How Did I Get Here?

by Bruce McCall

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  My arrival in Detroit coincided with another epic change: the accumulated cobwebs of the fifties were being broomed away, even here. The nation’s mood was shifting. The era of the befinned, bechromed behemoth as the ideal car for American buyers couldn’t be sustained. The luxury of extravagance was collapsing from terminal fatuousness, speeded by a shove from smaller, cheaper, infinitely more practical European, then Japanese, cars.

  The big V-8 had been all but a birthright to most Americans, who deplored the drop in status of a downsized car. Now the Roadblaster El Supremo Limited’s tailfins were losing their novelty: they looked stupid. Chrome bumpers, trim, medallions, and such were becoming gauche. Detroit awoke one day in the early sixties to find the American car buyers’ tastes were changing fast. And so began Detroit’s evolutionary move to safer, sanely sized, fuel-efficient cars styled to look as sober as a judge compared with the blimps of yesteryear. Chevrolet spent big on full-page newspaper ads as fine as any competitor’s. But newsprint can blotch the sexiest car photo, so Jim Hastings, Campbell-Ewald’s art director, skirted this problem. Jim commissioned great pen-and-ink illustrators like Bruce Bomberger to provide big, gorgeous, black-and-white renderings—starring a Chevrolet or two—that filled almost a whole newspaper page, without the blemishes common to photo reproductions.

  I knew I would be committing seppuku if I tried passing off my Corvette copy as David E. Davis–style prose. It read the way he talked: breezily laid-back, tossing off casual insights, never heavy-breathing or macho. All four hundred words unrushed and mellow as a summer’s day. A Davis Corvette ad was a feast of delicious word-pictures. What a way to sell a sports car. I swore off imitating the master; I was neither old enough nor worldly enough to ape that voice. Finding my own would require a delicate balancing of confidence and amiability. No chest thumping: not even a car nut would stand braggadocio. And in the end it all had to sound Corvettish.

  Campbell-Ewald was too big, its layers of command too complex and individual tasks too varied, to allow an intimate atmosphere. We creative drones seldom even saw our ostensible partners, the account executives. A fragmented organizational system kept Chevrolet car and truck creative groups physically separate. The TV creative department was a ten-minute walk from that of its print coevals. Print copywriters and art directors, the creative infantry, worked in rectangular cubicles no bigger than they had to be to hold a copywriter, his typewriter, and a small wooden credenza. Drawing boards replaced the typewriters in the cubicles where art directors sat. I wish I’d pilfered, or even paid for out of my pocket, the big old Underwood that came as standard equipment in my cubicle. You could drop one of those machines to the street from the tenth floor and it might bounce but it wouldn’t break. What most endeared it to me was its elegant typeface. It transformed banalities into profundity and ad copy into deathless prose. I’d type nonsense just to marvel at the crisp authority it bestowed on everything it typed.

  Modernity hadn’t interfered with practicality since Campbell-Ewald had taken up residence in GM’s kingdom: dark wood, frosted glass, and a stiff sense of order lent an aura of solidity and security—and a kind of charm reminiscent of a stuffy bank. It certainly didn’t feel, on first impression, like the ad agency of sleazy song and raucous story. The Chevrolet print creative group functioned in a quiet, organized, friction-free environment. Where were all the prima donnas and assholes of legend? These were amiable, intelligent people.

  None of my new colleagues invited me along for lunch in my first week or so. I was relieved; the process of acclimation made the midday break a chance to digest my new experience. I ate at a saloon across the street from the GM building, getting back within an hour to a largely empty fourth floor. The break-in period ended when a grizzled, middle-aged fellow copywriter named Bart took me to lunch. Bart’s enthusiasm, if he ever had any, was buried under a thick layer of cynicism. I proved just the audience he preferred: naive, impressionable, and clueless.

  Bart would have fit perfectly in Mad Men. Drinking was his hobby. Work didn’t interest him. He introduced me to the two-hour, three-martini lunch. It wasn’t Bart’s invention, but nobody ever did more to honor it. My experience was bereft of lunches in places above the Three Guys from Athens greasy-spoon level. Red-leather banquettes and linen tablecloths charged those luncheons with shots of glamour and booze. Bart had mastered his three martinis through years of dedicated practice; with scant exposure to brown goods, I never drank beyond two Rob Roys. Only two? That seems a modest intake only to the non–Rob Roy drinker; two would adorn your neck with one of the descendants of the Albatross from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Three Rob Roys, downed by a rookie, jabbed the skull with ice picks for about a week.

