company, heading up Ty UK and spending twenty years with Ty Inc before leaving in 2004.
Shortly after his break-up with Roche in 1993, when looking to perfect a lighting fixture, Warner met Faith McGowan, a lighting sales associate recently divorced with two young elementary school aged children. She went to his home to attend to his lighting problem (Warner apparently has a fixation with proper lighting in both personal and professional settings) and they got to talking.
They started dating and became a couple fairly quickly, and McGowan eventually came to work with Warner on Ty Inc. Shortly after, Warner came up with Beanie Babies, and a fairly complex but highly effective marketing strategy (keep them limited to gift/specialty stores, not toy stores) and his own sense of perfectionism (even if a toy was in production, Warner was a consummate perfectionist that would continue to improve the toy, thus by accident making the previous "imperfect" model collectable) led to the slow, steady rise of the toy to become a building craze.
We see the birth of eBay and the nascent Internet take shape, and collector communities grow, along with innovations not made by Warner, such as the concept of retirement (credit goes to Ty Inc toy distributors, Brian King, Chris King, and Kevin King, a trio of brothers that became multi-millionaires in their twenties), and the Beanie's poem and birthday (Lina Triveldi, who was still in college when hired and who also with her young brother helped pioneer the Ty website and thus the idea of corporate website marketing).
The height of the Beanie craze, with the 1997 McDonald's toy promotion (Warner hated the idea of any collaborations with other brands, but McDonald's helped introduce the toys to a bigger market), and the inevitable crash as well as Warner being seemingly the only one to come out unscathed (save for a nasty scrape with tax evasion which earned him probation and community service because of course it did) and the fates of all the players at the time of publication (2015, and most had gotten out of the toy business, but Warner remains, even six years after the book) are all covered. The book ends a bit gloomily and abruptly, speculating only on what will become of Warner's empire should he, a single, childless man with only his estranged younger sister as heir, die with everything as is.
Got all that? Because that's a very condensed summary. If the sources in this book are to be believed, Warner is a credit-stealing ("By the late 1980s Warner was frequently shouting at his subordinates, "I am the designer! I designed everything!"", pg 38), shameless (wanting to create a Halloween Beanie but unsure of how a ghost would look, McGowan's young daughter had an idea and drew a perfect shape. Warner loved it and gave her design credit for "Spook" until threatened by the idea, apparently, he removed her name credit and renamed the toy "Spooky" much to the little girl's dismay), maniacal (frequently, when out at a restaurant with McGowan and her young daughters, no one was allowed to eat until they came up with a new name for a new Beanie Warner was working on) unlikeable pretentious asshole (""He was a smart-assed shithead," remembers Mike Ingram, a former Dakin sales rep. "He was arrogant and thought he was somebody he wasn't. I would guess you're gonna be hard-pressed to find anybody who liked him."" pg 21).
And that's just his professional life. His personal life is even more bizarre, and even more staggering. A cosmetic surgery addict since at least the early '90s, he talked McGowan into getting her jawline "corrected" and frequently his face would frighten her and the girls; he had sinus issues as a result of "too-frequent procedures" and cosmetic surgeons had warned him that he long ago reached "the point of diminishing returns." But aside from involving McGowan, that's a slightly eccentric, if dangerous-sounding personal choice, isn't it?
Less so his treatment of his two partners. With Roche, he was for a time physically abusive (she says it stopped while they were still together), stalked her after they'd broken up (including literally turning up at a hotel where she was staying with her new boyfriend and sneaking past security as "room service"), and once played her recordings he'd made of her with another man. Employees remember screaming arguments with Roche, and Roche being verbally abusive to other employees, feeling herself above speaking to anyone but Warner himself.
With McGowan, in addition to the plastic surgery urging, he also obsessively picked out her clothing, stole her ideas and took credit for them (sources differ, but McGowan claimed it was her idea for a bear in memory of Princess Diana; "All you ever did was pick colors!" Warner screamed at her during an argument once-- he also "screamed" at her that she was a bitch that wasn't getting a dime from him, when she expressed concern about having assets in her name). In addition, he offered next to no financial support for her and her daughters and on at least one memorable occasion (it was Christmas Eve), cheated on her with Roche, relishing the scene it caused between the two women (when McGowan punched him in the face in the lobby of the hotel where the, er, deed was purportedly taking place, she was apprehended by the police the hotel manager wisely called ahead of time, but Warner "shooed them away" and went home with McGowan), according to witnesses.
