Debbi Fields: One Positive Cookie
A negative person sees the glass as half empty, a positive person sees the glass as half-full, Debbi sees the glass as overflowing! Debbi is without doubt the most positive person I have ever met.
There was a tap on our bedroom door. Fresh baked cookies, still warm from the oven, were being delivered to our bed! In fact they were Mrs. Fields Cookies made and delivered by Mrs. Fields herself.
I had taken our Puerto Vallarta guests, Debbi Fields and her daughters, on a predawn whale watching adventure in our powerboat. By the time we returned to the Villa, Betty and I were so exhausted that we decided to take a nap. Debbi had another idea. She went to the store, bought the ingredients and baked her wonderful chocolate chip cookies, and delivered them to us in our bed.
In the early 1980s, I had just completed the Cuatro Villas project in Puerto Vallarta. Debbi and her husband, Randy, were in Vallarta on business, had fallen in love with the area, and decided to purchase a villa. They were a family of seven with five beautiful young girls so Villa Ventura with six bedrooms was perfect for them.
Debbi told me the story of how Mrs. Fields Cookies, a multimillion-dollar company, started. Randy, an investment advisor. did much of his consulting from their home in California. When clients would come to the house Debbi would make chocolate chip cookies for them and her cookies became extremely popular.
“Randy, I am going to start a cookie business.”
Randy thought it was the craziest idea he had ever heard. But Debbi, being Debbi, decided to go for it and opened a shop in a local mall. Business was slow at first so Debbi would take a tray of cookie samples throughout the mall to entice people to her shop. One thing led to another, and a national chain was born.
Debbi and Randy divorced and Debbi later married Michael Rose who was also a divorced father of five kids. Their first Christmas card was unforgettable – a picture of the whole group with the caption “From a Dozen Roses.”
Michael was one of the founders of Harrah’s and The Promise Company, the parent company of several major hotel chains. He built a beautiful home in Wildcat, a very exclusive area near Aspen. Soon Michael and Debbi built a second home on the property large enough to accommodate all the kids! Michael died in 2017. Debbi, who has always loved Aspen, continues to maintain a home there. She is a great friend of my daughter, Kim, and happily, I get to enjoy her company and her cookies when I am in Aspen during the summer.
And her enthusiasm? Just listen to her message on her answering machine, “Oh my God I’m so glad you called! I will call you back as soon as possible…in the meantime, the only thing I want is for you to have the most phenomenal, happy and sensational day. Talk to you soon.”