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TALES OF THE CITY

Motivational speaker Pam Lontos: self-made myth
By John Bloom |

THE OFFICIAL Pam Lontos Story goes like this:

She was a fat North Dallas housewife, introverted, depressed and suicidal, who slept 18 hours a day. Then she went to a positive-thinking rally and discovered the wisdom of Zig Ziglar. Suddenly she was energized. After listening to his tapes in her every waking moment, she decided to join a health spa to lose weight. Not only did she lose 60 pounds, but she became the top commission salesperson for President’s Health Clubs, then a legendary advertising rep for KMGC Radio, then executive vice president for the Disrey-owned Shamrock Broadcasting. And today, as president of her own company, she makes $350,000 a year telling people how she did it.

In two interview sessions with Pam Lontos, 1 heard this story, in various versions, at least 10 times. Sometimes she used the exact same phrases to tell it. She doesn’t even seem to be talking about herself. Pam Lon-tos is a person, but the Official Pam Lontos is a mythical being. ‧’I’m not talking about myself,” she purrs, kicking off her shoes and stretching out on the world’s largest couch. “I see myself as a product.”

As she speaks I keep looking over my shoulder. One entire hallway of her condo is blanketed with photos of Pam embracing various celebrities. Here she hugs Burt Reynolds, there she mugs lor the camera with Paul Harvey. Phil Donahue and Barry Goldwater are up there somewhere. So are Michael York, David Copperfield and Kris Kristofferson. Burt wrote “You’re the best” on his picture. They line the walls like a shrine in the Networking Hall of Fame.

“I really don’t know how it happens,” she says. “How do I seem to meet all these people? It’s a mystery to me. Just like 1 don’t really know how I make a sale-how I can close 95 percent of my sales calls. I know all the techniques. I can teach it. But I don’t know why it works.”

I flip through a mimeographed Pam Lon-tos book she’s given me called “Don’t tell me it’s impossible until after I’ve done it.”



Dear Pam, Ever since we shot our story with you our crew has had that “I can do anything attitude!” . .Leeza, PM Magazine.



“Like if you look in that book, you can sec I always get publicity wherever I go,” she says. “My friends, they call me up and say, ’How did you get all this publicity?’ Did you sec that mention in Esquire?”

I turn to an Esquire article authored by Bob Greene. Greene is describing how a “Dallas motivational consultant” accosted Muhammad Ali in an airport, thrust her card into his hand, told him how she could make him rich and seemed unflustered when Ali studiously ignored her. The eager consultant, Pam tells me, was her.

“I don’t even ask (or publicity like that.”

Pam Lontos is a chameleon. In each photograph in the book, she looks different- , sometimes prim and proper, heavily made up. round features framed by a perpetual Mary Kay Cosmetics smile; at other times her face is bathed in shadows, an aggressive half-smile, almost a smirk, playing around her lips. In a couple of them she is strikingly beautiful. In others she is so nondescript that she almost fades into the Xerox paper.

I was very impressed and found. Pam’s seminar informative, entertaining and fun… Dam DeLuise.

Dom made his signature into a little clown face.

“They say you should stick with one pic-ture,” she says, showing me the Official Photograph. She’s chosen the dark one. her right fist bunched under her chin like The Thinker.

After listening to you. I set quite a few records with the company…Trudy Collard, KF Bountiful AM Radio. Salt Lake City.

“That’s an interesting question,”1 she says. I had asked her what sales techniques have to do with self-help, self-image, success, being a better person. She seemed genuinely perplexed. “I’ve never thought of that angle.”

These two things-character on the one hand, sales on the other-always seem confused in the minds of inspirational speakers. who are. after all, the new priests of the 20th century. If you carry their logic to its natural end. we should be teaching “Thirty-seven Ways to Close the Sale” in our churches and synagogues.

Pam Lontos, by breaking into the ranks of the high-ticket corporate “motivators.” is the first woman to be ordained into this strange priesthood. I ask her how it happened.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I started out talking about sales, but more and more people ask me to do just the motivation part, without the sales.”

What, I ask her, makes the Pam Lontos message different from the Zig Ziglar presentation, the Norman Vincent Peale presentation or the Og Mandino presentation? She laughs.

“Delivery,” she says.

That’s it?

“That’s it. The message of positive-thinking is the same.”

That’s the gospel and you’re merely the preacher?

“That’s right.”

And the gospel begins with Sales. Pam is, first and foremost, a salesperson. She went to work for KMGC when it was brand new-34th in the ratings book in a 34-station market. Over a four-year period, she says she made it third in advertising billings, sometimes selling as much as 80 percent of the station’s time herself, and scored such coups as once selling a three-year contract worth $90,000 to the U.S. Army-on a station whose demographics are skewed toward 30-year-old suburban housewives. As she tells me that story, she starts to get embarrassed.

“Of course, I wouldn’t recommend doing that,” she says. “I use the example to show that it can be done. I sold that contract by using a technique called the Negative Switch Pitch. I did it on a dare.”

In other words, I suggest, you can sell anyone anything-even things they don’t want or need?

“Again, I don’t recommend it. I don’t teach it. It’s not good long-term policy. But the answer is yes.”

