Kate spent her 12th birthday on hands and knees, clambering through the narrow passage at the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza. On one trip to the United States, the ship sailed through fog and ice and struck a whale. She once shared a cargo ship with a family of giraffes being ferried in specially made topless containers, their heads bobbing in the breeze, across the Atlantic to Canada.
Roberts finished high school at age 16, then studied hotel and catering management for two years. She worked briefly for Relais & Chateaux, a European hotel group, then landed in the Netherlands, where she learned Dutch and Flemish ("because everybody needs Flemish") and worked finding alternative acts for a theater-restaurant she managed.
Kate Roberts, who once promoted soft drinks and cigarettes to youth, has enlisted pop stars to promote safe sex.
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
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Publishing came next. In 1993, following her boyfriend, she wound up in Moscow, where she helped launch the Russian version of Cosmopolitan magazine. "She has always been her own girl, with supreme confidence in herself," Peter Roberts says.
She soon switched to advertising and marketing, working for Bates, Saatchi & Saatchi, where her biggest client was a cigarette maker. When she wasn't flying to remote regions of Russia to cut deals, recalls advertising executive Chris Willingham, "She was always up for a party."
She loved being in Moscow, but the kidnapping changed that. She worried her abductors would find her again.
"I like living life on the edge, but I was getting nervous," she says.
One day in the fall of 1996, she walked to her Moscow office with colleague Linda Hennessey. Men with guns were swarming the building, pulling computers away from the walls, Hennessey says.
Roberts asked the secretary in hesitant Russian what was going on. The secretary nervously replied that if she wanted to see Kate Roberts, Roberts wasn't there, because those men with Kalashnikovs were searching for Kate Roberts, too.
Moving On
The cover of the February-March 1999 issue of In Review, an English-language Romanian business magazine, shows Roberts, dressed in black leather pants, a black turtleneck and black leather gloves, her long hair piled high on her head. Five young female acolytes stare out from the background.
The body language screams: "We're very cool, and we mean business." The headline reads: "Getting Down: Below-the-Line marketers like the '141' agency are whipping the Romanian consumer into shape."
Bucharest is where Roberts landed after the Moscow hullabaloo, physically unscathed but with a new set of nightmares.
The gunmen were revenue agents, sent by the Russian tax authorities who claimed her firm owed millions of dollars in taxes, according to the St. Petersburg (Russia) Times. Saatchi & Saatchi later settled with the Russian government, paying more than $350,000 in back taxes and penalties.
After she and Hennessey left the building, they contacted Saatchi's London headquarters, which "suggested that we should get the first flight out of Russia going anywhere west," Hennessey says.
Roberts flew to England that night.
After a brief stay in London, she moved to Romania as senior account director for Saatchi & Saatchi and managing director for 141, a promotion agency she started under the Saatchi umbrella. She was about to learn, she says, "how to become famous in a small country in a short time."
Mega-events were her forte. She brought all-night rave dance parties to Romania to promote Coca-Cola. She had an affair with a rock star. With her designer clothes and edgy hairstyles, she developed a reputation as the ultimate party-giver. She used all of it in the service of hawking cigarettes, soda, electronics and bubble gum to young people.
Her decision in 1997 to compete for an account developing the country's first national HIV/AIDS prevention campaign was part of the fun. Roberts became "determined to win it," not so much because it was a great public service but, she says, because "I thought it would be cool."
With one of her employees dating the drummer of the top rock band in Romania, Holograf, Roberts arranged an introduction to the lead singer, and promised to help support the band's next tour if he would help her fight AIDS. The deal included writing a song and performing it at the pitch session.
