The Decline of the Coors Sisters: Wealth and Public Controversy
The Decline of the Coors Sisters: Wealth and Public Controversy
There’s something about the early 2000s that felt like a different era entirely. A time when a beer commercial could stop a bar full of college students mid-con conversation. When two women could appear on a television screen for 30 seconds and become almost overnight the most talked about faces in American advertising.
Diane and Elaine Klvski did exactly that. And then just as fast as they arrived, they were gone. But what happened in between and everything that happened after is a story about fame, controversy, politics, and the strange, fragile nature of being famous for exactly one thing at exactly the right moment. Two girls from Worcester.
Before any of this, before the billboards and the football games and the Saturday Night Live sketches, there were just two sisters from a small town outside Worcester, Massachusetts. Diane and Elaine Klowski were born on September 13th, 1971. They grew up in Leicester, a quiet workingclass town just a few miles outside Worcester, where their parents, both Polish immigrants, had settled after coming to the United States.
Their father and mother worked as factory workers. English was not the first language in their home. Life was not easy, but by all accounts, it was full of the specific warmth that immigrant families tend to build around the things that matter most. hard work, family, and the stubborn belief that the next generation will have more than the last.
The girls trained in dance from the time they were four years old. They were from the very beginning a pair. They moved together, performed together, thought of themselves together. There are people who grow up as twins and spend their whole lives trying to establish a separate identity from their sibling. Diane and Elaine were not those people.
They leaned into it. Their twinness was, by their own account, the thing they had always known would carry them somewhere. As Elaine later put it, they knew from a young age that they were more marketable as twins, and they simply didn’t know what it was like to work separately. Their first real brush with television came in 1987 when they appeared as teen dancers on Star Search, the talent competition show that at the time was one of the biggest stages a young performer could hope to reach.
They were 15 years old and they performed with the kind of synchronized confidence that comes from years of practice and from never having had to think of yourself as anything but a unit. The applause they got that day was probably the first external confirmation of something they had always privately believed.
By 1990, they were appearing on Let’s Make a Deal, the NBC game show, working as models. The following year, they got their first credited film appearance, a small role in Problem Child, the 1991 comedy starring John Ritter. The film was not exactly a prestige production, but in the world of working models and actresses, you take the work that comes and you use it as a stepping stone toward the next thing.
Through the 1990s, they built a quiet, steady career, the way most working models and actresses do through auditions, callbacks, small roles, and a lot of patience. They appeared in ads for McDonald’s and Kodak. They landed guest spots on the soap opera General Hospital. They did the kind of work that keeps your name in circulation without making you famous.
The invisible years of a career that the public never sees, where you are building skills and contacts and a sense of your own place in the industry. In 1998, they appeared in a television special called Breaking the Magician’s Code. magic’s biggest secrets finally revealed, assisting a performer known as the masked magician in one of his illusions.
It was memorable only in the sense that it was different. By 1999, they had taken a detour that nobody would have predicted when they signed up for dance lessons back in Leicester. But the detour they took before the beer commercial is one of the more unexpected chapters in their story, and it’s worth spending some time on.
The wrestling years. In late 1999, Diane and Elaine Climski walked into the world of professional wrestling. On November 29th, 1999, they debuted on World Championship Wrestling, the WCW, in a backstage segment, performing under the names Lolly and Pop alongside wrestlers Johnny the Bull and Big Veto Lraso. By 2000, their ring names had been changed to gold and silver, and they had been folded into the WCW’s Nitro Girls, the group of performers who danced and appeared during the broadcasts of Monday Nitro, WCW’s flagship weekly program.
It was a world as far removed from Polish immigrant factory towns as you could possibly imagine. Pyrochnics, crowds of thousands, cameras everywhere. and a very particular kind of spectacle that American television had made enormously popular throughout the late 1990s. The WCW’s Monday Nitro was at various points in the late ‘9s the highest rated weekly program on cable television in the United States.
The Nitro girls were part of that world, present in the arena, visible on screen, part of the brand identity of a product that millions of people watched every single week. For two women who had spent a decade quietly building careers through auditions and small roles and modeling work, the scale of it must have felt significant.
