It"s a little bit like the old West. A guy"s reputation is the first thing you hear about. Let"s say you"re brought to a new agency, and usually somebody walks up to you that first week and he says, "Hi, my name is So-and-so and I work here." Invariably, inevitably, the conversation gets around to "Watch out for that guy." Then your new friend says, "This is a nice place and I like it. You can"t get much work out, but don"t worry about it." Then, all of a sudden it"s like a prison movie: "That guy over there, that little b.a.s.t.a.r.d, watch out for him." This is the language of the business. Then you know that the guy he"s talking about is the killer. You know that he"s the guy who will do the job on you if the job ever has to be done.
Let"s say a creative director has got himself a bad art director who has to go. Since the creative director hired the art director, the chances are that he"s afraid, so he"s not going to go blabbing around that "I blew it with Joe over there, I made a bad decision and shouldn"t have hired him." The creative director is beyond all that. The agency president? He"s so far removed from everything that he"s really out of advertising. He"s spending most of his time with a couple of guys who run a boiler room who claim they"re going to take his agency public and make everybody a bundle. The account supervisor is so scared of losing the account that he can barely talk, much less think straight. So the actual job falls to someone between the account supervisor and the creative supervisor. The way it"s done is that the creative supervisor will mumble something to the killer which goes like this: "You know, Joe isn"t behaving too well lately." Then the account supervisor screws up his courage and he might stammer to the killer, "Yeah, Joe is acting up, he came in at ten yesterday morning and he was drunk. He"s got to go." The killer mops up.
Some killers eventually kill off so many people that the board of directors decides on a change of management. Then a whole new crew of guys is brought in, and the new guys don"t realize that they have a killer on their hands. That"s when the killers get it. Whenever a killer gets. .h.i.t in an agency, or when he retires, there"s a celebration a real party.
The retirement party for the Bates killer was marvelous. Practically the whole agency showed up for it. First of all, everyone had a great deal of respect for the guy you know, here we have a tried and true survivor. And secondly, n.o.body"s going to screw around and not show up because who knows, maybe he"ll get bored by retirement and he"ll come back to work at the agency. n.o.body wanted to risk a scene like that. Even in retirement the guy struck fear into people.
When I worked at Daniel & Charles there were so many going-away parties for guys who got fired that I figured out a way to ease the financial burden on those people who had to kick in five or ten dollars every week for the party. I decided to sell insurance. I went around to the creative department and said, "Give me three dollars out of your paychecks every week and I"ll book it. The next time somebody gets it I"ll pay for the party."
There was a copywriter there named Marvin who was doing quite nicely with his accounts. One day he got into a conversation with some other people in the creative department who said, "Marvin, you"re being underpaid. You"re doing a h.e.l.l of a job and they"re killing you when it comes to bread. Frankly, Marvin, you"re worth a lot more."
Now they weren"t egging this guy on, they honestly thought that the guy was doing a job and deserved a better deal. Marvin says, "Holy s.h.i.t, you"re right, I"m going to go in there and talk to Charlie." Charlie Goldschmidt was one of the two owners of the agency and is the chairman of the board. Well, he went in to talk to Charlie and Charlie says. "Marvin, that"s very funny, I wanted to talk to you." And then Charlie fired Marvin. Marvin was going to be fired all along; if he had kept quiet he would have lasted a few more weeks.
Charlie was doing a lot of firing those days. On one day there were account a.s.signments coming out and Charlie had to pencil in a.s.signments for everyone. He pencils in a lot of names and then when he comes to a guy named Dennis, he doesn"t pencil Dennis"s name in but rather he puts down "Mr. X" to work on such and such an account. In his mind, of course, he was about to fire Dennis. The only problem is that on the list are Dennis"s accounts and next to Dennis"s name is "Mr. X." Of course he hadn"t gotten around to tell Dennis that he was out and "Mr. X" was coming in. And of course his secretary, she doesn"t know anything, so she goes ahead, types the list out, and the account list is circulated throughout the agency. The next scene: Charlie running all over the agency trying to grab back these things from everybody including Dennis. Well, he wasn"t fast enough the legs go first on an agency president and when Charlie gets to Dennis"s office, there"s Dennis, white, looking at the list. "I"m sorry," said Charlie, "I"m sorry you had to find out this way." Charlie had not been able to find a replacement for Dennis and didn"t want to fire him until he did.
Charlie liked me and when I told him I was leaving he was quiet for two weeks. On the next to the last day he came into my office and said, "Kid, can"t you change your mind? Kid, what can I do for you? Kid, you could own this place someday." Last day, he"s in my office again. I shook his hand and said, "Goodbye, Charlie." "Goodbye, kid," he says. "I wish you luck, but you"re making a mistake."
I went downstairs for a going-away drink with everybody. A guy comes running down saying, "You got to go upstairs again. Charlie"s gone berserk; he"s firing everybody. So help me. Go upstairs."
