by Bruce McCall
Our progress was slow—no, it was fumbling and stumbling, a dictionary definition of naiveté. We hadn’t even settled on the kind of house we preferred. Or where it would be. Or what it had to be—or not be—to suit our needs. Oh, and by the way, what were these needs? All our energy was poured into projects like what wood-burning stove to buy. Vigilant or Defiant? Their names were more suited to World War II fighter planes than a hot, squat metal box.
We ended up on a property near the town of Conway, Massachusetts, home of the much-lauded Librarian of Congress and poet laureate Archibald MacLeish. Why would a renowned man of letters choose to live in a town of rustics whose last brush with poetry was “Mary Had a Little Lamb”? Now and then he parked his Mercedes in front of the post office, dashed in to collect his mail, and drove off. I never worked up the courage to intercept him and ask this question.
An hour’s worth of due diligence might have warned us off Conway as a McCall homestead. Socioeconomic factors alone should have saved us much later heartburn: no industry, no jobs, an elderly-heavy populace, and perennial vetoes on allotting tax money for education. A short drive through town would have served to turn us off. Conway shared its charms with any half-dead little burg in a Kentucky hollow. New England should have expelled it; “lackluster” is too fancy a word for a string of small houses, a sagging old bar, and a run-down hut that sold groceries, gasoline, and lottery tickets. Had we done our homework, the discrepancy would have whacked us in the kisser: neither of us was a polished intellectual, but neither were we of the mouth-breathing ranks. And the mouth-breathers held sway.
Sitting in Manhattan, seduced by myths of New England as the leitmotif of our new life, I envisioned dinner parties with tweedy academics. Cracker-barrel chats with salty old-timers. Meeting reclusive writers and artists to talk all night about Whither Creativity. And on and on, until reality melted into fantasy. But the cultural influences of Smith College in Northampton and Amherst College in Amherst faded at the city limits. Had Polly or I rooted out the facts, we’d have seen that our bit of heaven formed what could well be the northern end of Appalachia.
Nightlife was seriously lacking. Either the combined economies of Northampton and Amherst weren’t robust enough to support more than a couple of mediocre restaurants or else dining out was regarded as putting on the dog. In Conway the locals’ favorite social event came every Saturday evening, when vans and speeding pickups bounced up the gravel road in front of our house. A small mob convened at a beat-up shack in a clearing a quarter mile on: the Sportsman’s Club, where members celebrated their working lives by firing their guns. Sometime after midnight, what sounded like a convoy of half-tracks barreled back down the gravel road, their occupants flinging beer bottles and insults at the night and the world.
It was 1978. Polly had just graduated from Columbia with a degree in social work and wanted to start her career, but the only employment available relegated her to a Dickensian halfway house on a side street in nearby seedy Greenfield, serving sad wrecks turfed out of state mental health facilities because standard measurements said they weren’t crazy. Some she treated for alcoholism. As for the other residents, neither Polly nor Sigmund Freud could help: imperfect upbringings, broken families, bad-joke educations, and generations of poverty produced citizens unable to work and left to wander the streets. The best Polly and her colleagues could do was babysit their wards. And show them a little kindness.
Some residents did not reciprocate. One such person, thirty or so years old, was given to declaiming loudly, tantrums that escalated to a hyper condition wherein he muttered dark threats. He needed discipline. Polly began trying to talk him off the ledge but backed away, very slowly, when she discovered that this obstreperous young sorehead had recently cried for help in the most convincing manner known to the science of healing souls: by murdering his dad.
Meanwhile, twenty miles south of us, in Worthington, Dan and Becky were living the life we’d expected for ourselves: interesting friends, physical activities: turning a rough and bumpy patch of lawn into the best and possibly only croquet venue north of Stockbridge; cross-country skiing; playing hockey on frozen ponds and softball games in local fields.