This wasn’t a soap opera segment or a game show appearance. This was prime time cable week after week in front of an enormous and extremely vocal audience. The WCW was struggling by this point, losing ground rapidly to the WWF, the World Wrestling Federation, in what had been a yearslong battle for ratings and audience attention known to fans as the Monday Night Wars.
The twins signed with the WWF later in 2000, but the role they were meant to play was never clearly defined. They were sent down to Ultimate Pro Wrestling, a developmental territory in California, where younger and newer talent was trained and evaluated. They competed there as the Power Twins. In June 2001, the Klashvskis were released by the WWF.
The wrestling chapter was over. The WCW itself had been purchased by the WWF earlier that same year, folded into the larger organization in one of the most significant consolidations in the history of the business. The world the twins had entered was no longer quite the same world they were leaving. It had been an unusual couple of years, full of effort and ambition, but not much in the way of lasting recognition.
They were 30 years old. The careers they had spent their entire lives building were in some important sense still waiting to happen. They had been on national television. They had been in films. They had performed in wrestling arenas in front of thousands of people. And yet, the thing that would define them publicly hadn’t happened yet.
What happened next changed everything. And it started with two copywriters stuck in a car on a highway between Indianapolis and Chicago. The story of how the most famous beer commercial of the early 2000s was born is stranger than you might expect. The ad that changed everything. In the fall of 2001, Aaron Evansson and John Godsy were making the drive from Indianapolis to Chicago.
Evansson was an art director. Godsy, a senior copywriter, both working for the advertising agency Foot Cone and Belding, which had offices in Chicago. They had been given a straightforward assignment. Come up with something new for Coors Light that would resonate with men in their early to mid20s and incorporate music.
It sounds like a simple brief. In practice, it was the kind of brief that most campaigns never crack. The beer advertising space of the early 2000s was crowded and competitive, and the brands that did it well had usually found something specific and ownable, a feeling, a character, a moment. K’s light needed something like that, and the agency needed to find it.
Somewhere on that highway, Godsy’s mind wandered to an old country song he’d heard as a kid. Tom T. Hall’s I Love. A gentle list style song that worked through simple pleasures one by one. Little baby ducks, old pickup trucks, slowmoving trains and rain. The structure was the thing. The song wasn’t about any one thing.
It was a collection of small, specific, honest pleasures strung together without apology. What if you kept that structure and changed the list? They worked it through on the drive. Football on TV, something every man in their target demographic understood. Gina Lee Nolan, the actress who had starred on Baywatch and was in 2001 exactly the kind of reference that felt both current and nostalgic at the same time. Hanging out with friends.
And then the kicker, the unexpected landing, the thing that turned a pleasant enough list into something with a punchline and twins. When they presented the idea back in Chicago, their creative director wasn’t sold. Godsy would later describe the moment vividly. Evansson essentially throwing himself on the sword for the concept, arguing that it was the only genuinely strong idea they had, refusing to let it die in the room.
Eventually, after some resistance, they got the sign off. The casting call that followed led them to Diane and Elaine Climvski. Their agent had sent them to the audition, and by Elaine’s own account, it was one of those right place at the right time situations that you can’t engineer and can barely predict. The eight months that followed the ad’s first airing, she said at the time, felt like a dream.
The first Love Songs commercial aired in the spring of 2002, starring Gina Lee Nolan alongside Diane and Elaine, who appeared at the end to deliver the now famous Final Note. Coors Brewing Company based in Golden, Colorado, had one immediate reaction. According to those who were present, Leo Keley, the president of cause at the time, watched the finished spot and offered a single word of feedback.
Twins, the ad went on air. And then something happened that nobody in advertising can fully plan for. It became part of the culture. Reports came back almost immediately from across the country. A group of students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor had stopped talking mid-con conversation in a bar to belt out the jingle together when it came on screen.
The and twins punchline became a shorthand, a catchphrase, something people said in contexts that had nothing to do with beer or cause light or football. It spread the way things spread in 2002 through word of mouth, through bars, through conversations, before social media existed to accelerate or distort any of it.
Coors reported internally that the Love Songs campaign was generating the highest audience scores of any advertising in the company’s history. That is a significant statement for a company that had been selling beer since 1873. and had produced decades of marketing over that time. By the fall of 2002, the ads were airing during NFL broadcasts every weekend.
