November 29, 2005
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Cheerleaders and Pharmaceutical Sales
Allison V. Smith for The New York Times
Penny Otwell, a former cheerleader, is a drug sales representative
November 28, 2005
Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales
By STEPHANIE SAUL
As an ambitious college student, Cassie Napier had all the right moves – flips, tumbles, an ever-flashing America’s sweetheart smile – to prepare for her job after graduation. She became a drug saleswoman.
Ms. Napier, 26, was a star cheerleader on the national-champion University of Kentucky squad, which has been a springboard for many careers in pharmaceutical sales. She now plies doctors’ offices selling the antacid Prevacid for TAP Pharmaceutical Products.
Ms. Napier says the skills she honed performing for thousands of fans helped land her job. “I would think, essentially, that cheerleaders make good sales people,” she said.
Anyone who has seen the parade of sales representatives through a doctor’s waiting room has probably noticed that they are frequently female and invariably good looking. Less recognized is the fact that a good many are recruited from the cheerleading ranks.
Known for their athleticism, postage-stamp skirts and persuasive enthusiasm, cheerleaders have many qualities the drug industry looks for in its sales force. Some keep their pompoms active, like Onya, a sculptured former college cheerleader. On Sundays she works the sidelines for the Washington Redskins. But weekdays find her urging gynecologists to prescribe a treatment for vaginal yeast infection.
Some industry critics view wholesomely sexy drug representatives as a variation on the seductive inducements like dinners, golf outings and speaking fees that pharmaceutical companies have dangled to sway doctors to their brands.
But now that federal crackdowns and the industry’s self-policing have curtailed those gifts, simple one-on-one human rapport, with all its potentially uncomfortable consequences, has become more important. And in a crowded field of 90,000 drug representatives, where individual clients wield vast prescription-writing influence over patients’ medication, who better than cheerleaders to sway the hearts of the nation’s doctors, still mostly men.
“There’s a saying that you’ll never meet an ugly drug rep,” said Dr. Thomas Carli of the University of Michigan. He led efforts to limit access to the representatives who once trolled hospital hallways. But Dr. Carli, who notes that even male drug representatives are athletic and handsome, predicts that the drug industry, whose image has suffered from safety problems and aggressive marketing tactics, will soon come to realize that “the days of this sexual marketing are really quite limited.”
But many cheerleaders, and their proponents, say they bring attributes besides good looks to the job – so much so that their success has led to a recruiting pipeline that fuels the country’s pharmaceutical sales force. T. Lynn Williamson, Ms. Napier’s cheering adviser at Kentucky, says he regularly gets calls from recruiters looking for talent, mainly from pharmaceutical companies. “They watch to see who’s graduating,” he said.
“They don’t ask what the major is,” Mr. Williamson said. Proven cheerleading skills suffice. “Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm – they learn those things, and they can get people to do what they want.”
Approximately two dozen Kentucky cheerleaders, mostly women but a few men, have become drug reps in recent years.
While there are no statistics on how many drug representatives are former or current cheerleaders, demand for them led to the formation of an employment firm, Spirited Sales Leaders, in Memphis. It maintains a database of thousands of potential candidates.
“The cheerleaders now are the top people in universities; these are really capable and high-profile people,” said Gregory C. Webb, who is also a principal in a company that runs cheerleading camps and employs former cheerleaders. He started Spirited Sales Leaders about 18 months ago because so many cheerleaders were going into drug sales. He said he knew several hundred former cheerleaders who had become drug representatives.
“There’s a lot of sizzle in it,” said Mr. Webb. “I’ve had people who are going right out, maybe they’ve been out of school for a year, and get a car and make up to $50,000, $60,000 with bonuses, if they do well.” Compensation sometimes goes well into six figures.
The ranks include women like Cristin Duren, a former University of Alabama cheerleader. Ms. Duren, 24, recently took a leave from First Horizon Pharmaceuticals to fulfill her duties as the reigning Miss Florida U.S.A. and prepare for next year’s Miss U.S.A. pageant.