  Bart, with his toilet humor and alcoholic passion, would eventually wear me down. What had at first appeared to be stylish and glamorous revealed itself as pathetic. I had been in Bart’s thrall out of ignorance. Time to grow up and move on. No sooner did I accept this than the first friend I made at Campbell-Ewald, the art director on the Corvette ads, swooped in and made lunchtimes useful. His name was Roy. He was an insouciant boulevardier with a gigolo’s looks and perfect taste in clothes. His every waking hour furthered an avid quest for fun and pleasure, with not a thought in the world to deter it. I’d grown eager to shed my sad-sack Canadian identity. We clicked.

  Roy persuaded me to put Saks Fifth Avenue suits on my back and taught me, a sophisticate-in-training, the right drinks to order, how to approach a woman you don’t know, how to feel socially poised. Roy affected a homburg and pretended he was just in for a visit from London or New York. He didn’t have moods; his temperament was stuck on Happy. He wore his suavity like a pricey cologne. I trailed in his wake, an apprentice flaneur, until my imitation of his style and amiability had to end. Maturity was always a tardy arrival in my life. But I eventually conceded to myself that I wasn’t Roy and shouldn’t try to be; better to be your real self, imperfect as you may be, than to pretend to be someone you’re not. And suffocate under the mask.

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  In my romantic solo Detroit life I never entered a bar or lived it up at a wild party of louche young hedonists. Wild parties of louche young hedonists must have been banned in Canada. Or my mousy existence had kept me far from such noisy, hectic, thrillingly seductive venues. Naw, that couldn’t be! Yet I felt that a wholly new social environment, in a city of two million, must be absolutely writhing with attractive young women fond of fun and men who could spell and had never contracted a social disease. Detroit presented a rare opportunity to adjust my personality and meet female partners. They didn’t need to know about my crappy life, played out against a drab background. That me was in the rubbish pile. I was starting over: the new, Americanized Bruce McCall, worldly, charming, wittier than six Oscar Wildes, was about to hang out his shingle.

  I thought I’d achieved a splendid makeover to qualify. Gone was the socially awkward gink in shabby outfits of zero style. The surly loner who never smiled. Who didn’t play football or show up at dances or run with the fast crowd. Now he was recast as an interesting guy, a dynamic catch, fresh from the home of the Mounties and the high-steel Mohawks.

  By my sixth month in Detroit, Ms. Skelton had reclaimed her apartment and I had clambered back down to my usual level. I had rented the mini-loft above a carriage house that was tucked behind a redbrick manse on Iroquois Avenue in Indian Village, a stable old East Side neighborhood of fine homes and leafy elms. In the former stable downstairs sat the successor to my Volvo, my cute silver 135-horsepower 1963 Corvair Monza coupe. What was wrong with this picture?

  What was wrong was that I was the guy who wrote the Corvette ads, a guy who had a mandate to immortalize the most powerful production sports car in American annals, yet was driving, as his personal choice, the weakest entity in the Chevrolet performance fleet. Bolder driving ambitions rumbled in th
e hothouse culture I was paid to stimulate and perpetuate. Unmarried young rakehells bound for the open road didn’t need four-place cars. I’d belatedly seen the car I drove as a key—indeed the basic—element in stamping my identity (now that I had the general outline of one) on the world.

  For the first time in my life I had some money in the bank. If anybody had less reason to avoid the joys of driving a Corvette, it was the guy who wrote the ads for them. Fate once again elbowed its way in and took over the project. Once again it was Betty Skelton who delivered a solution. She offered to sell me her Corvette.

  I didn’t buy just any old Corvette. This was astronaut Alan Shepard’s 1960 Corvette, acquired by his good friend Betty after being custom-modified and “breathed upon” by Shepard’s pals in the Chevy skunkworks. More than mere hot-rodding was his aim: Shepard and several cohorts in the Manned Flight program loved racing up and down the access roads near the Cape Canaveral launch sites in their free time, coming as close to escaping velocity as an earthbound internal-combustion engine could achieve. These were among the most competitive guys extant.