Warner also has a super creepy obsession with obesity and fat people, particularly (surprise!) fat women.
On a romantic interlude at the St. James Hotel in San Diego, Warner opened the door to the suite; while Roche started to unpack, he stretched out in the bathtub, still wearing his suit, and called out to her, "It's a beautiful tub!"
"Yeah, it sure is!" she replied.
"I bet your mother would never fit in it!" he yelled back.
Nasty comments about overweight people were a recurring theme with Warner. In restaurants he sometimes loudly remarked on the physical fitness of patrons at other tables. If his meal was too big for his liking, he'd send it back to the kitchen to be halved-- with a lecture about how such portion sizes were making America the fattest country in the world. He also made a habit of entering a restaurant, sitting down, looking at a menu, blowing his nose on the napkin, and then announcing he wanted to go somewhere else. (pg 43)
He also had an incredibly creepy sales style when selling his stuffed animals which ties into his bizarre fat-hatred (which is particularly directed at fat women). Obsessively grooming his products, "Warner was also vigilant about keeping overweight women away from his [plush] cats. "He was afraid they'd sweat on [them]," Roche remembers" (pg 36).
Along with his bizarre, highly specific fears about fat women, he also had a habit of flipping out if employees didn't stock everything to his exact standards, yelling and more than once driving away a buyer with his theatrics.
Finally, in what sounds smarmy/insufferable, but the book describes as highly effective in selling,
When he was dealing with a husband-and-wife team of buyers, Warner knew just when to shift his attention back to the guy.
"If for two seconds that man thought he was flirting with the woman, you just lost the sale," says Roche. "So you better get the focus back on the man."
For this, Warner had a go-to move: picking up George, a baby gorilla that was among the company's most popular offerings, placing it on the man's chest, and saying, "I want you to look into his eyes and tell him you hate him." (pg 35)
Since we're back at his professional life, interestingly,
Most of the negative stories about Ty Warner came from his former high-level employees. "You get beat with a stick and there is no carrot," one of them said of his management style. "And if you still want the carrot, you get beat again. Then he'll tell you that maybe there is a carrot after all, and then he'll got to Europe and fire you while he's out of the country."
With hourly workers, though, it was entirely different. When Warner was running things with Patricia [Roche], he made sure everyone knew that Ty was basically a family business; he was the dad and Patricia was the mom, and everyone was valued and loved. When he hired his first warehouse worker from a job-board posting at a for-profit college across the street, he offered the young man the use of his home-- Warner was living in a condo while the house was under renovation-- to help him save for college. (pg 107)
The book goes on with some other positives. When an early employee was diagnosed with cancer, Warner brought research on top specialists he'd done the next day. He purportedly knew all the workers in the warehouse by name and asked after their families. He was "obsessed" with the living and working conditions of the Chinese factory workers that manufactured his products and made sure they were paid above-market wages-- and with enough light.
The most concise interpretation and probably the most accurate the author gives about Warner's management style comes during the introduction and section on student Lina Triveldi (the website pioneer, Beanie birthday inventor, and poet of the early hang-tags):
If you didn't have power that threatened Warner and he wasn't paying you too much money, he could be extremely kind. (pg 108)
Which sort of explains why he could be a family man and concerned advocate for low-wage workers and scream and hurl invective at people who'd been in the company with him for years, like Roche (who frequently screamed back).
When on a visit to Harrods in London turned up Beanie Babies with prices stickers covering the Ty logo on the tag, he called Patricia Roche and demanded that she immediately stop selling to all three hundred Harrods locations.
"They put a sticker over my name!" he "shrieked," as Roche put it. (She told him to shut up, and he eventually let it go.) (pg 104)
It's worth noting here that plenty of Ty Inc employees and those that knew Warner professionally at Dakin snickered quite a bit over his choice of a company logo: his first name, in a heart: for a man that purportedly sees himself as a lone genius, among other things, a more perfect symbol couldn't exist.
