From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor

by Jerry Della Femina

  He trusted Cato. Cato would come into the office and stand around, just like a buzzard, hovering over the ad. David always had a secret way of looking at Cato to tell Cato whether he really liked or hated the ad. David would say, ‘Cato, what do you think of this ad?’ I never could get the key word but Cato always could read David. Cato would look at David and read his face and say, ‘You’re right, David, it doesn’t make it.’ Or David would call him in and say, ‘Cato, what about this one?’ Quick as a flash Cato would pick up the sign and say, ‘Hey, David, that’s a great ad.’ Then David would turn to me and say, ‘You see, Jerry, I told you, it’s a great ad.’

  One day I showed David an ad and he hated it, so he called in Cato, but evidently forgot to flash the signal. Maybe David would twitch his eyes, but this time he must have forgotten. David asked Cato what he thought and zap, Cato blew the signal. David was standing there and Cato’s trying to pick up the signal. But no signal. ‘Well, David,’ Cato started to say, and then he stopped. Meanwhile, David was getting impatient and kept saying, ‘What about this one, Cato?’ Cato is fumbling. ‘Let me read the headline again,’ he said. He’s reading the headline, and he’s looking at David trying to get some kind of playback and David’s standing there and no playback is showing up. The guy’s whole life was going before him. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.

  I couldn’t stand watching this guy die any longer, so I finally said, ‘Cato, listen, David hates this ad. Thinks it stinks.’ It was like rescuing a drowning person. Then Cato went into his act. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Now the problem with this ad is the layout and …’ All he needed was to know how David stood on the ad and then he was able to fly.

  I really don’t think creative people are afraid of losing their jobs at the whim of the agency, but there is one thing that drives them up the wall: fear of losing their talent, their abilities. Everybody I know feels this pressure. Is this ability something like magic? Will it ever just disappear? Will the day come when you sit down and suddenly you don’t feel the same thing working in you the way you used to? You can’t write any more. The words don’t go together.

  One of the ways Charlie Goldschmidt of Daniel & Charles had of spurring his troops on was to play on this fear that copywriters have: he used to plague me with it and everybody else, too. ‘Well, kid,’ he would say, ‘what do you think? You haven’t had an idea in about three weeks. You’re starting to fake it, aren’t you? You’re trying to coast because it happens sometimes, you’ve got it one day and the next day it’s gone.’ And he would do this, he would pressure his people this way in the hope of shaking them up and getting them out of the doldrums.

  Listen, somebody is paying you thirty-five, forty grand a year to do this thing, copywriting, or being an art director, and you’re bound to have this fear of going dry. A fantastic art director named Bob Gage at Doyle, Dane once made a speech on fear, what it was, how to combat it. He described it as the fear of going dry and then he discovered that you can never go dry, that there is no mystique, there’s no magic to it, you can’t turn off like that. Gage said that when he found himself going dry, it was a matter of being faced with a problem that had to be solved and that he could always solve the problem the same old way he had solved it years before. He said that going dry was simply becoming impatient with problem-solving in the same old way.

  Most writers and art directors become impatient when they’ve got a tough problem, and that’s where they get into trouble. They play, they dance, they do everything in their power to look as though they’re producing advertising. And the minute they come in your office you know they’re pretending. They’re cold and they’re dry and they know it and you know it and they know you know it.

  I’ve seen guys who couldn’t produce an ad for six or eight months, they’d be so tied up in knots. During that time, these guys would have to dance. Charlie Goldschmidt was a guy who started out as a copywriter and became a brilliant agency president. He’s a fantastic guy who could walk into a room, shake your hand, and tell you what your hang-ups were as he was shaking your hand. He always amazed me that way. He always knew everyone’s weak points, their panic buttons, and he knew just how to push them to get you started.

  When I was working for Charlie I went through a bad dry spell where I did zip for three or four months. Nothing. I would sit in the room and nothing would happen. And you know when you’re coming up with ads and you know when you’re not. I would fake it. I would come up with mediocre solutions to problems. And you start to think about it, and it starts to bug you and you don’t know quite what to do. So to get by you start to dance a little bit.

  But Charlie caught it. He knew it. And he would walk into your room and say, ‘Did you ever stop to think that that’s it? You might have just dried up? You haven’t got another idea in you. Well, kid, stay loose.’

  Those were always his exact words. First a slap on the back and then, ‘Well, kid, stay loose.’ You didn’t stay exactly loose after he left you, but sooner or later – usually sooner – you shaped up.

  Another problem with copywriters and art directors is the problem of recognition. There are a lot of copywriters who get mixed up and think they’re Faulkner or Hemingway. They sit there and they work and they mold and they play and when it’s over they’ve written something that’s absolutely beautiful but they forget one thing. It’s within the confines of a page that’s bought by a media director. What kills most copywriters is that people don’t buy Life magazine to read their ads. People don’t buy Gourmet to read their ad for Bombay Gin. People are buying Gourmet to read the recipes, and the ads are just an intrusion on people’s time. That is why it is our job to get more attention than anything else. Nobody buys any magazine to read an ad. But a lot of guys act as though this is what is happening. This guy sat there, he’s written this thing, and as far as he’s concerned, this is it. Then he meets someone at a party and is explaining with a great deal of pride that he is a copywriter and the person says, ‘Oh, you put the captions on the bottom of the pictures.’

