Banking on Banks
Meet the businesswoman — the brains and the brand behind the sex appeal — who has the entertainment industry on the edge of its seat.
Tyra Banks has already paraded around in the bra, wings and headdress of a Las Vegas showgirl, raced actor and ex-supermodel Molly Sims around the stage and demanded to know why white people are so into vintage. Now she's waiting for her next guest, Randy Jackson, the American Idol judge, who's either running late or is stuck in hair and makeup. Whatever the holdup, Banks has a hot set, a full house and some time to fill. Stepping to center stage, she offers to take questions from her Tyra Banks Show audience. Her first creed of business: Never waste an opportunity.
The show has just moved from Los Angeles to New York, and the audience consists of not only worshipful men and grandma types who might have just climbed off the Gray Line tour, but also, mostly, black, white and Latina women of that highly coveted daytime talk show demographic that not even Oprah has managed to secure – the 18- to 49-year-olds. The crowd might have come to see the rising talk queen schmooze Jackson, Sims and, later, actress Alyssa Milano, but it is this moment that will linger: Tyra speaking directly to them, recognizing them, encouraging them personally – eyeball to eyeball.
In a tight gold Black Halo dress and Christian Louboutin spikes, and with super-straight golden hair, Banks looks a bit like a trophy come to life. The blend of girlfriend and glam is her signature – the essence of her growing multimillion- dollar brand that, beyond the lights and cameras, has made her a respected player in the entertainment business and beyond, even placing her on Time's list of the world's 100 most influential people (and her estimated $18 million income among TV's highest). When an audience member asks, "What do you do in your free time?" Banks jumps on it. Having already charmed them with her trademark frankness, she now locks them in with her work ethic, delivering the day's itinerary breathlessly, as if mirroring the breakneck momentum of her life. Her Tuesday has gone from a 6 a.m. wakeup to a two-mile run, voiceovers, production meetings, the taping of not one show but two. She grins almost gleefully. The short answer would have been: What free time?
Banks, 34, has never been quite so occupied in quite this way. As a supermodel she was slammed for sure, running as fast as her size-9 stilettos would allow, before her retirement in 2005; but now, as she parlays her instantly recognizable face, her Victoria's Secret body and her household name into a multimedia mini-empire fueled as much by sass, smarts and gumption as by glamour, her calendar practically smokes. She tapes 13 new weekly episodes of America's Next Top Model, her other hit show, every six months or so and 185 Tyra shows per year. She's no longer the go-see girl. She's the boss. "In the past it was about being the talent and waiting for the phone to ring," she says. "Now I'm the creator and the producer. I make things happen."
Banks founded her company, Bankable Productions, in 2003 after more than 10 lucrative years as one of the most famous models on earth. By all accounts a demanding and hands-on presence on the set or in the office – "I expect excellence but I know perfection isn't possible," she says – she manages a staff of three in Los Angeles and eight in New York, where she's looking to establish a division that will oversee her future businesses, which could extend to merchandising, real estate development, films and a magazine. "As talent in the entertainment industry, you license your name," she explains. "A lot of people license their name out and they're not in control. I want to own a big piece of the businesses. It's about having equity in the brand."
Bankable produces and co-owns Tyra, which reaches a weekly national audience of 6 million viewers on 140 FOX affiliates. The show has shown such steady growth over its first year and a half on air that Warner Brothers Domestic Television Distribution recently renewed its distribution contract through the end of the 2008-09 broadcast year, a declaration of faith and a milestone, considering that only 10 percent of talk shows make it past season two. Bankable also produces and owns a 25 percent stake in Top Model, the most popular program on the CW network, where, each week on average, 5 million viewers watch young women compete for a modeling contract and a major fashion spread. Banks herself conceived and pitched the idea for Top Model years ago, first to a couple of people who said, "Nobody wants to see that be cause nobody cares about models," she says. "I was like, 'Yeah, that's the stereotype, but….'" Eventually CBS embraced the show for its UPN network, which evolved into the CW. To day Top Model is in its 10th season and is syndicated in 110 countries.
