Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  My response on receiving the happy news was not that of a normal father-to-be. I was horrified. I hated the idea of having a child, I always had. And I hated the idea of bringing one up. What I’d seen of my own family had not been a recommendation for either role. Also, I believed it was contra-indicated that my brothers or myself should produce children (which neither of them has), because a strain, visible for several generations, existed in the line – an inability to engage, an instability, perhaps a blankness, accompanied in some by an incontinent urge to kill themselves – which it was undesirable to pass on. More shallowly and selfishly, I disliked the notion that, with the arrival of a child, uncertainty was removed from life. The future lay mapped out and I didn’t like the look of the country it passed through.

  And then had come the job of producing these Hamlet commercials in New York. Gratefully, egoistically, I seized the opportunity and schmeissed. But now, as I rode the elevator to the sixth floor of the Algonquin, I knew my reprieve was over with the completion of the shoot. After settling the last bills on the production I was following my clients back to London next day.

  My small hotel suite was very pleasant, done up in vaguely ’thirties style with framed Thurber drawings on the cream-coloured walls. I’d been happy here and was sad at the prospect of leaving it to confront the unwelcome reality awaiting me in London. I’d started to pack my suitcase with a heavy heart when I noticed the message light on the telephone was blinking.

  The message was to call back Gary Geyer at Doyle Dane. I did so and a voice said, ‘Hi there! You ran your Garrett demo reel for us here a week ago and we have a TV spot we’d like you to make.’

  A commercial had delivered me from London to Manhattan … and now another commercial changed my life and kept me here. For a year and more. While I was setting up that job for Doyle Dane I received calls from other ad agencies in the city and further work came in. Quite by accident the Garrett Company had opened a New York office.

  Its premises, my small suite in the Algonquin, seemed to me ideal. The hotel was rich in association for me, the shrine to an era. The same leather chairs furnished the panelled lobby, and the round table where Dorothy Parker, Ross and Bob Benchley had lunched regularly still stood where it had then. Comfortable and expensive, the Algonquin had the sort of shabby chic which only the English understand to be stylish. Located unfashionably mid-town, it stands on the edge of the theatre district, is popular with actors and the cultural heart of Manhattan’s English ghetto. At times it felt like an expat club, leavened by the more cosmopolitan of the city’s native residents.

  I loved living in the hotel, happy to have again no possessions except the clothes I’d brought with me. And I loved New York. When I’d lived here before I could afford to look at life only from outside the window, now I had cash in my pocket and a virtually unlimited expense account. There was vindication in that, as there was in the fact that such profitable work was coming in, the company prospered, and I was so verybusy.

  My job was to woo clients, and I did it assiduously. Lunch was at Orsini’s or the Four Seasons, most evenings took in Elaine’s – then at its fashionable peak. Normally I used taxis to get around, but in summer I cruised the sweltering city streets in a black Cadillac with air-conditioning and windows tinted a deep underwater green. There was work, parties, clubs, weekends in the Hamptons, Fire Island, the Bahamas or Mexico, and there was cocaine. The fashion and the music were still coming out of London and there was no disadvantage in being British in Manhattan in the late ’sixties. We were still the flavour of the decade.

  Our best client remained Mary Wells, who now ran her own agency, Wells Rich Greene. I was summoned by her to discuss a two-minute spot for Braniff Airlines. She had won the account only two years before and her first move on getting it had been to paint every aircraft pastel pink or pastel blue and transmit a series of commercials each ending with a different but consistently ravishing flight attendant in pastel uniform ogling the viewer with sultry eyes as she breathed ‘I’m Tricia/Sharon/Kate, fly me!’ in invitation. Mary’s second move was to marry Harding Lawrence, president of the airline.

  Arriving at her agency, I was directed to her private office in what had been Gloria Swanson’s duplex. Though the temperature outdoors was in the upper eighties, a log fire blazed in the open hearth, but the air-conditioning kept the place pleasantly chill. The only furniture was a leather chesterfield sofa, a few chairs, and a circular table fifteen feet across, the center of which had been sawn out to create a hole three feet in diameter. ‘An interesting piece,’ I observed when Mary wafted in, a vision in Pucci, to find me staring at it in mesmerised curiosity.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed. ‘I had it made that way so I could put a man inside. For presentations.’

  She was looking tanned and well. ‘Just got back from Mexico,’ she explained. ‘Three parties in a week. Emilio Pucci’s, the President of Mexico’s, and mine – we all have homes in the same locality. Guess which was the best?’

  We moved on to the subject of work. The film she wanted us to make was about Braniff’s commitment to supersonic air travel. No supersonic commercial aircraft existed at that time; Mary said she wanted Garrett’s to build one.

  One was used to fairly exacting demands from clients, but this was unusual in that I estimated it would involve head hunting key technicians from Boeing and Lockheed, cost several billion dollars and take between fifteen and twenty years to set up to shoot. As she wanted the spot completed in two months, it was a relief to learn the aircraft did not actually have to fly.

