CHAPTER 20

BOOBS ’N’ BEER

Back in the early ’80s, Coors Brewing Company of Golden, Colorado, came up with a new marketing strategy. Their intention was to corner the beer market on Halloween. And why not? Every year Halloween had morphed into more and more of an adult holiday, mainly attributed, I believe, to the gay community, but also in part to Elvira. A quote from the Wall Street Journal in 1986 proclaimed, “Halloween, once a romp for kids clad as pirates and princesses, now rivals Saint Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve as a party time for adults. Blame it on Elvira.”

Putting a spin on their “Silver Bullet” tagline, Coors introduced the “BeerWolf.” Unfortunately, the cheesy-looking hairball didn’t quite accomplish what they’d hoped for. In 1986, Coors made one last-ditch effort to bring back the hokey beast, only this time he was flanked by the Mistress of the Dark. The brewery saw an enormous rise in sales and took steps to dump the BeerWolf soon after, replacing him with Elvira as their exclusive Halloween “spooksperson.” I was now the first female celebrity in commercial history to endorse a beer.

Remember, I’d been raised in Colorado where drinking Coors beer was practically a state law. In Kansas, my dad drank Hamm’s beer—“from the land of sky blue waters”—or Pabst Blue Ribbon, but once we moved to Colorado it was Coors all the way. When I was a teenager, Coors 3.2 beer, a lower-alcohol version that tasted like watered-down camel piss, was positively de rigueur (that is, of course, when I wasn’t drinking other fine beverages like Ripple).

In addition to the money I was paid, Coors supplied us with all the beer we could drink. I vividly remember the day a huge truck pulled up to our house and unloaded hundreds of cases of Coors into our garage. Party!

So, winding up as the spokesperson for Coors, of all companies, was Kismet. It was also reparation for my dad and other family members who had contributed so much to their bottom line.

The appearance in stores of life-size cardboard stand-ups featuring Elvira holding a six-pack cemented Coors’s title as “The Official Beer of Halloween.” When the Elvira standees were displayed in markets around the country, they stopped in-store traffic flow faster than a spilled case of Mrs. Butterworth’s pancake syrup on aisle thirteen.

In an interview with Chief Marketer magazine titled “Trick or Drink,” Phil Senes, former manager of Coors promotion, declared, “We couldn’t keep the displays up at retail. Consumers, competitors, even the store personnel were taking our Elvira stand-ups out of the stores as fast as they could stock them.”

The campaign was so popular that it ran again in 1987 to rave reviews. Yet the company did everything in its power to tone down my sexy image. They requested that whenever shooting promotional photos or commercials, I cover my chest with my hair as much as possible, and they always made sure someone from their marketing team was on hand to make sure I did. What little skin managed to peek through, they were happy to retouch to guarantee that no one who drinks beer would accidentally get a glimpse of cleavage—God forbid! I mean, what was so scandalous? Coors sells booze, not baby formula, right? Check out the Coors commercials and standees online sometime. I could have been a boy for all the cleavage I showed!

During this time, in addition to my other beer-hawking duties, I made extensive tours through the South and Midwest to visit Coors distribution companies in towns like Chillicothe, Ohio, and other out-of-the-way places that took two or three plane changes to get to. The workers at the bottling plants loved me, and I loved them! I think they felt I was an approachable beer-drinkin’ gal, an “everyday Joe” they could relate to, instead of a snooty Chardonnay-sipping Hollywood celebrity.

