THE FABULOUS FURY OF BARBARA CORCORAN
FALSE FAME,” says Barbara Corcoran, puttering around her bright, minimalist Park Avenue offce. She’s wearing no makeup and her skin looks pink, partly because of the bright fuchsia T-shirt she’s wearing, and partly because she had a skin procedure earlier in the day that her dermatologist promised would make her look younger. “So much of my success depends on how I look, and I’m 67,” she says, shaking her head. “Why didn’t I have this [fame] in reverse, when I looked good? What a joke.”
Corcoran is about to begin taping the eighth season of ABC’s Shark Tank, and no one is more aware of looking the part than she is. And Corcoran looks amazing. She has clearly mastered the art of image, and it has served her well, both in selling herself and in moving real estate during her 23 years at the top of her New York City brokerage, Corcoran Group. Her uncanny instincts, killer work ethic, megawatt personality, audacious risk tolerance, enormous capacity for self-promotion, and collection of signature red suits rounded out her tool kit. It helped her build Corcoran Group into the biggest residential real estate firm in New York before she sold it for $66 million in 2001.
Her backstory is well known: the second of 10 kids raised in the gritty, blue-collar town of Edgewater, New Jersey. With four brothers and five sisters, Corcoran was the sibling in charge of fun—she staged rainy-day plays in the basement, drew chalk sidewalk games, and set up a “rock store” in the side yard. At 23, she met an older, handsome guy, Ramone Simone, while waitressing in a diner. They fell in love. In 1973, he lent her $1,000 and she started a real estate business, Corcoran-Simone, giving him an
