From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor

by Jerry Della Femina

  We got back to the agency and Irwin Engelmore, the president, a very sweet guy, takes a look at the two of us who are soaked through and says, ‘How’d you do?’ And for the first time in the history of advertising someone told the truth after a presentation. Bob said, ‘We bombed.’ Irwin said, ‘Oh, were there things that they didn’t like?’

  Bob said, ‘There was everything that they didn’t like. We bombed.’

  Now Irwin, who had spent quite a bit of money on this presentation, said, ‘Well, do they want us to come back again?’

  Bob said, ‘I don’t think they want us in that neighborhood any more. I don’t think we can go around Broadway and Forty-second Street.’

  Irwin said, ‘Uh, is there somebody I can call?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Call a priest, Irwin. Maybe he’ll help.’

  Once, also at Ashe & Engelmore, we were going to make a presentation to a fellow named Richard Meltzer, who was the president of Beauknit Mills, a very big textile company. We had come up with some kind of campaign to show them – I don’t even remember what it was, it’s not really important. The thing was we all had instructed Irwin before the presentation, ‘Irwin, when you go out there, when you sit down with this guy, don’t forget he’s going to ask you some questions about what kind of advertising they need. This is new to him. Remember, it’s human advertising. I want you to tell him it’s human advertising.’ I would do this to Irwin all the time, set him up, get him straight. ‘You got it now? It’s human advertising you’re showing. If he says, ‘What is it?’ tell him it’s warm and human.’

  Irwin said, ‘Yeah, yeah. It’s warm and human.’

  I said, ‘Right, Irwin. It’s warm and human, warm and human, warm and human.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Jerry. We’re going to do well.’

  Irwin gets to the presentation and he’s sitting there with his right-hand man, a very bright guy named Lee Barnett. Irwin hands Meltzer the campaign and says, ‘Mr. Meltzer, this is it. This is humane.’ Barnett’s muttering, ‘No, no, no.’ Irwin says, ‘It’s humane, Mr. Meltzer. This is humane advertising, warm and humane.’ Barnett’s whispering, ‘It’s human, it’s human.’ Irwin says, ‘Yeah, human. It’s humane, Mr. Meltzer.’ Finally Barnett kicked Irwin under the table and said, ‘Human! Humane is kind to dogs, you schmuck!’

  Irwin was a good man on presentations. He would always start off his presentation by saying, ‘Do you have the courage to run our kind of advertising?’ And the prospective client usually was confused because he couldn’t figure out what kind of advertising he had to have the courage to run. This was Irwin’s standard pitch. Most agency presidents have a standard pitch where they say, ‘It takes courage to run our kind of advertising’ or ‘It doesn’t take courage to run our kind of advertising.’ Or ‘We’re marketers’ or ‘We’re salesmen’ or whatever they are on any given Thursday. Irwin’s pitch always was the courage pitch. Running his ads was a sign of virility. It was wonderful, just wonderful.

  Pitching with Shep Kurnit was just as much fun as it was with Irwin. Kurnit is a brilliant guy. He could be very good. We compete pretty hard against each other but I like the guy. He’s got tremendous staying power. It’s hard to keep up with him. He stays. He claws, he scratches, he fights, but he’s there. He’s not a pushover by any means. One of his funny traits is that when he talks to you he’s got to touch you. When he makes a point, he touches you. The touching used to drive us crazy. One day Ron came out of his office and said, ‘I solved the problem. Whenever he comes near me and starts to touch me, I start lighting matches.’ Shep always used to back you in a corner. Ron said, ‘It’s easy. You stand there lighting matches and he never comes near you any more.’

  One of Shep’s little idiosyncrasies was that during a pitch he usually would find fault with the product they were pitching. As I said, he’s very bright, and quite often during presentations he would take a look at the thing and automatically redesign it before your eyes. The problem was that you never knew when Shep was going to redesign the client’s product and this led to a lot of tension at new-business meetings at Delehanty. You never knew when Shep was going to drop the bomb. Maybe the client has been in business for fifty years and maybe his father had started making these widgets or whatever. This guy has lived with these widgets for years, he wakes up widgets, he sleeps and dreams widgets. Shep would come in, take one look at the widget and say, ‘You know what? If you took this handle off here, put the handle there, changed this, switched that, then you’d have a hell of a product.’ It was great because it gave you a chance to become reacquainted with your shoes. You would look at them and after a while Shep would be finished with redesigning the product.

