From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Read online

  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 accumulated 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 pass. 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 hell of a temper, plus the fact that he’s very, very creative and a hell 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 classic 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 casement windows stopped him, along with an assist 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 hell 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, grass, God 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 hell 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 fuck 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 ass 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.’