From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. Jerry Della Femina
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 times 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