Modesty Personified

Gary also worked on a number of shorter (usually
2-minute) TV commercials and probably the most memorable
is the one which featured Nancy Kwan who was the star of
"The World of Suzie Wong," "Noble House" and many other
famous productions. Personally, I was especially
intrigued with the work he did with frequent-Playboy
model and B-movie queen, Becky LeBeau and I understand
he currently has Margaux Hemingway (granddaughter of
Ernest Hemingway) under contract to help promote his
forthcoming book tentatively titled...

HALBERTIZING: How

To Get Everything You

Ever Wanted Even If

You Don't Deserve It!

Another of Gary's interesting clients was George
Zangas, a world-famous power lifter, who mailed a
postcard Gary wrote for him which generated $1,000 for
every $100 he spent even though he mailed it to the same
list five different times. As far as direct mail is
concerned, that's where Halbert really shines. One of
his "killer" successes was an 8-page sales letter that
doubled Howard Ruff's subscription base of his RUFF
TIMES newsletter. He also did a letter for CASI
(Computer Amusement Systems, Inc.) That shot their gross
up from $3 million a year to over $13 million per year.
He has created direct mail promotions for Personal
Finance Newsletter, The Doug Casey Letter, Tax Avoidance
Digest and Predictions. And, the work he did for Robert
Allen (he wrote the famous best-seller Nothing Down)
helped Allen develop a seminar business that, I hear
through the grapevine, ended up grossing $75 million per
year!

By the way, Gary's marketing career started back
in 1968 when he formed a company called "Halbert's Inc."
(it still exists today) which sold coat-of-arms research
reports and hand-painted family crests. The letter Gary
wrote to launch that project has become the most
widely-mailed letter in history and the company has
since grown into an international, multi-multi million
dollar operation. (By the way, Gary is still kicking
himself for selling his « interest in that deal!)
Anyway, that letter and its derivative letters are still
being mailed at the rate of hundreds of thousands per
week even though...

More Than Half A

Billion (500,000,000)

Of Them Have Already

Been Mailed!

After Gary sold his share of Halbert's Inc., he
formed yet another company called "Good News Inc." with
offices in North Canton, Ohio and Madison Avenue in New
York. Primarily, that company sold "how to" self-help
books like How To Get What The U.S. Government Owes You,
How To Rob A Bank Without A Gun and other
equally-intriguing titles. Sometimes the profits from
selling these books was astronomical. For example, one
ad Gary wrote for a book titled How To Collect From
Social Security At Any Age ended up running in magazines
with a combined circulation of 55 million. One of these
was Parade, a newspaper-distributed magazine, which, at
that time, had a circulation of 17,546,168. Halbert's
ad cost for Parade back then was $33,214.37 and his
gross from that one ad in that one magazine was
$228,492.00 and eventually his company made over
$1,000,000.00 net profit from just this one publication!

Hey, how'd you like him to create a winner like
that for you?

Unfortunately, as good as Gary is at creating
marketing successes, he's just awful when it comes to
managing companies and, when they start to get big, he
starts getting itchy to go get out. So, when that
happened with Good News Inc., he sold out and moved to
Los Angeles. As soon as he got there, he took some time
out from marketing to write a couple of investment
books. One of them was about how to make profits with
U.S. postage stamps and it was titled Thank God Not
Everything Printed By The U.S. Government Loses Its
Value. The other, Foolproof Features, was about how to
make money trading commodity futures. Aside from that,
he remained "retired" just long enough to become
excruciatingly bored and that's when he decided to take
on a few clients and I met him and... the rest is
history.