Are you selling me?

“I hope not. I don’t think so.”

In her 30-session “Basics of Broadcast Selling” course, which she sells to radio stations at $1,500 on videotape ($3,500 an hour for the real thing), she outlines all the ways to break down people’s defenses, expose their weaknesses and go for that severing of the jugular vein quaintly known as the “close.” She has classified the closes, refined them, studied them, developed a list of questions for each one. She can teach the Assumptive Close, the Ben Franklin Close, the Physical Action Close, the Columbo Close, the Impending Event Close, the Sharp Angle Close, the Summary Close, the Testimonial Close and the Should Have Done It Sooner Close. She used to mention the Negative Switch Pitch Close, but audiences got mad at her because the manipulation of the client was too obvious.

I have the strange sensation that, the longer I talk to Pam Lontos, the less I know about her. I ask her about her past. She gives me four or five versions of the Official Pam Lontos Story, adding details here and there. Later 1 would listen to a couple of hours of her inspirational tapes. The story was there, too. told in a shrill, wildly energized voice of tinny happiness.



FINALLY, AFTER 1 close my notebook, we get to the real story.

film’s father was a frustrated Greek artist who painted restaurant interiors for guys like Jack Ruby. He never loved her mother and said as much, often in loud, violent arguments that raged through the nights until Parti stood at her bedroom door, pounding and screaming for them to stop. She would usually stay awake until 4 a.m.-until she could be certain that neither of them would leave that night. “If it wasn’t for you,” her father once told her in a moment of anger, “I could leave your mother and be an artist.” She started working at a shoe store when she was 12, because the family was always in debt. When she was old enough to date, her father was ruthless toward her boyfriends, threatening them with violence, swearing out peace bonds against them. Occasionally he would let her dale the gentle, shy ones, the ones that weren’t like him. Her mother told her it didn’t matter anyway, because she was ugly.

it was a pleasure being with you and Zig on the Donahue Show. You were terrific!… Love, Mary Kay

Pam has been nearsighted all her life, but. because of her mother’s objections, she was never fitted with glasses until she was 11. The day she got the glasses is still the single most important day of her life-the day when kaleidoscopic color combinations suddenly became discrete objects to her. The years without complete vision made her intuitive, she says.

“i can read people without seeing them. I can read them over the phone.”

When she was a freshman at SMU, her father’s aggressiveness continued. The only boyfriend he didn’t mind was a man from the Greek Orthodox Church. He was 11 years her senior, an orthodontist, quiet and inoffensive. She was allowed to speak to him for more than five minutes on the phone. (For the others, her father would perform “five-four-three-two-one” countdowns while she was talking.) She could even stay out past 10:30 with him. So, before she began her junior year, she married him. She saw the marriage as freedom.

But both men, the father and the husband, wanted her to change her major from advertising to elementary education. She did. And after graduation, she taught Highland Park fourth-graders for four years. She hated it. She had constant conflicts with the other teachers, most of them 30 years older than her. who frowned on her open-classroom techniques.

She and her husband adopted a child, which gave Pam a convenient excuse to quit and become a housewife. Then, just as Pam was about to move into her first very-own Fox & Jacobs house, her father died. He was 50. She couldn’t understand the depth of her depression at the time. He had not been a particularly kind father, but his loss tore at her from the inside for months afterwards. She felt she had done everything for him. She had married the man he wanted her to marry, pursued the career he wanted her to pursue, she was even going to night school to get her master’s degree to please him-and now he was gone. She had done all these things for someone who was no longer there.

Pam ballooned up to 170 pounds, slept the days away and only woke up long enough to consider suicide. She and her husband had long since stopped speaking. “For 18 years of marriage,” she says, “we really never talked at all. When I started working, 1 would sometimes stay at the office till 3 in the morning, because I didn’t want to go home. I would hope he would call, to check on me, to see if I was having an affair. But he was never even worried about it.”

THEN SHE FOUND Zig Ziglar, and she discovered she had a talent that most people don’t have: She was a superb actress. It was all those years of acting for her father, acting for her mother and acting for her husband. She had acted so long, for self-protection, that acting for a sales client was simple. Part of her secret was that she never did a sales pitch the same way twice. She had some kind of intuition about the weakest link in someone’s defenses. And she usually closed the sale on the first call. (Some of her co-workers put it another way, saying that once Pam sold a client, she could never go back to him. Her subtle high pressure filled the clients with regret as soon as she left-and made them fearful the next time she called on them. That meant she either wrote up the sale on the first call or never wrote it up at all.)

Her success eventually gave her the cour age to divorce her husband, she says. She let him keep everything; by that time she had a flourishing business of her own. Sometimes she would spend 18 straight days on the road, speaking in a different city every day. sell ing her tapes, pulling down as much as $10,000 a day. But one night on her way back from Chicago, with $9,000 stuffed in her purse and sure that her success was at its peak, she suddenly thought, “I’d give all this money back to be home right now, watching TV with a friend.” And she tried not to fall apart right there on the plane. It’s a little sacrilegious to admit it, now that she’s entered the priesthood, but Pam Lontos is profoundly lonely. She can sell everybody but herself.

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