* * *
■ ■ ■
We approached our handsome old Greek Revival house with zest. Hardly an inch of High Meadow Farm (a name inherited from some prior tenant) escaped a cosmetic makeover. Built-in bookshelves flanked the fireplace. Light gray and silver wallpaper worthy of a Paris salon lined the entry hall. The house provided us the luxury of five bedrooms. Ours was lushly carpeted; guest rooms that wouldn’t host an occupant for months were spiffed up with delicately color-coordinated bedspreads, carpeting, window treatments, and paint.
Misery descended on High Meadow Farm and persisted for most of our days there. Yet I had to grudgingly admit that our location offered certain pluses. Hardware-store calendars tried but only came close to reproducing the sylvan beauty we experienced from our late June arrival through most of November. Even the town basked in a kind of glow. Day after day for our first six months, staying indoors felt like a crime against nature.
Polly’s green thumb, an offshoot of her rabid new passion for growing plants and an outlet for her blast-furnace bouts of energy, created a huge garden; we consumed most of its yield, which was topped by a crop of monster zucchini.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Cars have always mattered to me more than to most grown-ups—a statement instantly belied by the wheels I chose for our bucolic life. Together with the obligatory L.L. Bean wardrobe, the wood-burning stove, and a boxcar-size freezer for the fall venison haul, we’d also need the appropriate vehicle for country living. Back in 1978 the SUV was still in the offing, a sugarplum fairy dancing in Big Oil’s eyes, and the pickup truck had yet to become the Marlboro Man of the suburban affluent. Americans deep into the black Lab/Agway/antique-refinishing lifestyle had the Hobson’s choice of a station wagon or a station wagon, or another station wagon.
The station wagon perplexed me. Having never come within hailing distance of that creature, I did the smart thing and consulted an eminent automotive journalist for his station wagon wisdom. A foolish move: the automobile journalist of those days lived with the car he’d be reviewing for a few days. What it’s like to drive a vehicle through the vagaries and vicissitudes of quotidian life is for those poor owners who actually have to keep it running to find out. Car journalists are in the commercial news business, atwitter about what’s poised to burst onto the scene. This is a virtual guarantee that whatever they recommend will be too new to have established a record, pro or con.
I gritted my teeth and settled on a brand-new 1978 Ford Fairmont wagon. Polly and I often drove aimlessly around in it just for something to do, to get out of a house that felt more and more like a spiritual prison. The Fairmont was a lowest common denominator on wheels. It did nothing well, and I hated it because it was so dull. Dull to drive, dull to ride in, dull to contemplate sitting in the driveway. “Build quality” was still a slogan in Detroit in 1978 and was supposed to mean more than pieces falling off a car. What annoyed me most was how flimsy it felt, and for a V-8–powered vehicle, how gutless. Rattles and squeaks appeared after a thousand miles. The bench-type front seat was a monument to cheapness, as ergonomic as an electric chair. What it says about the American car buyer’s standards in the late seventies that the Ford Fairmont was a smash hit in sales, Dear Reader can probably divine.
I had better luck with a spavined old 1952 Dodge station wagon, bought on an impulse. Like the loyal Saint Bernard trekking through snowdrifts to haul his sick master to safety, that Dodge—built like a brick smokehouse, fittings that were metal castings, the paint still shiny after twenty-six years—ran and ran, requiring only age-related fixes (a new fuel line and a new battery) and four new tires. Nothing could be done about the faux-useful “vacuumatic” transmission, which required the driver to change gears by l
ifting his foot off the gas and pray that this would result in a reassuring clunk! before the Dodge had slowed to a near stop.
* * *
■ ■ ■
In late November came a brief snowstorm, and it dawned on us that a New England winter would alter our life. The weather deteriorated, fast. The color drained from the landscape. Snow and sleet started to make driving iffy. Freezing rain was a novel menace.
The dark moments always seemed to be darkest in the slack after-dinner hours. We spent New Year’s Eve of 1978 alone in the living room, watching Jim and Tammy Bakker’s 700 Club on the one channel our black-and-white TV could pull in, while a sleet storm pelted the windows with what sounded like buckshot and the phone didn’t ring.
