From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor

by Jerry Della Femina

  The creative director moved so quickly that before the meeting was out, people were convinced that the line was his. Each time somebody tried to bomb the line, the creative director would say, ‘I insist that this is the way we’ve got to go.’ People thought he came up with the line, he was defending it so much. Well, they got the Air France account and then things were even bigger and better for the creative director. I’ve seen it in different advertising trade papers crediting the creative director not only with the line but with pulling in the account. That creative director was making maybe $100,000 a year and riding high. The guy who came up with the line is dead and gone. The creative director was a hero at Fuller & Smith for a long, long time, just on the strength of that campaign. The only thing is that the creative director knows who came up with that line. He knows that he didn’t; that he had to grab it off some poor guy. He has to know this and very late at night that guy must shake just a little bit.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  CENSORSHIP

  ‘One of the biggest problems that all agencies have is the headache of censorship. There is simply no reasonto it. Censorship, any kind of censorship, is pure whim and fancy. It’s one guy’s idea of what is right for him. It’s based on everything arbitrary. There are no rules, no standards, no laws …’

  You don’t spend $50,000 or $60,000 to make a commercial and just put it on the air. It’s not that easy. There are rules and regulations and censorship. There is so much of this that it’s goddamn funny and stupid. Sooner or later every commercial is passed on by someone. The National Association of Broadcasters is the national bunch of censors and they pass on commercials on certain sensitive subjects, like cigarette advertising, personal products, feminine hygiene products, and parts of the body like the belly button. The National Association is very strong on belly buttons. If you get by the N.A.B., then you’ve got to deal with the networks, which have their own censors. And the individual stations, they’ve got their censors too.

  One of the biggest problems that all agencies have is the headache of censorship. There is simply no reason to it. Censorship, any kind of censorship, is pure whim and fancy. It’s one guy’s idea of what is right for him. It’s based on everything arbitrary. There are no rules, no standards, no laws. The problem is, the Code of the National Association of Broadcasters changes every week; each week a new directive comes out of the N.A.B. I don’t follow any rules or standards or laws when I do commercials because how can I? What is O.K. this week may not be good next week. There are no rules. There’s only Miss Cheng.

  Now Miss Cheng is a very nice chick – her first name is An-Shih – who is about thirty-one or thirty-two years old, and she is the lady whom you see at the National Association of Broadcasters when you want to clear a commercial. Miss Cheng sits in her little room up on Madison Avenue, which is a strange place for a censor to be, she sits there saving the Great American Public from being offended. She has no stake in any of the commercials, no money stake, all she wants to do is keep America clean.

  Although Miss Cheng is cute as hell, I have had my biggest problems with her in doing commercials for Feminique. All right, Feminique is a feminine hygiene product, to coin a phrase. Women use the spray so they will smell nice around their vaginas. This is what the stuff does. But you can’t come within miles of saying this in an ad or a commercial. So what we tried to do was get a movie star to endorse the product in a commercial. We tried everybody. Vanessa Redgrave sent us a letter saying that we Americans were crazy over our clean armpits and so forth. She said that she thought Feminique was just one more example of the American craziness about cleanliness. As far as the vagina was concerned, Vanessa Redgrave said women ought to use bidets, soap, water, and baby powder. I’m standing there looking at the letter, and it dawned on me that we’re not going to be able to get anybody.

  I mean everybody turned us down, everybody but Linda Darnell, and she’s been dead for three years. I’m sure that if she was alive she would have turned us down. Finally, the word comes from one of those endorsement outfits that Dorothy Provine, the television star, would do the commercial for $50,000. There was much rejoicing in the agency when Provine said she’d do it. Even though $50,000 is a lot of bread, we would have the only commercial on the air that will be able to get past all the things that the Code says you can’t say. You can’t even mention sex but Provine is sex. You can’t say attractive but Provine is attractive. My theory was that when the competition looks at our commercial and we really start to fly and take off in sales the competition is going to say, ‘We’ve got to get a star too to neutralize these people.’ I figured out as I looked around that the only star left for them to get is Arthur Godfrey. He’s doing Axion commercials now, but I mean he’s the only star left.

