The Queen of Reinvention
From rags to riches to rags to reinvention. The Natural Glow founder talks to Kim Knight on why she’ll always give it a go.
WHICH CELEBRITY’s Zumba group recently nailed a harvest moon dance performance at an Amway ball? Which celebrity can’t wait to start on a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle featuring a photograph of her third wedding?
Which celebrity uses felt-tip pens to recolour her faded butterfly ankle tattoo?
There is — and will only ever be — one answer to all of the above.
Suzanne Paul is the sales savant who wooed a nation with plastic pots of Natural Glow. She flogged a face bronzer and became a millionaire. She tried to establish a Māori-themed entertainment village and was declared bankrupt.
Vibrating pillows, Ginsu knives and an eponymously named scarf clip. Weddings, divorces and IVF failures. From Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to Dancing With The Stars to — well, she can’t say what’s next, but watch this small screen space.
It’s a narrative arc chronicled by magazines, newspapers and at least one academic journal. Do New Zealanders know the real Suzanne Paul?
“Obviously, everybody’s always a bit deeper than you think,” says Suzanne.
“But, yes. I think that was one of the things people liked about the commercials when they were first on.
They’d meet me and they’d say ‘Oh my God — you look the same and sound the same’. Except people always think I’m going to be taller.”
A fortnight ago in the Viva photography studio the world’s shortest Infomercial Queen is looking dubiously at a pair of black pants. “This is my waist,” she says, pointing. “And these are my hips. Same place.”
Suzanne is being fitted for a Viva Autumn Fashion Special. Creative director Dan Ahwa wants to celebrate her national treasure status with a shoot focusing on colour, vibrancy and positivity — high-end fashion with a tongue-in-cheek twist. There will be luxury labels and outrageous headwear; platform boots and a vintage maribou cape. Of course, there will be a “how to” scarf video (Suzanne Clip, model’s own).
“I have a thing, where I just say ‘yes’ to everything,” says Suzanne. “And then I figure out how I’m going to do it or what on earth possessed me.
“And a funny thing happens when you take on that persona. You do it so much that, eventually, that’s who you become.”
Suzanne Paul was born Susan Barnes. A working-class kid from Wolverhampton who grew up in a terraced house where baths were a scrub down with a face cloth in front of the fireplace and the loo was in the backyard.
Her accent determined her destiny:
“It meant I was from a lower class. They judge you straight away — your parents work in a factory — and in England, you can’t move from one group to the next. You couldn’t even say, ‘I’m going to be a secretary to a doctor’. In those days, the likes of me didn’t mix with doctors or lawyers. They were middle class and don’t even think about the upper class.”
Suzanne left school at 15. She sold menswear, shoes, camping equipment and confectionery. She packed meat, pumped petrol and engraved names on combs. She picked oranges and minded children on a kibbutz in Israel and demonstrated metal polish at a home show in London. For a decade, she travelled the UK selling everything from magnetic window washers to barking toy dogs. Once, she worked as a photographer (and bunny girl) at a holiday camp. Finally, miraculously, she landed a job at the British Pavilion at the Brisbane Expo — and made her first visit to New Zealand.
In 1991, she moved here permanently. She was 35, with $18 and a phone number for a man a former boss said might help her find work. They met outside a McDonald’s and he agreed to go into business selling vibrating massage pillows; a few months later, they started discussing a face powder she’d seen in the UK.
“It seems ridiculous now, but none of the big companies had a bronzing powder. There was no powder to make you brown. And then, one year at the Ideal Home Show in London, this company launched it. We all thought ‘that’s a great idea’ but it was very dark, and it was very orange . .
. I would not be selling that.”
Could she sell a better version? Suzanne is, simply, the woman who never believed she couldn’t.
“The newspapers declared me an overnight success. I’d had so many failures. Try here. Failure, failure, failure. Try again. No, that didn’t work. It was that, all my life.
“People would stop me and say, ‘how did you get the job?’ You see, they thought I’d been picked. ‘How did you get that job selling makeup when you’re not this, and you’re that, and you don’t have a very good voice, and you’re old’. They didn’t understand. I invented the product. I made the advert. I put it on TV.”
The plan was to hire a local name to front advertisements that would be based on the spiel Suzanne had developed for shopping mall demonstrations. Lana Coc-Kroft and Jude Dobson were too expensive. And so Suzanne became the face — and more crucially, the voice — of Natural Glow and its “thousands of luminous spheres”.
The first commercial screened in 1992. Shortland Street debuted that same year. Julie Christie’s recently launched Touchdown Productions was about to begin its barnstorming run of local programming. New Zealanders were finally ready to embrace homegrown celebrities — even those who came via Wolverhampton.
“I remember TVNZ had a whole day seminar for all its celebrities and presenters. How to deal with the public,
I have a thing, where I just say ‘yes’ to everything. And then I figure out how I’m going to do it or what on earth possessed me.
how to present yourself in interviews. There was a whole room of us,” says Suzanne. “They would just move you from show to show. I think my initial contract was for a three-year period, and they’d just come up with so many shows for you in that time.
“There were lots of parties. I remember me and [netballer] April Ieremia and — ooh, who was it — the tall one? Gorgeous. Blonde hair? We did a couple of years where it was a live New Year’s Eve show . . . I had to stand on a box.”