One of the most expensive and coveted slots in American television advertising. By February 2003, they had earned the Saturday Night Live treatment, which is in the American media landscape the clearest possible signal that something has become so wellknown that it can be parodyied without explanation. Jennifer Garner and Rachel Drjoined Twins in a sketch that everyone watching apparently understood immediately and without context.
Diane and Elaine were invited to sing the national anthem at sporting events. They appeared in Maxim. They launched a fashion line called Zipper Girls. They talked in interviews about a music album in progress, a project called Clone, and about a sitcom based on their lives that was in development.
They ran their own website. They were in the specific way that fame worked in the early 2000s. Everywhere on television during football, on magazine covers, in conversations in bars, on billboards around Colorado that were reportedly causing drivers to slow down. The Boston Globe ran a profile of them in February 2004, describing how they had doubled the fame of their hometown.
That was the peak. And peaks by definition are where the descent begins. What the ads were accused of and what that backlash looked like set the tone for everything that came next. The backlash begins. Not everyone watching those commercials was charmed. A USA Today poll conducted in 2003 measured audience reaction to the love songs campaign and found that the ads carried a dislike score of 22%, significantly higher than the average dislike score of 13% for television advertising at the time.
Among women, the numbers were marketkedly different from those among men. Where 29% of men reported liking the ads a lot, only 16% of women said the same. The campaign was named the most misogynistic advertisement of the year by a women’s advocacy group. Godsy, speaking about it years later, pushed back on that characterization.
He described the concept as a kind of self-aware joke at the expense of a certain type of man. A meatthead singing about the things he loved, which happened to include football and identical twins. That was the tone it was meant to have. He said the mockery was aimed at the guy in the song, not the women in the frame.
Whether or not that reading holds up is something people have debated for 20 years. Then came the scary movie problem. In 2003, Coors agreed to sponsor Scary Movie 3, the third installment in the horror parody franchise. The Klowski twins appeared in the film, playing exaggerated versions of themselves in a cameo.
Diane later described the experience as a kind of peak moment. They had been so embedded in the culture that they were spoofing themselves on a movie screen. It felt, she said at the time, like they had truly arrived. The problem was the rating. Scary Movie 3 was rated PG13. The first two films in the franchise had both been rated R.
The anti-alcohol advocacy group known as the Marin Institute, later renamed Alcohol Justice, saw the rating as a direct signal that the movie was being aimed at younger audiences. and they mounted a public campaign against cause, writing directly to cause CEO Pete Cor and calling on the company to stop using films that attracted teenagers to promote alcohol.
The Marin Institute’s complaint described the Coors Light Twins role in the movie as part of a broader pattern of alcohol marketing directed, however unintentionally, at underage viewers. cause canled at least one commercial that had incorporated footage from the twins appearance in the film and the company declined to pursue a similar promotional tie-in with Scary Movie 4.
A civil lawsuit was filed around the same time naming cause among several alcohol companies accused of seeking profits from marketing to underage drinkers with the twins scary movie Three Connection cited as part of the evidence. The company had no public comment on the litigation. Diane and Elaine, for their part, maintained that cause had always acted responsibly and that they hadn’t been paying much attention to the controversy.
The careers they had built their entire lives toward were moving, and standing still to argue about lawsuits didn’t seem like the priority. But a much larger storm was forming, and it had a name on it, Pete Kors. The moment Pete Kors announced he was running for the United States Senate, the twins became something they had never expected to be.
A political issue, the Senate race and the collapse of the campaign. Pete Kors was in the spring of 2004 the chairman of the Kors Brewing Company. He was the greatgrandson of Adolf C, the company’s founder and the son of Joseph Kors, who had been instrumental in founding the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential conservative think tanks in American political history.
Pete Kors was born in 1946 in Golden, Colorado. He had graduated from Cornell University with a degree in engineering, later earned an MBA from the University of Denver, and had spent essentially his entire adult career at the family business, rising to vice chairman and CEO in 1993 before being named chairman of both the Kors Brewing Company and Adolf Kors Company in 2002.
In March 2004, he announced that he would be seeking the Republican nomination for the United States Senate seat in Colorado, which had opened following the retirement of Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell. Within days of that announcement, the coverage had already turned toward the Twins. Colorado newspapers began running pieces examining the tension between Pete Caus’s stated values.