In 1988, something happened that was downright spooky. Rumors circulated that Procter & Gamble’s CEO had appeared on several TV talk shows saying that he was giving large amounts of the company’s profits to his favorite charity, the Church of Satan. In reality, he not only never said that, but he’d never appeared on any of the talk shows they cited. Apparently, ridiculous conspiracy theories aren’t something new. For God’s sake, people! How gullible do you have to be to believe a multinational corporation would put any god before profits? Even Satan? But why should a silly thing like facts stop people from boycotting P&G? There was also Procter’s logo, a picture of the Man in the Moon surrounded by thirteen stars, which had been around since 1851, but suddenly it was the “trademark of the Devil.” As proof of the company’s being in cahoots with Beelzebub, overly zealous religious nuts even saw horns peeking out from under the Man in the Moon’s hair and numerous sixes embellishing the logo. Never a good sign. P&G claimed the stars represented the thirteen US colonies. Sheesh, I’m so sure! Under the heading of “believe it or not,” Procter & Gamble sued their competitor Amway, which was a competing manufacturer of health, beauty, and home care products, for starting the unfounded rumors. Coincidentally, Amway, a multilevel marketing company often referred to as a “pyramid scheme,” was cofounded by another famous “religious” family, the DeVoses, as in the oh-so-devout former secretary of education Betsy DeVos and her brother, Erik Prince, former head of Blackwater. I love that story.

Coors heard about P&G’s dilemma and, being the good alcohol-pushing Christians they were, feared they, too, might be accused of satanic shenanigans because of a certain spokeswoman known as the Mistress of the Dark.

At this point, my Halloween campaign was one of the few bright spots for a company that was mired in right-wing political backlashes, boycotts, and, consequently, plummeting sales. So, what did Coors president and religious zealot Jeffrey Coors do? He decided to kill the campaign at the very height of its overwhelming success. The PR and marketing guys called us personally to say they couldn’t believe what was happening.

Coors marketing scrambled to come up with a fix. They suggested sending a paste-on panel to the retail outlets that carried the 150,000 standees to cover any offending cleavage. They must have been thinking of sending out black turtleneck sweaters because, as I mentioned, there was absolutely no cleavage showing. In any case, they soon learned that it wasn’t the cleavage that was so offensive to Mr. Coors. According to the book Citizen Coors: A Grand Family Saga of Business, Politics, and Beer, “Elvira stirred in Jeffrey [Coors] a deep sense of revulsion and fear. He dubbed Elvira satanic.” And so, the decision was made to drop me.

Eric, Mark, and I were completely blindsided. This was the most lucrative source of income we’d had since the character began, and we knew the campaign was a huge success. We were more than a little unhappy to see it disappear through no fault of our own. But even more devastating than losing the income was the loss of visibility that national radio and television exposure brought us. It could have meant the death knell for Elvira.

Not long after, however, Pepsi, a company that obviously had no fear of the dark side, came along and turned our frowns upside down. Pepsi snapped me up at double what Coors was paying, to promote their two newest products, Mandarin Orange Slice and Mug Root Beer. Pepsi developed the brand’s largest-ever promotion featuring Elvira and partnered with Universal Studios to exploit it. The director of my commercial was the comedian David Steinberg, who was a joy to work with, and we shot on the Universal Hollywood lot at the original Psycho house, an added bonus for me!

In ’89 and ’90, Elvira was featured in newspaper, radio, and TV commercials promoting the “Go Psycho with Elvira” contest. Consumers who tried Slice or Mug Root Beer received a chance to win a trip to Universal Studios Hollywood for a ginormous party hosted by “Yours Cruelly.” The standees Pepsi produced that appeared in grocery stores across the country showed a lot more skin than the Coors version, even though I’m pretty sure Pepsi products are alcohol-free.

When the Pepsi promotion was done, Coors came knocking again, hat in hand. In the interim, their revenue had taken a giant step backward. They had run a campaign called Rocktoberfest featuring a guy surrounded by young women in tight silver lamé, believing they’d learned the all-important lesson: sex sells. Unfortunately for them, it tanked. When the sex angle didn’t work, they tried the comedy approach. They hired actor Leslie Nielsen to play his bumbling detective character as “The Phantom of the Fridge” and brought him back again in 1990 in “The Search for Halloween Headquarters.” But even that campaign brought disappointing sales. Now what kind of character could they find that not only combined both sex and comedy but was also a Halloween icon? Hmmm.

Amid these campaigns a groundswell was forming among Coors distributors, employees, and the beer-swilling public to bring back Elvira. “As long as we had Elvira, we were the preferred beer supplier for Halloween,” said Senes. She once again starred in Coors Halloween commercials, this time representing Coors Light. Elvira remained Coors’s reigning Queen of Halloween through 1995.

