The Snapple Lady Pours It On, And Her Public Drinks It Up

She storms into the quiet gray corporate lobby like a 5-foot, 2-inch force of nature, auburn curls bobbing, bangle bracelets jangling, necklace made of Snapple caps bouncing round her neck, and declares herself with a big smile and bigger voice.

"You better be in training, 'cause I'm ready for you!" she tells 14-year-old Brooks Oppenheimer, who has summoned Wendy Kaufman, known far and wide as Wendy the Snapple Lady, to a distribution plant in Pennsauken, N.J., near Philadelphia, for a Snapple drinking contest.

It's a steamy Thursday afternoon, and Wendy is greeting her public. In person, as on TV, she's hard to miss - unabashedly loud, undeniably big, all clinking jewelry and gusts of laughter, all appetite and exuberance and exclamation points, all double chins and merry eyes and Snapple-sticky fingers.

You know Wendy from Snapple commercials - the woman behind the receptionist's desk who opens each 30-second segment with her trademark, Long Island-accented salutation, "Hello from Snapple!"

"The best stuff on Earth"

Snapple - long the favorite libation of shock-jock Howard Stern - is big. The all-natural beverages (sodas, teas, fruit drinks and seltzers) made from, as the ad campaign goes, "the best stuff on Earth," do $500 million in business a year. Last year, the company was sold to Quaker Oats for a whopping $1.7 billion.

And Wendy, the company's goodwill ambassador, the undisputed star of its offbeat commercials, has gotten even bigger.

When a Snapple fan from Washington state writes that he can't find his favorite flavors, Wendy's the one who reads his letter on the air, then jets to his home in SeaTac to deliver his own personal vending machine. When another writes about his dream of a Snapple float, Wendy makes it come true and films him steering a giant Pink Lemonade bottle through New York City traffic. And when another fan writes that he loves Snapple tea and that he isn't lying, it's Wendy and Co. who strap him to a lie detector - just to make sure.

Brooks Oppenheimer, from the Philadelphia suburb of West Chester, Pa., is the latest commercial contender. He sent Wendy a letter, challenging her to a Snapple drinking contest. "If you accept and I win, I will get to be on TV," he wrote. "If you accept and I lose, I will still get to be on TV."

Wendy accepted. Even though next season's commercials are already in the can, she figured that it would be fun. "And this is my job!" she says.

And so, with his beaming parents and sister and cheering section on hand, and with about six television news crews filming, Brooks starts gulping. He swallows Bali Blast, Mango Madness and Kiwi Strawberry Cocktail, while Wendy seems content to fan herself extravagantly and pour cups over her chin and down her Snapple Mango Madness T-shirt.

"Is this hilarious?" she demands. Brooks, who has downed about a dozen cups between the elimination round and the final match with Wendy, accepts her congratulations, hugs her weakly - then heads off to throw up.

Wendy signs autographs and hands out T-shirts. She offers a sound bite to each news crew, remembering each talking head's name. And then she has birthday cake with still more fans, plus a car full of 16-year-old girls from Wayne, Pa. - more letter writers who've made the trek to meet their heroine.

"I saw her on `Oprah' and thought she was the cutest thing, so I wrote her," said Amy Goldstein.

But enough chit-chat! It's cake time!

A plant worker stands over the cake, knife hovering. Large slices or small?

"Large, large!" says Wendy. "Let's eat!"

The girls from Wayne, sylph-like in slip dresses or shorts and baby T-shirts, watch Wendy tell stories.

"My mother was the worst cook," she says. "I go to college and there were all these choices! It was, like, heaven! I gained 80 pounds . . ."

The girls giggle, amused and a little uneasy. Whoever heard of a woman talking about an 80-pound weight gain with something akin to . . . pride? And whoever heard of this happening while the woman in question daintily consumed a generous portion of frosted chocolate birthday cake?

Wendy grew up in what she calls a typical Long Island family, the oldest of three (she has a twin brother and a sister). She went to public schools, then to Syracuse University, where she had a double major: "Sociology, because I love people, and film, because I love movies."

Wendy said she was a good kid. "But I always had the devil in me - I always had a sense of humor."

She also always struggled with her weight.

"I wasn't going out every night. Well, I was going out every night, but with my friends, not with dates. My high school love didn't love me back. . . . I had my first boyfriend in college."

Things Wendy would like you to know about her:

She loves movies, from action flicks to art-house fare. "Bergman, Fassbinder, Bunuel . . . all of that stuff. I always saw myself behind the camera, not in front of it."

Her favorite Snapple flavors are Mango Tea and Mango Madness.

She'll go on a diet if she wants to - but she won't bow to pressure to get skinny. "Oprah's people asked me to do that fitness thing in the park. I turned them down."

Her salary is "none of your business."

Her life is on the road - attending parades, throwing out first pitches, but mostly dropping in on Snapple fans who have written her - sometimes to fulfill a request, sometimes just to say hello.

From mail room to stardom

And no, she is not an actress. She really was working in Snapple's mail room when her A-Star-Is-Born moment dawned, when ad executives propped up pictures of Roseanne and Oprah in front of Snapple's dubious owners and said that they wanted Wendy for the new ad campaign.

Wendy had been working at Snapple since 1991. She joined the beverage company at the bottom of the corporate ladder, as an order department administrator.

Then she started noticing that the company was getting mail. "Huge" amounts of mail. And Wendy, who once had sent a fan letter to Greg Brady and never received a reply, started taking the mail home with her at night and penning responses - to the delight of her bosses.

So what happened was a convergence. In 1992, just as Snapple was going national, ad-makers decided that the company needed a "real person" as its commercial representative.

And there was Wendy, who had recently stood on a chair and proclaimed herself director of public relations ("because I can relate publicly"), ready to take on the job.