  I’ve had account executives who sit down and practically cry, asking me to change something because the client’s going to yell. ‘We’re going to lose the account.’ That’s the big word all the time from the account executives to the copywriters and the art directors.

  Once a year the New York copywriters hold a party. Last year it was held in a photographer’s studio with maybe five hundred people jammed into a room that can really only hold about two hundred. With a rock-and-roll band that’s blasting so you can’t hear yourself think. Copywriters aren’t the kind of people who usually go to parties. But this is the party they all go to, this is where they’re going to get that job or they’re going to meet that guy or they’re going to do something that is going to change their lives.

  They try to make their contacts. Any creative director who walked from one end of the room to the other had at least eight people tell him, ‘Can I bring my portfolio up and see you on Monday?’ One after another. ‘Hi, how are you? I hear things are going very good. Can I bring my book up to see you on Monday? The place I’m at is really terrible; can’t stand it, I can’t stay there another day.’

  Then I met a guy at the party, and I knew him fairly well. He’s a very good writer and kind of a strange kid, very quiet, but nothing unusual about him. He was making about thirty thousand a year. At that party he was very uptight.

  What was it all about? He’d been fired that morning. And he said, ‘I’ve got five hundred dollars in the bank, I make thirty thousand a year, and I pay two hundred and eighty-four dollars a month in rent.’ Who knows where his money went? Clothes, apartment, chicks, I don’t know. But he’d blown all his money and there he was, thirty-one or thirty-two, and I tell you he was a desperate kid, he really was. I had never seen him like that. ‘What am I going to do?’ he asked. ‘How about some free-lance?’ I said. He shook his head. He must have made twenty calls that day because every time I said, ‘Did you call Ned, di
d you call Ron, did you call Ed?’ he’d shake his head yes. He’d called everybody worth calling. So he’s run out of names to call and he’s only one day out of a job. Now he starts with the headhunters and asks them to start setting up appointments for him.

  He’s a good writer. That’s the scary part of it. He blew his last job essentially because he’s a very tough sport. He won’t take any garbage. He had been working for Leber, Katz & Paccione, and Patch finally couldn’t take any more lip from him. So out he went.

  Before Paccione he had worked for Daniel & Charles and got fired because he couldn’t get along with Larry Dunst, who then was the creative director and now is the president. The job after Daniel & Charles fell apart the same way.

  On about the fourth job out, he’s not going to be so quick to be such a smart-ass. He mentioned to me that he had called a small agency which is really not an advertising agency but rather a dress house; they do all of that Seventh Avenue advertising you see in Women’s Wear Daily and the Sunday Times magazine section. Very big on girdle and bra ads. Anyhow, the owner of the agency told him to come on by on Monday, that is, the guy said, ‘I’ll see you Monday if you want to come in and say hello.’ Now this agency is one of the all-time bad places – it may be the worst agency in America. And he’s thinking seriously of going there for a lot of bread – if they’ll have him. So he’s scared, he’s got a bad weekend ahead of him, and when I left him he was quaking he was so scared.

  Paccione already had replaced this guy. He found a twenty-two-year-old who thought advertising was the living end and hired her for eight grand a year. I had talked to her a couple of times about coming to work for us. No sooner do I finish talking to the guy who’s out of work when I run into this kid. ‘Hi,’ she says, full of life, ‘I got my job. I’m working. I’m starting with Leber, Katz, Paccione on Monday.’ ‘That’s terrific,’ I said, and I started to figure it out. Patch hired this kid for eight grand, and he’s saving twenty-two grand a year already by getting rid of the thirty-grand guy. Plus he’s gotten rid of somebody who was a pain in the ass to him. And this young chick now is on her way to making a lot of money. Her next job she’ll be able to grab off ten grand, the one after that fifteen grand, then twenty-one and then up to thirty a year. And then she’ll find herself in the same position as the guy who just got fired. And she’ll start to get a little nervous because there will be somebody else hot coming up.

  It’s really not unlike baseball. You don’t have that many good years to perform in. You’ve got about seven, eight, or maybe nine years when you’re hot and everything you do works and they’re calling you for a job and the headhunters are crying for you, and then there’s that long downhill slide. Which is why the shrinks are making out so well. And everybody knows that day is going to come to them. It used to kill me that I never saw a copywriter over forty. Very, very few. There are one or two guys worth mentioning but that’s it. I can’t figure out where they go after forty. But they leave. There must be an island somewhere that is populated only by elephants, copywriters and art directors. I can see it now. One tiny island jammed with old elephants, burned-out copywriters and art directors. That must be where they go.

