A few weeks later they did come up to see us. We went through the pitch again and walked them through the offices. We even had gotten Bob to wear some normal clothes for the occasion. We have a good shot at the business, too. Lots of handshaking and congratulations. The last thing one of their guys said as he left our offices was, ‘Boy, you creative agencies sure have some strange types around. Like that art director of yours.’
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
THE MOST
FUN YOU
CAN HAVE
WITH YOUR
CLOTHES
ON
‘New agencies always start at lunchtime. Everybody goes to lunch and everybody bitches at lunch. “Those sons of bitches, they don’t appreciate what I’ve done for them. Why, in the last year I’ve picked up two millions’ worth of billing myself.” All of a sudden, “Imagine that. Two million dollars. That means three hundred thousand dollars to the agency and all I’m making from them is a lousy forty thousand a year. They’re making three hundred thousand and paying me forty thousand. I’d really like to start a place.” The other guy says, “You know, we’ve worked together for a lot of years. I haven’t got any money but I’ve got a friend who’s got all the money and he’s got a connection. Let’s go into business …”’
I am very poor on dates and it is a good thing I’m in the advertising business where they don’t worry too much about how accurate résumés are. I was born in 1936 and in July I will be thirty-four years old. I got married when I was twenty years old but I really have been married all my life. I graduated from Lafayette High School in Brooklyn in 1954 and I went to night school at Brooklyn College for one year. That’s it with regard to education. My first job was as a messenger boy for The New York Times and I really didn’t do anything much beyond that from 1945 to 1961. In 1961 I finally got a job with a real advertising agency, Daniel & Charles.
I started with Danny and Charlie as a copywriter at $100 a week, and when I left in 1963 to go to Fuller & Smith & Ross I was making $18,000 a year. I didn’t last too long at Fuller & Smith – no more than nine months or so – and the next place I worked, which was Ashe & Engelmore, was an even shorter time. In 1964 I went to work for Shep Kurnit at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller and I lasted there a couple of years. From Delehanty I moved over to Ted Bates in 1966, making $50,000 a year plus all the grief they could give you. We started our own agency in September of 1967 after Ron went out and practically raised $80,000 all by himself. I knew very few people with $800, much less $80,000. This September we will celebrate our third anniversary in business and of course we will have a big party. I really don’t know what we’re billing, but it must be someplace around $20 million a year, which is not bad at all. We’ve got fifty-three people working for us and we’re paying some of these people $40,000 or so a year, which is not too bad, either. We have never been fired by one of our accounts. We resigned a couple of small ones because of some trouble with them, and one account, The Knickerbocker, just disappeared. We have a company car, a Lincoln, and one weekend last summer I drove out in it with my family to Montauk for the weekend. I locked the keys to the car in the trunk just as we were about to come back, so there are still strange things that happen now and then.
Last summer, one of our clients mailed us a check for $400,000, which was to cover a lot of television buying, and Ron and I took a look at that check and started to giggle like kids. It is a very weird feeling to hold a check in your hand for that amount of money and not think about skipping town to Brazil. When we go to the Coast to shoot a commercial they are very nice to us at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and it’s great to sit at the pool and get paged. Our banker is nice to us, too, and we even have a line of credit. Guys call us up and try to hustle us to go public, which I hope we will never do. We have terrific offices at 625 Madison Avenue, a full floor, and the day we moved into the place we ran out of space. I work crazy hours and not long ago I spent three days and nights trying to control an AC-DC actor who was starring in one of our commercials. This guy tried first to make it with every girl on the set and after he went through the chicks, he then started on the shooting crew.
We have come a long way in three years, baby, to steal one of Leo Burnett’s lines. The year we went into business, about 140 agencies also started up. There are now ten of those new agencies left. The problem with all of these new agencies is that most of them are started by creative guys who really aren’t business-oriented. And they start agencies for the wrong reasons. A guy gets fired and he decides to start an agency. Guys don’t plan their agencies. They don’t plan their growth and they wind up in trouble.
A friend of mine just opened an agency and he said, ‘Gee, I don’t know if I should work out of my house or if I should work out of a hotel.’ I said, ‘You’d better work out of a hotel. At least if you have a prospective client call you he won’t get your mother on the phone.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’ I read in the paper the other day that he just started in a hotel – a hotel I’d never heard of. I thought I’d heard of every hotel in New York but I think this one is one of the Lyons hotels down in the Bowery. I don’t know where he found it but he’s in business. He’ll fold.
New agencies always start at lunchtime. Everybody goes to lunch and everybody bitches at lunch. ‘Those sons of bitches, they don’t appreciate what I’ve done for them. Why, in the last year I’ve picked up two millions’ worth of billing myself.’ All of a sudden, ‘Imagine that. Two million dollars. That means three hundred thousand dollars to the agency and all I’m making from them is a lousy forty thousand a year. They’re making three hundred thousand and paying me forty thousand. I’d really like to start a place.’ The other guy says, ‘You know, we’ve worked together for a lot of years. I haven’t got any money but I’ve got a friend who’s got all the money and he’s got a connection. Let’s go into business.’