Hilary Estey McLoughlin, president of Telepictures Productions, the Time Warner division that syndicates Tyra and co-produces it with Bankable, first took notice of Banks as far back as 1999, when, as a "youth correspondent" for The Oprah Winfrey Show, Banks showed range in her interviewing skills. "She was really smart and impressive," Estey McLoughlin says, "some body who could command the kind of presence that you have to have to succeed on television." Right away Estey McLoughlin approached Banks about starting her own talk show, but Banks declined. "She felt she wasn't ready. We went back to her a couple more times and finally she felt she had more relevant experience and was at a different place in her life."
Banks's swift professional growth and media savvy astonished many observers last fall when, in what some saw as a legitimizing moment, she hosted Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama for his first hour-long interview since announcing his candidacy. To some TV critics, Obama's visit helped prove that "Tyra's being taken seriously," says Jenice Armstrong, a Philadelphia Daily News pop culture critic who has tracked Banks's career for years. "I could dish and talk crap about a lot of celebrities, but Tyra isn't one of them," she adds. "She's been building and growing and working her way up, and she hasn't made a big mistake – not professionally, not personally that we know of. Tyra's doing it right."
To understand Tyra Banks the businesswoman, we have to look back – past the TV shows, the iconic magazine covers, the lace thongs and angel wings – to Tyra Banks the teenager. The secret to her success started long before she became the first black model to make the covers of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and GQ, before her 10-year contract with Victoria's Secret and her five-year contract with Cover Girl, even before she was old enough to vote.
In Paris, at 17, while her leggy colleagues were out making the tabloids by capitalizing on their youth and looks with French boys and champagne, Banks holed up in her hotel room chronicling not the typical teenage diarist's angst but rather the kind of data you might expect of a bookkeeper: date, job, amount due, minus 20 percent for her agency, IMG. "It was a business for me from day one," she says.
She inherited focus from her mother, Carolyn London-Johnson, who raised Banks and Banks's older brother, Devin (today an Air Force captain), as a single mom and medical photographer in Los Angeles. "I always planned for the end in the beginning," Banks says. "That's something my mother told me to do. She said, 'You're like an athlete. You're in your prime and then there'll be the next draft pick. You'll retire, and then what will you do?'" Banks adds, "I was methodical. It's in my blood. My mom would make me write down my menstrual cycles."
It's exactly this kind of comment that allows Banks to rule the 18-to-49s, that golden demographic of consumerism of which she commands 65 percent to Oprah's 37 percent. Sixty percent of Winfrey's audience is 50 or older; about 36 percent of Banks's audience – roughly double Winfrey's number – is under age 35. If Oprah keeps it real, Tyra keeps it raw, and judging from the voluminous fan mail on her websites, Banks's viewers especially love her candid questions, her confessional outbursts, her honest talk on body image and her youthful antics. "She has an Everywoman feeling to her and relates to people – she's been surprising that way," says Telepictures' Estey McLoughlin. "You don't expect a supermodel to be someone you can feel a connection to. It turns out she has this authentic quality."
Tyra-love does have its limits, though. For every 10 viewers who love her there are some who find her programs and her personality inane or even borderline cruel. Entertainment Weekly's Michael Slezak recently pointed out the case of a Top Model contestant named Marvita, who was grilled about her awful childhood only to be eliminated later. "Tyra will continue to strike whatever pose it takes to keep us entertained, keep Top Model as the CW's MVP and keep the ad dollars flowing into her 'real-sized' pockets," he wrote. Banks has admitted that she needs to make good television to stay in business – and in the Reality TV world of stunts and gimmicks she's hardly alone – but she bristles at accusations that she's less than sincere. "I want women to feel they're in control of themselves," she says of her overriding message. "Things happen to us, but it doesn't have to be our fate."
