However, his status in British society had nothing to do with his money or his title. It rested on the one indispensable thing he had never even bothered to covet during his youth—land. And the land came through his mother’s family, the family he had barely considered as he grew up. His mother was the only child of an untitled family, the Woodhills of Woodhill Manor, in Devon; quiet squires who had lived in one spot since before the Norman Conquest, looking down their noses, with pastoral certainty, at all parvenus, whether they were recently created earls whose titles didn’t go back further than the eighteenth century, or merely merchant princes whose businesses had made England great in the Victorian era. As far as the Woodhills were concerned, they were all “fearfully recent” people.
The important thing about Valensky, everyone agreed, was that, when his grandfather died, he had inherited Woodhill Manor and the nine hundred acres of farmland that went with it. It was the ownership of this small piece of England that put Ram on the same lists as H.R.H. Prince Michael of Kent; Nicholas Soames, grandson of Sir Winston Churchill; the Marquess of Blandford, who would one day become the twelfth Duke of Marlborough; and Harry Somerset, heir to the Duke of Beaufort Without Woodhill Manor and its pleasant fields, Ram’s fortune and title would have always been just a bit foreign, but with Woodhill backing them up with the reassuring solidity of county status, they could be appreciated fully.
Ram went to his office in the City every day and worked hard. He returned home on foot, considering the walk as necessary exercise, changed for dinner, went to the entertainment of that particular evening, drank little, came home at a reasonable hour and went to bed. He rarely picked up his phone to arrange a country weekend, nor did he often ask for admittance to any young woman’s bed. When he did it, he never asked a second time, not wishing to encourage bothersome attachments or raise false hopes. If he had had a cat, he would have kicked it.
When he reached his thirtieth birthday, Ram decided he must consider the idea of marriage to someone suitable. Not immediately but eventually. Looking around White’s one night, when he’d taken a partner there for dinner, he’d noticed how different the club’s atmosphere was from the busy, cheerful lunchtime scene. Only a handful of tables were occupied, many of them by solitary, older men who were far more interested in their wine and food than struck him as entirely decent. Ram didn’t care for that fate. He began to consider the available crop of possible wives in the intense, humorless, practical manner that fit his outward demeanor.
Ram knew perfectly well that eligible as he was, he was not really liked. He didn’t know why and he considered it of little importance. Some men spent their time being liked, others had better things to do. He was, however, highly and widely respected, and that, he felt, was the important thing, the major thing.
When Daisy’s picture appeared in Vogue or any of the other publications, English, French and American, which kept an occasional eye on her horsy weekend parties, Ram looked at them with bitter disapproval. He felt absolute disgust at her job with North, working in a field he considered low, common and contemptible. Her social life seemed, to him, to be devoid of discrimination. Whenever any of the people he knew questioned him about her, he took pains to inform them that she was only a half-sister, with no English blood, and that he knew nothing and cared less about her private life. If it were not for the dreams about Daisy, dreams of love; hopeless, endless, devouring, destroying, never diminishing love, that tormented him ceaselessly, week after week, year after year, he might almost have managed to believe what he told his acquaintances. How he wished she were dead!
14
Conference rooms are, almost by definition, designed to impress, but few of them were as explicit, Daisy thought, as that of the Frederick Gordon North Studio. It always amused her to look around and appreciate its purposefully spare and unornamented severity, its deliberately unemphatic and austere whitewashed brick wall and bare wooden floors lacquered in shining black. No one of any sensitivity could fail to be susceptible to the astringent luxury of the chrome Knoll chairs covered in pewter suede and the ascetic sweep of the huge, bare, oval conference table of white marble. From his place at the table, North could operate a concealed console of pushbuttons that signaled to the projectionist in the booth outside, telling him when to darken the room, when to lower the screen from the ceiling and when to roll film, a device which rarely failed to make even the most sophisticated clients sit up and pay attention. The conference room was on the top floor of a three-story building which had once been an abandoned music school in the East 80s, between First and Second avenues. Seven years ago North had bought it and converted it into one of the few privately owned commercial studios in the city. The first and second floors formed one huge sound stage which could be arranged in a thousand ways. Only the top floor was used for offices. North also owned his own cameras, lights and equipment. Since the vast majority of commercial directors had to include the cost of rental of studio space and equipment when they bid on a job—and most advertising agencies ask for at least three bids on each assignment they award—North was able to underbid on almost every commercial he went after, and still make a larger profit than his competitors despite his high fee.