  The great thing about Shep is that he would drop a bomb on you in the unlikeliest places. Once we had to attend a Group W (Westinghouse) affiliates’ convention in Florida. Shep had given a little speech the day before, and on this day we were sitting around the pool having lunch: Shep, Marvin Davis (a vice-president of Delehanty), me, and the lady in charge of continuity for the Group W stations. She was a very prim and proper lady because if you’re in charge of continuity you’ve got to be at least a virgin, if not better. We’re sitting there eating and I’m waiting for the bomb to fall. We know it’s going to happen, so Marvin and I are trying to pick easy subjects to talk about. Marvin was picking good subjects like the weather, I was picking good subjects like baseball, we both were picking very good. The directress of continuity must have thought we were crazy, but little did she know! The minute he zapped in that this woman is in charge of continuity, he had to do continuity stories. He started off by saying, ‘I have a client who is a great guy, but I once had a problem selling him an ad for Talon Zippers that showed the Statue of Liberty with a zipper down her back.’ He goes into the whole story about how he has to create ads all day long on zippers, and I kind of looked over at Marvin for a second and he had a sandwich up to his mouth and his eyes rolled to the back of his head. We both knew something bad was going to happen but we weren’t quite sure what. I said to myself, ‘He’s not going to tell the old Statue of Liberty story – he’s not going to do that.’

  Sure enough. He says, ‘We had this ad with the Statue of Liberty and I knew how the client would react to the Statue having her zipper in the back open. He could say it’s unpatriotic – but I remembered something I once saw on Forty-second Street.’

  I said to myself, ‘Oh, oh, here’s where he tells the story about how he picked up a Statue of Liberty with a thermometer in its backside in some souvenir store on Forty-second Street. Oh, Shep, please don’t talk about the thermometer being in the backside.’

  Shep came through, all right. He did not say the Statue of Liberty had the thermometer in its backside. He said, ‘So when I took the client this Statue of Liberty with a thermometer shoved up its ass I told him if they can shove a thermometer up the ass of the Statue of Liberty, you can take a zipper down in the back.’ Like it was the first time someone really said a prayer after a meal. Everybody had their heads down at their plates, reading their parsley.

  You can’t underestimate Shep. One day he was flying back to New York from I don’t know where and he happened to be sitting next to the advertising manager in charge of Singer Sewing Machines of Peru. Shep talked to him during the plane ride and the guy got to like Shep and he gave Shep the account. It was one of the most beautiful accounts in the history of advertising. We were selling sewing machines to Indians who couldn’t run them because they had no place to plug them in. Shep went out and researched things and we found that the best form of media in Peru was to put a sign on a boat that floats down the Amazon River – or whatever river flows through Peru.

  Singer of Peru was a great experience. I once wrote an ad that said, ‘The machine you buy your mother on Mother’s Day will last until Father’s Day.’ It went to the client off in Peru and it came back with the note, ‘We have no Father’s Day in Peru.’ We had a girl in our office who was a student from
Colombia and was some kind of an Indian and she knew the kind of Spanish that they spoke in Peru – at least she said she did – and she would translate everything we did and then we would send it down to Peru.

  A crazy account. We had an American who understood the language to shoot commercials for us, so we wrote this one commercial which showed a young man and a young woman walking into the local Singer Sewing Center. Well, our man in Peru gets the storyboard for the commercial and he didn’t know where to go to hire the models for the shooting. So this guy did what he thought was a logical thing. He went to a local movie studio and hired a couple of young out-of-work actors. The next day as our guy got ready to go out to shoot the commercial, he happened to glance at the local newspaper. There, staring back at him, was the face of his male model on page 1, and across his chest was a string of numbers. It turned out that the actor had just been picked up by the local police when he had attempted to hold up the National Bank of Lima. Our cameraman called us up in New York and informed us that the commercial we were waiting for would have to be held up for three to five years.