  The commercial, which had an enormous production budget, would never be aired on TV. It would be screened only once … to President Nixon as part of a presentation designed to win Braniff South American air routes in the coming re-allocation among US carriers. Explaining this, Mary leaned forward to look me in the eyes. ‘I’m going to take over Lima, Peru,’ she confided.

  I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Great idea,’ I told her.

  ‘Turn it into an International Free Trade Area, the number one fashion shopping capital on the planet. One bright island of light in the surrounding darkness of the Third World.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I agreed warmly.

  The Braniff film she wanted from us was only one of Mary’s planned tactical moves towards the realisation of her sovereign intent. To handle the details of the spot’s production she appointed her art director, Phil Parker.

  I got to know him well, too well, over the next couple of months. He was a small dark man, paid a huge salary. Top creative talent in the newest, flashiest and most fashionable ad agency in Manhattan, he was a star. He had expenses, kids’ schooling, medical and psychiatric coverage, perks and benefits; he was thirty-two and hot – but he was also under great strain. One major fuck-up and he’d become what’s-his-name.

  Phil was responsible for the concept of the commercial – and its success. Excitable by nature, the pressure of it sent him manic; and it was my job to translate his lavish fantasies into some sort of reality on the studio floor. Over the course of three weeks we flew three separate film art directors into New York from London. Jetlagged, they were whisked through offices and conceptualisations, were abused, rejected and replaced. There’d been scenes of hysteria and high drama … but at last designs had been approved, set construction was under way and filming ready to start.

  I had the flights to London booked and was ready to accompany the clients there in two days’ time when I returned to the Algonquin after lunch to find a message to call Phil Parker.

  ‘I want a meeting. Get your ass round here right away,’ he said.

  We met in a clinical all-white office. We sat facing each other across a white table, he in one white chair, I in another. He talked, I listened. There was a pad and pencil on the white surface before me, but I did not take notes while he spoke, for all he said had been already discussed and agreed. All he touched on had, in fact, been done. And when he paused occasionally for reaction
I nodded and smiled reassuringly.

  I was agreeing with everything he said. Our meeting should have been smooth, yet it was not. The atmosphere between us in that all-white room was building with electricity; static thickened the air, rage was darkening Phil Parker’s face, his hands had begun to shake. Suddenly it became too much for him, the wires that held him together parted with a twang. He sprang from his chair, cleared the space between us in a bound. ‘Stop it!’ he shrieked.

  I stared at him in consternation. His face was purple. What had I done?

  ‘Stop it! Stop it,’ he screamed. ‘Stop being so fucking polite! I’ve got my ass riding on this job and so have you and all you can do is be polite!’

  I gaped at him speechless. It was a timeless instant; only after what felt like about an hour did he back off.

  The event had a profound effect on me. It was disconcerting to be attacked for saying nothing. And I found it astonishing that anyone could get so steamed-up crazy over a TV spot. TV commercials were silly, it was absurd to be making them. Increasingly I was aware that the brisk lunacy of the business I’d found so bewitching no longer held quite the same allure. The expense-account life appealed to me, but I’d come to dislike the work I did.

  It felt strange to be back in London for the Braniff shoot after so long away, and to be staying in a hotel as a visitor. Having settled the clients into Claridge’s and the Hilton, on my second day there I called Tania and went to visit her at the apartment in Chelsea.

  We had tea in the large, starkly modern living room, harshly lit by sun. Both of us were anxious not to touch on anything sensitive; our conversation was casual and surreal. Then Tania asked, ‘Would you like to meet your daughter?’

  ‘Why, of course,’ I answered, and Sasha was brought in by her nanny. I looked at a tiny, dark-eyed girl; tentatively I reached out to take her minute hand.

  An unnavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and things we aim at, converse with, and try to touch. I waited … waiting for the flash, that current of instinctual rapport said to flow between father and daughter, and did not sense it. Instead I felt only a blankness – an admission I am not proud of, but I tell it like it was.

  ‘I think Daddy’s had quite enough now,’ said Tania, and the child was taken away. With mutual relief we turned to other subjects.

  The nanny was not the usual Norland’s type in a lightly starched blue/white uniform but a handsome, craggy-faced man in his twenties, speaking in a West Country accent and answering to the name of Norman. He looked more like a young Mellors than a nanny and, after he’d left with the baby, I asked Tania delicately, ‘Is he your …?’

  ‘Are you kidding! He’s a stable hand and brilliant at looking after horses. Sasha adores him.’ And Norman was conscientious and devoted to the baby, she told me. ‘But he’s got the most frightful verbal diarrhoea and he will talk. Bangs on endlessly about being buggered by Jeremy Thorpe, and Thorpe stealing his National Insurance card.’

  ‘What an extraordinary story! Could there be anything in it?’ I asked.

  ‘Total fantasy, all of it,’ Tania assured me. ‘But the fact is he’s utterly wonderful with your daughter.’

  Left to their own devices in London, clients often grew restive and created problems. I had to be with them constantly, pouring oil on the water and liquor down their throats. I was always looking for fresh ways to divert them. A huge anti-Vietnam War protest was scheduled to take place in Grosvenor Square. ‘You gotta be there, man,’ said my dopedealer Michael X. ‘We’re gonna take over the fucking US Embassy, I mean, like, storm it. We got weapons, rockets, an armoured car, we’re gonna blow the fucking place apart, man!’