  We shot the commercial out in Los Angeles in a big mansion. We’ve got a great photographer, a director, script girls, dozens of people running around, and we’ve got a lot of bread tied up in this thing. I go into this mansion, which must have had forty rooms in it, to talk to Provine, and when I saw her I almost fainted. She was under the hair dryer and you know, this is not a good place to talk to a lady because ladies usually look lousy under hair dryers. I went downstairs feeling very uptight and nervous. I mean, here we are with a crew of twenty-five people, spending $50,000 for Provine and maybe another $25,000 for the commercial, and what are we going to do?

  Finally, the time comes for Provine to come down. And she’s beautiful. A fag makeup man has put her together and made her into something. I started talking to her and I said, ‘I want you to give this a Sandy Dennis reading.’ She said, ‘What’s a Sandy Dennis reading?’ I said, ‘A Sandy Dennis reading is as though you were mentally retarded for the first eighteen years of your life and you just learned how to talk but you can’t remember words too good. So you say things like “This is the first time I’ve … uh … ever done … a … commercial.” ‘ I said, ‘It’s got to be natural, like Sandy Dennis, you know – fake natural.’

  She did it and she did it very well. There’s one part where she comes on and says, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever done a commercial. It’s about a product that I … ah … feel very strongly about…. It’s a feminine …’ And she gave us a terrific Sandy Dennis reading. A marvelous commercial. Then our troubles started with Miss Cheng.

  The offices of the National Association of Broadcasters are very deceptive. It’s like another business office. You walk in, and there’s a girl behind the desk and you say, ‘Miss Cheng, please.’ And out comes Miss Cheng. She’s very soft-spoken, very nice, and I don’t know, maybe she’s the brains behind the whole thing. Her title is Senior Editor. All I know is that I’ve never seen many people up there. All you do is show your stuff to Miss Cheng. She always talks vaguely about people in the back she has to consult with but I’ve never seen more than one of those people. She goes away, and then she comes back with some of the stupidest decisions I have ever seen in my life.

  You usually go up to Miss Cheng with your storyboards – those cardboard things with the various shots of the commercial drawn in and the audio typed out. With the Feminique commercial Miss Cheng did such a job on the storyboards that she knocked two-thirds of it out. Miss Cheng says we cannot say ‘It’s safe.’ But we can say ‘It will make you feel safe.’ ‘Well, doesn’t this mean that the woman is safe?’ ‘Yes, but you can’t say that it’s safe.’ Miss Cheng also does not like the use of the word ‘feminine’ three times in the commercial. ‘Is feminine good enough to use once?’ ‘Certainly, you can use it once.’ ‘Well, why can’t I use it three times?’ ‘Well, when you use it three times you’re stressing it’ Plus: ‘You’re not allowed to use your competitors’ name, even though you’re saying something nice about them.’ Plus: ‘You’re not allowed to use the phrase “feminine hygiene.” However, Miss Cheng is cheerful throughout. ‘Good luck with your commercial,’ she says.

  You could, of course, shoot the commercial without Miss Cheng’s approval bu
t you can’t put it on the air. Oh, I guess you could put it on any station in the United States which doesn’t subscribe to the Code of the National Association of Broadcasters. There may be two stations which don’t subscribe to the Code – maybe one of them is in a big market like Monahans, Texas (KMOM-TV).