And he was. Charlie had simply gone into the office of a fellow named Mike Lawlor and said, "Mike, are you going to follow Jerry?" Mike says, "No, Charlie, I wouldn"t do anything like that." Charlie says, "Mike, are you going to take your book [meaning portfolio] up to Fuller & Smith & Ross?" "I might," says Mike. Lawlor felt that the Bill of Rights allowed a guy to show his book around town. "Get out of here," says Charlie. "You"re fired. Pack up your things and get out." He then went into the office of a guy named Bert Klein and said, "Bert, you"re Jerry"s friend, aren"t you?" "Yeah." Are you going to follow him?" "Gee, I don"t know." "Did you ever have your book up to that agency?" "Yeah, I"ve had my book up there." "Get out," said Charlie, "you"re fired." Still another friend of mine, a guy named Bob Tore, was coming out of the men"s room. He was a little wobbly because he had heard that Charlie was going from office to office firing people. Charlie grabbed this guy Bob and said, "You"re Jerry"s friend, aren"t you?" Poor Bob. He starts to stammer, "Uh, uh, yeah, I know Jerry ..." Charlie got compa.s.sionate: "Never mind. You got two kids. I won"t fire you."
Charlie, who now is a good friend of mine, really did a job that day. I don"t know what the final head count was, but he put in a good day"s work. The next day he had four freelancers working up there to take up the slack. And the guys he fired were no slouches. Mike Lawlor went to Doyle, Dane, Bert Klein to Wells, Rich.
One of the reasons for all the chaos is that, suddenly, an account can pull out of an agency. An account has to give an agency ninety days" notice before it pulls out. I swear there are some guys on Madison Avenue who hide in the bathroom on Friday. Friday is kill day because it"s the end of the week killing is done on Friday for bookkeeping reasons. What"s so sad about it is that the wrong guys get fired. Management calls in some poor guy and says, in effect, "As you know, we"ve just blown fifteen million dollars worth of billing, and your one hundred and sixty bucks a week stands between us and survival." It"s almost ludicrous. Agencies net 15 percent of the account"s billing, plus a little extra from things like production charges. Agency blows $15 million in billing, which adds up to like $2,500,000 to the agency and they go to the guy who"s making eight or nine grand a year and they tell him, "Look, things are very bad and we"re going to have to let you go." The guy who"s saying this, by the way, is making forty or fifty big ones a year and he"s usually safer. There seems to be a rule of thumb, written somewhere, that the guy making thirty thousand or better is much safer than the guy making eleven.
It"s a terrible system and one of the results of it is the guy who makes that thirty or forty grand a year is a very nervous cat. Although he really is safer, he has so much more to lose. He cries a lot at night. During the day you can spot him breezing out of the agency for a fifty-minute pick-me-up from his shrink. G.o.d knows how many people on Madison Avenue go to the shrinks, but the number and percentages must be enormous. You see everyone zipping out on Wednesday afternoon, two to three, for a fix. They come back and they"re acting like real people again. They"re O.K.
If you get into a discussion with somebody about his shrink, he clams up. Going to the shrink is not any status thing. People get very uptight about their shrinks. Oh, someone might casually remember that once, about ten years ago, he paid a short visit to a shrink, but that"s about it. The advertising guy goes to the shrink because he"s worried about losing his account. The shrink is probably sneaking off to his shrink because he"s worried about losing all of those advertising guys who sh.e.l.l out the bucks. So the shrink has to hold the advertising guy; the advertising guy has to hold the account. Everybody"s holding on for dear life. The day is going to come when a bunch of shrinks decide that they ought to start an agency.
It"s not tough to figure out why there is so much fear in advertising. It"s my theory that much of the fear starts very, very casually. Let"s say the wife of the chairman of a board of a large company is sitting under the hair dryer one day and she hears a couple of chicks talking about a funny Volkswagen commercial. At dinner that night she starts nagging her husband. He"s got enough headaches as it is, what with trying to get a new line of credit that won"t be usury, and also thinking he"s developing a heart condition. Anyhow, there"s his wife whining, "Harry, oh Harry, why can"t your company have funny little commercials like they do for Volkswagen?" He feels a little pain in his chest and he mumbles something at her.
Next day, he"s out of sorts and the president of his company walks in, and the chairman says to the president, "Listen, Fritz, why don"t we get some advertising here? I sign a lot of bills. We spend three million dollars a year on advertising. What have we got to show for it?" The president suddenly feels that creepy little chill and says, "My G.o.d, Harry, you"re right!"
The president suddenly trots down to the advertising manager and says, "You know, Don, I wonder if it isn"t about time that we reevaluate our advertising. We"ve been with Winthrop, Saltonstall, Epstein and Gambrelli now for four years. They still haven"t turned out a campaign that we can be proud of and happy with." Now who"s going to stop pa.s.sing the buck? The advertising manager, who"s making maybe eighteen or twenty grand a year and up to his ears in a mortgage in Tenafly, isn"t about to say to the president of the company. "You"re wrong." Nor is the president about to say to the chairman, "Now, Harry, I think maybe you"re wrong about our advertising, why don"t you take a Cert or a Tum or something and settle down?"
So that fatal telephone call is made. The advertising manager calls two or three agencies he"s been keeping his eye on and says, very casually, "Wonder if you fellows would like to come over and talk to us? We"ve been reevaluating our advertising and ... Now we"re very happy with Winthrop etc., don"t get me wrong about that, we just thought we"d take a look at some other approaches ..."
