Rachael Ray
American cook/entertainer (1968 - )
- || At The Bottom
1995 -- Rachael Ray had grown up in upstate New York and believed, like so many other young people, that she could make it in the Big Apple. The daughter of successful restaurant owners, Ray entertained vague dreams of becoming a hit in her own right in the competitive atmosphere of New York City. She was able to find work -- first at the candy counter at Macy's Marketplace, then as a manager at an upscale grocery store -- but she was young and didn't have a clearly defined career plan. Then the 27-year-old Ray was mugged outside her apartment in Queens. As she explained to a journalist years later, "This kid comes in behind me next thing I know he shoves my face up against the door, jams a gun into my back and says, 'Give me your bag.'" Ray managed to escape after spraying him with mace, but the mugger returned the following weekend, dragged her down an alley and struck her numerous times with the handle of his gun. Ray was terrified, but her attacker fled when a dog began barking in a nearby apartment. Spooked by the experience, Rachael Ray left New York City for good a week later and returned to her mother's house in Lake George, the tiny upstate community where she'd grown up. Lacking a college degree and without much experience outside of working in grocery stores, Ray was now just another young woman living back home.
- || At The Top
2009 -- Though she had never received any training as a chef, by 2009 Rachael Ray was perhaps the most popular cook in the United States. With more than 15 best-selling cookbooks to her credit -- including 30-Minute Meals and Yum-O! The Family Cookbook -- Ray had become a franchise, with three shows on the Food Network, a magazine (Every Day with Rachael Ray), and numerous product endorsements. In 2008, she even introduced a line of pet foods. Her earnings by the end of the decade had reached $15-20 million a year, with Forbes magazine naming her as one of the 100 most powerful celebrities in the world. In 2008 and 2009, Ray earned back-to-back Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Talk Show/Entertainment.
- || The Comeback
While living with her mother, Ray once again bounced around from one job to another before winding up as a food buyer for a gourmet store in Albany. After a while, Ray noticed that grocery sales were going down, even though she was stocking what she believed to be some of the best food in the world. "I started asking my customers why they didn't buy the great stuff I was bringing in," she recalled. "Their universal response was, We don't cook, we don't know how to cook, and we don't have time to cook.' ." To help address her customers' needs, she began to offer short cooking classes at the store, and she quickly gained a following. Even though she had no training as a chef -- a fact that bothered her a little at first -- she was energetic and understood that her students wanted to know how to prepare quick, nutritious and tasty meals. Her "hook" was to teach people how to make dinner in less than 30 minutes, and it was a hit locally. Before long, a local television station in Albany signed her on to do a weekly evening news segment. She won two local Emmy awards over the next few years and sold more than 10,000 copies of a self-published cookbook before the producers of NBC's Today show got wind of her story and asked her to appear on the show in 2001. When the president of the Food Network saw her performance, he saw her potential and signed her to a $360,000 contract for her first show.
