by Bruce McCall
But optimism defeated wariness. Long before I crossed the border, the prospect of America’s energy busting my potential wide open infused me with a shot of American bullishness and optimism. Sorry, Canada; you wouldn’t understand.
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With the stodgy Eisenhower era finally over and JFK set to cheer up the White House and the nation, it felt like a propitious moment to immigrate. My mild qualms about switching national allegiances were just that. For me it was a win-win proposition. I was about to become a permanent alien resident of the USA, but remained a Canadian citizen and would still travel on my Canadian passport, albeit I’d pay my annual taxes to the IRS. If I could just avoid conspiring to foment a revolution and topple the government, I was home free. And, should I ever be hounded for a crime, I could skedaddle beyond the reach of my pursuers with impunity. In strict legal terms I had only loaned myself out to Uncle Sam. Yet there was a hint of profundity as I eased my car into the line approaching U.S. Customs.
I would exit the tunnel in my unglamorous Volvo to find no welcoming committee, nor be handed the key to the city. My advent was low-key, so no key. But so what if my entry to the United States of America fell short of the Emma Lazarus scenario: an immigrant standing queasily in line on the dock, having barely survived four grinding weeks confined in the airless twilight of steerage, roughly checked for signs of tuberculosis and lice, speaking not a word of English, with everything he owned in the world in the knapsack strapped on his back? But hey, that hadn’t been my fault. Just like those Balts, Slavs, Pomeranians, and Ukrainians, I too was starting anew in a new country, in a new career.
The cheerful customs officer waved me through, and the most significant act of my life passed with all the drama of paying last month’s water bill. The journey that had begun years ago, when as a five-year-old I fondled a Bakelite model of the Empire State Building in the family dentist’s office, had actually transpired. That building stood for all the opportunity and excitement of America, aspirations I was only tacitly aware that I had. Twenty-three years later, I was now officially a landed immigrant.
Late-afternoon winter darkness was cloaking the city and the snow still swirled. I accelerated into the midwestern heart of America. Meanwhile, deep in my psyche, the lifelong fear of failure and the closely linked suspicion that the will, the guts, and the talents inside me would be exposed as fraudulent were suddenly defanged. I had told my mental tormentors to back off and shut the hell up. And they had, at least for a while.
I hadn’t even started the search for someplace to live when Betty Skelton solved it for me. For my first three months I lived beyond my station, in a swanky apartment furnished like a Playboy pad. Diminutive and perky, Betty was a star aviatrix, skydiver, and speed junkie. We crossed paths at the perfect moment: I needed a place, she was off on some three-month mission and wanted to sublet her apartment. (I’d met her through David E. Davis Jr.—but more about him later.)
Some sublet! A glass-walled aerie in the deluxe Lafayette Pavilion, a new building in a moribund neighborhood, near downtown and a five-minute stroll to the Detroit River. The living room, carpeted wall-to-wall in off-white moon dust, featured a bar and a cabinet as big as a small apartment containing a color TV. An Ericofon advanced telephony so far I couldn’t decipher how it functioned. A wall featuring a bas-relief solar system overlooked the vast sectional sofa. The bedroom was eighty percent bed with the approximate dimensions of a boxing ring. Once I’d lived down my sense of fraudulence and decided that living this high was just another element in my profile as a rising young adman, I felt myself slipping into a fresh new state of being. I felt supremely cool.
Detroit in 1962 hadn’t yet virtually vanished into a sinkhole so deep that half of its two million residents would eventually vamoose. This proud, culturally, and financially rich midwestern city would soon suffer a mighty fall, tumbling so far, so fast, that once-regnant “Detroit” became a worldwide synonym for urban squalor.
Step back to the Motor City of fifty-eight years ago. Grosse Pointe, a mansions-only suburb stretched along the shoreline of Lake St. Clair seven miles east of the city, was the poshest neighborhood west of Greenwich, Connecticut, and east of Malibu. Estates of a gaggle of Ford heirs and other panjandrums drew rubbernecking weekend sightseers and disappointed them all; vast lawns lay between these modern palaces, while far in the distance were tennis courts and polo fields and swimming pools. The stupendously rich and their circles congregated in these Xanadus.