Whammo! As soon as two or three agencies get the word, that word leaks out. I don"t know why, but pretty soon everybody in town knows it. There hasn"t been a new account change in years that was a surprise. The word finally reaches one of the advertising publications. Is it true that Ford is looking for a new agency? Well now, you"re at Thompson working on the Ford account and your life goes before your eyes. You see that in two or three months you"re going to be out of work, and in advertising when you"re on the beach it usually lasts for eight or nine months.
For the sake of argument, let"s say the word doesn"t get out. Maybe you just sense that the chairman of the board might have talked to the president. Maybe, just maybe, there"s a meeting and you get a feeling: "I don"t like the way Don smiled at me when he left that meeting." I"ve seen guys standing around after a meeting saying, "Did you notice that his last words were, "I"ll see you. It"s been nice knowing you"? What did he mean by that?" Then somebody else pipes up and says, "Obviously, he"s trying to scare us." Another guy says, "f.u.c.k him, he can"t scare us." And you know what? It hits them. The next day everybody"s sitting around wondering how they"re going to lose that account. Still another guy says, "Remember looking at that guy from the account? He didn"t smile during the presentation." Then they start at each other: "Why did you talk so much?" "I didn"t talk so much; you spent too much time talking to the guy who didn"t smile." "I didn"t talk that much; you screwed up the slide projector. No wonder that guy didn"t smile."
Now let"s take the other side of what can happen. Let"s say that the advertising manager decides to tell his agency that things aren"t going well. The opposite of when the word doesn"t get out officially; that is, the account executive is told point-blank that he"s in trouble, and he doesn"t have to go through all the mumbo jumbo of figuring out who didn"t smile at a meeting.
So Don, the advertising manager, meets with the account executive and says, "Joe, I had a little session with the president yesterday and look, I don"t want you people to get nervous but he"s really not too pleased with the way things are going." The blood starts to drain out of Joe"s face and his fingers go numb. He starts to nod and stutters, "Well, Don, don"t worry, we"ll work something out." Joe runs back to the agency like Paul Revere screaming "The British are coming. The British are coming." He"s screaming, "We"re in trouble, we"re in trouble." Guys begin running around. There are dozens of meetings. The whole thing is weird to watch because when that account man comes back and they close that door and he says, "Look, we"re in a lot of trouble, the president of the company says our ads are lousy," that"s the first sign of death.
Whichever way the word comes directly from the advertising manager or indirectly from gossip in the trade papers or from something you pick up at a meeting it immediately spreads throughout the entire agency. I was a mailboy at Ruthrauff & Ryan when they were on their way to losing the Kentile account. The kids working in the mailroom making sixty bucks a week knew a year ahead that Ruthrauff & Ryan was going to lose the account and they were scared stiff. And you know, the kids were right, Kentile moved out of there in like ten months. Ruthrauff & Ryan is gone today nothing, it doesn"t exist. One of the reasons that it died was because of no communication. The mailroom knew they were going to lose accounts before the management did.
They were an old-fashioned agency, old-line, and they just dribbled away to nothing. When I went to work there in 1955 the big news was they hired a guy who "had a great book of names." I didn"t know what the h.e.l.l that meant and then it dawned on me: they went and hired a guy who was more of a pimp than he was an account executive. This was the guy with a big fat address book who was going to save them. I mean, forget it, this guy knew how to get anybody in town fixed up. Blue movies. He"s got it. Blondes, brunettes or redheads, he has them. You know, I really was impressed as h.e.l.l. This guy was to be the agency wh.o.r.emaster. And the talk about this guy: "He"s going to bring us the business." They honestly thought a cat like that was going to save them. And there are agencies around today with a somewhat similar att.i.tude. Glad-hand the account. Get the account tickets to the Giants" football games. Big dinners at "21" and Le Pavillon. The weak agencies, fearful of losing an account, will resort to anything to keep the account. The hot agencies, they don"t need this. What does Doyle, Dane need with a wh.o.r.emaster? They"re turning out terrific work. What does Delehanty, Kurnit need with a guy like this? Or Wells; Rich, Greene? These people are professionals doing a good job.
Now sometimes an account takes advantage of all this fear of losing an account. TWA is the cla.s.sic example. In 1967 TWA was at Foote, Cone & Belding, and they were doing a pretty good job on the account. Most of the airlines are losing money hand over foot, not because their advertising is good or bad, but because the Government has screwed up the business so. The airlines live on Government handouts and subsidies and on airmail contracts. And the Government tells the airlines where to fly. Give me an airline that the Government says must fly to Buffalo and I"ll show you an airline losing money. I mean, n.o.body goes to Buffalo. Anyhow, someone gets itchy at TWA and they decide that maybe what they need, besides a couple of routes to Hawaii, is some new advertising. So they call up Foote, Cone and say, "You"re a swell bunch of guys, Foote, Cone, but we"re not that happy ..."