Onya, the Redskins cheerer (who asked that her last name be withheld, citing team policy), has her picture on the team’s Web site in her official bikinilike uniform and also reclining in an actual bikini. Onya, 27, who declined to identify the company she works for, is but one of several drug representatives who have cheered for the Redskins, according to a spokeswoman for the team, Melanie Treanor. Many doctors say they privately joke about the appearance of saleswomen who come to their offices. Currently making the e-mail rounds is an anonymous parody of an X-rated “diary” of a cheerleader-turned-drug-saleswoman.
“Saw Dr. Johnson recently,” one entry reads. “After the ‘episode’ which occurred at our last dinner, I have purposely stayed away from him. The restraining order still remains.”
Federal law bans employment discrimination based on factors like race and gender, but it omits appearance from the list.
“Generally, discriminating in favor of attractive people is not against the law in the United States,” said James J. McDonald Jr., a lawyer with Fisher & Phillips. But that might be changing, he said, citing a recent ruling by the California Supreme Court, which agreed to hear an employment lawsuit brought by a former L’Oreal manager who ignored a supervisor’s order to fire a cosmetics saleswoman and hire someone more attractive.
But pharmaceutical companies deny that sex appeal has any bearing on hiring. “Obviously, people hired for the work have to be extroverts, a good conversationalist, a pleasant person to talk to; but that has nothing to do with looks, it’s the personality,” said Lamberto Andreotti, the president of worldwide pharmaceuticals for Bristol-Myers Squibb.
But Dr. Carli, at the University of Michigan, said that seduction appeared to be a deliberate industry strategy. And with research showing that pharmaceutical sales representatives influence prescribing habits, the industry sales methods are drawing criticism.
Dr. Dan Foster, a West Virginia surgeon and lawmaker who said he was reacting to the attractive but sometimes ill-informed drug representatives who came to his office, introduced a bill to require them to have science degrees. Dr. Foster’s legislation was not adopted, but it helped inspire a new state regulation to require disclosure of minimum hiring requirements.
Ms. Napier, the former Kentucky cheerleader, said she was so concerned about the cute-but-dumb stereotype when she got her job that she worked diligently to learn about her product, Prevacid.
“It’s no secret that the women, and the people in general, hired in this industry are attractive people,” she said. “But there so much more to it.”
Still, women have an advantage with male doctors, according to Jamie Reidy, a drug representative who was fired by Eli Lilly this year after writing a book lampooning the industry, “Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman.”
In an interview, Mr. Reidy remembered a sales call with the “all-time most attractive, coolest woman in the history of drug repdom.” At first, he said, the doctor “gave ten reasons not to use one of our drugs.” But, Mr. Reidy added: “She gave a little hair toss and a tug on his sleeve and said, ‘Come on, doctor, I need the scrips.’ He said, ‘O.K., how do I dose that thing?’ I could never reach out and touch a female physician that way.”
Stories abound about doctors who mistook a sales pitch as an invitation to more. A doctor in Washington pleaded guilty to assault last year and gave up his license after forcibly kissing a saleswoman on the lips.
One informal survey, conducted by a urologist in Pittsburgh, Dr. James J. McCague, found that 12 of 13 medical saleswomen said they had been sexually harassed by physicians. Dr. McCague published his findings in the trade magazine Medical Economics under the title “Why Was That Doctor Naked in His Office?”
Penny Ramsey Otwell, who cheered for the University of Maryland and now sells for Wyeth in the Dallas area, says she has managed to avoid such encounters.
“We have a few of those doctors in our territory,” said Ms. Otwell, 30, who was a contestant on the CBS television show “Survivor.” “They’ll get called on by representatives who can handle that kind of talk, ones that can tolerate it and don’t think anything about it.”
But there have been accusations that a pharmaceutical company encouraged using sex to make drug sales. In a federal lawsuit against Novartis, one saleswoman said she had been encouraged to exploit a personal relationship with a doctor to increase sales in her Montgomery, Ala., territory. In court papers responding to the lawsuit, Novartis denied the accusation. The company has also said it is committed to hiring and promoting women.
For her part, Ms. Napier, the TAP Pharmaceutical saleswoman, says it is partly her local celebrity that gives her a professional edge. On the University of Kentucky cheering squad, Ms. Napier stood out for her long dark hair and tiny physique that landed her atop human pyramids.
“If I have a customer who is a real big U.K. fan, we’ll have stories to tell each other,” Ms. Napier said. “If they can remember me as the cheerleader – she has Prevacid – it just allows you do to so many things.”