  So you go ahead and rewrite the commercial to make Miss Cheng happy and you go out to the Coast to shoot it and you spend I don’t know how many thousands of dollars putting it together and then you take it back to Miss Cheng so she can screen it. She looks at it in her little screening room, nodding her head sagely, and then the next day she calls you up and starts to hack away. One of the lines that Dorothy Provine says is, ‘There are a lot of other great products, but the one I use is Feminique.’ Miss Cheng doesn’t want the ‘but.’ The ‘but’ indicates that we’re trying to put down the competition. Miss Cheng wants Provine to say, ‘There are a lot of great products – the one I use is Feminique.’ Miss Cheng says we have a line in the commercial saying that Feminique has a fresh, clean fragrance you couldn’t get from a shower or a bath. Miss Cheng says that the line indicates – and this is the way she puts it – ‘you still stink’ after a shower or a bath. So help me, ‘you still stink.’

  We’re killed again. She held us up, more problems, more hang-ups. It will go on and it’s a never-ending battle. The more power the censors get, the more I will have to fight them. And it’s a fight that the agencies don’t win. Eventually we got the commercial on the air. We dubbed, we cut, we made a mess out of a nice commercial to keep Miss Cheng happy.

  I ran into censorship again when trying to run a print ad for Feminique in McCall’s magazine. Art Stein was the publisher of McCall’s at the time and he despised the thought of feminine hygiene. We went to him with the Provine commercial, which by now had been completed and cleared, and we showed him that the same ad had been accepted by the Ladies Home Journal and the Washington Post and a lot of other papers and magazines. Stein read the copy, part of which said, ‘Now that the pill has freed you from worry, the spray will make all that freedom worthwhile.’ ‘What makes you think the women who read my magazine take the pill?’ he said. ‘Well,’ we said, ‘we have a story that you ran in your magazine six months ago about the pill and pregnancy and the whole thing.’ We showed him the story. He said, ‘That’s the editorial side. My side is advertising. You can’t tell women that the pill has freed them from worry. I won’t accept it.’ ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘we’ll take that line out.’

  ‘You have another line here,’ he said, pointing to a line which said something to the effect that when you bathe, take care of the most important part of you. ‘This line,’ he said, ‘about take care of the most important part of you – you can’t say that.’ I said, ‘Well, look, I wrote the ad and I happen to think that that is the most important part of a woman.’

  Stein got very red in the face and he looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Della Femina, did you ever hear of the heart?’ I told him that when I went to bed with a woman I didn’t particularly look for the heart. He said, ‘You are not going into my magazine with this ad; you’ll never get into my magazine with this ad. The story is closed.’ Boom. And he got rid of it. Since then, Stein has been fired and the man who took his place came up to our agency last summer asking if he could have the very same ad in his magazine. Censorship is just somebody’s hang-ups. I was censored because Mr. Stein could not bring himself to believe that the women who read his magazine had vaginas.

  Don’t think for a moment that we’re the only ones having trouble with the censor because of the nature of the product. Once, at Bates, they turned out a commercial for a toy company that showed a kid with a little machine gun on top of a mound of dirt blasting away at Nazis or whomever we’re killing or fighting with these days. Maybe Vietcong. The commercial was sent over to the censor and the answer came back, ‘This commercial is not acceptable to the Code.’

  The account man says, ‘Why not?’ He’s obviously very shook about their reaction to the commercial. The account man figures he hit somebody up at the censor’s office who hates war and is trying to downplay violence on the screen.

  Not so. The censor said, ‘Well, it’s obvious that the mound of dirt is part of the game.’ The account man said, ‘Mound of dirt? What mound of dirt?’ ‘The mound of dirt the boy is shooting from.’

  The account man blinks his eyes and steps back. ‘The mound of dirt is part of the game? How could any kid think that the mound of dirt is part of the game? It’s just a mound of dirt.’