I guess TWA at that time was billing $22 million. Do you understand what that means to an agency? Any agency? Something like $4 million a year in income. Well, the panic spread through Foote, Cone like wildfire. I was a creative supervisor at Ted Bates at the time and the calls started coming in. Copywriters, art directors, creative people the big scare was on. That afternoon I met a girl from Foote, Cone in a restaurant and she said, "It"s true, it"s happening. We"re going to lose it in a day or so." She was petrified. She was making forty grand a year as a writer and TWA was the only account she was working on, and she had to find a job fast. She had a whole list of people she was going to see about a job.
What happened in those next few weeks was the second most public rape since the Sabine women got it. Never before in the history of advertising were so many guys taken at the same time. TWA really did a first-rate job. A lot of very smart, very wise guys got taken. The whole thing was a big flimflam.
TWA was looking for freebies presentation of agencies" work without paying the freight. To get the freebies they went to nervous agencies Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample; Benton & Bowles; Ted Bates. And they were such nice guys they even let the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds at Foote, Cone compete for their own account. William Esty, N.W. Ayer, Sullivan Stauffer, and even McCann-Erickson were in there, too. They went to the old-line agencies who were beginning to feel the pinch from the new agencies coming up. Now these old-line agency fellows are not dummies; they"re sharpies.
I don"t know how many guys called TWA and said, "We want in on the presentation," and I don"t know which ones were called specifically by TWA and told, "We"d like you in on this." TWA was pretty smooth, too. They never would come out and say go out and spend $40,000 or $50,000 on a commercial. No, they would say, "We"d like to see some examples of your work, the work you would be doing for us."
TWA never said, "Don"t spend the bread." They just smiled and sucked everyone in.
They didn"t get any response from outfits like Doyle, Dane. Or Ogilvy. Or Mary Wells. Agencies like these show possible new business what they"ve really done in the past and let it go at that. If anyone ever asked Doyle, Dane for a sample campaign, Doyle, Dane would say, "We don"t play that way." They turn out great work; they win awards every year from their fellow workers. They"re good and they know it.
All of a sudden this thing s...o...b..lled, s...o...b..lled right out of sight. Everyone started out by saying, "Well, we"ll give them a few sketches, maybe a handful of roughs." Then another guy would say, "Well, look, you know we"re up against those guys at Bates. You know what sharpies they are. Let"s go for a little more than a sketch. Let"s go look for a shot." And the next guy says, "Well, look, if we"re taking shots for a print ad, we just can"t walk over there with a storyboard. You know how tough it is to show storyboards." And another guy says, "I know a guy who would shoot this commercial for twenty thousand dollars." Guys suddenly went into business working on the TWA account without having it.
Long about then a skinny kid named Jim Webb with a lot of hair was out on the West Coast starting out as a songwriter. If this kid knew what chaos he caused in New York, he"d break up. One of the songs he wrote was called "Up, Up, and Away" and it"s got lines in it like "Wouldn"t you like to fly/in my beautiful balloon?" and stuff like that. Well, a chase develops for the commercial rights to this song. A group called the Fifth Dimension had recorded it, and it was very big about then. The infighting over that song! Also, the word leaked out that TWA hated their current song and this one seemed ideal. Anyhow, Foote, Cone somehow latched onto it, but as soon as the others heard that Foote, Cone had a song, then everyone else had to have a song.
You can"t believe the Mickey Mouse stuff that went on at Bates during all this. I don"t know what was doing at the other agencies, but at Bates it was crazy all the way. Doors were locked. Delivery boys used to show up with food orders from the delicatessen and couldn"t get in all Mickey Mouse. I remember one of the biggies running down the hall with a record cover this guy was making maybe one hundred grand a year and he"s saying, "This is the song, this is the one that"s going to get us the account." There was false elation that was almost sick. There was this absolutely positive feeling that we had it locked.
Well, everyone presents. Who knows how much money was spent on everybody"s presentations? Upward of a million dollars would be my rough guess. Anyhow, everyone presents, and here"s Foote, Cone with this beautiful song, which they"ve changed now to "Up, Up, and Away TWA," and here"s everyone else with real commercials, real print ads, the works. This kid Webb wrote a h.e.l.l of a song and after looking at all of these presentations, TWA lets all the Sabine women have it. "Nice work," they say, and then they say, "Foote, Cone, you"ve done such a h.e.l.l of a job that we"re going to keep the account with you."
At Bates, when they learned what happened, it was like V-J Day, except that they were like the j.a.ps, falling on swords. Unbelievable.
About six months later there was some kind of shake-up at TWA. A new guy with a lot of clout moved in and he decided that despite "Up, Up, and Away TWA" the account really didn"t belong at Foote, Cone. So beautiful Mary Wells, who had just finished painting all the Braniff Airline planes fuchsia and colors like that, walks in and off with the account. No formal presentation, nothing. Maybe she showed them a fuchsia plane, but nothing more. And she got it. To get the account and avoid a conflict of interest, she had to resign the Braniff account. And the president of Braniff is her husband.
George Lois, who used to be at Papert, Koenig and Lois and then started Lois, Holland, Callaway, is minding his own business and pretty soon there comes Braniff, fuchsia planes and all. It"s not that all of advertising business is crazy, but there are times, there are times ... And it is the craziness that leads to the nervousness that leads to the real fear on Madison Avenue. The TWA story must have driven twenty guys to drink, and it isn"t all that unique a situation. There will always be nervousness wherever big money is at stake. And above everything else, Madison Avenue is big money.