  I wonder what happened to most of the guys I started out in business with. I began in the mailroom of Ruthrauff & Ryan, and the only guy that I know of still in advertising from those days is Evan Stark, who is now at Doyle, Dane. Forget about where the guys are. Where are the agencies? Ruthrauff & Ryan is gone. I once went looking for a job at the Biow Agency. Gone. Donahue & Coe. Gone. Cecil & Presby. You ever hear of that one? Lennen & Newell used to be Lennen & Mitchell. You’d better amend that thought about the island with the elephants and the ex-copywriters: they also got on that island one hell of a lot of dead agencies.

  Fashions change. So does advertising. The physical look of advertising changes from year to year. Last year’s ads don’t look as good as this year’s. I get tired of looking at my old ads. They bore me. The kids are changing everything – language, clothes, style, and the visual arts.

  The schools are breeding kids like nobody’s business. Don’t you think that when Patch got rid of that thirty-two-year-old guy that a lot of guys felt a cold draft down their necks? Of course they did. I know a $40,000-a-year art director working for Patch who’s thinking about that eight-grand-a-year copywriter and he’s saying to himself, ‘What if Patch goes out and finds an eight-grand-a-year art director – where do I go with my forty grand a year?’ Phones are ringing all over town. Everybody’s changing jobs. It’s like musical chairs – you can’t keep up. The kids are death on forty-grand-a-year art directors and copywriters. Pure death.

  Maybe we’re in the middle of a recession and we don’t know it. Advertising people can usually predict a recession a lot sooner than the rest of the country. I know when the economy is going to get a little rotten and I can smell it because the advertisers slowly start to pull back. Agency presidents start to get a little more nervous than usual, and the whole pullback works its way down to the copywriters who won’t get hired.

  At that annual copywriter’s party I went to last year, there was a lot of fear and the whole room was kind of nervous. What is happening is simply that there aren’t enough jobs to go around. There have been periods in this business when the phones were always ringing and you couldn’t keep up with all of the openings. Not today – and I wonder if it is going to get even worse. It’s interesting that in that room of five hundred people – mostly copywriters – there were only four or five people I would hire. Forget about the party; in the entire city there are maybe twenty-five copywriters worth mentioning. The whole city. You’re talking about an agency like J. Walter Thompson which had only one writer whose work I admire – Ron Rosenfeld – and he just quit there after one year. Forget it after that. An agency like Compton must have fifty or sixty copywriters. The only guy whose stuff I can look at is my ex-partner’s – Ned Tolmach. Four years ago I went to that party and this year it was an entirely different group of people. I found about ten or fifteen standbys who always show up, and the rest, you know, it’s tall, gangly kids with pimples and girls who have decided it’s the most glamorous business in the world and they’re really out to make it.

  The same sort of fear that copywriters show in public – like at the party – bugs them in private. For example, if a writer’s campaign is killed, forget it, the guy is lost for a couple of months. And these campaigns are like babies. These guys sit there and they love their campaigns and they look at their ads and they take them out and mount them. You’re talking about a piece of paper, and the copywriter puts it on a piece of mounting board and wraps it in Cellophane and he carries it around to show people.

  The dilemma is that the good writers in this town are those who are really not afraid. You’ve got to be loose. It’s the one business where you’ve got to be so loose when you’re sitting down to work that you can’t sit there and worry about what’s going on next door or am I going to lose my job. And there are very few people like that in the creative end of advertising. Practically none. Most copywriters have the same background: middle class to lower middle class. All the copywriters in town have read Portnoy’s Complaint and they all say, ‘That’s my life. I was Portnoy except that I would never do such a thing to a piece of liver.’

  Everybody in advertising in mixed up – but especially the creative people. Your whole life is screwed up. You’re not the same kind of guy once you get into the business. It’s hard to describe a business that really gets into your blood the way advertising does. After you’ve worked in it for a while, you’re not the same person that you ordinarily would be. I often wonder how I would have been or how I would behave if I had gone into the aluminum-siding business.

  What happens to some guys is – well, I’ll draw the analogy to sports again. Baseball has its hot players and the next year the hot players cool off, and what happens is that their salaries drop and they get optioned out to Toledo.

  There was a re
ally good creative director in New York a few years ago who either lost it, blew it, or God knows. Anyhow, the next thing you hear he’s out in Chicago working for an agency. When you go to Chicago that’s like being optioned to Newark if you’re playing for the Yankees when the Yankees were the only thing going in baseball. I don’t know where you go after Chicago. He’s making a lot of money but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s still Chicago, the minors. Some guys go to Pittsburgh, the minors. You go to Cleveland, you’re still in the minors. When you talk about the major leagues you’re talking about New York, with Los Angeles coming up fast. In between New York and L. A. you have very little except for Leo Burnett in Chicago.

  It’s very strange out of town, especially when a guy from New York is invited by some locals someplace to make a speech. There’s real hero worship. They all want to grow up and come to New York, and when you show up in their town they expect you to turn the water cooler into a wine cooler. They look at you and they say, ‘Jesus, he’s here. He’s going to tell us how to do it.’ And then you find they know everything about you.