He was presenting himself as a conservative candidate opposed to gay marriage aligned with traditional family positions and the reality of what his company had been airing during NFL games for the past 2 years. The Rocky Mountain News ran an editorial in April 2004, just one week after cause had officially entered the race, noting that at least four separate newspaper columns had already drawn attention to the contradiction.
The piece noted that the pressure was likely only beginning. The criticism came from multiple directions at once, which was the particular trap Pete Kors found himself in. His conservative base had concerns about the suggestive nature of the twins campaign. The idea that a candidate emphasizing family values was simultaneously the public face of advertising that women’s groups had called the most misogynistic of the year was difficult to reconcile.
Those on the other side of the political divide had their own set of objections, some overlapping with the conservative concerns, others distinctly their own. And then there was the complication that the company had already extended beyond beer commercials. The scary movie 3 controversy, still fresh from 2003, added another layer to the picture being painted.
A company that had been sued over allegations of marketing alcohol to underage audiences, now helmed by a man asking Colorado voters to trust him with a Senate seat. The cause company itself made an extraordinary decision. It began distancing itself from its own candidate. In July 2004, the brewery ran its own advertising, clarifying that Pete Caus’s campaign reflected his personal views and not the positions of the cause brewing company.
This was in the history of American corporate political entanglement. A genuinely unusual thing to witness. A family company publicly separating itself from its own name, running advertisements to clarify that it and its chairman were not one and the same. The Love Songs campaign was discontinued in 2004. Godsy, one of the campaign’s creators, said plainly in later interviews that the political pressure had effectively ended it.
The ads hadn’t run their natural course. They hadn’t been replaced by something fresher. They had, in his words, died a political death. Pete C’s conservative base had found them indefensible, and the campaign was quietly pulled rather than allowed to become a daily debate point. Pete Kors won the Republican primary in August 2004, defeating Bob Schaffer with 61% of the vote.
But the general election was another matter. He faced Democrat Ken Salazar, the state’s popular attorney general, in November and lost 51% to 47%. It was one of only two Democratic Senate pickups in the entire country during the 2004 elections. Colorado, which had been rated a likely Republican hold at the start of the year, had flipped.
How much the twins controversy contributed to that outcome is impossible to measure with any precision. There were many factors in that race. But the ads had made a difficult campaign harder and their discontinuation during the race had not made the issue go away. It had simply confirmed that the issue was real enough to act on.
Pete Kors returned to business life after the election. In May 2006, he was arrested by the Colorado State Patrol on suspicion of driving under the influence, registering a blood alcohol level above the legal limit. It was a brief news item, notable primarily for the irony of its context. For Diane and Elaine, the political storm had passed, but the campaign that had made them famous had gone with it, and the world they returned to was quieter than the one they had stepped out of two years earlier.
After the lights of the campaign went out, the twins tried to keep moving. What those next few years looked like is worth understanding. The years after the period between 2004 and 2006 was not without activity for Diane and Ela Klvski. They took on film work, small roles in a string of low-budget comedies and parody films that leaned heavily on their established image.
They appeared in drop deadad sexy in 2005 and in Date Movie in 2006 among others. The roles they were given in these productions often amounted to variations on the same persona they had played in the K’s ads. The twin joke, the visual punchline, the pair of identical women deployed for comic effect in a scene that didn’t ask much more of them than to appear and be recognizable.
The film work was sporadic and the productions were modest. None of these projects matched the scale of what they had been doing two years earlier. Being in a parody film is a very different thing from being the most recognized faces in American beer advertising. The audience that had stopped conversations in bars to sing along with a jingle on television was not the same audience buying tickets to see Date Movie on a Friday night.
The music album they had been developing, the project called Clone, never materialized. Diane spoke about it in interviews with a mixture of frustration and pragmatism, attributing the delays to the unpredictable machinery of the music business rather than any problem on their end. The label hadn’t released it.
That happened. The fashion line, Zipper Girls, didn’t develop into the ongoing enterprise they had hoped it might become. The sitcom based on their lives, which had reportedly been in development with involvement from producer Damon Wayans, also never made it to air. That kind of development limbo is extremely common in television.