It’s funny, says Suzanne: “When I look back now, I don’t see many of them left.”
She has invited Viva to her home in Red Beach. She lives here with her husband Patrick Kuhtze (drummer and actor), rescue dog Matty and a gobsmacking view of the Hauraki Gulf. They recently shifted from a property in the country and it has necessitated a sartorial first. Suzanne finally owns a pair of Crocs. Pink. Embellished with hearts, flowers and peace signs. “Never thought I’d buy a pair . . . Perfect for the beach!”
Reinvention after reinvention. If at first you don’t succeed, don’t wait for it to happen. An hour with Suzanne is a lesson in never giving up.
“Right. I’ll have to start again. I’ve got to think like this, I’ve got to behave like this. That’s what I did the first time, and it worked. So all I’ve got to do is do all that again.”
Of course, she says, you won’t feel like doing it again. You won’t have the energy to do it again. But you must.
“Because if you’re sitting there waiting for some sort of energy and motivation to strike you like lightning
. . . that is what most people wait for. It’s actually completely the other way around. You’ve got to actually do the thing!”
In 2013, the Pacific Journalism Review published an academic paper summarising Suzanne’s life so far under three headings: The penniless product demonstrator makes a mint. Pushing into the mainstream — and the mainstream pushes back. The madeover make-over queen.
“Her story offers a case study of how the nominally famous can move from using themselves to sell products to selling themselves as a product,” wrote Rosser Johnson and Nemane Bieldt. “Ultimately, we contend that Paul’s career depended on a constant interplay between the carefully
constructed appeal she projected and her responsibility for, and responses to, a semi-permanent state of scandal.”
That “scandal” included a marriage break-up and a very public bankruptcy (much was made of the $39 million sale of the company behind Natural Glow, but Suzanne’s holdings were just 20 per cent. She received shares that quickly became worthless and “about $3m or $4m”. She spent it all and, she says, she’d do it all again, because “it was fun”).
Dancing with the Stars was meant to be her redemption. She cracked a rib in rehearsals and was in so much pain in the 2007 season finale, there were fears she wouldn’t finish. At her Red Beach kitchen table, she role-plays the meeting she had with television executives after her hard-won win.
“Right. So I’ve had hit shows before. Several. And now I’m the most famous woman on New Zealand television right now. Everybody loves me at the moment, so this is my time. I’ve come up with a couple of show ideas, and I’m sure you’ve got your own. Maybe they can merge? So, what are you thinking?”
Crickets.
There was some interest, she says, in a dance-based concept she pitched, but the network wanted someone else to front it.
“I said ‘no . . . she’s not a dancer, she hasn’t won Dancing With The Stars, she cannot present this show. It’s not, you know, authentic’.”
Suzanne shakes her head at the memory. “It was like I was talking reeeally slow. We never did it and I never got anything.”
How do you reinvent a reinvention? Today, Suzanne continues to voice adverts for Brand Developers (the owner of Thin Lizzy, successor to the Natural Glow throne). She recently finished a year-long stint with a company developing infomercial content for small businesses to use on social media platforms. She’s on the celebrity speaking circuit and — bombshell — she’s filming a television show.
She can’t and won’t say what it is. But here’s a surprising admission: At 67, Suzanne says she had to think hard about saying yes.
“I’m judged on my age now. I’m not getting offered things. It’s a very ageist society.
“I want people to see, particularly women, that at any age — but especially as you get older — you can still do things. You can still be relevant and have a go. I might not be brilliant at certain things, but I’ve always had a go.
“I took up tap dancing. I think I’m pretty good at that. I do ballet and I’m all right. I do hip-hop dancing — oooh, I’m rubbish at that, let’s stop that. Shall I go for singing lessons? I think I could be good at that . . . No, I’m rubbish at that! But I don’t want to be sitting in my rocking chair one day thinking, ‘I wish I’d had a go at that’.”
Last year, Suzanne was getting ready to give a speech when she overheard someone in the audience: “Suzanne Paul — can you believe it? I thought she was dead.”
Alive and kicking. Literally. At the Viva fashion shoot, the playlist ran from Chaka Kan to George Michael; Aretha Franklin to Abba. Suzanne couldn’t help herself. “Oooh — my Zumba class does this one!” She shimmies her hips, sparkles and shines. Never give up, she says. Eventually, someone will buy your product.
“It’s the law of demonstrators. Somebody will always stop. They always have and they always will.”
Sure, she says, she has the gift of the gab.
“I can know that ooh, if I say this, that sounds more appealing. You know, ‘thousands of luminous spheres’ sounds better than ‘shiny balls’. It’s the same thing, but ‘put these shiny balls on your face, love’ is not going to cut it.
“We could say it like this, or say it like that. At the end of the day, what it really comes down to, is not giving up. That’s what it is in sales and that’s what it is in life. People give up too soon.”
Photos / Guy Coombes
Fashion director / Dan Ahwa Make-up / Claudia Rodrigues Hair / Newton Cook
I want people to see, particularly women, that at any age — but especially as you get older — you can still do things. You can still be relevant and have a go.