From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Page 2
Clark Gable. A beautiful guy. Played the hero in The Hucksters, the guy who bails out the tough soap account – although the book was modeled after George Washington Hill of the American Tobacco Company.
The Hucksters must have pulled in a lot of guys off the street into advertising. There was the image. Gable’s main concern was getting laid every hour on the Super Chief between Chicago and the Coast. The movie had something going for it.
Then the image changed to Randall. He’s slick and suave. Underneath, he’s like a shell. He’s terrible. Down deep Randall is really a very shallow guy. The real business is much closer to Wally Cox because Cox, unlike Randall, shows fear. Cox is real; you see him. I’ve dealt with guys like Cox.
I know a guy at a very large agency – I’ll call him Jim – who’s got courage. Pilot, World War II. He couldn’t fly in America in 1940 because he was only seventeen years old so he went and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. Bright, and a lot of courage. He flew in the Battle of Britain, the whole thing. Gets out of the service and doesn’t know what to do. He’s still a kid because he enlisted when he was eighteen. Anyhow, Jim goes to work for a small advertising agency because it seems like a glamorous thing to do. He’s still courageous and bright, then. And as he grows older he gets scared that he might lose his salary, his expense account. The higher he goes, the more frightened he gets. The guy now is a frightened little man, and today he’s only someplace in his forties.
I once asked him what happened between the time that he was shooting down planes and now, when he is a terrified account executive. He looked at me and said, ‘Well, for one thing, the Nazis never tried to take away one of my accounts.’
The average person who sits and watches Tony Randall perform ought to be around a large, bad agency when the big account is pulled out. Nobody cries the first day. What happens is an announcement comes around that says, ‘We regret to announce …’ The next thing that happens is that the president of the agency says, ‘Screw them. They were never any good in the first place.’ That’s the unofficial attitude. They might even break out the drinks and everybody is talking: ‘We’re better off without them. We never needed them and now we’re really going to pull in the new business.’ It’s a very interesting thing to watch. As the account guys are talking they start to break off into little groups. Immediate bravado. ‘Hey, we got rid of those sons of bitches. I’ll never have to put up with that bastard again. And his wife is a drunk.’ Then they break off into even smaller groups. On that first day, excitement. ‘We lost it!’ And the next day, death. The calls go out, guys get out their address books and start calling anyone they ever met in business. The second day they start calling Judy Wald, the lady who runs one of the largest personnel agencies in the business. ‘Judy,’ they say, ‘I’d like to bring my book over.’ Guys start leaving the office with suspicious-looking big packages under their arms. Those packages, it’s their portfolio, their work, anything that they could put together that is going to get them a job. Everybody immediately assumes he’s going to lose his job.
The top, the very top management very wisely stakes out a claim on an account not already in the house. Let’s take a hypothetical example – let’s say your agency loses Texaco Gas. Suddenly an executive vice-president says, ‘I went to school with a guy from Sinclair, and they must be tired of those folks over at Cunningham and Walsh. I’m going to give old Jack a call. Maybe we can have a few drinks. I think I can line up something with Sinclair.’
Not to be outdone, another vice-president says, ‘I have a cat over at Esso. Forget about your guy at Sinclair. My guy at Esso, like we not only went to school together, we fought in the Army together. Esso is unhappy with their agency. My friend has told me so many times. I think we really could work out something with Esso.’