  I had written a nice little commercial which showed a bullfighter sitting in the middle of a ring, sewing himself a cape. They let the bull out and the bullfighter starts sewing like a son of a bitch. Then the commercial cuts to the bull, back to the bullfighter, back to the bull, until the last moment when he finished the cape just in time to give the bull a pass and save his neck. The way it was shot, the opening scene showed the bullfighter wearing a black suit and in the next shot he was wearing a white suit, and in the third shot he had on a suit with a lot of crazy decorations on it. They just found some stock film and put it in wherever they could.

  You wonder why Peru is mad at us. We were selling them machines and the poor Indians were buying machines without power. On time, yet. We got a letter from a guy who was trying to make a collection from a couple of Indians who had bought a sewing machine. They were stuck away on a mountain someplace and the collection guy spent four hours going through swamps, jungles and who knows what else trying to reach them. He was able to see them but he could not get to them. He could never reach them and he couldn’t understand how they ever got down off their perch to get the sewing machine and put it on the back of their donkey and go back up the mountain.

  The Peru guy used to show up in New York every so often and Shep spent hours trying to teach the guy media. The Peru guy says, ‘You have to go in this magazine, El Commandore.’ Shep says, ‘What about this other magazine, El Fig?’ (You had a choice of two magazines in your Peru marketing plan.) The Peru guy says, ‘El Fig is no good because it’s never on the newsstands. You can’t advertise in it.’ Shep says, ‘Why isn’t it on the stands?’ He’s figuring maybe they’re having union trouble with El Fig down in Peru. The local tells Shep, ‘The minute El Fig comes out it disappears from the stands. But El Commandore, it’s always around on the stands.’ Shep says, ‘Do you understand that people are buying El Fig and not buying El Commandore and that’s why El Fig is never around and El Commandore is?’ The Peru guy said, ‘Oh.’ We ran ads, we ran commercials, and we made a lot of bread. If you got the Indian to make the down payment, you were breaking even. The rest of the stuff was gravy.

  The best presentation I ever took part in also was at Delehanty. We were getting ready for a presentation to Chemway, Inc., which makes Pretty Feet. Usually, the night before any presentation Shep would come in and suddenly decide that everything was wrong and we were not going to get the account. True to form, he came in the night before the Chemway pitch and said our stuff was garbage and we wouldn’t get the account. Well, we had a terrible fight. Shep and I were always having terrible fights – but this one was worse. Marvin Davis, who also would be in on the pitch, said something about one of the ads and I went berserk. I had been working very hard and I just flipped. I climbed over a table after Marvin. People had to pull us apart because it was turning into a real brawl.

  I was so uptight about what had just happened that I went out drinking for the whole night. It was a very wild night and I woke up at seven o’clock in the morning in a strange place not knowing what to do for clothing because my clothes were a shambles. I knew that I had to make a presentation and my shirt looked as if somebody had thrown up on it – maybe it was me. I had to find a shirt, if nothing else. The presentation was scheduled for nine o’clock. No store is open at 8:30. I had a car and I couldn’t remember where I had parked it. So I left the car wherever it was and jumped into a cab and told the guy to take me down to the West Side waterfront. Down there the Army-Navy surplus stores are open all night. I bought a denim shirt and a solid blue tie and figured it wouldn’t look too bad. I was still hung over, terribly so, and I took the cab back to the office to make the presentation.