[Warner] sometimes shipped products to the United Kingdom only to tell Patricia Roche, while they were en route, that she couldn't sell them because they'd been retired. She'd respond, "Well, if you're charging me for them, they're not retired in England, Ty," but he wouldn't budge. Such tactics made Roche furious, and she did call him at this office every now and then to hurl obscenities at him. (pg 105)
Worth noting here that Patti the Platypus is named for Roche and Warner wrote the hang-tag poem himself:
Believe me, she wouldn't stop talking
Listened and listened to her speak
That would explain her extra-large beak!"
The author also spends a great deal of time exploring the collector market and the collectors, some still collecting, others long since given it up. Some tidbits include Warner's notorious litigiousness (on family outing with McGowan, he would have her young daughters scoop up beanbag toys as example to take to his lawyers) which led him to crack down on a collector-made Beanie game, pretty much mocking collectors and the whole hobby (The Beanie Chase, designed for between two and nine players, featured nine profile cards each with a Beanie-like poem describing a collector type, including "Dealer Dave" and "Retired Ben") and a line of Christian-themed toys "HolyBears" which included biblical references on the hangtags (the CEO had the audacity to issue a press release stating "Using teddy bears to help spread the Word of God apparently does not sit well with the maker of Beanie Babies products. Ty, Inc. has filed a lawsuit against HolyBears, Inc. asking for all HolyBears teddy bears to impounded for destruction." before actually continuing "When materialism challenges religion, there is often an interesting result-- and I believe HolyBears has been put in this position for a reason.") among many others.
While Warner encouraged retirements to drive up demand, especially on low-selling products, and late in the craze even allowed price guide "experts" to license the Beanie name (presumably being assured your $5 purchase will increase substantially in value each year is good for business), Warner by most accounts truly hated adult collectors and the collector market.
While we're talking about those collectors/Beanie aficionados, the author interviews several of them, including the couple desperate to have a bestselling book, any bestselling book, and finally hit gold with their Beanie Baby handbook (eager to talk about their more recent projects that do not include Beanie Babies, nor any reference to them, the authors sniffed via email that "I think we are done with Beanie Babies."), the self-proclaimed "soccer mom" that started a Beanie collecting magazine (which got adjusted to a "bean bag" toy collecting magazine after some complaints from Ty), the prisoner incarcerated for murdering a man with a Beanie deal gone bad (he asks the author if Beanie Babies are still hot), and father and adult daughter collecting team that hopes to build a museum one day (more on them later).
He also dedicates a few stories to children and Beanies, including a psychotherapist who ran a therapy group for children who had a family member (usually a parent) battling cancer and used Beanies (before the craze) to help them cope. She'd usually allow the children to pick a Beanie to take home with them, a practice she had to stop after the craze hit since parents and other family were getting greedy and instructing their children to pick the toy with the greatest investment potential. Much like the employee holiday party story at the beginning of the book, it's an excellent example of a greater phenomenon, in this case, a children's toy that brought happiness and comfort being twisting into something ugly by adults' greed.
That of course brings me to what I frequently wondered reading this book. Is the author good at telling this story, or is this just as fascinating enough story it doesn't really matter?
Certainly, he has access to enough rare material, and with plenty of these people it's clear this is the first time they're speaking out. This book, judging by the number of articles about it, was fairly popular. Frankly, given a few passages, I'm far more inclined to think this information is just too compelling for it not to be interesting, but save for a few passages, one has to give the author credit for getting out of the way enough to let the material be interesting, something not all authors can do.
While MG Lord could combine in-depth, rare, and pioneering coverage with a well-crafted storytelling style to put it into perspective, this author can't always and some of his digressions could've been far better integrated. While there are a few situations in the book that veer dangerously close but fortunately don't directly get into what I call David Sedaris syndrome (in which the author of a non-fiction book somehow gets in into their heads to long-windedly tell their side of a personal story in a manner too-similar to the famous and rightly revered humorist), but in the situations in which the author finds himself (visiting a sketchy collector, waiting for an eccentric toy designer, meeting a convicting murderer in prison), it was both inevitable and again shows more restraint that he managed not to quite go that route.