  I now owned a sizzling chunk of the Right Stuff. The Corvette had evolved since its 1953 introduction as a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a fake sports car that was underpowered and flaccid. By 1960 it was a muscular kind of sports car, as American as a cowboy, if also about as crude. Gobs of V-8 power forgave a multitude of sins. And with a driver strong enough across the shoulders, it could be hogged through corners surprisingly fast. A retrograde solid rear axle and drum brakes kept the Corvette something of a techno-laggard, but it outperformed while underpricing everything near its cost level by thousands of dollars. Grudging acceptance of America’s only sports car morphed into a sneaking affection. It became the Vette.

  My responsibility to obey the Corvette way of driving weighed lightly: Corvettes weren’t exactly outlaws, but all that power, and the term “sports car,” meant something other than gentility. You were expected to be crude: mash the gas pedal and burn rubber accelerating from every stoplight, treat highway speed limits as suggestions, let out the loudest exhaust belch possible with every upshift. And get all Conan the Barbarian whenever you and your Vette came near another car with performance pretensions. Living up to the Code of the Corvette could be fatiguing. Top-down driving raised the stakes by fifty percent: no open-air car would dare to duck a challenge.

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  Our boss in the Chevrolet creative group was Jim Bernardin, and a nicer person didn’t exist. Jim smoked a corncob pipe symbolic of his West Virginia roots. He was soft-voiced and patient and the least cynical advertising man who ever lived. Part of his creative director role was to present finished layouts of upcoming Chevrolet campaign ads to the client. His copy and art staff writers started work after a session of informal interpretation of the client’s needs from Jim. The presentations that ensued once the ads were conceived were where great creative ideas went to die. Only out of respect for Jim and sympathy for his plight did the Chevrolet creative team attempt one more time to roll the boulder up the hill.

  It’s the very definition of the creative advertising man or woman to get famous and rich by making magic—to make a name, build a reputation. That dreamy ambition can succeed only if the client wants boldly innovative work. Most agencies, and most creative types, are worn down and worn out by unimaginative or gutless responses. Smart, bold creative work usually terrified the average client’s advertising manager, who was inevitably a corporate second-rater less impelled to demand greatness than to cover his ass. His insecurities made him fearful of risk.

  Some clients, desperate for attention and squeezing smallish budgets, can’t afford not to go for broke. Volkswagen of America ranks as the all-time champ of this approach. The cheap, ugly, dismally underpowered Beetle, via madly unorthodox advertising, earned a niche in American folklore as a plucky, beloved underdog on the one hand, and on the other earned a sales success that would ultimately shake up Detroit and euthanize the insolent chariot.

  Chevrolet’s advertising was powered by almost diametrically opposite factors. Every ad is part of a strategy, and this strategy didn’t call for VW-like surprise. A lack of surprise was in fact considered smart. Chevrolet sold one of every ten new cars in America in 1962. That success was nerve-racking on executive row, treated as much as a burden as a plus. Once you’ve reached first place, how do you stay there? In bare terms, you run scared all the time. And you never take risks, either in designing Chevrolets or in selling them.

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  David E. had slipped me into the least-square job in the Chevrolet copy department: writing the so-called buff book ads (buff books being the monthly car magazines beamed at America’s thousands of enthusiasts of performance, racing, and sports cars). Every American manufacturer eager to be credible among the competition-savvy cognoscenti searched for somebody—not necessarily an adman—who could talk the talk, walk the walk, knew the industry from the inside, and could write comprehensible “enthusiast” ads.

  Chevrolet’s sister GM division Pontiac, flailed by wunderkind general manager (and future carmaker) John Z. DeLorean, had sneaked its way into a lethal one-two combination of performance-car lab and maker of sexy sedans and coupes. This pissed off Chevrolet. Goaded by a client spending millions to support a largely sub rosa racing program and itching as well to inject performance fever into the blandly white-bread Chevrolet brand, Campbell-Ewald had tapped David E. Davis Jr. to do the job. And now it was my turn.