More recently minted grandees founded exclusive new suburbs in gently rolling golf club country a few miles north of the city, Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham among them, accommodating the overflow of millionaires. The old money (huge fortunes had been amassed before the automobile existed, from logging and Great Lakes commerce and shipping) remained all but invisible. These conservative elders dwelt in less flashy neighborhoods under towering elm trees dotted about the city. By 1962, wealth had sprawled in every direction. To the tourist casually cruising around the city, Detroit must have seemed one giant upscale ad featuring naught but porte cocheres fronting handsome brick houses.
In the postwar flush of prosperity circa 1960, it would have been unthinkable, indeed laughable, to connect these manicured symbols of American wealth and security to nasty fates like, say, disaster, depression, and bankruptcy. Go ahead, the boosters’ chorus piped: Detroit’s sunny well-being was built on the burgeoning, ever-growing, inexhaustible appeal of the automobile. Compared to Detroit’s blithe sense of permanence, ancient Rome was a tent city. Downtown glittered with places to spend money. Woodward Avenue ran arrow-straight northwest from the Detroit River to Pontiac, twenty-four miles away, splitting the city into east and west sides. Downtown shopping had been anchored for generations by J. L. Hudson, a vast Bloomingdalian department store. Grand Circus Park, a few blocks north and west, linked Detroit’s theatrical and financial districts in a necklace of hotels, restaurants, high-end stores, movie palaces, and cultural fixtures such as the Detroit Opera House. Farther north, just off Woodward, the New Center complex lined West Grand Boulevard with upscale apartment residences cheek by jowl with the elegant Fisher Theatre, the mighty General Motors Building, and merchants stamped with New York prestige such as Saks Fifth Avenue.
Detroit was hardly a strange new environment for me. The McCall family had moved from Toronto to Windsor in 1953. That gritty little Canadian industrial city’s meager supply of entertainment, shopping, and related distractions lured Windsorites, including my parents, across the river on balmy summer evenings to window-shop the haberdashers’ and ladies’ shops on Grand Circus Park. There were birthday dinners in restaurants with napery on the tables and wine menus. Tigers night baseball at Briggs Stadium. Red Wings hockey at Olympia Stadium. No McCall even knew where the Lions football team played, or cared.
Sunday runs out to suburban Dearborn let us marvel at the Henry Ford Museum’s staggeringly rich collection of historic self-propulsion technology. What a treat. You could see and touch giant Rocky Mountain locomotives and swanky transcontinental trains. A Pitcairn autogiro dangled above. So did a big passenger plane built by a Ford-owned company and renamed the Ford Trimotor, the first reliable commercial airliner.
My brother Hugh and I had morphed into serious car consciousness years earlier, and our thirst for knowledge became insatiable. Magazines weren’t enough anymore. So imagine our joy at being let loose to paw over a hundred automobiles lined up in neat rows like soldiers in review, from spidery black Ford Model Ts to the Brobdingnagian Bugatti Royale, the largest production car ever built. And every other kind of car from every era—extraordinary and wacky, civilian and racing machines, cars ordinary and iconic alike, brought here from Europe and Great Britain and Asia, dating from the self-propelled automobile’s 1886 birthday to landmark cars covering every decade since, with every car cosmetically and mechanically perfect. The entire frozen parade of automobile hi
story stood there, glowing. So did Hugh and I.
A cultural gem of a different stripe was the internationally famed Detroit Institute of Arts on Woodward, greeting visitors with Diego Rivera’s huge murals, damning the automobile factory as a stygian hell of backbreaking labor and ceaseless mechanical violence, right under old Henry’s nose.
