From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. Jerry Della Femina
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 without 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.
At the swinging agencies – Wells, Rich; Doyle, Dane; Delehanty; Carl Ally, Papert, Koenig, Lois; Lois, Holland, Callaway; Smith/Greenland; Daniel & Charles; Spade & Archer – all of them are more casual, looser, more fun. Even the dress is a lot different. I’ve got a twenty-two-year-old art director who wears Uncle Sam pants, see-through shirts, and God knows what else. But he’s good, and as long as he’s good he can work naked for all I care. One day at Ted Bates, a girl wore a pair of culottes to the office. She really was great-looking, a beautiful chick. The next day there was a memo saying, you know, bug off, no more of this culotte jazz, this is an office of business. All of the giant agencies try to maintain their offices as a place that you would want to put your money into. It’s got to be very banklike, and very sleepy.
When I say things are looser, the average person immediately makes rampant orgies out of that statement. Everybody knows the story about the wild Christmas party they supposedly had at Young & Rubicam years ago. According to one version, the wife of the president of the agency walked into one of the offices and found a copywriter making it with his secretary. Well, I don’t believe it. But everybody on Madison Avenue swears it’s true. When I was working at Fuller & Smith & Ross it supposedly took place at Fuller & Smith & Ross. It’s probably apocryphal. I just don’t think that that many guys can get caught in the saddle. Another one of those stories: A guy used to go to work at six in the morning and make it with a chick on the conference-room table. Don’t believe it for a minute.
Take the president of one agency where I once worked. This guy always thought that we were making it in his office. He was very, very shook about that. Well, here’s a case of a guy who’s in advertising but he’s also living this vicarious life. He goes back to Darien every night, but he would like to feel that there is a lot of screwing going on in the business because it makes him feel happy to think that his boys are out there carrying on. He likes the idea of having a bunch of Peck’s bad boys working for him. He doesn’t do any of this carrying on, but he likes to talk about his crazies when he’s out at some party in Connecticut. It’s nice for him to say to himself as he rides home on the train: Gee, there’s a lot of screwing going on in my agency – why, right this second I’ll bet they’re making it on my couch. When he comes in the next day and finds a girl’s bobby pin on his couch he immediately decides that they were making it the night before.
A couple of summers ago we started playing a few games of strip poker in our office. Nothing serious, just for a few laughs. I was walking through the hall one day and this nice girl came running out of a guy’s office buttoning her blouse. I looked into the office and there was this guy, with a deck of cards in his hand and a smile on his face. He had said to her, ‘Do you want to play strip poker?’ She said, sure, why not, and she lost her blouse. So the mood in the office that week was sort of strip-poker-oriented. But nothing more serious than that.
A lot of people have accused the younger creative people in advertising of being a bunch of potheads. Let me say a few words about grass. As I walk around New York City, it seems to me that a good 50 percent of the population under the age of thirty looks like it’s either stoned, about to get stoned, or coming down from a high. None of the kids drink any more. All of the drinking at our agency is done by those of us who are over thirty. Throughout advertising, you’ve got a hell of a lot of young kids working who laugh at anyone who drinks. I guess you’d find that hundreds of the younger people have tried grass at one time or another – in advertising and out of it.
An art director I know had a freelance assignment to do some work for an avant-garde publisher down in the Village. While he’s sitting in their offices the other day, a secretary says, ‘Would you like a smoke?’ He says innocently, ‘Sure.’ And the chick hauls out the whole business, complete with a water cooler or hookah or whatever the hell they call those things. So he fired up. Little does he know that the cops have been keeping binoculars trained on this publisher for quite some time, and just as he and the chick are about to go up, here come the cops. He got busted, which I guess goes to show you that you shouldn’t accept a smoke from a stranger.
Despite all the talk about romance, boozing, and carrying on, the advertising business is not what you think it is. Crazy? Yes. Romantic and glamorous? Not one bit. The wild stuff, I’m afraid, is very much overrated.
CHAPTER
TWO
WHO KILLED SPEEDY ALKA- SELTZER?
‘Good advertising gets exposure. People talk about it, notice it, think about it. The client is standing up there waiting at the train station for the New Haven to take him into New York and he’s dying to be stopped by his buddies. He is dying for them to