I was a beauty consultant with Mary Kay in 2002 when “The Battle of Mary Kay: Hell On Heels” movie was aired on CBS. Despite the warnings from Mary Kay, Inc. and my upline that Mary Kay beauty consultants and sales force should not watch it, temptation got the best of me and I tuned in to see what it was all about. According to Mary Kay, Inc., they were not contacted by CBS regarding the film and supposedly they had not given any information to CBS. Mary Kay, Inc. felt that if we all just ignored the movie and the press on the movie, that it would just go away.
Shirley MacLaine, who portrayed Mary Kay Ash in the movie, had no idea who Mary Kay Ash was before doing this movie. She had never heard of her.
I received the DVD as a Christmas present last year and I decided to watch it again recently to look at it from “out of the pink fog”, as I had given up my Mary Kay business a year ago. It is amazing how well Shannon Doherty portrayed a Mary Kay beauty consultant and director who was passionate about moving on up in the company. The movie definitely pokes fun at Mary Kay, yet it is oddly the reality.
The movie was about Mary Kay Ash who was at the time, the top direct sales beauty company around. Then Beauticontrol started to give Mary Kay some competition and Jinger Heath (played by Parker Posey), the wife of a top Beauticontrol executive took over training and motivating the Beauticontrol sales force, as Mary Kay did with her company.
I have outlined below the scenes from the movie that really stuck out to me:
Shannon came home from a Mary Kay Seminar telling her husband that she was going to be the Queen of Sales at the next year’s Seminar. Her husband wanted to know if she was going to fix him something to eat. Personally, he could have gotten off of his butt and done it himself, but here is the gist that many of us who used to be in Mary Kay have spoken about. She hurriedly heated him up a plate of chicken and potatoes, threw mustard on top very quickly and popped it in the microwave. She then tells him that she was making him his favorite – Chicken Cordon Bleu! She said that she had to go and start working on her goal right now. I took this jab to represent the “family second” aspect that Mary Kay teaches, yet as you can see, she was spending very little time with her husband.
As Shannon was holding a skin care class, they showed her closing with each guest and telling each one of them how good they would be at selling Mary Kay. The last lady was being sucked in by her spiel and when Shannon asked her what she did for a living the lady said, “I teach first grade”. What was Shannon’s response? “Don’t you want to do something meaningful with your life?” Here again this really struck me because this is another area that us ex-beauty consultants and directors have discussed many times – the fact that Mary Kay ladies will put down other jobs, no matter how important. Being a teacher is a very important and meaningful job.
As Shannon progresses in the company, she is starting to become alienated by people around her. She is at a friend’s house and they show a scene where Shannon is being kicked out of the house. The friend said, “You promised you weren’t going to start this time! The last time you were here my friends didn’t talk to me for a week!” What does Shannon do after this? She shrugs her shoulders, puts a big smile on her face and walks away. She doesn’t care that she has just lost a friend. All she cares about is moving up in Mary Kay.
During the entire movie, there is a reporter following Mary Kay Ash around interviewing her. Whenever the reporter would bring up questionable practices regarding sales and recruiting in front of other Mary Kay beauty consultants and directors, Mary Kay would change the subject and turn everything around to make the women forget about that small seed of doubt that was starting to be planted in their minds. This reminded me of how when consultants pose concerns with their businesses, what they have to say is taken as a “negative” comment and twisted around to benefit the director.
The one scene shows Mary Kay Ash making birthday calls to beauty consultants. The one beauty consultant continued to talk on and on. Mary Kay Ash then presses a button that sounds like a doorbell and says, “Oops! There’s the door – gotta go!” in order to get off the phone. I remember my upline telling me that when Mary Kay would be on the phone with someone who was starting to talk “negative” about their business (which we know what they all consider negative – it was probably a legitimate business concern) she would look at the door and say, “Oops! There’s the door!” My upline said she would justify that it was not lying because Mary Kay was actually looking at the door when she said it. This is just another example of how Mary Kay wheedles around the truth.
When Mary Kay Ash is having a meeting with her directors, she begins to talk about how she started the company and how she got hold of the formula for the products. The reporter interrupts and tells her that Beauticontrol uses the same formula, so how could it be that she got the formula from the Tanner family? The reporter also brought up a litigation that resulted from this. All of the directors lose their smiles and Mary Kay turns the subject around to praising herself and her accomplishments.
All in all, the movie paints a very realistic picture of how beauty consultants and directors act in Mary Kay. The warm chatter scripts Shannon and her recruit used in the movie were so similar it was scary.
If CBS did not have any input from Mary Kay, Inc. they definitely did their research. They nailed many subjects and problems dead on and turned it around to make a joke out of it.