But there are a few other bumps, as in describing Warner's ill-fated toy promotion idea about voting to continue producing Beanie Babies ("Warner announced a forty-eight-hour period during which people could call in and pay fifty cents to vote on whether Beanie Babies should be continued with proceeds going to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatic AIDS foundation-- although the question of what kind of psycho would spend fifty cents to vote to discontinue a stuffed animal was left unanswered." pg 195) that do pause the narrative flow in their own way ("Psycho", really? You think it wasn't primarily children making the calls? You know, those Beanie-loving children for whom you're repeatedly leading a narrative have been wrongly forgotten in all of this craze?).
But there's the matter I posed at the beginning. Just how true is all of this, particularly the stories about Warner? Most of the most personal comes from two ex girlfriends/partners/fiances who were connected with the company and his estranged younger sister.
It's worth noting also that the second girlfriend/partner/fiancee, Faith McGowan, had a post-break-up memoir she was shopping in 2004 with a website created with Robert Keck, an attorney she knew through a friend, about her time with Ty Warner to which the author of this book had access. Ty and the Beanie Stalk: Faith McGowan's personal story of how she and Ty Warner turned bean bags into billions and lost each other, the blurb for which the author describes as a mix of "a Harlequin Romance novel with The Wolf of Wall Street":
Faith, Warner's power partner and lover, retained attorney/author Robert Keck to write the inside story revealing how Warner's personal demons prevented him from ever marrying; how they made Beanies the first great product sold through e-commerce; how work consumed them and the avalanche of money changed them; and how, in the end, Warner made the fatal mistake which killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
It's all there in fascinating detail in Ty and the Beanie Stalk, a soon to be released 300 page non-fiction book with 16 pages of personal photos and personal handwritten letters. It is the writing and the consummate blending of a business story and a love story which distinguishes Ty and the Beanie Stalk. (pg 209)
McGowan's publishing hit a snag when Keck set up a deal with a "vanity publishing outfit" and he wanted her to pay him a fee for negotiating and also to indemnify him from any legal liabilities.
Also, once the announcement went up on their website, Warner contacted McGowan and they talked "for ten hours" and after that, McGowan "put the manuscript in her closet and stopped talking to Robert Keck." (pg 210)
The author goes on that by the time he met McGowan in the summer of 2012, she was living in a rental a few miles from the home Warner bought her as part of their split, owned free and clear, worth about five million dollars, and renting it out financed McGowan's living expenses. She couldn't bear to sell it, and once, "while checking the house between tenants, she found a stuffed Ty cat the previous tenant had found in a closet and perched on a mantel in the living room. She ran from the house in tears."
Her [rented] home was a museum to her time with Ty Warner, and she seemed to live in a state of suspended reality-- surrounded by memories, waiting for the day when Warner would come back to her, just as the most optimistic speculators hope that Beanie Babies themselves will soon make a comeback. The first thing I noticed upon entering was a built-in, glass-fronted bookcase filled with Ty prototypes, early Ty cats, and a Steiff dog that Ty had bought her. There was also Kaleidoscope the Cat-- a beautiful rainbow-colored Beanie Baby that Faith's sister, at one time a creative director at Ty Inc., designed. Faith showed me a photo of her then preteen daughters at the beach in the mid-1990s; it was, she said, the first time they had been to Santa Barbara, where Ty was having cheek implants removed.
The house and money were nice, but it was clear that what McGowan really wanted, more than a decade later, was Ty Warner. She'd had other relationships since him but nothing serious. Faith and I drove around Santa Barbara in her Jeep SUV and she showed me the homes and hotels Ty had built and bought with the money he'd made when they were together. She showed me the landscaping at his Biltmore hotel-- which, she said, Warner was constantly having ripped up. She made the connection between the landscaping and the constant changes to Beanie Babies that had led, entirely accidentally, to the first rare pieces. "Nothing is ever enough and nothing is ever good enough," she told me, "because his soul is empty."