Each biggie in the agency picks a major company that he’s going to shoot for. This is the way they express their fear. They all talk about a big piece of business that they could bring into the house. Nothing ever happens, but that doesn’t matter. They try. They honestly believe that they can do it. What beautiful calls they make. The executive vice-president calls his pal Jack, who may or may not remember who this guy is, and he says, ‘Hi, Jack, you see we’ve just been screwed by Texaco. What do you say we get together and have a drink?’ He has his drink with pal Jack, and then he goes back to his agency and at a management meeting he says, ‘When I said to Jack that we lost the account, he smiled at me. I know that smile. I know the way he smiled at me – he was trying to tell me, “I can’t give it to you now, baby, but in six months it’s yours.” I have heard those exact words. There’s a slight variation on it. ‘When he said no, he said no in such a way that he was opening a door for us – he really was saying that in six months it’s ours. We’ve got it.’ That’s how top management lies to itself and how these guys lie to each other. After a while they forget about it. They’re out pitching new business, holding meetings, fooling around with the creative departments, and they forget all about pal Jack and how old school buddy Jack was going to give them Esso, or Sinclair, or Shell, or whatever the hell it was they were pitching. The biggies keep occupied. They must keep busy. As for the little people, they’ve already been screwed by the biggies. They haven’t got a chance. They’ve been fired.
The image of advertising still hangs in. The movie Blow-Up is a good example. Here’s this scrawny English photographer – a fashion photographer – and in one scene these two chicks literally attack him on his purple no-seam backdrop. Thousands of people watch this photographer jumping from one chick to the next and they think, Wow! Imagine what goes on in advertising if this is what happens to a photographer. So another whole batch of people decides to quit delivering milk or whatever the hell they were doing and they’ve made up their minds to get into advertising.
Those who don’t go into the business talk about it. You meet them at cocktail parties and they say to you, ‘Do you put the captions under the pictures or do you take the pictures?’ That’s the difference to them between an art director and a copywriter. A copywriter puts the captions under the pictures. As far as these people are concerned, you’re only playing around. They think you walk around during the day freaked out on acid or hash, and in between trips you’re carrying on with the women.
A friend I grew up with in Brooklyn – he’s a fireman today – once said to me, ‘Boy, day in day out – models coming out of your ears. You must be killing yourself. I’ve been up to your office and I’ve seen the girls with the miniskirts. I mean, there really must be a lot of fooling around in that business. Can I come up and see? I just want to walk around and see.’ He wants to be part of it. He figures the models must be making it with everyone, and then, of course, you’re doing commercials, and that means actresses. As far as he’s concerned, I’m in Hollywood and the whole world is one big casting couch.
This rumored playing around is so exaggerated. The average model is, first of all, so dumb that nobody even wants to approach her. And neurotic! This is the most neurotic group of people that you could ever want to be with. The average model is so uptight that she’s impossible. You have to remember one thing about models: they live on their looks, and their only job is to look beautiful. Yet, five times a day, they go to an agency like Ted Bates or J. Walter Thompson and sit around in a room with fifteen other girls who look just as beautiful. It’s like a meat market. The art director stands there and says, ‘O.K., girls, stand up. Turn around. Say “Duz does it,” with a French accent.’ So the girls walk around, mumble ‘Duz does it’ with a French accent – or without a French accent, it doesn’t matter – and at the end of the session the art director says, ‘O.K.You, over there, you can stay. Thanks for coming by, everybody.’
I once interviewed fifteen models for a feminine-hygiene spray which we handle, and one model got the job. Fourteen were rejected. Those models go from our rejection to another rejection to another rejection to a point where they’re going out of their skulls. How many ti
mes can you be rejected a day?
So the average model is so crazy that most guys wouldn’t want to go near her. Besides, the only person in an agency who comes in contact with models is the art director, or maybe the account executive. The models are really not concerned with the art directors anyway, because it’s a one-shot job and there just can’t be a casting-couch situation. The art director hires the model for one commercial and he may never see her again.
The only people who wind up sleeping with models are photographers. And photographers are monkeys. I mean, they’re really monkeys. You know, most photographers are very short and have very long arms. I guess the long arms come from carrying those bags around – that’s a lot of equipment they haul around. Some photographers’ arms scrape the ground, they’re so long. The funny bit is that they make out as far as models are concerned. I may be projecting now, which is what my fireman friend is doing. The fireman’s decided that I’m making it with every model in town and I’ve decided that the photographers are the ones who are really making it with the models.