  I had a lot to work with: indeed, a pack of saliva-inducing road thugs led into the arena by the flashy, sensationally capable 1963 Corvette Sting Ray. These included a line of big, special-option “Super Sport” sedans and coupes transformed into fire-belching V-8 roadblasters no normal family should ever be allowed to sit in; a second phalanx of compact Chevy IIs also fitted with brawny V-8s; and the star-crossed Corvair. Chevrolet general manager Ed Cole’s attempt to raise Corvair’s power output by clamping on a turbocharger lifted performance, but not enough, alas, to come close to competitive levels.

  Total ignorance of advertising wisdom was my starting point in writing ads. In the performance sphere, writing talent and advertising savvy were all well and good, but they were useless if the ad didn’t talk the talk and exude authentic cool. I performed my writing tasks as if there were no rules. There weren’t. And I had nothing like a philosophy of advertising to guide me. Copy needs could easily be summarized: just concoct four-hundred-word paeans of praise and we’ll slap them into an ad. What a sandbox to play in! My Underwood coughed up a dozen versions of every such copy block, packing in the peppiest four hundred words, with the most adjectives and least reader breathing room ever achieved in English. These were overheated, overwritten imitations of how an amateur thought a performance-car ad should sound: slick and superficial and insincere.

  I got that part exquisitely right. Cowed by the glimmering halo of authority shining down on the Performance Car Expert, nobody dared question anything I wrote. It was a mysterious language that bound writer and reader, and I was immune from criticism. Nobody stopped me. Nobody even edited me. Those initial efforts must have been some of the most wretchedly inept car ads ever printed. But the paychecks kept on coming. Have another Rob Roy! I learned nothing about writing ad copy, or the more general craft of advertising, in my time at Campbell-Ewald. I didn’t even know there was anything I needed to know. What more could there be to it than spinning aerated fluff? It turns my ears hot pink today to recall the Corvette headlines I perpetrated, then passed all checkpoints to get in front of the performance-oriented magazine reader.

  A startlingly original design, capable on looks alone of making people want to buy it without even knowing what it was, the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray was the most technically advanced and arguably the least criticized car in General Motors history. And yet “Clip Along the Dotted Line” was the headline on one Corvet
te ad. A lame pun; the photograph above it showed a Corvette clipping along the dotted line on a rural highway. Another inanity of stupendous irrelevance: “We Took a Little off the Top”: borrowing a barbering phrase to prattle about the doors of this hot new sports car from Mars slightly cutting into the roof was devised to spotlight a virtually meaningless feature. I can plead a newcomer’s ignorance, but that idea was seen and green-lighted by the chain of command. That nobody said anything tells you a lot about Campbell-Ewald’s advertising prowess.

  Not that Chevrolet advertising in general set a standard for innovation. Corporate advertising clung to “Jet-Smooth Ride” as the slogan for the entire model line for years. Even when new, this slogan conjured an image with all the panache of a Don’t Walk sign. Jets no longer implied superlatives. “Jet-Smooth Ride” typified the retrograde thinking that plagued Chevrolet advertising year after year. By sheer coincidence, this gem had come from the pen of Campbell-Ewald’s chairman, a Buddha-size man of a certain age whose name, ironically, was Mr. Little. Nobody knew his first name, and he was apparently too busy to set foot outside his Mahogany Row office and certainly too engaged to tour his agency’s creative cave. I never actually glimpsed our monarchical leader in my time at Campbell-Ewald.

  This feudal culture of the all-powerful authority figure personally in charge of everything, remote from his lieutenants and answerable to nobody, was not the key to advertising greatness. Happily for Mr. Little and Campbell-Ewald, greatness wasn’t required. Chevrolet preferred to maintain the status quo ante. Its advertising was risk-averse: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

  Someone at Chevrolet decided that the failing Corvair could be repositioned as an ideal runabout for Milady: rear-engined and thus light-steering, gutless enough not to frighten a spinster, cute as a button in feminine pastel colors. Into the breach lunged Mr. Little, an unchallenged copywriting tyro such as only an agency chairman could be. His Corvair headline: “She flirts with you, that’s what she does.” The creative troops cringed.