CHAPTER.
FOUR.
GIVE ME.
YOUR.
DRUNKS, YOUR.
WEIRDOS ...
"Advertising is the only business in the world that takes on the lamed, the drunks, the potheads, and the weirdos. You can"t make it as an account executive with a reputation for being a pothead, but you can probably last in the copy business or as an art director if your pupils are a little dilated. Eccentrics are drawn to the business and welcomed into it. Your best grade of eccentric is normally found on the creative side, among the copywriters and art directors ..."
We get a great number of nutsy guys. Let"s say that there are hundreds maybe thousands of guys in this business who, if they were working for Bankers Trust right now, would have found themselves committed. You know, their boss would have sat back and decided, "This guy is really going," and he would call the guy"s wife up and say, "I think it"s time we committed him because, you know, he"s doing strange things."
Take a good friend of mine, Ned Viseltear, for example. He"s really a legend. And yet he managed to get good job after good job.
Ned once worked for Grey Advertising for three hours. He had been hired as a copywriter and he goes into work at nine in the morning. Because Grey is a very straight-arrow kind of place, Ned shows up at work on the first day right on time nine o"clock. He meets some people, fills out all the forms you have to fill out on the first day on a job and then around 12:15 he goes out to lunch. He had a date with someone at Daniel & Charles. Well, they had a nice lunch and the guy from Daniel & Charles says, "Why don"t you come to work at Daniel & Charles as a copywriter?" They get down to specifics and Ned is offered a job better than the one he"s got at Grey. So he goes down to Daniel & Charles, meets Danny Karsch, the other owner of that agency and the chairman of the executive committee, accepts the offer at about two in the afternoon.
But he couldn"t resist picking up the phone. He"s still up at Daniel & Charles and he dials Grey and asks for personnel. He says, "My name is Ned Viseltear. I was working for you this morning. I worked for you for approximately three and a half hours." And the woman on the other side says, "Yes, what can I do for you?" Viseltear says, "I"m quitting Grey. I"m leaving and taking another job." The lady is getting a little uneasy with this guy on the phone, she thinks maybe he"s some kind of a nut and pretty soon he"ll start breathing heavily. Viseltear says, "Well, I just wanted to know, have I acc.u.mulated any vacation time? I know I"ve only been working at Grey for three and a half hours, but if there"s any vacation money due me I wish you"d send it to me in care of Daniel and Charles."
In 1961 Daniel & Charles was like a school, except all the kids in the school seemed to be crazy. It was my first real job in advertising, I mean my first legitimate job. I had been out of work for seven months before going there and before I was out of work I had been writing hernia ads for a small outfit called the Advertising Exchange. I was living in Brooklyn and had no bread whatsoever. My relatives used to have my wife and me over to dinner. Sitting around the table, some uncle would say, "Hey, kid, I see by the Chief [the Civil Service newspaper in New York City] that they got some openings coming up in the Sanitation Department. Why don"t you forget this advertising bug and get yourself a job?"
I really didn"t have the heart or the stomach for the Sanitation Department. So I sat around in my apartment in Brooklyn and tried to get something going. I decided that Daniel & Charles was the agency for me. I had been going through a book called the Advertising Agency Register, which lists all of the agencies in the business, and I was down to the D"s. I started sending them in roughs of sample ads. I just sent them in to Danny Karsch, one of the agency"s partners, but without a name, just my initials, J.D.F. Anyhow, I kept sending those ads in and one day I called Daniel & Charles and asked for Danny. When the secretary asked who it was, I said, "I"m J.D.F." Danny had me come up for an interview and he hired me at one hundred dollars a week.
I found that the whole place was filled with young guys who suddenly discovered that somebody was going to pay them a lot of money for the rest of their lives for doing this thing called advertising, and all of us got caught up in the insanity of it and went crazy. A whole group of people slowly went out of their skulls.
The first day I was at work we were sitting around in an art director"s office and a guy came running into the office, screaming, "Channel Eight, Channel Eight, there"s something on Channel Eight."
With this the room, which was full of guys, emptied. They literally ran over me. They ran down the hall and I followed them and when they got to the end of the hall they opened the doorway that led to the stairwell. Daniel & Charles was located on Thirty-fourth Street, about ten feet away from an apartment building. It was almost as if they were connecting buildings. From the stairwell these guys were able to look right into the apartment building, and they had designated the various apartments as Channel One, Channel Two, and so forth. Channel Eight was a very zaftig-looking young girl who happened to be walking around in her bra at the time and nothing else. And like everybody was standing there, you know, commenting on the chick, throwing lines like, "I don"t think she"s as nice as Channel Five." This was my initiation into advertising.
There were guys at Daniel & Charles who were so addicted to those windows that they spent hours keeping an eye on the channels. The funniest sight and the funniest sound in the world was when we would be working late at night after 10:00 p.m. and you would hear a copywriter, Evan Stark, pushing his typewriter table down the hall to the stairwell and setting up the typewriter so he could write and watch at the same time. Bob Tore, the art director Evan worked with, would sit on the steps and the two of them would stare out the window and work on ads, but keeping an eye peeled to see what they could find. Evan would sit there and think of something and he would type because he would never work with a pencil. He would sit there and type a headline, always checking the windows, and finally one day Charlie Goldschmidt caught everybody.