So the three of them get together, find an Uncle Sam hotel and go into business. The friend with the connection doesn’t pan out; he can’t raise the bread. The account executive who’s got some kind of promise that he can have an account when he opens suddenly finds that he doesn’t have any business. The man who tells you he’s going to give you business doesn’t give it to you and all of a sudden you can’t get him on the phone.
It was very tough for us in the beginning. There were the four founding partners: Ron, myself, Frank Seibke, an art director, and Ned Tolmach, a copywriter, all of us from Bates. And two girls – Barbara Kalish and a kid named Sandy Levy. We were at 635 Madison Avenue then and we had too much space. Just the six of us rattling around in these big offices. We were sitting around making presentations, hoping against hope that the guys would invite us to see them at their offices instead of ours. We got a little business but after three months we were in deep trouble. It was December and one day Ned and Frank came in and said they were leaving. It was just too tough. That day, the day they left, was very bad. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon and we figured we had $11,000 left in the bank after three months. There was furniture and rent, salaries for us and nothing but money going out. The lawyer got $5,000 for setting us up and the accountant took a fee too. You’re talking about $2,000 going out every week with nothing coming in and we were sitting there and we realized that we had less than $11,000 left. We figured that if we quit paying ourselves and stretched it as far and as wide as we could, we might be able to last until March. Here we were on December 8th, I think it was, and it dawned on me that it was like the worst day of all time.
We had a lot of guys saying to us, ‘Well, you know, we were considering you but now that Frank and Ned have left, well …’ We had this date staring at us, March 1, the doors close and the sheriff comes in and takes the furniture out. We would have continued to try, but can you imagine trying to pitch an account without having an office – without having at least a girl answering the phone? If Sandy was out sick and Barbara was out doing something, a potential client would call Jerr
y Della Femina & Partners and get a guy answering. It was so frustrating because you know that all you need is time and you realize by the end of February you’re out of business.
Then I remembered something. One of my heroes, really, is Mike Todd. The great Mike Todd story is that once he had a show running at the Winter Garden in 1944 and it was about to close. It was some wartime thing with Gypsy Rose Lee in it and it was in terrible shape. Todd didn’t have any money and he didn’t know what to do. He needed at least six months to get his money back and he can’t buy a customer for love or money. So he threw out the guy he had at the box office and hired a lady who had arthritis very bad. She could move her hands, but very slowly.
Somebody would come up to the box office to buy a ticket and it would take her maybe ten minutes to make change. The day he hired her he was in business. She took so long that she built a line. Every time three people tried to buy a ticket the line grew. Pretty soon they had lines all around the Winter Garden. People would see the lines and ask, ‘What show is going on here?’ It was fantastic, and then Walter Winchell wrote an item in his column to the effect that ‘They’re standing around the corner to get into the Winter Garden.’ Which was true, they were. The only trouble was the lady couldn’t make change fast enough. The show suddenly turned into a big hit, ran for eight more months, and Todd got his money out.
What I did that bad day in December was decide that we needed something like Todd did. Ron said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘We’re going to have a party.’ Ron said, ‘Are you crazy?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re going to have the biggest Christmas party on Madison Avenue. We’re going to invite every potential client we know. We are going to load this place up so with people that we will have to get two bartenders. We’re going to have a photographer come down from ANNY and Ad Age to cover it. We are going to look so affluent that it’s going to hurt.’
We must have sent out a thousand invitations. The place was so packed you couldn’t move. We had the press, we had friends, we had enemies, we had potential new business, we had everybody. The party cost us like $3,000 and we knew that if this didn’t work we were really sunk. But we pulled it off. People kept coming up to me that night saying, ‘You know, I heard that things weren’t going along so good but boy, you’ve got a place here, haven’t you?’ And we said, ‘Things are going great, man.’ Barbara was watching the bartender very carefully and I kept thinking we might end up eating the leftover food ourselves. We had guys who had come in from New Jersey for the party. We had all of our ads hanging up. You could hear it beginning to start. One guy would say, ‘What are you here for?’ And the other guy, ‘Oh, I’ve been interested in this agency for quite a while and we’re considering them.’ All of us were almost high at the party and we didn’t touch a drop of booze. My job was to walk around radiating confidence, you know, ‘Hi, how’s everything with you, how’s your account doing?’
And the next day we got a call from an insurance company, the guy decided he’s going to give us his business. The Moxie Company called the day after that and there we were: in business. The pictures started appearing in the trade papers and people around town were talking about Della Femina’s Christmas party. It was a big thing and it made us. People began calling us, saying, ‘You know, you people must be doing all right after all.’ The party was the turning point for us. If we hadn’t thrown the party and just tried to stretch the money out, we would have died. Guys would have been too suspicious. We had too many empty walls to convince anyone we were a going concern. Part of this business – a big part of it – is illusion. Illusion is very important; it makes the potential clients aware of who the hell you are.