“Never a dull moment” seemed to be the Okrent motto. “Never an interesting moment” could have been ours. Jealous envy could have but didn’t arise as the Okrents prospered in their new setting and the McCalls floundered. I knew damned well that ninety-nine percent of our disappointment was our own fault. Nobody had forced us to choose this place; my lifelong custom of inadequate planning, shortsighted and too reliant on others for too much of the heavy lifting, was the real culprit.
The absence of friends was a continuing sadness. The imminent Christmas season in our first year seemed a sound pretext to ingratiate ourselves with as many neighbors as we could identify by inviting them over. Thus we were the hosts of what might have been the first cocktail party ever staged in Franklin County. Polly laid out a rich spread of meats, vegetables, and hors d’oeuvres. She made certain that everyone had a plate. Cocktail napkins, swizzle sticks, scotch and bourbon, an ice bucket, and glasses for liquor and wine brought a Manhattan note of sophistication to this benighted backwater.
That had been a well-intended blunder. All guests had left by seven thirty. The scotch and bourbon, and the elaborate spread, had no takers. Beer was the drink of choice. One housewife said she’d never flown on a plane. Welcoming ourselves to the area wasn’t only a bust, it was an embarrassment. New York was a hundred and eighty miles away. The difference in culture was unbridgeable.
* * *
■ ■ ■
But a bailout was looming for Polly and me. The successor U.S. agency for Mercedes-Benz was McCaffrey & McCall, a pale echo of Ogilvy & Mather. Its head man was David McCall (no relation), who had been copy chief at O&M. He’d so implemented David Ogilvy’s rationalist philosophy that wags nicknamed the firm “Ogilvy East.” Yet neither David McCall nor anyone working with him knew the automobile industry, its history, or Mercedes-Benz. Somebody at Mercedes-Benz of North America must have absorbed the Ogilvy doctrine and was smart enough to recommend the agency most closely resembling O&M. Thus did McCaffrey & McCall reap the windfall.
David and I arranged to meet soon in New York to discuss my role and related matters. The notion of a return to advertising stuck in my craw after all the righteous bad-mouthing I’d done about it after pulling away from the business and not only surviving but finding psychic rewards in doing what I believed I was born to do. Polly and I talked it out. On a points basis, New York scored over one hundred. Conway earned twelve.
Moreover, taking the job would settle us financially—slaying the dragon we feared most. That made the prospect of getting back to New York real. But trashing our folly and pulling up stakes was no overnight task. Should we sell the property? How could we find an affordable apartment in New York from a hundred and eighty miles away?
I should have written a list of issues and questions before meeting David McCall, but settling things face-to-face struck me as a speedier means of resolving issues than endless fence-sitting telephone negotiations. A pure bonus would be the chemistry test: Did he seem to be a guy I’d respect, admire, and be ready to follow?
An expensive East Side Italian restaurant was the venue. David was a red-faced WASP in a seersucker suit who radiated earnestness. I trusted him on sight. He was physically restless, spoke fast, and was as transparently honest as anyone I’d ever met. His sense of proportion differed wildly from Hank’s monomaniacal focus. His balanced life meant time for his five sons, his political activities, and his recreations, i.e., tennis and golf. His first marriage had ended in divorce. His second wife died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage.
David had a well-furnished mind; I considered myself well-read, but he matched and often beat me to the latest political or historical find. I could only conclude that he must be a speed-reader.
The advantage in negotiating terms for my “consultant” role, it turned out, was all mine. David hadn’t been ordered to retain my services, but he was quick-minded enough to sense that dragging his heels without a convincing reason would send MBNA the wrong message at the wrong time. The negotiating of terms proved swift and easy. I’m the sorriest dealmaker in advertising’s annals, and it was part of David’s charm that money and related negotiations weren’t exactly his strengths. One could describe it the way Shirley Povich, the great Washington Post sportswriter, portrayed a trade of nobodies between the hometown Senators and the Chicago White Sox: “Both sides lost.”
Thus did I find myself an advertising guy again.
I personally liked the McCaffrey & McCall creative group—to my private relief: if an asshole art director and a prima donna copywriter fight over an ad, or a brilliant idea veers off-strategy, the hellish tensions arising therefrom can screw an ad or a whole campaign.
