It Isn't Easy Being Maria Bartiromo

“My girlfriends call me up and say, ‘I love your hair and I love your shoes but I no idea what you’re talking about,'” she tells The Daily Beast. Thank god we girls have Maria to explain it all.

And the CEOs are thanking god for her, too. A fresh round of interviews with the CNBC anchor anchor pegged to her book on success reveal that she has the endless capacity to read from a PR playbook, along an unquestioningly pro-business line:

“When I’m interviewing somebody, my viewers know that I’m gonna ask all the questions they want answered, but I’m not gonna do it in a ‘gotcha’ kinda way-because that’s not who I am. I’m not gonna have somebody on air with me and throw all these fast questions at them and try to gotcha gotcha gotcha gotcha!”

She also tells New York, “most of the businesspeople I meet tried to do the right thing.”

In any case, no matter how much the girlfriends of the world love her hair, Bartiromo has quietly distanced herself from the “Money Honey” moniker she once moved to patent. According to The New York Post,

Over the years, Bartiromo was said to have privately bristled at the nickname, feeling it demeaned her work. But publicly, she accepted it.
In 2007, it became clear she couldn’t outrun it, so she filed to trademark the name on a host of products, including entertainment and educational services, a Web site, personal finance TV show, toy action figures, card games, jigsaw puzzles and toy cash registers.

But now records show she has dropped the eight filings to patent the claim, around the same time she got a new, seven-figure deal at CNBC, so the world may never know the joy of the Bartiromo-branded toy cash register. At least we still have that marvelously full hair and the SHOES! And whatever it is she’s talking about under the blowout — what was that again?

The Money Honey’s Left Turn [The Daily Beast]
Maria Is No Longer Sweet On ‘Honey’ [NYP]
49 Minutes With Maria Bartiromo [NYM]