There was a great confrontation, and because Charlie used to blame me for most of the crazy stuff in the agency he called me down and said, "Well, Jerry, you and your gang have finally done it. The neighbors have called the cops and they say I"ve got an organization of Peeping Toms working here." And I said, "Charlie, I don"t know what you"re talking about." And really, I didn"t understand. He says, "Well, you and your guys finally did it." "Charlie," I said, "you"re out of your skull." He said, "You better go up and tell your gang they"re in a lot of trouble."
I ran upstairs and the first guy I saw was an art director named Bill Arzonetti, and I said, "Bill, we"re in trouble. Charlie says that there"s an organized gang of Peeping Toms at Daniel and Charles." Bill looked at me with a straight face and said, "Gee, that"s the first time I ever belonged to anything organized."
Bill is an unusual guy. Very quiet, very good art director. One day I was working with him, and actually it was the first time we really had done any ads together. Anyhow, we"re working away and his phone started to ring. Bill is a very uptight guy when he"s working and he keeps working and ignores the phone. Couple of minutes pa.s.s. The phone is still ringing. I look at the phone but since I"m new I figure maybe Bill likes a phone to ring for five minutes before he picks it up. It"s still ringing and he still doesn"t answer it but I can see he"s getting tenser and tenser, and he"s just building up to an explosion. Finally he looks around and picks up a pair of scissors and he stabs the phone. Not simply cut the wire or anything like that. I mean he stabbed it, right from the handpiece all the way through the rest of it. "That should hold it," he said.
I looked at him and then I said, "I think I hear somebody calling me. I"ll be right back." I didn"t come back for two days. We still meet now and then and laugh about it. How many guys stab their telephones? He didn"t kid around with it, either, I mean he wanted to kill that phone. The funny thing is that even after he stabbed it, it still rang. Bill was much calmer after he stabbed it.
We had another art director at Daniel & Charles I"ll call him Jack. One day Jack decided to leave his wife. He went home and told her, "I"m leaving you. I have a girl friend." His wife says, "How can you do this to me?" Jack says, "I have a girl friend." His wife collapsed into a chair and started beating her breast, shouting, "Why, why?" And he said, "Well, what"s wrong with having a girl friend? Look, all the other guys at the agency have girl friends. Why can"t I have one?"
She decided to go gunning for everyone at the agency. Somehow she got a list of the agency people with their home phone numbers and she decided that she would call all of the wives and tell them that all of their husbands were running around. Then Jack told us that she decided not to make the phone calls, but instead she was going out to buy a gun and shoot everyone at the agency. We all started to look around for a good place to hide when she showed up. In the back of the creative department there was a closet with a false wall, and Bob Tore and I decided that if we ever heard gunfire or anything going on we would jump into this closet and stay there until it blew over. You may think I"m kidding but she was quoted as saying, "I"m going to go up and get everybody."
You can"t really compare Jack with a guy like George Lois, who uses his wildness to get a lot of things done. There are literally hundreds of George Lois stories around town. George is a big husky Greek guy who has a h.e.l.l of a temper, plus the fact that he"s very, very creative and a h.e.l.l of a good art director. All of these factors rolled into one tend to make things very exciting when George is around.
There are a couple of cla.s.sic stories on Madison Avenue involving art directors trying to stuff their immediate superiors out a window. The way I heard one of these stories, an art director once tried to throw Norman B. Norman out of a window in the Look building, but the cas.e.m.e.nt windows stopped him, along with an a.s.sist from another art director, named Onofrio Paccione.
There is a great, great nut in town I"ll call Riley. He was a very good copywriter for Doyle, Dane. One day he went out to lunch and got very, very drunk and started feeling sorry for himself. He finally said the h.e.l.l with the whole business, and when he came back from lunch he started to bust up his office. You know, throwing lamps around, breaking the chair. His method of getting the whole thing over with was not to leave Doyle, Dane but to destroy everything that was in there. The desk was the last piece that he wanted to do the job on.
He lifted up the window and started to shove his desk out of it. Well, those desks can weigh anywhere from a hundred pounds on up. Anyhow, all the racket that Riley was making busting up the chairs attracted attention. People started running into his office and the first thing they see is Riley, about to get a hernia, with his desk halfway out the window and about to go all the way out. A couple of guys tackle him and another couple of guys tackle the desk and manage to save a few lives. For years people would talk about Riley and his desk, and one day I asked him if the story were true. "Hey, Riley, did you really try to do it? Did you really try to throw your desk out the window?" And he said, "Yeah, but it was only on the Forty-third Street side of the building." I mean, how can you help loving a guy who realizes that if his desk goes out on the Forty-second Street side it causes a lot of headaches, but it"s O. K. on the Forty-third Street side. That"s a very rational man.