She cried several times, and after a few hours she told me that she couldn't talk about him any more in one day. The hardest part of having a relationship with Warner end, Patricia Roche once told me, "is realizing that he didn't care about you-- not even a little bit." McGowan, Roche says, had never recognized that her relationship with Warner hadn't been the fairy tale she'd once thought it was. Ten years after Faith last had any meaningful contact with him, she stayed in Santa Barbara-- with few friends and no family. (pg 210, 211)
The author goes on that he and McGowan continued talking by phone on a regular basis and a few months after first meeting, he was visiting his mother and had given McGowan the landline number (??!!!). He was out when she called, but his mother (who is a psychotherapist, the author informs us) answered and McGowan "seemed in no hurry to get off the phone", talking about her day, her future plans and the weather. His mother "could tell that Faith was lonely" (pretty sure you don't have to be a psychotherapist to guess that when someone's idly chitchatting with the mother of someone they've only met a few times interviewing them for a book) and his mother "thought about staying on and chatting with her but didn't" which is, uh, a certainly interesting thing to add (perhaps his psychotherapist mother needed to be billed first?).
Particularly in light of what comes next. In 2013, McGowan died suddenly. Warner was reportedly distraught and called his sister and described his time with McGowan as the best years of his life. (He purportedly assured his sister he'd left McGowan with plenty of money; his sister purportedly replied that for some people it wasn't all about money.)
Her daughters tried to get in touch with Warner, but they didn't hear from him until he made a surprise appearance (and a scene) at her funeral:
They'd remembered him as having been paranoid; that was also their experience with his reemergence in their lives. He'd been looking at Faith's Facebook page, he explained, and was concerned about the people she'd been associating with. He suspected foul play and told them that he wanted to hire a private investigator. They declined the offer. A week after the funeral, he invited Lauren and Jenna to his Oak Brook home for lunch. "You know," he said. "I should have married your mother." "Don't you ever say that again!" Lauren screamed at him. Warner apologized.
His sister, Joy, posted this comment on the obituary the funeral home posted: "Faith, I was so lucky to have met you and your beautiful daughters. Ty knows you were the best thing in his life. I'm so sorry he threw all of you away. But now his time is coming..." (pg 212)
His sister Joy, incidentally, is where most of the incendiary material from his early life originates, including telling Warner about the sexual abuse from their father and his blase reaction (when told that her father later justified the abuse as a way of not cheating on their mother, a puzzled Warner muses that their father cheated on their mother all the time), Joy repeatedly running away because of the abuse and when questioned by police was not believed, their mother's mental health (which is supported by accounts from Roche and other witnesses) including her attempted murder or at least threatening of her daughter (Joy remembers waking up and finding her mother standing over her with a butcher knife), and the fact Warner got a girl pregnant during his one-year tenure in college (this account is supported by a classmate as well as his sister) and was paid off and sent off by Warner's father.
This would be after his sister caught him stealing and selling electronics with his friends in high school and told their father, who put him in military school (where he was bullied and hazed well "beyond what would be tolerated today" according to several classmates, and came home crying from a knife fight according to Joy) to avoid juvie. (Interestingly, a spokesman for the military school told People magazine that Warner has asked the school not to comment on his time there and another classmate in charge of coordinating reunions said Warner doesn't want anything to do with the school and this classmate knows why, but refused to be more specific.)
Okay, but what does all of this mean for this story's veracity?
Can people be vengeful after being wronged by an ex, be it a colleague or a lover/partner (or both)? Sure.
But given that there were several people, two of them his former partners and one his sister, who were willing to go on the record with their real names (and frequently, the stories read as though the person has let their guard down when telling it to the author, which given his experiences with McGowan, sounds like what happened) against a notoriously litigious billionaire.
Yeah, they would accomplish the objective (if it was an objective) of airing a grievance or several, but at the expense of angering, again, a notoriously litigious billionaire. So given the claims and the way they're told, I'm given to thinking they're probably fairly accurate.
At least, in most cases, in particular the stories from his two exes.
In the case of his sister Joy, I noticed that it's Joy who is given zingers in her memories of discussions with Warner. There's her rejoinder we saw above at Ty's statement about McGowan's death, and also once when Warner showed her a palatial estate he was building "worth well over $150 million", he showed her every detail, landscaping and architecture and then led her into the formal dining room with seating "for at least forty people."
When Warner informed her that this is "where we eat when we have company", it's Joy who asks who would he have over, "with an edge she quickly regretted, because she could see it had hurt him." (pgs 240 and 241) Warner was quiet for a moment and then responded "Nobody," coldly, and then continued the tour of the estate.