Projects are attached, discussed, shopped around, and then quietly set aside when the timing doesn’t work or the financing doesn’t come together. But the accumulation of things that didn’t come together tells its own story about where their momentum had gone. The last credited acting work for both sisters, according to available records, was Date Movie in 2006.
After that, the public trail goes genuinely quiet. Elaine Klazowski married a man named Tyler Goldman in Deer Valley, Utah, and the marriage was reported in early 2007. From that point forward, neither sister appears to have pursued public professional engagements in modeling, acting, or media. There are no campaigns, no credited roles, no reported appearances.
What exists as of the mid 2020s is an occasional social media presence under the handle at top beast twins. The sisters have periodically posted comments about sports, golf, and basketball mostly as recently as 2024. It is a glimpse of ordinary life, entirely detached from the world they once occupied. Two women in their early 50s talking about basketball on the internet is a long way from two blonde sisters singing the national anthem at an NFL game.
The transition from the highest scoring campaign in Coor’s history to private life in Utah and wherever Diane settled is not a story of catastrophe. Nobody lost everything in a dramatic fall. There were no public scandals beyond the ones that surrounded the brand rather than the individuals themselves.
There was no courtroom drama, no public breakdown, no cautionary tale in the traditional sense of that phrase. What there was instead was a very particular kind of ending that is in some ways harder to explain. the gradual undramatic conclusion of a moment that had been very intense and then simply stopped. The world kept moving.
The twins moved with it quietly and out of view. But the story of the cause sisters isn’t just about two women stepping back from public life. It’s also about the broader world they inhabited and what it said about that particular era in American advertising and culture. what the cause twins meant.
Looking back at the early 2000s from any kind of distance, the love songs campaign lands in a very specific cultural moment. It was a time when the advertising industry was still operating on assumptions about its primary audience that would within a decade come under serious and sustained scrutiny. The idea of building an entire campaign around a particular kind of male fantasy, presented cheerfully, even self-consciously, almost as a parody of itself, was not unusual then.
It was, in many ways, the standard approach for a category of products that had long defined their audience as young men, and built everything around that definition. Beer advertising in the early 2000s was not subtle. Budweiser had its frogs and its Clydesales. Miller Light had its ongoing arguments about great taste versus less filling.
Coors Light had the twins. Each campaign was a concentrated effort to become the thing a particular kind of man thought of when he thought about beer. And each one did it through images and sounds and feelings that were designed to feel familiar and easy and appealing to that specific person. The Klevski twins didn’t create that world. They found it and it found them.
They were working models and actresses who had spent over a decade building a career before a chance audition led them to a beer commercial that happened to catch fire. None of the culture around that commercial, the backlash, the political complications, the debate about what it said about women in advertising was something they had engineered or intended.
They were performers doing a job, and the job had consequences none of them could have foreseen from the room where the audition took place. What the ads also captured, without anyone necessarily intending this, was a version of early 2000s America that felt very sure of itself. The NFL on weekends, the Baywatch references that still landed, the humor built around a certain type of man who liked simple things and wasn’t embarrassed about any of it.
That version of America has not entirely disappeared. But the advertising world that served it so directly has changed substantially. The commercials that replaced the twins era were increasingly commercials trying to speak to everybody. Broader, more cautious, more deliberately inclusive in ways that the Love Songs campaign made no effort to be.
Whether that shift has made advertising better or just different is a conversation that tends to go in circles. The people who loved the cause light ads loved them for exactly the reasons the people who hated them found them objectionable. The same clarity of intent that made them effective was the thing that made them a target. There is also something worth noting about the timing of the backlash relative to the campaign itself.
The ads ran for about 2 years before the political dimension of the Pete Kors Senate race brought them to a wider kind of scrutiny. During those two years, they were enormously successful by every measurable industry standard. The audience scores were the highest in cause history. The brand was being discussed in bars and on sports television and in magazines.
The parodyied version on Saturday Night Live aired in early 2003, over a year before the campaign ended. What that suggests is that the ads themselves were not inherently unsustainable. They might have run another year or two and gradually faded the way most advertising campaigns do, replaced by the next thing, remembered fondly by the people who had been in their target demographic.