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Sin City 100 Years old
Sin City Inc.
Las Vegas is 100 this year.
John L. Smith’s “Sharks in the Desert” and William L. Fox’s “In the Desert of Desire” look at the high-stakes city of spectacle and how it reflects American culture at large.
By Marc Cooper
November 13, 2005
Sharks in the Desert: The Founding Fathers and Current Kings of Las Vegas
John L. Smith
Barricade Books: 400 pp., $24.95
In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle
William L. Fox
University of Nevada Press: 186 pp., $24.95
Any doubt that Las Vegas has become America’s mainstream cultural capital — the city that best embodies the nation’s corporate ethos — evaporated this year when the town was neatly chopped (as they say at the poker tables) between two behemoth corporations: Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM Mirage acquired the Mandalay Resort Group and Harrah’s Entertainment bought out Caesars Entertainment, thus becoming the largest casino company in the world. The two gambling titans now own almost every major property on the fabled Strip, the main attraction in a city that draws nearly 40 million tourists a year. The notable exceptions, Steve Wynn’s Wynn Las Vegas and Sheldon Adelson’s Venetian, are themselves part of multibillion-dollar publicly traded corporations. Tax receipts from the newly aggregated MGM Mirage and Harrah’s alone now account for almost a third of Nevada’s general fund revenue.
As the desert metropolis celebrates its centennial this year, it has completed its transition from a Sin City run by gun-toting mobsters to a New Las Vegas run by risk-averse Bluetooth-equipped MBAs. “Consolidation was the way of capitalism, and the gaming industry practiced that philosophy at hyperspeed,” writes John L. Smith in “Sharks in the Desert: The Founding Fathers and Current Kings of Las Vegas.”
A respected columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of several books on his hometown (including an acclaimed biography of Wynn), Smith has compiled an entertaining series of meticulously researched sketches on just about everyone who has ever owned a casino there. What makes his juicy, almost surreal tales of Vegas’ founding fathers (roll over, Tom Jefferson!) so engrossing is that for decades, as Smith reminds us, this neon island in the desert was the only place in America where it was legal to be illegal. Indeed, Benny Binion, the founder of Fremont Street’s legendary Horseshoe casino, must be the only multiple killer in U.S. history memorialized by a bronze statue of himself on a horse. “Men considered not only notorious but deadly in other communities had evolved into colorful characters in Las Vegas,” Smith writes. “Binion admitted killing three men, was suspected of ordering several other murders, and had maintained a decades-long relationship with organized crime, but on Fremont Street, he was a gregarious cowboy gambler who allowed customers to play with as much cash as they could carry into the Horseshoe.”
Countless other reprobates laundered themselves in the desert sun, most famously Bugsy Siegel. There was also Moe Dalitz, who came to Las Vegas from the Cleveland mob, partnered with the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, created the lavish Desert Inn, backed a couple of other such “carpet joints” on the Strip and then went on to build the city’s first full-service hospital and become a venerated philanthropist and B’nai B’rith man of the year.
The most richly detailed portraits in “Sharks in the Desert” are of the city’s two contemporary mega-players, Kerkorian and Wynn — the men most responsible for the accelerated modernization and corporatization of America’s gambling mecca. Kerkorian, a reclusive but driven tennis-playing octogenarian, has on three occasions in Vegas history built the largest hotel in the world. He now controls a dozen casinos on or near the Strip and heads a $9-billion empire.
Wynn, for his part, revolutionized the casino industry in 1989, when, financed by Michael Milken’s junk bonds, he opened the spectacular Mirage and proved that gambling resorts could make as much money, or more, from the shows, shops, restaurants and meeting rooms as from the slots and the card tables. Five years ago, Wynn suffered a humiliating blow when he was forced to sell his Strip holdings to Kerkorian. Now he’s back, with the Wynn Las Vegas. Only in the corporate-bloated America of 2005 could his $2.7-billion property be seen as David to Kerkorian’s Goliath.