If there’s little glamour in advertising with adult models, there’s even less for kid models. You ought to see kid models. Kid models practically eat the rug, they’re so crazy. They’re out of their minds. And the mothers are insane, too.
When I was working at the Daniel & Charles agency, we had to do a commercial for a children’s toy called Colorforms. Because we couldn’t afford to go and do the commercial on location, we had to settle for Central Park in the dead of winter. We got the kids into polo shirts and short pants and went out to the park. It must have been like maybe ten or fifteen degrees above zero and there was snow all over the place. We managed to shovel off one patch where the kids were going to play with the toy. The kids were turning blue and screaming; the mothers were screaming at the kids because they didn’t want the kids to blow the job. It was terrible.
Once an agency was shooting a commercial on Fire Island, and there was the usual pack of people at the shooting – the kid model, the kid model’s mother who was hanging on to the agency producer’s ear, the director, the assistant director, prop men, grips, cameramen, script people, agency people, account people, the usual tremendous mob. Anyhow, they shoot the commercial, and it comes off okay and everybody packs up and starts walking to the dock to get the next ferry back to New York. The mother is still putting on the producer, telling him what a great actor her kid is; the cameraman is telling the director what a terrific job of camera work the commercial is; the copywriter is telling the account man what a great script he wrote – the usual nonsense from everyone concerned. Everybody gets to the ferry and they’re starting to get on when somebody turns around – and it wasn’t the mother, either – and says, ‘Hey, where’s the kid?’ Well, everyone starts looking high and low for the kid and it turns out they had left the kid back on the beach. Just left him there, playing in the sand.
When I was working at Bates, I happened to be walking through the reception area one day when suddenly I found myself surrounded by little Chinese boys. I mean, the place was jammed with them. There must have been at least fifty Chinese mothers there too. Now the Chinese are a very stable group; they’re probably the sanest group of people in New York. Yet there were enough crazy Chinese mothers to fill up the halls of Bates with these little Chinese kids, all looking for their job. Again, one Chinese kid is needed – and think of the rejections. Fifty Chinese kids could start a revolution if they got rejected enough.
You’ve got to go crazy to be a model. During one of the periods when I was out of work I shot a commercial on spec using my own kid because I couldn’t afford to hire a kid model. As we walked out, I noticed my kid was high. She was up. She was so spaced out that she wasn’t a kid any more. She was way out of it almost as if she was on pot. She couldn’t talk, she was breathing heavily. It’s a crazy experience for a kid to have to do this. It gives them the idea that they’re better than normal people because they’re in an ad.
When I was working for Fuller & Smith & Ross, I happened to be on the agency basketball team. One night our team had a game scheduled with a group of male models. Invariably the word is out that all male models are fags. It’s not true that all of them are, but quite a few of them are a little too cute for words.
Anyhow, here come the male models, and five of the most beautiful guys in the world come out and run across the floor. We were staring at them, that’s how beautiful they were. And, like we figured, you know – male models – we’re going to kill them. We forgot one thing: quite a few of the male models are ex-jocks out of colleges. It was a great scene. The game gets started and pretty soon I get a break and start dribbling toward their basket. I’m all alone, or I thought I was alone. I’m going up for a lay-up, and as I go up one of these guys – he was six foot four, so help me – one of these beautiful, beautiful guys comes down on me with his elbow and catches me across the top of the nose. I fell to the floor and I couldn’t see for a second, the pain was so unbelievable. Blood was gushing out of my nose, all over me, the floor, everything. As I was bouncing around on the floor I remember I was shouting, ‘My nose, my nose!’ And this beautiful guy just looks down at me and says, ‘You call that a nose?’ It was so funny that I was laughing and bleeding at the same time.