Instead, they were caught in the crossfire of a political race that needed them to disappear, and they disappeared. The ending was premature in a way that felt unresolved, as if the story got cut off before it reached its natural conclusion. For Diane and Elaine, that premature ending meant that their peak moment was defined not just by what the campaign was, but by how it ended. They became famous.
and then the thing that made them famous became inconvenient for the company they represented and the company moved on without them. That is not an unusual experience in the world of advertising. Campaigns end, faces change, brands evolve. But when the ending is driven by a Senate race and a political controversy rather than by the ordinary passage of time, it leaves a different kind of mark on the story.
where the story ends. Diane and Elaine Klashvski are as of the mid 2020s private individuals. They are in their early 50s. They grew up in Leicester, Massachusetts as the youngest children of Polish immigrants who worked in factories and did not speak English when they arrived in the country. They trained in dance from the time they could walk.
They spent over a decade grinding through auditions and small roles and an unusual side career in professional wrestling before a car ride between two ad agency employees produced the idea that made them famous. For about 2 years really from the spring of 2002 through the end of 2004. They were among the most recognized faces in American advertising.
The campaign they anchored was parodyied on Saturday Night Live, referenced in Colorado newspaper editorials, discussed in Washington Post columns and Boston Globe profiles, cited in a lawsuit, and ultimately discontinued because a candidate for Senate found the association politically damaging. That is a remarkable amount of consequence for a 30-second beer commercial.
The Coors Brewing Company continued without them. Coors Light remained one of the bestselling beers in the United States for the years that followed, eventually merging with Molson to form Molson Corors and later combining with Miller. The brand outlasted the campaign and its era by decades as large brands tend to do.
The love songs ads became a nostalgic artifact. The kind of thing that surfaces in retrospective articles about the early 2000s and generates comments from people who remember exactly where they were when they first heard and twins shouted in a bar. Pete Kors remained a figure in Colorado business and conservative political circles.
He wrote opinion pieces about the beer industry. He donated to political causes. He moved through the post Senate world the way most wealthy businessmen with political ambitions that don’t fully materialize tend to do. Still present, still connected, but no longer at the center of the story. The advertising people, Aaron Evansson and John Godsy, moved on from Foot, Cone, and Belding to other agencies and other campaigns.
When they spoke about the love songs ads 15 years after their debut, there was a quality of genuine affection in how they described the whole thing. The drive between cities, the idea that almost didn’t make it out of the room, the reaction from the University of Michigan bar, the Saturday Night Live parody.
They were proud of it. They thought it was good. They found its ending by political pressure genuinely unfortunate in the way that any creative person finds it unfortunate when the thing they made gets taken away from them for reasons that have nothing to do with its quality.
And somewhere in all of that in the gap between the moment when two sisters from Leicester, Massachusetts became something that every bar in America recognized and the moment when they simply stepped back into private life. There is a story about the fragility of a particular kind of fame. The kind that is built on one thing in one era aimed at one audience using one medium.
When any of those elements shifts, the structure beneath the fame shifts with it. When all of them shift at once, when the campaign ends, the political winds change, the internet era begins, and the cultural moment passes. There is very little left to hold on to. Diane and Elaine Klazeki took the audition when it came.
They did the job with everything they had. They became for a genuine moment part of the American cultural fabric. The kind of presence that gets parodyied on national television that stops people mid-sentence in bars that ends up cited in congressional race coverage as a symbol of everything a candidate needs to answer for. That is not nothing.
That is in fact quite a lot. And then the moment passed. The commercials stopped airing. The films dried up. The projects didn’t come together. The years moved forward in the way that years do, regardless of what anyone has accomplished or hoped for. Two women who had grown up dreaming of being stars, who were the daughters of factory workers and the products of smalltown Massachusetts, and years of dance training and patience and ambition.
They stepped back into ordinary life. There’s something almost nostalgic about all of it. About the simplicity of what their peak moment actually was. A jingle, a punchline, a pair of identical faces at the end of a 30-cond spot about football and beer and the very specific uncomplicated pleasures of being young in the early 2000s.
The world that produced that commercial and made it a cultural touchstone is not entirely gone, but it is far enough in the rear view mirror now that it feels like a different time because it was. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.