I wouldn"t want to give the impression that all the creative guys in town are crazy. I actually know of only one stabbing that ever took place, I mean besides the stabbing of the telephone. An art director named Angie once got into an argument with an account man over an ad and they started yelling at each other so Angie simply stabbed the account guy with a ballpoint pen. Oh, I guess there was a lot of blood and screaming, but the account guy lived. The agency decided they had to do something to Angie, so he was officially censured at a Plans Board meeting, which is composed of the most influential people in an agency. The account guy recovered nicely and then took out a Major Medical policy. I see Angie every now and then. I ran into him just the other day on Fifty-ninth Street, looking very strange. He was carrying his coat under one arm, his shirt was not tucked in his pants, he had a three-day growth of beard, and I don"t think he had been home for a while.
On the whole, there"s not that much violence. Once, on the New York Central, an agency president got into an argument about politics with the guy sitting next to him, and the next thing you knew, the president hit the guy a good shot in the mouth.
George Lois was involved in a small brawl with a friend of mine, Bill Casey. Casey had been working at Papert, Koenig, Lois and he was leaving. There was some kind of stock dispute about his leaving and so they scheduled a reconciliation meeting. Casey was the kind of guy who might have a couple of drinks in a bar and all of a sudden a brawl seems to erupt around him. Something went wrong at the reconciliation meeting and the first thing you know Lois vaults over a table and tries to take a punch at Casey. Secretaries were yelling, the usual chaos. It wasn"t the greatest example of a guy leaving an agency. Casey then sued Lois, Julian Koenig, the whole bunch of them, on the grounds that "an atmosphere of physical violence" kept him from doing his work at the agency.
He might have had something, because back in 1965 there was a terrific fight at PKL during which an account supervisor named Bert Sugar slugged another guy, leaving blood all over the place. They used to call PKL "Stillman"s East," after the old fight gym.
If I were told to make a choice, I would say that copywriters are the craziest of all of the creative people. I once had a kid named Herb working for me when I was at Delehanty, a great nut. He was on everything in the world, you name it speed, acid, gra.s.s, G.o.d knows what else. He used to come into the office looking very strange. It got to the point where if I had to stare into his dilated pupils one more time I would go crazy. I mean, he was bad news. But he was a h.e.l.l of a good writer, so I kept him on.
The real problem with Herb was not the condition that he arrived in, but when he arrived. He used to come into the office at four o"clock in the afternoon. He used to tell me that he was afraid of the morning, that he hated the morning, so he would stay in bed until three or four and then go to work. It wasn"t that he was shirking or anything he used to work until midnight or one in the morning it was just that he was working a different schedule.
Well, the problems started. Art directors were constantly looking for him and of course he was in bed. Account guys were always trying to pin him down, and there he was, breezing in at four in the afternoon, more likely than not zonked out, and account guys never did know how to handle zonked guys. And then the other copywriters saw Herb and the hours he was working and they wanted to work at night, too, and sleep in the morning.
I used to tell him, "Herb, you"ve got to come in a little earlier. People are looking for you after ten in the morning, you know that, don"t you?" Herb said, "I can"t help it. I"ll do anything else you want, but I can"t help it I just have to come in at four or five in the afternoon." I said, "Herb, listen, you"re going to be fired if you keep it up." And he wouldn"t listen.
We finally had to get rid of the guy because he was causing too much trouble. The day I decided to fire him he comes into my office. "Jerry," he says, "I figured out how to get in early. I want a raise."
This surprised me a little so I asked him what he meant.
"I"ve got a girl friend and I need the raise so that she can leave her apartment and move in with me. If she moves in with me she"ll wake me up in the morning because she isn"t afraid of the morning like I am and then I"ll be able to get in to work on time. I won"t oversleep."
I said, "Herb, you need more money from me so that your girl friend can move in and then she can wake you up, right?"
"Yes," he said.
I said, "Herb, did you ever hear of an alarm clock?"
"Did you ever try to f.u.c.k an alarm clock?" he said.
Herb went from Delehanty to several agencies where he did good work and always got fired, and he"s someplace else now where he"s about to get fired. He"s been fired from some of the best agencies in town. One guy, at still another agency, fired him in the traditional Mafia method. He went out and bought a big fish and came back to the office and put it on Herb"s desk. That was this guy"s way of telling Herb he was through.
Many, many copywriters are paranoids. Herb felt that people and things were always rejecting him. One day he put a piece of paper into the Xerox machine at Delehanty to make a copy. Everybody was coming up to the Xerox machine and putting their pieces of paper in it and getting copies, but when Herb tried it there were some strange sounds and the original came out of the machine all ripped up. He picked it up, looked up, and said, "Even the Xerox machine rejects me."
There are hundreds of these guys floating through New York. One of them, named Wilder, has worked for practically every agency in the city. You hire Wilder and the next day he comes running down the hall barefooted, screaming, and causing a lot of commotion. He shows up at strange hours, doing very strange things. He keeps getting jobs because he"s fairly good.
