GQ Magazine Article
"They're normal girls who lead normal lives," said Robert Thorne about the
Olsen twins he helped create. "They have friends who are fat, short, dumpy.
The only difference between them and the other girls is next year they're
buying a jet." Thorne is the force - a sort of manager/agent/marketer - behind
the $500 million industry that is the Olsen Twins. The sisters began life
as matching babies on the TV series "Full House". Now they are 15 and fodder
for the sexual fantasies of snowboarders. The arc is now complete. Mary-Kate
and Ashley, as they like to be known, have an animated TV series (Mary-Kate
& Ashley in Action!), a forthcoming feature film, innumerable vidoes and DVD's,
books, calendars, a monthly magazine, a company (Dualstar Entertainment),
and a staggering profitable line of clothing at Wal-Mart. They are a living,
breathing brand. And they have Robert Thorne to thank. Actually, he does a
fairly good job of thanking himself: "The thing I want to say, it's very important,
they brought nothing to table except popularity and charisma, and I brought
marketing and really phenomenal deal-marketing." At 47, Thorne only has a
thin hash of hair in an unusual place - on the middle of his forehead. It
stitches its way across his brow like an old scar. He used to be the Olsen
family lawyer. Now he works almost exclusively on all things Mary-Kate and
Ashley. He spends a lot of time pacing his 12th floor office in Century City
- you can see the green Herbalife sign flickering down on him - brainstorming
and jangling his coins. As soon as he gets an idea, no matter how small, he
flings the door open and shouts it out into the hallway, "A coke!" Or if he
sees something that besmirches Mary-Kate and Ashley's honor, he's on the phone.
"Hello? Hi, Brian. I just saw a movie, a teen-snowboarder movie, yesterday,
Out Cold, and at the end this guy has a certain part of his anatomy hurt-
there's two of 'em. Ok, his 'thing' gets caught in a jacuzzi- and he walks
into a bar that night kind of dragging, and says,'Gee, my Mary-Kate and Ashley
are really hurting'... Now, is that ok?" Jill Zimmerman walked in, the twins'
32 year old ex-nanny, a blond in a slit denim skirt chewing on a salad. Zimmerman
has gone from au pair to executive of the company. She controls the girls'
shopping (they live to shop!) and school schedule. What's unusual is that
the two directly deal with the girls, not through their parents, who have
divorced and share custody of the children. The twins live in San Fernando
Valley, but in a larger sense their home is in Century City. The company has
become their family and little Mary-Kate and Ashley are growing up in it.
What the twins have evolved into- or what their particular talent is, is another
question. Their talent is almost beside the point now - a confection of teen
identity, something poached from their puberty and increasingly indistinguishable
from it. I asked Thorne and Zimmerman if they agreed that the girls are now
selling early teen sexuality. "They're attractive," said Thorne, "and more
and more boys are buying their movies because they're hot looking, but there's
nothing sexual about their content. It's scintilling because of beauty, because
of sexy dress, but they don't overdo it." "They won't," said Zimmerman. But
it's obvious: They're the object of horndog jokes in Maxim and on Howerd Stern.
"What are you going to do?" said Zimmerman. On the other hand, I said, you
could argue that the twins exist mainly to make money for adults like Thorne
and Zimmerman. Thorne rose to the defense: The Olsens have made plenty of
money for themselves. "They're set for life, and their great-grandchildren
are set for life. I don't know if that's bad. They're filthy rich and control
the biggest kid-entertainment empire in the history of the world. So yeah,
adults are making money, but no one's making as much as they are." One thing
you can say about Thorne: He's direct. He's so unabashed that at one point
he and Zimmerman sat eating lunch in his office, he began speaking openly
with her about the money they were making. "I'm going to do bonuses and raises
in January. You don't want it this year with taxes, you want it next year."
"Yeah, but next year I'll be even more - " "Then you'll roll it. Seriously,
you don't want it this year. You'll save half of it - or 40%., or whatever
you are in your high bracket." The only thing Thorne couldn't tell me is what
the empire he created meant. He kept talking about the "Olsen brand" and its
aspirational qualities. I wondered what the Olsen brand was supposed to represent.
Most brands have a slogan, I told him, something that wraps up in a sentence
what the brand is about. What were Mary-Kate and Ashley about? Aha! He said.
Somebody in the office had come up with a slogan. Wrote it down on a napkin.
He flung open his door and screamed into the hallway, "What was that slogan?!"
No one could remember. Though he couldn't recall the term, he did try to explain
what the Olsens symbolized: "They're real beauty for real girls, the fashion
is real for real girls,the magazine is real talk, the dolls...are really dolls....real
books. The point of all that is, it's all about real." And what of the real
girls? It's easy to forget the actual girls in this brand empire, since they
do so much representing and signifying. I had to interview them over the phone
- they lead very busy, very normal lives, Jill Zimmerman kept telling me,
they have school and shopping and boys. They get massages. They fly to London,
Paris and Venice for their movies. Normal, normal, normal. They're normal
girls. Maybe that should be their slogan. Mary-Kate spoke to me from the innocence
of her bed. Both her and her sister were sweet and adorable, as I knew they
would be. Ashley more grounded and savvy, Mary-Kate more sparkly. "Mary-Kate
and Ashley are not the kind of people who go to nightclubs like Drew Barrymore,"
said Ashley. "I do everything else that other kids my age would do," said
Mary-Kate, "even though I wouldn't know." Back at the offices of Dualstar,
Thorne became more obsessed about finding a slogan that defined the Olsen
essence. He disappeared for a long while, leaving me alone in his office,
then suddenly barged back in with an absent look on his face, like Uncle Billy
having lost the money in "It's a Wonderful Life". "We'll find it! But anyway,
what defines them is that they're number one. They're number one in every
category - fashion, videos, magazines. And why - what does it mean? It's entertaining-
real fashion, really cool stuff. I don't know if it's any deeper. This one
sentence says it all, and we'll find it." --- The article has been typed out
& scanned by Lynn; all credit goes to her. Thank you Lynn! 