A Bunch of 5s Looking for 10s
By ANTHONY PIGNATARO
Reprinted from OC Weekly
Bill Rubenacker is about six feet tall, with brown hair and deep-set eyes. He is 58 years old and bears a fair resemblance to Fred Gwynn of TV’s Car 54, Where Are You? He’s seated on his couch in his spacious living room overlooking a Long Beach golf course he rarely visits because it’s just an executive course.
“I’ve got a date tomorrow night,” the wealthy owner of numerous racehorses and concession stands says with the same level of enthusiasm as someone saying he’s going to his yearly eye exam. “Her name is Pamela, but she pronounces it Pahmela, so that’s probably a sign right there. I guess I’ll just have to call her ‘you.’ But she’s probably a helluva girl. She sounds successful in her own right. I think she’s in real estate. Maybe we’ll hit it off, and I can become a house husband and just sit at home and eat bon-bons all day.”
Rubenacker and Pamela were fixed up not by mutual friends or relatives, but by an extraordinary dating service called Model Quality Introductions (MQI). With offices in Beverly Hills, Irvine, San Diego, San Francisco, Palm Springs, Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago, Boca Raton, Orlando, Tampa, and New York. MQI is not your typical dating service. Its ads in Los Angeles Magazine, Orange Coast, Opulence, Robb Report, LA Weekly, etc.—make that perfectly clear.
“Would a 9 or a 10 join a dating service? They wouldn’t!” reads one MQI ad from the OC Metro showing a blonde with a lock of hair seductively falling over her face. “If you are ready to settle down with a 9 or 10, we need to talk.”
All MQI clients are single upscale men aged 30 to 60. And they all joined to date attractive women—9s or 10s.
“I only deal with the top 2 percent of bachelors in the nation,” said Craig Donaldson, MQI’s president. “Most are turned away. I have all the top doctors, all the top attorneys in my database. All the big people in Hollywood. Lots of real-estate developers and lots of venture capitalists.”
“Gentlemen use our service for one reason only: they don’t like to stand at a bar or nightclub like the average Joe Blow, begging for phone numbers,” said Donaldson. “They’d rather outsource their dating life to our agency, which directly markets itself to the kind of girls they want to marry. We can share a guy’s strengths and accomplishments in a non-boastful manner to a woman before she even sits down with him at the table. Half the guy’s job is done, and the rest is just chemistry. It’s such a nice thing.” Donaldson’s use of the words “outsource” and ‘markets” is telling. He’s a subcontractor brought in by Corporate America’s best not to study office efficiency or provide legal counsel, but to procure girls.
“I have zero unhappy clients because this caliber of man and this caliber of woman are dying to meet each other,” said Donaldson. “In today’s world, who’s got time to do bars and nightclubs?
Rubenacker doesn’t consider himself a superstar. “Basically, we’re just a bunch of 5s looking for 10s,” he said. ” Divorced for several years, Rubenacker has also done bachelor auctions, blind dates, and all the other awkward and usually unsuccessful methods single people use to meet each other. Then he met Donaldson. Initially dubious, Rubenacker quickly changed his mind after thumbing through the voluminous MQI albums packed with professional portraits of MQI girls.
“You’re a kid in a candy store, and I’ve got a sweet tooth,” said Rubenacker. “I’ve met several beautiful women. Lots. More than anyone would have a right to. Each match was more beautiful than the the last”.
Rubenacker likes “sophisticated tomboys.” Donaldson introduced him to many such girls, all slender and athletic.
“But I’m attracted to someone exotic, different,” Rubenacker said. “I’d give up a point or two on the face if she has a good body. I don’t really want to deal with small children. It’s not a complete deal-breaker, but it’s not my first choice.”
“I look at the agency this way: they do the work for you,” Rubenacker explained. “Most successful businessmen work 75 to 80 hours a week to get there in the first place. It’s nice to have someone else beating the bushes for you. I hire consultants to do this and that—why not for dating, which is more important to me?”
Lest anyone think Donaldson merely lobs handfuls of random hotties at his clients, he and his matchmakers have an extraordinary “client profile” on the men to help them find their future wives. After a couple of questions on personality and interests, the form asks prospective male members what they’re seeking.”Is obvious breast enhancement okay?” asks one question, which Donaldson says typically breaks 50-50. “Is previously married okay? Is it okay if she has children?”
From there, men have to rank three”look preferences:” Sexy/Sultry, Classy/Sophisticated and Sweet/Girl Next Door. Of the three, Donaldson says most guys put Classy/Sophisticated at the top of their list.
Other questions include “Are there any non-negotiables when selecting a lady for you?”—Donaldson says “smoking” is by far the most popular answer here—and whether the client would prefer his date already have a career or maintain a more flexible schedule so “she has the desire and time to support you in your career or to travel and play with you.”
The motivation for the male clients of MQI is straightforward enough: they want to marry—or at least date—beautiful women. “Men have just two requirements of women,” said Donaldson. “That they be extremely attractive and have a heart of gold. Everything else can be worked out.”
But the explanation for why a thousand women would join MQI is more complicated. “Girls join to get a commitment-minded successful man who will treat them well. They join to meet someone they wouldn’t meet otherwise.”
Many of the girls in the database are indeed models and actresses, but the others have a wide variety of careers. “There are attorneys, doctors, the whole gamut,” he said.
Kelly, who did not want her real name used for this story, is an MQI girl. A blonde 35-year-old elementary school teacher in Los Angeles, she easily meets MQI’s requirements for her membership: be between the ages of 21 and 40, wear a size zero to six, and bring two of her similarly qualifying girlfriends into the program with her.A member for about a year, Kelly joined after seeing an MQI ad. A divorced single mother, Kelly says she decided to try various dating-service options to locate a “highly intellectual, successful, substantive, conservative, clean-cut family-type guy.”
“My mother tried to introduce me to her dentist,” she said. “I met him. I don’t know what she was thinking. I also tried meeting guys through my girlfriends. But let’s face it: all girlfriends do is introduce you to their brothers or their leftovers.”
She says she joined Great Expectations but was disappointed with the amount of time she had to set aside to flip through the endless books of member profiles. She sat down with a matchmaker from It’s Just Lunch but decided against membership. Internet dating went nowhere as most guys are not what they claim.
After three months as one of Donaldson’s Model Quality girls, Kelly says she hit it off with a guy from MQI and moved in with him.
Of course, marriage is MQI’s stated goal. “This is a G-rated company,” said Donaldson. “This is for individuals seeking long term relationships only”.
For more information, check out www.ModelQualityIntroductions.com or call 310-860-9300
