Sunday Star - Times; Wellington, New Zealand
By NICOL REED, Megan
She's paying her creditors and Suzanne Paul's natural glow is back, writes
MEGAN NICOL REED. WE'RE SITTING in a luxury hotel, not a stone's throw from Suzanne Paul's Waterloo. The magnificent surrounds could not be further removed from Rawaka, Paul's failed Maori culture tourism venue. It's nearly two years since her "Kapa Haka meets Las Vegas cabaret" venture went belly-up and just over a year since she was declared bankrupt.
To this day she can't cross the Auckland Harbour Bridge in the left lane lest she catches sight of the old Fisherman's Wharf. It's a hell of a building but Paul poured her heart, her soul and her money into it. The whole mess left creditors, including Paul, owed $1.1 million. Shouldn't she be hiding under a rock? Or in a mall pushing stuff?
Actually that's exactly what she has been doing. And last week, after 18 months of hawking bronzing powder, hair removal gel and a vibrating massage pillow from Taihape to Timaru, she was discharged from bankruptcy, paying back her creditors $250,000 (25c in the dollar), with the promise of more to come.
As a bankrupt she wasn't obliged by law to pay back the money, but, says Paul, morally she was compelled. "I'm paying people back because it's the right thing to do and I think this world would be a much nicer place if people always did the right thing. I would not enjoy spending the money... I couldn't go to my grave thinking, `Wow, I've had fabulous holidays and bought loads of clothes, never mind all those people that I blimmin, you know, did the dirty on'."
Suzanne Paul's story is almost a fairytale. A working class girl from Wolverhampton, expelled from school at 15 for being disruptive in class, she rejected her factory worker parents' life for the glamour of retail.
She arrived here on a whim 14 years ago. Within five years her "Natural Glow" success had made her a multi-millionaire. Her "luminous spheres" pitch became a national joke and she became a reality TV star. Until it all came crashing down. She lost her posh pad and flash car. Her mobile phone and credit cards were taken off her, and a few months ago when her father had a stroke in the United Kingdom, she had to beg permission to leave the country.
"Most mornings I didn't have the motivation to get out of bed, let alone try to make millions to pay back people. You don't leave the house every morning going, `Yippee, I've lost everything! I'm catching the bus into town to demonstrate for six hours in a shopping mall'!"
There were those who laughed. Someone walked past her vibrating massage pillow pitch and muttered, "How the mighty have fallen". Did she question what possessed an almost 50-year-old Pommie infomercial queen to take on hangi and haka?
"No, I didn't. I still think it was the right thing to do and if we'd had the money and it had opened on time like it was supposed to, I think it would still be going now."
It flopped, she says, because she was let down, lied to and ripped off. The liquidator's report noted that before taking on the lease Paul's company employed a consultant to secure funding. But the information he supplied was incorrect, causing delays and missing the high-season tourist trade. Paul says the judge who discharged her from bankruptcy found she'd done everything "humanly possible".
So why, when angry creditors called a meeting, did she fail to show? Because, she says, she was already out there, plugging away, earning the money to pay them back.
"Can you imagine getting up every day and saying to yourself, `Right I'm going to do it today, I'm going to bloody stand in the mall if it frigging kills me, I'm going to sell this bloody stuff and even better than that I'm going to try to look happy about it.' You have to look happy and cheerful, or you'd never sell anything, and you can't if somebody is criticising you and bringing you down and blaming you and calling you names and making you feel small. I felt small enough, I'd already lost everything, I didn't need to be completely stripped bare of the last shred of dignity I had. So I made the decision, no, if I'm going to do this, then I have to stay strong."
Unable to afford her elderly mother's upkeep in a retirement village, Paul now has mum at home with her and Duncan Wilson, her Rawaka partner and husband, in their rented Epsom home. If one good thing has come out of this debacle it's that it proved Wilson, younger by 10 years, isn't with her for the money. They are, she says, blissfully happy. He rips out nasty stories about her before he lets her see the paper.
"You cannot get up every morning and think, `This time last year I was looking at my spectacular view, I had the sea and the cliffs and the beach and I was going to get my nails done and have a massage'. You can't think that. What you have to do is think, `What can I be happy about today? I can walk. Marvellous'."
She wants a new house. A home theatre before an indoor pool. "And you talk like this and try to stay positive. Right, what else do we want? We want the gold Mercedes convertible. Write that down. The gold Mercedes convertible."
Paul's a walking-talking self-help book.
She delivers an extraordinary sales pitch. In two years she plans to be New Zealand's richest woman. How? She's finished with the malls, but the company she works with, Adman, has got a knife set and a can opener coming. Plus she's got a new foundation that she's going to launch internationally. She'd love to get back on telly, not selling, but entertaining people.
There's a book. She started writing it the day she was declared bankrupt: 10 Easy Steps to be a Millionaire. She's approached a publisher. "I've put my plan in place, I've got the steps and I'm starting to follow them."
The photographer's worried the plush surroundings will give people the wrong idea. This after all, is meant to be a woman on the bones of her bum. Has she got time to reshoot in a more humble location? "No, this is me. I've got an empire to build."
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(c) 2006 Sunday Star - Times; Wellington, New Zealand. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
