Home
A shortcut for millions of happily acquisitive but terminally lazy video consumers, the Home Shopping Network is still too exhausting for me; even the mere act of picking up the phone can leave me spent. And yet, whenever a fabulous rock-shaped paperweight or combination radio/toilet paper dispenser appears on that screen, my reluctant fingers instantly perk up and almost start talking. I'm a believer! The chance to visit HSN's headquarters in the balmy town of St. Petersburg, Fla., was worth making some calls for. It's heaven-everything on the premises is for sale, with the possible exception of the baby crocodiles that sneak into the marshy area near the parking lot. Has no one there thought of the shoe and handbag possibilities? Inside this shrine to disposable income is an Orwellian scene: Hundreds of workers toil away in rows of cubicles, taking order upon order for things we all know we don't need yet feel we absolutely can't live without. Faux diamond earrings! Beverly Sassoon skin-care products! Care Bear sleeping bags! Ever since HSN was started locally by real estate developer Roy Speer and radio man Lowell ''Bud'' Paxson in 1982 (it went national in '85), vendors have schlepped in such wares, which are approved at executive sales meetings, tested for quality control, and then hawked to the voluntarily homebound. Seeing as how HSN's net sales surpassed a billion bucks last year, it's a disturbing cult I wish I'd thought of. Hosting on the day I dropped by was the endlessly effervescent Tina Berry, who could describe the appliques on a ramie cotton blouse until they found Jimmy Hoffa. Berry was performing an impressive three-hour stretch of merch- babble that brought her from Capodimonte swans to Lucite toilet plungers with breathless equanimity. Everything was gorgeous and simple, everything affordable and amazing. Even her trips to the loo were fantastic; she brilliantly timed them to coincide with the hourly breaks. (HSN broadcasts live 24 hours a day, every day-except Christmas, by which point everyone's bought everything anyway.) Once back, Berry started pontificating about something called the Pollenex ionizer/air cleaner, insisting that ''it will prevent smoke, dust, and pollen'' in cheerfully confident tones that had me scratching my head with one hand and reaching for my credit card with the other. Inopportunely enough, a clerk sneezed loudly at this point, and HSN publicist Louise Cleary cracked, ''It must not be on.''
The stove was working, though, as-in another studio-celebrity chef Martin Yan began chopping broccoli in preparation for a wildly anticipated on-air demonstration of Taipan VI International Cookware. Not since Phyllis Diller came in to sell her skin cream had there been this much excitement. Yan has written six cookbooks, the last one being Everybody's Wokking, but his real claim to fame is that he can bone a chicken in 22 seconds. Would the boner agree to an interview? ''If I get paid,'' Yan laughed. Rather than negotiate in Ruta Lee spray vitamins, I kept wokking and ended up in the Quality Assurance Lab, where the network can weed out any deadly cookery or any doll with a potential Chucky bent. In this control freak's paradise, there are myriad testing devices, including a plastic tube the size of a 3-year-old's esophagus to determine whether something can be choked on. A grandfather clock, for example, is definitely safe. But not everything makes the grade: ''We had a dress from the Vanna White line dry-cleaned, and it came out looking like this,'' grimaced lab technician Richard Muinos, pulling out a disturbed garment with patches of sequins missing. The cleaning instructions label was corrected, but it still makes you wonder if you can trust Vanna even to sell you a vowel. In the celebrity green room, there was bi-i-i-g star Lesley Boone, who appeared on the short-lived series Babes and is now doing a line of full- figured clothes. Berry isn't anywhere near ready for the Babes line, though she was now scarfing down the last crock from Yan's wok. ''This is such a fun thing to do!'' she exclaimed, meaning her job. ''This is my niche in life.'' It is too perfect. Berry was a homemaker-and obsessive HSN customer-when she decided to try out for a host position. ''My husband said, 'They're the reason you need a job, so you should work there,''' she said. As I left, a trip to the nearby Salvador Dali museum was suggested, but I had already seen surrealism at its finest. Buy-buy!