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That I no longer labored in the mire of a crummy little journal in a dead part of Toronto was powerfully confirmed when I first laid eyes on the General Motors Building, a stately limestone and granite pile on West Grand Boulevard. Albert Kahn had been commissioned to design a working monument to the vision and business wizardry of the corporation’s founder, William C. Durant. Modesty wasn’t in the GM genes; if this hard-edged Ozymandias of commerce seemed to shout that GM was the once and future monarch of the automobile world, nobody inside it would disagree.
The marbled, high-ceilinged lobby blended the gravity of a large banking institution with the majesty of a cathedral. Raising your voice seemed almost sacrilegious. Nearing Christmastime, GM automobiles of the season sat dotted about the lobby. A live organist favored the assembled with sacred music, instilling a reverent mood in a temple of mammon.
On my first day as a copywriter on the Chevrolet account at Campbell-Ewald, I stopped by the newsstand—and blinked: there was an early edition of that day’s New York Times. Stacked next to it, that morning’s New York Herald Tribune. Daily New York papers! Right here in Detroit! An inspiring omen: if Detroit was so plugged in to the biggest, most important city in the country, and daily interaction with it was normal and necessary, this wasn’t the isolated midwestern burg I’d feared.
Campbell-Ewald had been Chevrolet’s sole advertising agency since 1928. So tightly bound were the two entities that visitors and newcomers often confronted a puzzle: Where did the Chevrolet Division of General Motors begin and Campbell-Ewald end, and vice versa? A legitimate question. Advertising history tells us—well, at least me—that no agency has ever ridden an account through depression, management change, and new ownership and escaped the ax. Chevrolet and Campbell-Ewald, however, formed a relationship almost destined to stick. Should Chevrolet management ever reach a point where Campbell-Ewald just had to go—for reasons of lame creativity or chemistry issues at the top—it would be easier for the agency to fire everybody and start over again. The account was so huge, so many-faceted and just plain busy, that transitioning to a new advertising partner would take a year or more. And no car company could afford to stand down from advertising for that long.
Uniformed operators controlled the elevators that whisked VIPs up to the top two floors and offices in the carpeted hush of Mahogany Row and the Chevrolet executive suites. The rest of us piloted our own elevators up and down. As I prepared to elevate myself up to Campbell-Ewald, I worked on trying to flatten my cowlick, now that the gluing effect of my morning half-quart of Vitalis had faded. The same couldn’t be said about that pungent Vitalis scent preceding me.
I finally blundered onto the fourth floor and into the agency. My advertising career could begin.
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My preparation for this job had dictated that my first priority be a mental showdown to rationalize my casual contempt for the advertising industry. Was it simply the ubiquitous cliché, shared by almost everyone not in it, that advertising was as sincere as a mortician’s handshake, a manipulating con job run by hucksters dedicated mostly to boozing, lunchtime sex, and obscenely bloated salaries? The mid- to late fifties storm of exposés—bestselling books like The Hidden Persuaders and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit—whomped the industry for its sins. It had been a big, unruly business before the twentieth century began. And compared with the almost gleeful, unregulated chicanery back then, the current standard of truth and product effectiveness was unimpeachable.
Now I was standing in the reception area, waiting to be christened as a copywriter, making more money than anything I’d ever earned before, lofted to a prestigious role in a big-time advertising agency linked to a giant of commerce.
What in hell had brought this about? Two weeks ago I had been sitting in the less-than-plush offices of Canada Track & Traffic, which was itself less than a magazine. I was the “Editor,” a grandiose title for ads traded for articles. Canada didn’t need a car magazine, and this one would ultimately strangle on its own financial shoestrings. That ignominious period of my career was soon to be forgotten. Having never been dubbed Mr. Success at anything, and with zero experience in that legendarily fierce arena, I was being elevated to a role in Chevrolet advertising that made sense to nobody.