The big problem with the new agencies is that you need an accountant and a lawyer – two of the most important people in the world. When people start agencies they forget about that and they think in terms of, Well, I can write and this other guy can draw. Not so. It’s a business of an accountant who has some clout at a bank and a lawyer who is willing to go along with you. If you make it with a lawyer and an accountant you’re in business.
You can make money right from the word go in advertising. I know of an agency that doesn’t have a single account and they’re making money. They do special projects. Ten thousand here on a project, twenty thousand a year there. Two guys and a girl – no overhead, no production headaches. They do special projects because nobody will trust them with a full account. When Ron and I were at Bates we made a lot of money for ourselves farming out our talent on special projects. It was written in my contract that I could do freelance work. It was at Bates where I learned that I never wanted to do political advertising.
I had a special project to do a campaign for a Philadelphia politician named Arlen Spector. ‘When do I get to see Arlen Spector?’ I asked. ‘You don’t.’ Spector was a district attorney in Philadelphia, running for mayor. He wanted New York advertising but he had placed through a Philadelphia agency. I complained about not being able to see Arlen Spector. ‘Are you crazy?’ his people said. ‘Nobody gets to meet Arlen Spector. We can’t even see him.’ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘what’s Arlen Spector for?’ ‘Arlen Spector is for getting elected.’ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘what’s Arlen Spector against?’ ‘Arlen Spector is against losing.’ I did the campaign, but Arlen Spector lost.
Everybody is doing freelance. My people are doing it. I walked into an art director’s office the other day and saw something for Schaefer Beer. I said to myself, son of a gun, I didn’t realize we got the account. I was all set to have a drink on it until I realized the guy was doing something for Schaefer on a freelance basis.
I’ve been very lucky in this business. My first job was my best job. Daniel & Charles was great and is great. It was crazy, sheer lunacy but it was fun. Working for Shep at Delehanty was fun, too, although sometimes people thought we were going to kill each other. I really began thinking about having my own place when I was working for Shep.
When I left Shep to go to Bates my mind was made up, and like Bates was the clincher. I knew after a while at Bates that if I wanted to stay in the advertising business and make a living and be able to hold my head up about my work, I knew that I had to have my own place. When Bates hired me they were trying to buy some of that alleged magic, some of that Doyle, Dane touch. What Bates and a lot of other agencies haven’t caught on to is that it doesn’t hurt to be born Italian or Jewish in the streets of the City of New York. You can’t buy the experience. The copywriter is in disgrace today if he was born in a suburb of Boston, of a fairly well-to-do family.
A guy I’ll call Churchill convinced me that if I wanted to keep my sanity I had to have my own place. This guy Churchill was famed throughout Bates for having written the headline for some stuff called Certs – ‘Two mints in one.’ Certs is a minty breath thing and Churchill wrote this famous commercial: There are two girls arguing and one girl says Certs is a breath mint and the other girl says it’s a candy mint. The announcer comes on and says, ‘Girls, girls, don’t argue. It’s two mints, two mints, two mints in one.’ Oh, it’s a fantastic commercial, it is some claim to fame in the history of man. Two mints in one.
Churchill also did the head cutaway and put hammers inside it for Anacin. Churchill produced the famous nose test where you’re told to send your sinuses to Arizona and if you can’t get your simuses on a plane try Dristan. Great stuff. I once wrote a memo up at Bates about Certs: ‘Listening to the meeting today I’ve come up with the theme that “Certs Cures Cancer.” I’d like to proceed with some storyboards on this theme.’ That memo almost caused a fistfight at Bates.
A terrific business, the advertising business. Young kids pounding on doors trying to get in. Agencies starting, folding. The new agencies are getting hot, the older ones are getting hardening of the arteries. I make a good living from advertising. I like to think the work I do is good – I know damn well it sells the product because my clients wouldn’t have anything to do with me if I didn’t move the product. I don
’t have to resort to ‘two mints in one,’ or ‘fights headaches three ways,’ or ‘builds strong bodies twelve ways.’ I don’t get too much sleep but I don’t cry myself to sleep either, the way a lot of guys do. I don’t kid anybody, least of all myself. I really love the business. There are some bad scenes you read about in this book. The things that are wrong in advertising would be wrong in any business. But don’t get the impression that I don’t dig the business. I really do. I could only write about the advertising game this way because I really do love it. Most people say, ‘This is a terrible business.’ They throw up their hands and go home to Rye at night and forget about it. There are ugly people in advertising, real charlatans, but there are good people, too. And good advertising. And I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
Copyright
First published in the United States of America in 1970 by
Simon and Schuster, New York
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published by Canongate Books in 2010
Copyright © Jerry Della Femina and Charles Sopkin, 1970
Introduction copyright © Jerry Della Femina, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Page 23