Now, in the fall of 1975, six months after the hairspray commercial had been shot, an important meeting was being held in the conference room. Before the average commercial job, North usually met only with Daisy and Arnie Greene, but today he had insisted that all of his key employees be present for the first planning session of the Coca-Cola Christmas commercial.
By now Daisy knew the people gathered around the table so well that they felt almost like extensions of herself. There was Hubie Troy, the free-lance scenic designer with whom North worked so often that he might just as well have been on staff; Daisy’s two young male production assistants, both recent Princeton graduates who would learn, or try to learn the business, and then go on to something which paid better; Alix Updike, her assistant for wardrobe and casting, a tall, quietly dressed and reserved girl, who used to be the lingerie editor at Glamour; and Wingo Sparks, the twenty-nine-year-old, full-time cameraman, in his Ivy League, impressed duck trousers and splotched tennis sweater which was unraveling in six places. Daisy was sure he’d plucked out the threads himself.
Wingo was a Harvard graduate, the son of one top cameraman and the nephew of another. Had it not been for these family connections he wouldn’t have been able to enter the cameraman’s union, as tightly controlled as any medieval guild. He’d served as an assistant cameraman to his uncle for the necessary five years before getting his own union card. North infinitely preferred working with young men because they were receptive to even the wildest of his innovative ideas, and although, as the owner of his own business, he was entitled to operate a camera himself, without a union card, he disliked being responsible for all technical considerations in the heat of filming, while he had to concentrate on the actors and an overview of the entire set.
Daisy’s eyes rested with affection on Arnie Greene, the business manager, who still found it hard to believe that after working most of his life for EUE with its four hundred employees he was now part of a “boutique” operation like North’s. However, many of the top directors in the business preferred to work in small, compact shops, and although Daisy knew that Arnie hated the term “boutique,” a word that was totally inappropriate for what was a mini-movie studio, it was used by the entire industry.
Finally, Daisy considered the flamboyantly elegant figure of Nick-the-Greek, North’s full time “rep” who worked on commission getting new business. Nick was, to Daisy’s knowledge, the only rep in the city who had found his way into the advertising business via a spitball. In the mid-1960s, when the big advertising agencies were each fielding a baseball team, and competing ferociously against each other, a copy writer at Doyle, Dane Bernbach had heard of a Puerto Rican high-school kid from the Barrio who was the best pitcher north of 125th Street He’d given him a token job at the agency afte
r school just to secure him for the team. But Manuel took one shrewd look at the agency business and liked it a lot better than any possible future in Spanish Harlem. The tall, flashingly handsome teenager baptized himself Nick-the-Greek and here he was now, earning over one hundred thousand dollars a year, wearing seven-hundred-dollar suits and drifting over to “21” for lunch every day, catching top jobs as easily as a lizard catches flies on his tongue. He could handle clients as carefully as any mahout ever handled a royal elephant during a lion hunt in India.
Now, just as North was about to call them all to order, Nick took the floor.
“Compañeros all—I have here the results of a new Gallup poll,” he said, taking out a clipping from the New York Times and brandishing it at them.
“Can it, Nick,” Arnie begged, knowing that when Nick-the-Greek got started, time got wasted.
“Wait! You don’t understand. This concerns all of us, Arnie. Those of you who suffer from Jewish Guilt or Italian Shame or Wasp Resignation—come to order, por favor, and pay close attention. This poll concerns honesty and ethics in various professions as perceived by a cross section of the American people.”