I could give you all the disclaimers in the world, but people are still going to look enviously at the advertising business. I just don’t understand it. In the average insurance office there must be a lot of fooling around going on, and yet the average insurance office isn’t as glamorous as the advertising business supposedly is. Many years ago when I was flat broke and selling toys in Macy’s and then bathrobes in Gimbel’s basement, I used to think about all the jazz in the advertising business. Just recently I heard about a book called Seventh Avenue, in which everybody in the garment business was chasing to beat the band. I tell you, when I was sitting there in Gimbel’s basement, it didn’t seem so glamorous to me. There are guys who are screwing around in every business. I’m sure there are plenty of carpenters doing things besides putting up bookshelves. And milkmen too. There’s just this crazy glamor to advertising, and we can’t shake it.
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Take booze. At the very large, established agencies there’s no casual boozing during the day. Clark Gable was always knocking down a quickie before a meeting. At Bates, there’s no liquor for the troops. You just don’t drink if you’re a troop. You may drink at Bates if you’re one of the very, very biggies, but then only in your office. Whenever an agency picks up an account somebody might be a sport and buy some New York State champagne. At J. Walter Thompson, forget it. They’ve barely accepted the fact that such a thing as liquor exists. For years, Thompson wouldn’t even take a liquor account because their chairman was anti-booze. The surest way to be fired at Thompson in those days was to show up bagged.
Go through all the larger agencies and there’s very little drinking going on. Oh, a guy might drink at lunch, and there’s always a handful of guys at an agency with what everyone calls ‘a problem.’ But there’s always a few guys at a brokerage house with the same problem.
When I worked at Fuller & Smith & Ross seven years ago there was an account executive who was quite a boozer. You knew that if you wanted to talk to him you talked to him like at eleven in the morning because at 3:00 p.m. you’re talking but the guy isn’t there – he’s out of it. He’s drunk, and he’s doing some pretty strange things. Those guys who do booze – the hard core of agency drinkers – they’re all bagged by noon. The only thing you have to remember when you’ve got business to do with them is be sure and get to them before lunch.
At our agency at the end of the day we haul out the booze, get a bucket of ice, and whoever wants a drink takes one. At the newer and looser agencies around town they do a little boozing. No one’s uncomfortable about my seeing them drink, because they’ve seen me drink. No one feels uncomfortable about opening a bottle at our agency. An account executive can run over and grab a bottle here w
ithout me saying, ‘Boy, is he having a drinking problem. We’re going to have to watch him closely.’ There’s probably more drinking done at our agency than at most other agencies in New York.
There are always a couple of guys who spur the drinking on. When I worked at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller, I was one of the guys who did the spurring. My thing was I had to steal Shep Kurnit’s booze. He was the president, and I had to get at his stuff. For a period of six months, whenever Shep would have a client in, he would open his liquor cabinet – which he kept locked – and reach in for his booze and it was gone. He knew I was taking it. The whole agency would wait for me to steal it – that was the scene. Finally he came up to me one day and he said, ‘Jerry, look, I won’t say anything but you’ve got to tell me how you get into the liquor cabinet. I’ll buy it for you, but you just have to tell me how you get into a locked liquor cabinet.’
Shep had a letter opener on his desk, given to him by the One Hundred Million Club, a direct-mail organization. I took the letter opener and said, ‘Watch. I’m going to open the cabinet faster than you do with a key.’ I shoved the letter opener into the cabinet and popped the lock without any trouble. The cabinet door swung open. Shep looked at me and said, ‘O.K.I’ll leave the cabinet open, but don’t screw around with my letter opener.’ Shep is such a beautiful person.
Sometimes people at agencies don’t actually booze in their offices; instead, they hang out at certain bars. For instance, the Doyle, Dane people hang out at the Teheran, which is a bar over on Forty-fourth Street. It’s their bar, Big carrying-on bar, big coming-and-going bar. Friday nights are the heavy nights at the Teheran. Guys who left Doyle, Dane fifteen years ago find their way back to the Teheran on Friday nights. The Delehanty people used to hang out a lot at the Mount D’Or, over on East Forty-sixth, and at P.J.Clarke’s.