  The censor said, ‘Well, the kid will obviously think that it’s part of the game since it’s on the screen for the entire commercial and the kid spends his time on the top of this mound of dirt.’ The censor feels that the kid is going to expect to be given a mound of dirt with every machine gun. The censor told the account guy that Bates had a choice: either give the kids a mound of dirt with every gun sold or they could run a visual on the screen during the commercial saying, ‘The mound of dirt does not come with the gun.’ The account man, who’s a very bright guy, suddenly feels that maybe he’s in 1984 already. ‘What kid,’ he says, ‘is going to believe this?’ The censor had an answer for that one, too. ‘It’s not the five-year-old we’re worried about. It’s the one-and twoyear-olds who might be swayed.’ The account man, just to make sure, said, ‘For the two-year-old kids who can’t read I must flash on the screen ‘This mound of dirt is not part of the game”? The five-year-old, who can read, is going to think we’re crazy anyway.’ The censor said, ‘Yes, if you don’t use a visual, the commercial doesn’t play.’ So it was flashed on the screen for the benefit of the two-year-olds who couldn’t read. Nowhere in all this did anyone say, ‘Gee, do you really think we should have a commercial running which shows a bloodthirsty little kid killing a bunch of kids with a realisticlooking machine gun.’ No, that’s fine. Kids can kill and everything else. The whole thing was the mound of dirt. That’s censorship at its best.

  I mentioned before that you just don’t have one censor, sometimes two or three. Miss Cheng is the N.A.B.’s censor. The network censor is usually a woman by the name of McGillicutty or something to that effect, who is over forty, a little heavy, a virgin and a professional virgin – I mean not just a virgin virgin. Her job is to sit and look and read and see as many commercials as possible; that’s the only job she has. The only thing she has to do all day long is to look for filth. If she doesn’t find dirt, she really didn’t earn her salary that day. So her job, day in, day out, is to find dirt. When she gets up in the morning and she’s having her coffee, all she can think of is dirt and garbage and filth. You know, was that a breast I saw yesterday in that commercial? Did I catch a leer on that model or did she smile? Was that guy in the shower showing a little bit of his hip? ‘Run that back, please, I think I saw a little bit of hip.’ That’s the whole day and the life of these people. You can imagine how twisted they are at the end of the day. It’s a crazy job they have. Maybe I’m trying to get something across in a commercial; maybe I’m trying to say sex in a commercial and I’m beating her. And she can’t be beaten, she’s got to find it. It’s a great big game: she’s got to find the little bit of hip, the leer, the eyebrow that went up, the dirt.

  Take the Noxzema commercial with the great-looking blonde, the one in which the blonde is sucking her thumb very, very suggestively and she’s saying, ‘Take it off, take it off.’ That commercial is very sexy.

  Somewhere along the line an account guy did a beautiful job. He must have taken the commercial in and sat down with an over-forty censor lady and they looked at it. Now if the censor raised any doubts about the blonde sucking her thumb, what’s she going to say – that the thing looks like fellatio on the screen? The account guy must have said, ‘She’s sucking her thumb. If you can tell me anything else that it might suggest, I’ll be glad to take it off the air.’ What a job! The woman obviously couldn’t bring herself to tell him what she thought the commercial suggested. I am sure that’s how it happe
ned.

  Most of the time, though, you can’t fake a censor out so easily. Smith/Greenland, a very good agency, was doing a commercial for Fresh, which is a deodorant. Why is it such clean products have such big troubles? Anyhow, they got past Miss Cheng, I mean they showed Miss Cheng what they wanted to do and she said, ‘Terrific.’

  They wanted to picture a belly dancer at her work, showing that she leads a strenuous, active life. Of course this belly dancer is terrific to smell all the time because she uses Fresh, which, hell, I don’t know, doesn’t wear off even if you want to spend a night belly dancing. They cut the commercial at a great deal of money, and when Miss Cheng saw the cut she said swell.

  They figured they were in. What they didn’t figure on was the NBC censor, who takes one look at the commercial and says, ‘That’s a belly button. My God, you can’t show a belly button.’ The theory was that kids might be watching and would see the belly button. Of course the NBC censor didn’t realize that when kids go into their tub every night they look down and they see their belly buttons. But no belly buttons on the air. Not good. Forget that every kid has a belly button. Forget that.