Banks knows that to be taken seriously she needs to keep her brand clean and push for credibility. She has famously said she neither drinks nor does drugs. During the fall season of Top Model the show banned smoking among contestants and began to use environmentally friendly transportation. When relocating to New York, Banks also decided to move her TZone Foundation, which runs a week-long self-esteem camp for girls, so she could stay connected. And as a manager she personally vets not only her talk show lineups, Top Model contestants and TZone campers, but a steady stream of business offers – all her way of shepherding the Tyra brand in the way she wants. "I've had deals thrown at me left and right," she says. "But women trust this talk show. So to say, 'Buy this potato chip' – that doesn't feel right to me. One thing that's important to me is not doing something just to make money. We'll be doing things we stand by, things we create."
But even in her passionate pursuits, not everything Banks has touched has turned golden. Her brief attempts at acting, for instance (small roles in sitcoms and a part in the film Coyote Ugly), led nowhere. And an attempted foray into pop stardom with the 2004 single "Shake Ya Body" left fans cringing but taught Banks an important business lesson. "Just because you have access to something doesn't mean it's right for you," she says. "I wanted to be a singer so bad, and I spent six years studying with vocal coaches. [But] I never would've been able to be a fantastic singer." Banks showed the same understanding of her limitations when she left the runway – then, as now, dominated by skeletal models – and made the conscious decision to model commercially for Victoria's Secret and others. She did so again when she gave up modeling for TV. She never completed college, where she had planned to study TV and film, and when she first started her production company she didn't know much about balance sheets and budgets – a problem she solved (after advice from her mother) by hiring specialists and having them teach her.
Banks is quick to praise that core staff in public – another tip from her mom – and when someone valuable leaves the fold, she keeps the door open for their return as a way to acquire and build on the knowledge they may have gained elsewhere. "My favorite thing is to hire new people," she says. "I love growing people and elevating from within." Her vice president of production for Bankable, in fact, started as her assistant. "Now," she says, "he's running my company." Among her colleagues, that kind of personal, day-to-day involvement inspires intense loyalty. In more than one instance, for this story, that meant no interview without permission from Banks's office. Banks, as a topic of insider conversation, is more roped off than Bungalow 8 on a Monday night. "She has a very special relationship with the people around her," says the agent of a close friend.
"Nobody's better than anybody else," Banks explains. "One time at [the Top Model] house wasn't ready. I had the glue gun in my hand and was putting rhinestones on the wall. If somebody acts like they're not willing to get their hands dirty, that doesn't work. We're in this together." But, then again, it is just her on the stage, in the spotlight, on the "most powerful" lists. "Being a woman of color you're told every day as a model that you can't have this because you're black," she says. "Not a day goes by as a supermodel that you don't hear that. Now that I'm on the business side, I don't hear that."
At the moment what she's hearing is applause and more applause. As Randy Jackson finally makes it to the stage, Banks is still working the hot gold dress in front of her audience. She asks Jackson about his struggle with type 2 diabetes. They talk about his sideburns. To wrap up the segment, she puts Jack son at an American Idol –like judging table and warbles a loony made- up tune. Then Alyssa Milano comes on to hawk her new clothing line, and then it's over. As Banks makes her way out of the spotlight, producers hustle some dressed-up Baltimore affiliate executives out of the audience and into the wings.
Banks often sells advertising personally and considers meet-and-greets part of her job. She comes offstage and appeases the suits with handshakes and approximately 15 seconds of chatter. All she really says is, "Welcome" and, "Did you like the show?" but she has sealed a connection with her slender handshake and direct gaze, and she leaves it there, with the suits numb and grinning, before disappearing behind another curtain.
Reprinted from the January.February 2008 issue of PINK magazine.
"In the past it was about being the talent and waiting for the phone to ring. Now I'm the creator and the producer. I make things happen."
Tyra Banks, entertainer and businesswoman
