St. Louis’ bad-breath doctor finds out what it’s really like to work with the Donald
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Pete Newcomb
Donald Trump may be the punchline for just about every “creepy, famous rich dude who has a smokin’-hot wife despite his bad comb-over” joke, but the guy still makes adults do his bidding. Case in point: When one of his minions called the Olivette offices of Triumph Pharmaceuticals to invite CEO Dr. Susanne Cohen to hawk her breath-freshening product SmartMouth in the latest season of NBC’s The Apprentice, she scurried out the door like an intern on a mission for coffee. “They called me at a quarter to 7 on a Friday night and said, ‘OK, you’re on,’ and I flew out to L.A. the next morning,” she says. Cohen’s episode won’t air until next month, but she gave up a few morsels of boardroom gossip to tide us over.
What was your response when they called—“We’ll get back to you”? What do you say? Of course we said, “Well, yes, we’d be interested.” I think they pretty much had all of the lineup set, and we were a backup. It went down to the wire.
What did you think of the show before you were on it? It’s entertaining, and it’s interesting to see how some of the contestants conduct themselves. Sometimes they say things and I think, “Do you not know that you’re on national television?”
Would you have hired any of the contestants you met? Let’s put it this way: Based on what I saw, I would be interested in talking to them—but we were not given definitive information on the contestants, so all we knew was what we saw.
What was it like to get your 15 minutes of reality-show fame? I had been the on-air spokesperson for our product on a television shopping channel, and I’ve done a lot of things where I’m in front of a camera, so I don’t think anything surprised me, from that perspective. It was a great, great, very positive experience, from start to finish. Donald Trump was very nice to us.
Really? How was his breath? Fine. Truthfully, he was A-OK. Actually, I didn’t encounter any bad breath out there.
Trump really seems to dig canning people. What’s your firing style like? Well, I can tell you it’s not Donald Trump’s. It would typically be something like “There are some issues, and this is not a fit—and we need to find somebody that’s a fit, and it would be great for you to find a place that’s a good fit for you so you can flourish.”
Right. So none of that obnoxious “Yuh fi-yud” business? No. I don’t think it’s appropriate for me. I wouldn’t feel right, being quite so overt.