“That has nothing to do with Coke, Nick,” said North, impatiently. “So why don’t you just go away and hustle? Haven’t you got some hungry, rich, potentially profitable client to take to lunch? Vámonos—we’ve got work to do.”
“Not until I give you good tidings” said Nick, who, like all reps, made it a point of honor to be far more grandiose than the working stiffs for whom they labored. The reps of New York, a mafia of superslick, ultra-fashionable salesmen, consider themselves to be to the actual commercial makers as Russian wolfhounds are to a pack of mongrels.
“Here it is—clergymen, you’ll be thrilled to hear, rate highest in the poll. Doctors and engineers come next. Out of twenty professions, twenty, the next to last rating is given to something called ‘advertising practitioners.’ That means us, compañeros, boys and girls included. Forty-three percent of the whole, fucking American public gave us a very low, repeat, very low rating for, and I quote, ‘honesty and ethical standards.’ The only people they rate lower than us are car salesmen! We even rate lower than state officeholders! Don’t any of you guys feel we should protest? March on Washington, take out ads to say how clean, upstanding, patriotic and plain, down-home good we are? I don’t think we should sit here and let them dump on us. Have you people no pride? Nor moral indignation? Don’t you give at least a little, tiny shit? This can’t be allowed to go unchallenged.” His faultless teeth gleamed in his swarthy face, as he stood there, mockingly listening to the burst of hooting, catcalls and derisive whistles that filled the room.
“Nick, for a man who suffers from Greek Fire, when he’s never been to Athens, you’ll have to muster the indignation for all the rest of us. Out! The headwaiters of the world are waiting eagerly for you,” North said firmly.
As the rep left, Arnie Greene said aggrievedly, “If doctors rate so high, how come there are so many malpractice suits?”
“Nobody pays attention to Gallup polls anyway.” For a second North’s wily grin appeared. “Forget it Arnie. Now that Mr. Wonderful has boogied off, let’s talk advertising for a change. And I’m warning you, anyone who isn’t taking notes will regret it. This is a ninety-second commercial, and the story board makes a Max Rhinehardt production look like batshit. Not only that, Luke Hammerstein is going for humor, and they’re not even going to show the product—which makes the whole thing different from what anyone else is doing.”
“Not show the product?” Arnie Greene asked, in such astonishment that he squeaked.
“Nope—not show it and not mention it for one whole incredible minute and a half! Then, at the very end, well hear Helen Hayes saying, ‘No matter how your family spent the night before Christmas, Coca-Cola wishes you wonderful holidays all year round.’ ”
“Did you say humor?” Daisy asked.
“Yup—Luke calls this the ‘Flip Side of Christmas,’ and he is seriously nervous about his idea. Luke talked Coke out of going with a big montage of Christmas dinners all over America, very mixed ethnic, your standard MidAmerican big-yawn time, but Luke managed to sell them this—haven’t I always said he was the best creative director in the world?”
“Yeah—but the two of you don’t usually work together. You fight all the time,” Daisy murmured, still dubious.
“True.” North gave her a disapproving look for her interruption. “Luke is my close friend, but he has the conviction, unfortunately shared by most agency people, that the concept is what sells the product and that the concept begins and ends with the agency. As far as they’re concerned, all a director does is bring the concept to life. I say it’s both the concept and the way I make it make it work—my taste level, if you’ll excuse the expression. That’s why we fight. I want my share of the credit, Luke wants his share, and unfortunately together they add up to a hell of a lot more than a hundred percent. However, this commercial is a clear-cut case. He needs my help. And he knows it! With the story board they’ve got here it’s either going to be a mild giggle or a fucking classic.” The sharp planes and angles of North’s face, his nose which ended so abruptly, even his freckles, all seemed to quiver with eagerness. North could hear the roar of the crowd under the circus tent, he was getting ready for the moment when he’d go into the cage and show the monsters who was boss. Daisy had seen him like this before, many times, but rarely had she seen him so excited by a challenge.