Smith clearly delineates the supine posture assumed by Nevada authorities and regulators, who tolerated not only the unsavory casino operators of the Siegel-Dalitz era but also some of the slippery corporate shenanigans of the present. It’s no accident that Vegas today enjoys what the pols like to call “broad bipartisan support”: Local county commissioners and city council members accept paid consultancies from the casinos, while in Washington the industry is aggressively represented by Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader. The head of the casino trade association, meanwhile, is Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., an influential former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
THERE are two key contextual issues that Smith’s book overlooks: Just what were the powerful economic currents that made the corporate transformation of Las Vegas inevitable? And what is the magic mass intoxicant that has made this city the nexus of so many superlatives: the fastest-growing, the hottest, the biggest, the best?
William L. Fox takes on the second question in his delightfully written “In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle.” Fox is described on his book jacket as an “independent scholar, cultural geographer, essayist, poet and travel writer,” so you know right away that this narrative will not exactly be linear. And it isn’t. How could it be, when it concerns “the presentation of art, animals, and sex in American society as seen through that very peculiar filter, the Las Vegas Strip”?
As I tagged along on his zigzagging explorations of Steve Wynn’s $300-million art collection, the local public art museum, the Guggenheim-Hermitage gallery inside Adelson’s Venetian, through the Mirage’s “dolphin habitat,” out to the bare-bones Vegas public zoo and then into Cirque du Soleil’s steamy stage production of “Zumanity,” I felt the exhilarated giddiness of one of those long, winding nocturnal rambles through the Strip itself.
What Fox discovers is hardly earthshaking: The awesome, glaring, for-profit entertainments overpower the city’s more sedate educational and public institutions. In other words, people come to Las Vegas not to stroll through its art museum or feed the furry critters at the zoo but to gawk at and mix it up with the city’s real wildlife: the world-weary dealers, the strung-out losers, the slot addicts, the bosomy waitresses, the undulating lap dancers.
“What’s being sold?” Fox asks in his preface. He provides several answers, foremost among them “spectacle” on a scale never before seen in history. “You can order up whatever spectacle you can afford, a pay-as-you-play paradise,” he writes. “Las Vegas enables you not only to gaze upon spectacle but also to sleep in its bed and have sex with it.”
Part of Las Vegas’ heady allure is the promise of intimate association with the greatest of all aphrodisiacs — power. With grudging admiration for Wynn’s chutzpah, Fox points to the casino mogul as one of its master practitioners, noting that Wynn got the Nevada Legislature to underwrite his vast private art collection, which he exhibited in one of his hotels: “So Wynn buys the art and is exempt from the tax for owning it. He leases it to the hotel, which earns more than enough in admissions to pay for the operating costs of the gallery. When he sells the art, he’s exempt from most of the sales tax….” Of the Mirage’s dolphin habitat, he remarks: “The unexpected juxtaposition of desert and dolphins implies the wealth and power necessary to produce such a sight, which creates the spectacle that Wynn wanted: a display of how he [had] the resources to overcome the conventions of geography, just as he [did] with tax laws.”
Fox is no simple scold. Aware that the line between public and private cultural spaces is erased faster in Las Vegas than anywhere else, he argues that this city is precisely where some sort of positive synergy between the two exists. The Shark Reef at the Mandalay Bay hotel is up to or even beyond the standard of any public aquarium. And although the exhibits at the Venetian’s Guggenheim-Hermitage gallery help attract new players to the casino, tens of thousands of casino patrons are also exposed to art they presumably would otherwise never seek out. Many visitors, Fox says, are apt to ask whether all those paintings are “authentic.”
Authentic or not, it hardly matters in Vegas. Things move too fast for anyone to figure such things out. The 100-year-old city is sprouting a bumper crop of high-rise luxury condos. A few blocks off the old Strip, a second one is emerging, on which actor George Clooney and his partners aim to build a $3-billion resort with an upscale dress code, no less. And Kerkorian’s MGM Mirage has announced the ultimate breakdown of the public-private barrier: a “Project CityCenter” that will construct a private metropolis inside the existing urban core. To be built on 66 acres, the CityCenter will offer half a million square feet of shops, an entrance on the scale of Fifth Avenue, a 4,000-room resort casino and 1,500 luxury residences for those who can afford to live in the city within the city, and who will probably never once ask themselves which one is authentic.
Marc Cooper is a contributing editor to the Nation and a columnist for L.A. Weekly. His latest book is “The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas
