Rachael Ray Has A Lot On Her Plate

By Joel Stein

If she can hold on to her fan base, Rachael Ray will be famous for the next 80 years. That's because a good portion of it is under 7 years old. If you look below Ray's waistline anytime she's in public, there's likely to be a child holding out a piece of paper for her to sign. "It's because I'm a bobble head, dude," she explains after giving a boy an autograph. "I have a cartoon-character voice, I've got a lot of energy, and they know I'm not going to punish them." Rachael Ray is our nation's kindergarten teacher.

In fact, it was a kid who got the cooking-show host her new daily daytime talk show (debuting Sept. 18), the only program besides Dr. Phil that Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions has launched. Terry Wood, president of creative affairs for syndication giant King World (which is co-producing the show), arrived home from work a few years ago to find her daughter staring at one of Ray's Food Network shows, all of which, Wood was surprised to learn, the 6-year-old was deeply familiar with. "I said, 'What do you like about her?' And she pointed to her face, right around her eyes and her smile, and she said, 'She's always happy.'"

And it's not a mellow happy. Ray is a rabid cheerleader whose shtick is that moxie and a good attitude will get you as far as you want. Before she comes out from the gated elevator door of her talk-show set, the audience has been pumped up by clips of her set to the insanely upbeat song Life Is a Highway, the same tune Arnold Schwarzenegger has played before speeches. Ray--who often smiles so wide, you see not only her gums but also that weird part above the gums--says that when she's feeling stressed or sorry for herself, she just remembers the 10-fingers, 10-toes rule her uncle taught her: If you've got those, you have nothing to complain about. She makes Annie look like a pessimist.

As with Barney, the Wiggles and Elmo, all that cheerfulness attracts major loathing from some adults. Anti-Ray blogs are shockingly virulent, harping on her cutesy catchphrases, her self-congratulatory comments on her food and the fact that her recipes often involve little more than removing things from their plastic wrappers and putting them on plates. On the new show, she makes a lasagna out of ravioli because that way you don't have to bother with pasta and cheese separately.

But it's her cheerfulness--plus the 30-minute meals she created back when her job was doing demos for a supermarket--that she has based an empire on. So far, it includes more than half a dozen best-selling books, the Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine, four Food Network shows, a line of cookware and an olive oil. "She reminds me of Julia Child," says Wolfgang Puck, the celebrated Los Angeles chef whose back Ray is rubbing even though they just met an hour ago. "She has a completely different personality, but the message is the same. The message is, she's not elitist. She gives confidence to people to go into their own kitchens." Ray is antisnob and utterly nonaspirational. In a time of war and a struggling economy, this domestic goddess is a down-home Martha Stewart--REAL SIMPLE without the complexity.

Other than sunniness, Ray's main attribute is accessibility. She positions herself at all times as the Everywoman with the hick upstate--New York twang. Like a sorority girl cooking for a charity event, she calls her dishes "yum-o" and says things like "Good thinkin', Lincoln." On her first few shows, she plays up the fact that--oh, ditsy Rachael--she has a limp at the moment because she fell down the stairs in her house. At a segment at Sterling Vineyards in Napa Valley, Calif., in which she and Puck choose wine for the Oscars' Governors Ball, she made sure to loudly announce during a tasting that "it looks like the setup for one of those chicks who play glasses with their fingers." During the daily snack time on her talk show, she walks out and personally serves her audience food, and unlike many TV hosts, she makes it feel as though she's chatting instead of lecturing. She is the most accessible celebrity ever. When she goes food shopping, her fans don't praise her; they ask her which aisle items are in. While some new shows have to pay audiences or bus them in from nursing homes, Ray had a waiting list of 19,000 for her 110 seats before taping started.

You can't attract her kind of following by just being accessible, though. Ray, like Regis Philbin, is gifted at being on television. It's almost as if she has too much energy to interact with directly and has to be filtered by a screen. "She kind of explodes through the television in a way that few people do," says Brooke Johnson, president of the Food Network, which started airing her in 2001.

To build on that accessibility, the talk show focuses on interviews with everyday people, not celebrities. Fans send in clips of themselves demonstrating how to shove tea lights into an eggplant or how to wash jeans to avoid flat-butt syndrome. Ray even tells jokes, the kind that start with "What do you call ..."--a type that might otherwise have left the air when Hee Haw was canceled. After a viewer competed against Ray to see who could carry more grocery items around her kitchen, Ray bear-hugged her and yelled, "We're buddies! We're buddies! We're hugging! We're sharing!" We're also starting to freak me out.

But not her fans. Ray--who has no teleprompter, earpiece, cue cards or even writers--has a finely honed sense of what is and is not Rachael Ray. When the Vegas affiliate wanted a promo in which she would say, "Join me for an entertaining and unpredictable hour of television," she refused. Instead, she blurted out, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but if you want to know what happens on my show, you'll have to check it out at 10 a.m." The audience went nuts. There are, apparently, Rachael Ray cliches and non--Rachael Ray cliches. And Ray is amazing at never breaking character in public. "In order to do a television show every day," says Winfrey, "the most important quality a host needs to have is the ability to be themselves day after day after day after day--on camera. And that's what she has."

Like Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, who declared there would be no hugging and no learning on his show, Ray drew up criteria for every segment: there could be no crying or finger wagging; it would have useful information for viewers of every age and class, and it would make the audience laugh. "I hope people feel more alive around the edges after they watch us," she says. Either that or they'll feel exhausted.

Fueled by caffeine, carbs and ambition, Ray, 38, doesn't seem to be tiring. Like Stewart, Ray claims to sleep four hours a night. "If I go to bed before 1 or 2, I'll wake up at 4 and catch an old movie until sunrise," she says. Admittedly, a little bit of the fun of watching her is hoping that you're there the moment she cracks--when she finally knifes the stage manager with a Wuesthof or wails into her peppers and eggs. She's like the popular girl in high school who is impressively nice to everyone but everyone secretly kind of hates. She's too perfect, too in control, and just has to be at least a little bit phony. But she's still the one you vote to be homecoming queen. Not just because she worked for it but also because, fake or not, she does make you feel a little more alive around the edges.

Want to ask Rachael Ray something? Pose your questions at time.com/rachael