I had no official standing as a consultant (commonly defined as the guy you bring in from out of town to borrow your watch to tell you what time it is). My role would be to keep creative work true to the brand’s marketing strategy. And, arguably for morale purposes, to avoid being taken for an inconsiderate know-it-all: a ticklish task indeed.
Meetings are the bane of any industry divided into separate disciplines that must regularly interact. I sat through hundreds of them, dealing with media, research findings, and myriads of bland details. I squirmed in my seat as hours ticked away. By that time I’d taken on the “informal” duties of chief copywriter. This was to circumvent the resident copywriters—eager fellows all of them, but hopeless amateurs in treading the fine line that separated good copy from wretched, inaccurate word clusters. Justifying a steep sticker price for a car that looked minimally styled, its power a fraction of that offered by a Detroit luxobarge, an interior designed primarily for comfort and driver efficiency demanded that every line of copy combine common sense and competitive fire.
Interacting with the advertising department in the Mercedes-Benz main U.S. office in Montvale, New Jersey (eventually labeled the Death Star by disaffected agency people), ate chunks of time. Gimlet-eyed Mercedes executives expected a thorough, sophisticated knowledge of cars—and especially those produced by Mercedes-Benz. This was a must for the creative team and a virtual job qualification for new writers. The belief that technology was paramount had to be the core of every ad; writers who strayed from that claim weren’t writers who stayed.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Bob (until he upgraded himself to Robert and told his secretary to tell the agency) was MBNA’s advertising manager and one of the most brilliant people I ever knew in that curious industry. At the same time, he could also fairly be termed a bully, a paranoiac, a sadist, and a saboteur of his own well-being. A lonely egoist. The McCaffrey & McCall creative group were ready to fall on their swords for the Three-Pointed Star. Robert-formerly-Bob was the obstacle. He organized a nest of flunkies—as outspoken a team as Trump’s cabinet. Advertising was voodoo to his Mercedes overlords: left to operate with minimal supervision, Robert-formerly-Bob was free to exercise his worst instincts. Had MBNA used a personality test for hirees, Robert-formerly-Bob wouldn’t have made it out of the waiting room.
The myth of smooth, reasonable “teamwork” to bring the ad department and the agency into an efficient, mutually rewarding symbiosis disgusted me more than any other aspect of client-agency relations. It
comes down, literally, to the bottom line. The client pays the agency. If the client sees an intractable problem with its agency, such as bad chemistry at high levels, weak advertising, or the feeling that the initial client-agency bond has withered over time, then there needs to be a rejuvenation of spirit on both sides. Other factors may be in play, too—such as another agency that’s producing more memorable work than the present firm seems capable of matching.
The honeymoon phase becomes nostalgia. The account is placed in review. The present agency, already a loser, is too boring, its brainwork inadequate to new challenges; its presentation flops and the account goes to the more creative outfit. The new agency is giddy. At the celebratory dinner, the chairman of the winning agency raises his glass and invites everyone present to join him in a toast—to something about the importance of teamwork.
The depredations of Robert-formerly-Bob’s regime have become too blatant, have embittered and damaged the efforts of too many loyal agency people. David McCall feels he can take no more. On a hot July afternoon he drives out to Mercedes-Benz headquarters in Montvale for a talk with senior executive Hans Jordan and spills the beans. Meanwhile, Robert-formerly-Bob happens to be lunching with a visitor from Stuttgart and a couple of senior agency people. The headwaiter comes to the table to tell him he is wanted urgently in Montvale. He leaves the restaurant and is never heard of again.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The agency was invited to visit the Mercedes-Benz works in Stuttgart once or twice a year. Courtesy demanded senior-level representation: by my reckoning I made at least a dozen visits. New creative and account staff, green as an Irish parade, soaked up every German experience. At least one agency visitor decided to speak a phonetic imitation of the German language at dinner—unaware that his hosts regarded the discordant gibberish of every such attempt as yet one more demonstration of American bad manners, condescension, and ignorance.