  During a presentation the top-ranking officer from the agency starts the pitch and then everybody around the table says his piece, including the creative department. And now it comes time for me to do my speech and somebody had given me a cup of coffee. The alcohol must have been condensed in my body, because the minute I got the coffee down I was drunk again. But I got up and made the best presentation I’ve ever made in my life. It wasn’t that I thought I was good; people came up to me at the end of the presentation and said, ‘I’ve seen you at a presentation before but I’ve never seen you so buttoned up.’ Well, the buttoned-up part was that I was afraid to open my mouth and really talk because I figured if I did open up my mouth I would throw up. So I talked very quietly. Afterward everyone said, ‘Usually you get very excited. This was so nice. You didn’t move, you didn’t jump around. This was just the way to present to these people.’ Little did they know that if I had jumped around my head would have fallen on the table.

  They gave us the account on the spot. I ordered champagne for everybody but I wouldn’t serve any to Shep or Marvin. We got drunk the same day. It was like one twenty-four-hour binge, the whole place just went crazy.

  Once, at Delehanty, we made a terrific presentation and the president of the company we were pitching fell asleep when the lights went out during the showing of the commercials. Shep was very good that day, and Marvin Davis was very good, too. I was sitting next to the president and he just didn’t like the whole group. He was getting very tight and very fidgety. When a presentation is packaged, as the Delehanty presentation was, it’s very hard to stop. It’s like when you stop a door-to-door salesman in the middle of his pitch, he’ll get so confused that he’ll start the whole pitch over again. Shep’s presentation couldn’t be cut at the right time or speeded up. The presentation went on, deadly.

  The lights went out for the reel of commercials. I’m watching this old guy. The lights went out, he went out. He had his head resting on his chest and if you looked at him in the dark, you would imagine that he was thinking very hard. He must have had a clock in him or maybe his advertising manager was bumping him but all of a sudden toward the next to the last commercial on the reel he woke up. The last commercial went off and he woke up completely. And he’s one of these guys who when he just wakes up he’s not a nice guy. He woke up a tiger and started taking people apart. ‘And you? What do you do?’ he said to a girl. ‘What qualifies you to be on my account?’ The girl was very nervous. ‘Well, uh, you see …’ ‘Are you on my account,’ he says, ‘or are you one of these people that they brought in to impress me?’ ‘No, no,’ the girl said, ‘I’m a fashion coordinator.’ ‘What do I need with a fashion coordinator?’ he said. It went on like that. Finally, he got to Kurnit. ‘Mr. Kurnit, why is your agency, of all the agencies I’ve seen – why is your agency qualified to handle my account?’ This is a very tough question. ‘Well,’ said Shep, ‘one of the reasons that I’m qualified is because our agency has been looking for this type of account for many years …’ ‘I know you’re looking for my account. I want to know if you can handle it now.’ The problem was he was just not a nice guy when he woke up. He took them apart.

  At Fuller & Smith & Ross, one of the probl
ems we had when we made a pitch was that one of the account supervisors – a klutz named Harry – was so inept he would blow everything almost right from the start. He claimed to have worked on almost every great campaign that ever came out of J. Walter Thompson, which was where he was at before he conned his way into Fuller & Smith. ‘Pan Am, oh yeah. I remember when we were doing Pan Am.’ He may have been in the building when they were working on the Pan Am account. He was fantastically uncoordinated. He would sit there with his pipe and talk, and invariably the phone would ring. He would reach for the phone and knock the pipe out of his mouth. Every time. Once, right before a meeting, Mike Lawlor saw him in the men’s room brushing his pants off. Harry said, ‘Got to go to a new-business meeting. Spilled some powder on my pants.’ He finally got the pants perfectly clean and said, ‘O. K., now I can go into the meeting.’ He walked into the meeting with his fly open. He set the indoor record for showing up at meetings with his fly open.

  They finally ran this guy out of New York but he survived. He went to Rome, billing himself as the great white hope of New York. They just booted him out of Rome but he’s got at least nine other countries to go. The guy has Germany; he hasn’t touched France yet. He’s got plenty of places in Europe. When they catch on to him in Europe he can come back here to some off-the-wall place like Topeka. ‘Here I am,’ he’ll say. ‘I ran an agency in Rome for a while but now I’m ready to come back to Topeka because I’ve got this little lung condition and I wanted some of that fresh air of Topeka and I think I’m going to really make your agency.’ Topeka, they fall for it.