First, let me say that the reports of Coors and Elvira’s amicable parting of the ways were grossly exaggerated. After the 1995 season, even though the Elvira campaign was the most successful they’d had up until that time, they made the nonsensical decision to scale back her presence for Halloween. The Coors execs called to inform us that they were making the move from life-size standees to mini countertop stand-ups, using the excuse that the life-size ones were too expensive to produce and so many had been taken from stores that they couldn’t replace them fast enough.

“Oh, and by the way, we won’t be doing any more radio or TV ads either.” To put the sour cherry on the shit cake, they added, “and we’ll only be paying you half as much—since you’re not doing radio and TV ads anymore.”

“Wait, what? Elvira did a hugely successful ad campaign that helped make Halloween the second biggest beer-consumption holiday of the year, they just begged me to come back, and now they’re choosing to back off?” It made absolutely no sense. The thought crossed our minds that minimizing Elvira’s presence would allow the campaign to die a slow death, thereby letting Coors off the hook and laying the blame for the failure at Elvira’s feet.

Could this have had something to do with a bizarre anecdote we’d recently heard from a member of the Coors marketing team? Considering the company we were dealing with, I suppose it’s not that far-fetched. Feeling confident and proud of their latest Elvira standee, the marketing team took the prototype to the big honcho, Joseph Coors Sr., for his approval. In his late seventies at the time and semiretired, Joseph leaned back in his cushy office chair and glared at it for a few moments. Then, in an ominous voice, he rasped, “I see demons there.”

The marketing guys were caught off guard and assumed he was joking. They chuckled and countered with, “Oh, right! Would that be the little green ones, or the big red kind?”

Mr. Coors was not amused. He slammed his fist down on his desk and shouted, “I see demons there!” Now how are you supposed to reason with that kind of logic?

Obviously, there was something at play behind this sudden change of heart, but we never really got an honest answer from anyone as to what it was. Was it that they really believed my fun, tongue-in-cheek character was one of Satan’s little helpers? Or were the rumors true that Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) had set their sights on Halloween and Coors was afraid of the negative press they would garner by promoting beer as a holiday beverage? That was the reason they gave us, anyway, and we had twenty-four hours to consider their crappy offer and get back to them. Mark, Eric, and I made the tactical decision to “save face” and walk away rather than stick it out and allow the seriously slashed campaign to make Elvira, at the peak of her career, look like she was no longer a hot commodity. Reluctantly, we declined their offer and ended our long partnership with Coors.

Since the beginning of Movie Macabre in 1981, and years before Coors hired me, I’d referred to my character as the “Queen of Halloween.” I’d used the title during several episodes of Movie Macabre and in many of the Halloween specials and promotions I’d done before signing with Coors. They apparently liked the moniker as much as I did, because they registered and trademarked it and continued to use it long after I left, adopting it for their Halloween promotions for the next several years. My replacement, their new Queen of Halloween, was actress Pamela Anderson. Now don’t get me wrong. I love me some Pam Anderson, especially because she’s a champion of animal rights and because she survived being married to Tommy Lee and Kid Rock, but when I think of Halloween, the tan, blonde beach bunny is not the first person who pops into my mind.

Around the same time, I had a lucrative appearance booked in Denver at one of the largest gay discos in the West. Just before I was to leave LA for Colorado, Mark got a call from the club owner telling him that a funny thing had just happened. He’d been in the club right before opening hours when who should walk through the door? None other than Peter Coors, vice chairman and CEO, and son of Joseph Coors.

According to the owner, Pete said, “If you’ll forego booking Elvira, we’d be happy to supply you with an appearance by Pamela Anderson, free of charge.” The club owner stared back at him slack-jawed and responded, “This is a gay bar. What the fuck would we want with Pamela Anderson?”

Year after year, Coors continued to slap the title “Queen of Halloween” on such spooky icons of horror as Jenny McCarthy, Daisy Fuentes, and Salma Hayek. After that, they dumped the celebs and figured they could just get by with anonymous sexy babes wearing skimpy black outfits and a Queen of Halloween banner plastered across their ample chests.