Joy claims that's the last time she's seen him in person, and it was in the mid-2000s.
Joy's also got quite a bit to say when it comes to Warner's tax evasion charges.
The account [a secret Swiss bank account which held more than $100 million and led to federal tax evasion charges] had been opened in 1996-- the year Joy remembers, that Ty had reneged on his promise to build her a $100,000 house because, he said, he couldn't afford it.
Two days after Ty's sentencing, I went to visit his sister for a second time at her home in Camano Island, Washington. When I'd first called her, she'd spoken negatively of "my famous brother," dismissing him as selfish, narcissistic, and obsessed with an opulent lifestyle that didn't interest her. When I'd first met her, Joy was preparing for hip replacement surgery in a few weeks-- surgery that her brother had declined to help pay for, instead advising her to turn to the seven children she'd raised with a former husband, none of whom Warner had ever met. When she asked him for a $1,000 loan, he'd refused via text message. He'd helped her out briefly in the wake of her divorce more than a decade earlier, but for the most part Warner's tremendous wealth has not eased her struggles. (pgs 213 and 214)
(It should be noted after Warner's light sentence, the author reached out to Joy for her reaction and she commented that "her prayers had been answered"; their relationship had its ups and downs, but "she says he's her brother and she loves him." pg. 236)
I bring this up about Joy Warner not because I'm inclined to disbelieve the bulk of what she's saying and her various allegations, both about Warner and about their family. I absolutely believe she was abused and theirs was an abusive home (and Warner acted out because of that abuse). It's worth also noting for the record she describes Warner's kindness and comfort to her when they were children, a kindness and comfort neither received from their parents. Her descriptions and stories of Warner were not just backed up in some instances by corroborating accounts, they're consistent with a larger pattern of behavior described in the book (pettiness, selfishness, unwillingness to spend money on others while spending lavishly on himself-- in one notorious example from early in his career, he takes the five-year-old daughter of work colleagues out for ice cream in his Rolls Royce and makes her go back and get money from her parents).
But I'd feel remiss if I didn't point out she's literally named in the book as having several financial reasons to lash out at Warner, not that McGowan and Roche (or many others, for that matter) did not. Also, her habit of awarding herself cutting lines when telling stories struck me as a bit strange (not that it doesn't and can't happen, but it doesn't happen with anyone else in the book and the author interviewed vast amounts of people connected in some way to Warner), but I don't doubt what I believe to be the point of the stories (Warner's values are grossly misplaced and he has trouble actually relating to other people).
Interestingly, the author offers this note on sources at the end of the book, literally titled "NOTE ON SOURCES":
This is a work of nonfiction. No dialogue has been invented; all dialogue is either lifted from primary sources, like Faith McGowan's unpublished memoir, or from interviews I conducted with people who were present for the conversation. However, please note that remembered dialogue is not necessarily the same as real-time dialogue.
The bulk of research and reporting for this book consisted of hundred of interviews-- in person and by phone. I also used contemporaneous trade publication and mainstream media accounts of the craze. Where possible, I've simply named the source within the text. Most of these accounts are available online and if you Google the quote "in quotes," you will be able to find the original source. In the note on sources in his most recent (and excellent) book, The Price of Silence: the Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of our Great Universities, journalist William Cohan writes, "In an era when digital access to documents of all stripes is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, the idea of providing page after page of notes on the sources of my research... seems somewhat superfluous." I agree. (pg 247)
I'm going to go ahead and vastly disagree. For one thing, some truly incendiary charges are made in this book and handwaving source collection with essentially a "Go Google it!" is insufficient. I would hope in the six years since this book's publication it's become clear why this isn't a good policy. For example, one of the most striking claims to me, about Warner's physical abuse of his business and domestic partner Roche, cannot be found by Googling the quote from the book.