There"s another guy named Harry nice guy, quiet, well-mannered, except that he has a thing about suing people. He usually was suing two or three people a day, so help me. It is a known fact in town that if you hire Harry you know he"s going to spend most of his time in court. He just loves to sue people and spend time with lawyers. What he does, for example, is walk down the street and wait at the bus stop for a bus. Let"s say the bus stops two feet from the curb and he has to walk through a puddle of water to get on the bus. The first thing he says to the driver is, "What is this, your stopping so far from the curb?" Bus drivers, who deal with nuts all day long, usually tell him to move his a.s.s to the rear of the bus, and naturally, the next day he knocks out a letter to the Transit Authority informing them they"re being sued for whatever crazy reason Harry thinks will work.
When he was working at Delehanty he once took on American Airlines. He had had a bad flight. He also is a racing driver, and he was on his way to a race. The flight was delayed and he missed the race. So he wrote American that he was suing. He got two beautiful vice-presidents from American as a result of that letter. They called him up and said, "How can we settle this problem?" Harry said, "I think the only way you can settle it is in my office and why don"t you try to be here at nine-thirty in the morning?"
I didn"t know what was going on but that Monday morning I needed the conference room for a meeting. I look in there and I see Harry sitting and talking with two very WASPish guys who are very disturbed. He was sitting there dictating something and a secretary was also sitting there taking it down. I had no idea what was going on, so I spotted a secretary outside the conference room and told her I needed the room for a meeting with a client. She told me that Harry"s been in there for a long time and there"s no sign of the meeting breaking up.
I got a little mad, but I figured he"s in there with a client, although we didn"t have any clients at the time who looked so beautiful. I took my client into a tiny room.
Later on that morning I asked Harry which client he had been talking to in the conference room. Harry said, "No, that wasn"t a client. Those were some guys from American Airlines and I was dictating my terms to them. I think they"re going to accept so I probably won"t sue." I said, "You mean you took agency time as well as the conference room?" Harry said, "Well, Jerry, it"s very important to me that this thing gets straightened out."
We fired him the next day.
Harry called me the other day asking to help get him a semiprofessional apartment. "Harry," I said, "I will be glad to write anyone, anywhere, anytime, that you are indeed a semiprofessional." "Thank you, Jerry," he said, and hung up, probably to sue somebody.
All the craziness doesn"t stay on the creative side. The account side, which is the direct link between the agency and the client, has its madness, too. The main difference is that the creative side takes advantage of its so-called creative reputation, and guys can grow beards at the newer agencies and wear see-through shirts and pants and dilate their pupils. The account side has to stay straight and narrow and wear Paul Stuart clothes and use Ban or Secret or Right Guard and bathe once a day.
The pressure sometimes gets to the account guys, however, and when they flip out it"s something beautiful to watch. I know a bunch of account guys who once had to make a trip to Batavia, Illinois, to visit the people who run the Campana Company. The Campana Company happens to be very big in the menstrual business: they make a little item called Pursettes. So here is this group of New York agency sharpies winging it in Batavia, Illinois, which, I guarantee you, is maybe one step below Des Moines. They spend the morning talking about the marketing plans of Pursettes and then they all go out to lunch. They"ve heard of martinis out in Batavia and the guys from New York load up a bit too much. Back from lunch, the president says he would like everyone around the table to sit for a while and brainstorm about other uses that Pursettes can be put to. Expand the business, explore new markets, conquer new horizons, that sort of thing. The guys from New York are sitting there in a haze and one guy pipes up, "Hey, how about using Pursettes as torches for dwarfs?" When you"re living in Batavia and you get fired by the Campana Company, there"s not many other places you can go to, so the tendency in Batavia is to downplay the cracks about Pursettes. The New York guys all break up at the idea of dwarfs using Pursettes as torches, but the president of Campana frowns and everybody shuts up.
They get through the brainstorming session, and the next item on the agenda is a tour of the plant. You can"t get out of Batavia without a tour of the plant. With the president leading the way, they drift through the factory and suddenly the group comes across a very strange, very strange-looking thing. The president proudly explains that this thing is an artificial v.a.g.i.n.a, in fact its name is the syngina, and naturally, it tests how good Pursettes are. The guys from New York are looking at these synginas and they"re biting through their lips to keep from laughing. The president keeps carrying on about how good these synginas are and finally one New Yorker says, "And if you"re real nice, they let you take the syngina to dinner." Here are guys collapsing on the floor of a factory in Batavia, Illinois, the president turning white with rage, the advertising manager petrified with fear, the agency guys still too stoned to worry.
I once worked for a vice-president of an agency whom we called The Klutz. The Klutz always managed to sit through a presentation and screw it up at the end. We used to make a book on when he would open his mouth and blow the pitch. We kept telling him his name was David "Please stay away from the presentations if you can"t stop insulting people." David would say, "I"m going to behave, I"m really going to be a nice guy." He had this awful tendency to insult the client and he was truly dangerous to have around.
One day we"re pitching for the Tourist Bureau of Mexico account and the bagman for President Aleman of Mexico shows up to hear the pitch. The idea was if you got your pitch past the bagman, then you got to pitch to the top tamale himself. The pitch went on for a h.e.l.l of a long time, something like two hours, and David was a marvel. He sat there, not saying a word, and I was beginning to feel sorry about the way we yelled at him. "He"s great," I said to myself, "he"s behaving like a real gent. I"m sorry we bugged him before the meeting about his behavior."