But, as luck would have it, my ass was rescued once again. In 1996, we were approached by a couple of members of the Coors team: Bob Fox, head of marketing for Coors; and brand manager Mike Wiley. They had been champions of the Elvira campaign and, fed up with the silly decisions being made there, quit. In 1996 the market for craft brewery beer was just heating up. Bob and Mike found investors to pump money into a one-hundred-year-old failing brewery in Minnesota called Cold Springs. Elvira’s Brewhouse, Inc., was born, making me the first celebrity to market her own beer, Elvira’s Night Brew—a “dark, full-bodied, and robust lager.”

To get the new beer off the ground, I flew out to Colorado to promote Elvira’s Night Brew at Denver’s prestigious Great American Beer Festival, the premiere beer competition in the country. Bob and Mike had a booth set up inside the Colorado Convention Center, with displays that included our newest Elvira stand-up, this time showing plenty of cleavage! After my bad experience with Coors, I was excited to show them what the Elvira name, attached to a beer, could do.

To say Coors held a grudge would be an understatement. When I hadn’t accepted their shitty offer and then had the audacity to come out with my own beer, with the help of their two top marketing guys no less, they were not amused. There was no room in Coors’s world for female entrepreneurial competition, especially a female who was so obviously in cahoots with the devil! Wearing my full Elvira drag, I pulled up in front of the convention center in my limo. Fans and photographers greeted me and cheered as I made my way to the entrance. Just as I began to cross the threshold, two big, burly security guards threw their arms out and stopped me dead in my tracks. “Sorry, Miss, but we can’t allow you in here wearing that outfit. You’ll need to change clothes.” I honestly thought I was being punked.

“You’re joking, right?” I asked, incredulous.

Nope. They weren’t joking. Since I had begun playing Elvira fifteen years earlier, apart from pulling more hair over my cleavage, I’d never once had to compromise the integrity of the character, or lack thereof, and I wasn’t about to start now.

“But, but, but…” I stammered. “We have a booth inside that we’ve paid for! I’m promoting my new beer and fans are already waiting in line!”

As my PR people and I gave the security guards every reason we could think of to allow me entrance, Old Milwaukee’s Swedish bikini team paraded past and into the Convention Center wearing—guess what?—b ikinis ! Compared to them I looked like I was wearing a burka! After several minutes of shouting and arguing, it became obvious that there was no reasoning with these guys. They weren’t going to let me in no matter what I said. By this time, we were causing a scene. A crowd had gathered, curious to see what was going down. Everyone seemed to be on my side and several people jumped into the fray, coming to my defense. More security guards were called. We must have created quite a stir, because moments later several members of “Denver’s finest” showed up and escorted me and my entourage from the premises. Even though my limo was parked on a public street in front of the convention center, we were told we’d have to move to another location. I was beyond livid! Instructing the driver to pull the car directly across the street, I hollered to my publicist, “Call every newspaper, radio, and television station in town and tell them what’s going on here!” Within minutes, dozens of reporters showed up. I stood outside my limo for the next couple of hours, doing interview after interview. I couldn’t have bought that kind of publicity! I also signed a ton of autographs for fans who’d heard about the brew-ha-ha—see what I did there?—and were lining up to give me their condolences. There’s no proof, of course, that Coors was behind this absurdity, but c’mon people, I didn’t just fall off the tuna truck! I’d made appearances dressed as Elvira at food conventions, video-game conventions, and even the Toy Fair in New York, and had never once been asked to “cover up.” But now I was being turned down at a convention for beer? Beyond ridunculous!

Even though Elvira’s Night Brew did amazingly well and was available in forty states, after one year, our deal went flat—s ee? I did it again—when the venture capitalist backing the brewery pulled out and the company’s initial public offering failed to go through. This, coupled with the shoddy treatment I’d received at Denver’s ’96 Great American Beer Festival, spelled the end of Elvira’s Night Brew.

There is one gratifying postscript, however. During the festival, in a blind taste test of thirty-eight beers, Night Brew placed fourth. Satanic power has its perks.