As for the author's motives, he doesn't appear to have an axe to grind and if anything, the story he discovers sounds different from the story he perhaps intended to write. When waiting to meet Warner at the beginning of the book, he says he told Warner what he tells the reader he still believes, that Beanie Babies were "the most intriguing entrepreneurial success story in American history" (pg 12) and although he fudges the truth a bit ("starting with nothing, [Warner] had become a billionaire with beanbag animals that he'd convinced the American public were rare even while ships from China delivered them by the tens of millions as quickly as the factories could make them."), which, to be fair, it's not quite clear whether or not the "starting from nothing" bit was to convince Warner to talk to him for the book, it's clear he still respects Warner's innovation. If anything, the unflattering parts about Warner read as both part of his legend and paradoxically a way of humanizing him. One of the most striking passages in the book is the author's mention of Warner in the acknowledgements section:
Finally, I want to thank Ty Warner. He continues to produce the best, most affordable plush animals in the world. While he might have preferred that nothing be written about him, in no way did he interfere with my reporting for this book. (pg 250)
While I'd rather the book have had a more cultural consideration angle than a business acumen and market speculation one, it's undoubtable that any ensuing books won't in some way borrow from this author's research. And though the book isn't perhaps from the angle I'd be most interested in reading, it's still a fascinating story whether one is interested in Beanie Babies or not, but also if one is (did you know that Warner was hoping to retire Beanie Babies entirely and the whole "vote whether or not to continue them" thing was kind of an out? That "The End" bear was meant as a goodbye and that the toys were to be replaced by "Beanie Kids", a weird sort of Beanie Cabbage Patch hybrid, Warner's biggest flop? When told these "baby-faced Joe Biden rag dolls" were ugly, Warner supposedly said "I could put the Ty heart on manure and they'd buy it!").
So in the end, whether you believe the stories are true or not (I have no reason to believe most if not all of them are true), and though the whole thing could use a bit of finessing, this is still a weird, fascinating story told in a weird, (mostly) fascinating way.
Notable: The author talks to several collectors, including as I mentioned a father and daughter pair that are planning a museum and whom, before meeting them, a friend of the author expresses reluctance at the trip:
When my friend Ryan dropped me off at the house, he thought it would be the last time he'd see me. All that either of us really knew about the trip was that I was there to meet with a sixty-four-year-old man who owned a collection of sixteen thousand Ty products and lived with his thirty-two-year-old daughter, who made a full-time job of cataloging her father's Beanie Babies. The first thing we saw when we pulled up in front of the house was that the windows in one of the rooms on the second floor were covered with tinfoil. "I am not," Ryan said, "dropping you off at the home of an obsessive Beanie Baby collector who cover his windows with tinfoil." But he did. (pg 226)
The man is a quite a character, and very into Beanies (after the meeting, the father calls the author to apologize for interrupting him so many times, saying that his daughter says he gets over-animated and talkative when it comes to Beanies and she normally steps in to calm him when he stars in with "wild hand-gestures") and also into talking about himself in the third person ("more than anyone over the age of five I've ever met" pg 227).
Their house, the author remarks, "has the look of many houses on the reality TV show Hoarders except it isn't dirty and the clutter is intensely focused-- it is virtually all Ty products." (pg 228)
Along with, say, shoveling literally several hundred Beanies out of his bed each night to sleep, the father estimates that he devotes about sixty hours per week to his Ty collection (same for his daughter) which includes such ventures as digitally recording the sounds of Ty's line of "squeeze-them-and-they-shout-gibberish" Monstaz and playing them backwards at slower speeds "to see whether or not there was any kind of hidden message" (there wasn't).
You could be forgiven for thinking Leon and Sondra Schlossberg were married; she's his daughter, not his wife, but he assured me that lot of people think they're a couple.
"People are like, 'Hey, nice going,' when they see us together," Leon says and looks at Sondra who is thin and attractive. (pg 226)
Part of this is the fact this is kind of a creepy comment when followed up by the rather sweet relationship suggested in their website (leonandsondra.com) bios ("As the site’s name may suggest, and I hope it does, we have been a close team for a long time. Leon is my father, the biggest inspiration in my life and my best friend." Sondra writes; in his, Leon says "Sondra and I are the greatest team imaginable. She is my best friend, my partner in a variety of business endeavors and the inspiration for almost everything I do.") quoted in the book.
A large part of this is the "thin and attractive" which in the wake of Warner's apparent gross obsession with fat women comes across as even creepier, and a part of this is the fact if you look at pictures of the two on their website, they look like father and daughter.
Final Grade: B
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