Except perhaps to David E. Davis Jr. It was David E. (nobody called him “Dave,” for the same reason nobody called Charles de Gaulle “Charlie”) who plucked me from anonymity at that legendarily crummy Canadian car magazine and hauled me across the ice floes to Detroit and Campbell-Ewald, where he wrote enthusiast ads and swanned around the executive suite, a Cardinal Richelieu to top agency management.
We’d casually met one April night in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in the spring of 1961. I was covering the Shell 4000 Rally, a trans-Canada slog important enough to draw entries from Renault, Volvo, and Saab. In the overnight-impound section of a parking lot I noticed a big, rangy guy with a tomato-red face and a handlebar mustache. He was holding forth with a gaggle of Shell Rally drivers and mechanics, following the event for the agency on the sketchy rationale that there was ad potential if a Chevrolet pulled off something heroic and photogenic. Laughter exploded whenever he said something. Later that evening, he held court in his hotel room. I’d never encountered such a combination of wit, intelligence, and charm before. And never would again.
I learned from close association with racing people of the early sixties that David E. deployed certain natural gifts that abetted his ambition. He was fast on his feet. He seemed to remember everything he’d ever read or heard. His manner of speech was graced with a natural fluency, laced with a wicked wit. Anecdotes flowed from some mental library. His passion for good books, well-chosen classics and strange historical episodes, and every magazine he found interesting got woven into his quotidian conversations. He knew what he was talking about, aided by an IQ substantial enough to kindle jealousy at a Mensa convention. He knew everybody.
I mightn’t have been so gobsmacked by David E. Davis if he hadn’t been the first sophisticate I’d ever met. His example illuminated what I had dimly suspected: life meant more when you were deeply involved in what truly mattered; curiosity sparked an engagement with learning for its own sake; the precious treasure of a well-furnished mind; interesting company, usually smarter than you; the pleasure of mastering a craft, an art, or a skill, and pride in the accomplishment. David E. awakened in me an awareness of the richness of life almost celestially beyond my previous twenty-eight years’ experience. Yet I freely admit that David E. was less than universally admired.
His oversized ego deserved to be studied by the National Science Foundation. Unsurprisingly, his critics focused on his predilection for showboating. He delighted in making a spectacle of himself. Clad in white linen suits, wrapped in an Inverness cape, he shut down ridicule with confidence. I never saw him sweat. Far from hiding his light under a bushel, he took a match to it and kindled a bonfire. His faults weren’t secret. He was as vain as a matador, and could be almost capriciously cruel to the innocent undeserving. He harbored an inner rage and started feuds with longtime friends and his own staff. He was never known to apologize. And to my baffled dismay, David E. made no secret of his party-line sympathy for the NRA and the wild-eyed defenders of the paranoid right against their ubiquitous, illusory tormentors. Confronting this intellectual zigzag was akin to discovering the Reverend Al Sharpton to be a King Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan. I painstakingly averted flocks of subjects that might set him off on a wild-eyed tirade about anything that threatened the fragile conversational p
eace.
It was almost Christmas 1962 when I was struck by the thunderclap of the announcement of David E.’s departure from Campbell-Ewald. He was to take over a New York–based car magazine. I was anointed as his successor, the agency’s performance-car ad writer. David E. owned every particle of my admiration and trust. No adult had ever spotted unusual promise in me; he had instantly caught on to my eccentric written and illustrated satirical humor, valued it, and pulled me out of the shadows to do something with it. And now, the one hero in my life, by far a better father figure than my father ever even tried to be, was taking a powder before our residencies at Campbell-Ewald could overlap for a single goddamn day. It was now too late to back out. I ransacked my brain for reasons to do what I’d always done when unjustly treated: quit, then sink further into an even darker depression than the state of hopeless inertia that had smothered my days.
Depression was staved off, and my decision was simple. If the august David E. Davis had publicly pronounced me as the best writer to continue glorifying the Chevrolet performance story—well, who was I to argue otherwise? Of course I didn’t believe him. But I had a good ear and an affinity for mimicry, so until practice produced the necessary volts, I was in.