“May one ask what the ‘Flip Side of Christmas’ is?” asked Wingo, in his usual cheeky drawl.
“It’s the shit that really goes down—thirty seconds backstage at a grade-school Nativity play, thirty seconds of a family of eight trying to get into a car meant for five small people, loaded with bulky presents, skis, what-have-you, all on their way to Christmas dinner at grandmother’s, and last, thirty seconds of the sheer, hideous trauma of decorating the goddamned tree and everything that can go wrong—beginning to get the picture? And soft, soft sell—Coke doesn’t want to be hustling during the CBS Christmas special, so that, Arnie, is why we don’t show the product.”
“Is any of this location?” asked Hubie, who was already sketching rapidly on the pad he always carried.
“No, thank God, we’re doing it all in the studio. Hubie, you’ve got not one, not two, but three—count them—three-walled sets to build. Nobody’s seen three-walled sets used in a year, so get lost, you know what you have to do—here’s a Xerox of the story board. I want everything middle-class but nice, and authentic, so fucking authentic you can smell the Christmas tree, smell the kids backstage, even smell that car with too many people in it.”
As Hubie left, North fixed what was left of his audience with a stern eye and continued. “Daisy, you and Alix pay attention. Casting is of major, major importance in this—you know what the Coke commercials usually look like—everybody totally all-American, too many teeth, so much blond hair you could repopulate half of Scandinavia with the models—I don’t want that. This is going to be different—we’re not selling Coke to make you popular or happy, we’re selling all that funny-awful crap that happens at Christmas, and telling everybody that maybe they should just laugh at it So don’t cast all-American Prom Queen. Most people get depressed enough at Christmas just seeing too much gorgeousness. For the kids’ Nativity-play scene, I don’t want little Jamie from Ivory soap or little Rusty from Crest toothpaste, I want real kids, nearsighted, fat, pimply, snot-nosed—cast sideways, not straight ahead, cast bent, as bent as you can get. Don’t give me those looks. You think I don’t know how much harder it’s going to make the job? Shit, ladies, if a kid can’t sit still, concentrate and follow directions, it’s home-movie time. That’s a chance I’m willing to take because this has to look like a real Christmas play in a real place—not TV-commercial heaven.”
“North,” Daisy asked suspiciously, “is this all in the story board—you’re sure the client wants bent kids? Coke always goes fo
r more-beautiful-than-life people.”
“Daisy, just do me one small favor? Stop trying to second-guess me,” he snapped, thoroughly annoyed. “This story board calls for a dozen kids, good mix, three black, five white, all colors of hair, two Oriental and two Chicano. On the other thirty-second scenes you need nine people for the tree-trimming episode and eight for the family in the car, plus a dog, a really big, awful-looking one—a crummy, slobbery, hairy dog … not a cute one … also a baby, nine months old. Get me the quietest babies in the world—remember we can’t keep them under lights for long, so we may need a dozen in reserve. Check it out. But bring me just one familiar face and I’ll tear your heads off! This is going to be the Dickens Christmas Carol of Christmas commercials.”
Arnie Greene rolled his eyes to heaven. He knew what could happen when North got really excited about a job. No matter how he insisted that he was in advertising, not show business, they might go over budget to get just exactly what he wanted and he wouldn’t be satisfied with a millimeter less. He didn’t know what the words “good enough” meant. Well, he owned the business and this year they’d net enough so he was entitled to play a little.
“Wingo,” North turned to the young cameraman. “There’re three Hollywood studios in town now shooting movies. You may have trouble getting the crew we want, so get off your ass and start phoning. Tell ’em it’s four days work, starting ten days from today.”
“Four days—since when can’t we do ninety seconds in three?” Wingo objected.
“With kids and dogs and babies? We’ll run over—it’s inevitable. And if you say three days they might have other jobs on the fourth—how’d you like to lose your crew before you finish?”
Princess Daisy Page 27