  I was in his rancid flat buying dope and I didn’t believe him for a moment. Michael de Freitas – I couldn’t get used to calling him Michael X – was a compulsive liar, he’d sold me dope and lied to me for years. As a teenager he’d worked as an enforcer for Rachman, the property crook, after whose murder it was said the police had narrowed down the list of suspects to 157. Then Malcolm X had embraced de Freitas on a visit to London, calling him ‘my brother’, and he’d changed his name and gone progressively more loopy ever since. Raising money from a number of people, including John Lennon, he started Black House. In the months to come another of his backers, the young Nigel Samuel, would go to the police after having been locked in a slave collar and abused; Michael would jump bail and flee to Trinidad, there to found a commune and murder two white women, one of them Gayle Benson, wife of an assistant director who worked for Garrett’s.

  He was destined to end on the gallows, but just now he was rehearsing to me his battle plans. And the newspapers too were hyping the coming demo; a huge crowd of under-thirties was expected. The combined forces of the counter-culture – including, Michael promised, a whole regiment of stoned black brothers – would be ranged against a battalion of British bobbies, supported by police cavalry, and a crack detachment of US Marines defending the Embassy in the name of American imperialism.

  It promised to be an epic battle. My clients wouldn’t want to miss it. I decided to book the third-floor corner suite of the Marriott Hotel overlooking Grosvenor Square so they could watch it in comfort while enjoying a buffet lunch. ‘It’s the most cynical, disgusting thing I’ve ever heard of,’ Richard Lester told me. I agreed with him, but spectators had journeyed to take up dress-circle-type seats in the foothills overlooking the Battle of Waterloo, and there was an established precedent. Besides, this was an historic event, and you should always witness history if you get the chance.

  In fact, it turned out to be a poor idea. By 11 am on that Saturday the streets surrounding the Marriott were sealed off, and it was only by claiming to be staying there that my clients managed to get through the police lines to join me at the hotel. Once there, they remained marooned, then besieged, and unable to leave for six hours.

  By 2 pm Grosvenor Square was packed solid with demonstrators. The bobbies were wearing the endearingly quaint riot gear of the period, and the mixed divisions of the counter-culture colourfully and fashionably dressed for anything but war, but my New York clients were clearly uncomfortable with the threat to their flag and the anti-American slogans the crowd were chanting.

  Unsuccessfully I tried to reassure them that we in England adored America and everything American. The mob below were merely expressing a cheerful anarchy, I explained. They were here for the hell of it. Few felt strongly about Vietnam, most would have been unable to find it on a map, I told them as a loud explosion came from the square, followed by a confused noise of shouting and police whistles.

  My guests were growing increasingly agitated. The ’sixties weren’t about love and flower power any more, the counter-culture had become ‘political’ under the influence of the Red Brigade and angry revolutionaries like Malcolm X. The mood had turned ugly and the flower children grown destructive, tearing apart the fairy-tale fantasy they had created. This was 1968; later that year Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were gunned down; at the Democratic convention in Chicago Mayor Daley would order the police to kill arsonists and shoot to maim looters.

  I stood with my clients looking down upon the scene. They’d wanted to leave earlier but it was impossible, the crowd were pressed solid around the hotel. They bitched, but there was nothing I could do about it. Now they moved to the buffet set up in the middle of the room and huddled together, muttering and darting glances in my direction. They were behaving as though what was going on was somehow my fault.

  The sound of explosions drew them back to the windows. A section of the mob were lobbing smoke bombs over the police line, streams of coloured smoke spread across the area. There was a sudden surge of movement. In a perfectly choreographed action the police line opened and a squadron of mounted cavalry cantered out of the smoke towards the crowd.

  From the ground it must have been an awesome sight. The mob parted and fell back, running from the horses. The riders did not pursue, they’d achieved their intent
. The squadron wheeled and cantered towards another section of the crowd to get it moving.

  No force had been used, but the attack on the Embassy had been turned. Thwarted of their objective to take the building, the huge mass of people began to move slowly towards the square’s two exits, one of them directly below where we stood. Someone looked up and saw us: ‘Pigs!’ he called out, and at once the colour of the crowd changed as a sea of faces tilted to look at us. Others took up the cry, ‘Pigs! Come down, pigs!’

  ‘Oh my God, they’ll tear us to pieces,’ I heard an American voice among those beside me mutter.

  ‘You’re perfectly safe. Have some more champagne,’ I told them. What a craven bunch they were, I thought.

  ‘Pigs … pigs … pigs …’ the crowd below was chanting.

  A client clutched my arm. ‘Jeremy, you’ve got to get us out of here!’

  ‘Relax! Smoke a joint. Try the chocolate cake,’ I said. Below us in the street the baying of the mob was growing louder. What a pitiful occupation we were involved in, I thought. I’d blanked off my mind with drink and drugs and the addictive pace of this unwholesome activity, deluding myself I engaged in it with the detachment of a child turning over stones to examine the life forms beneath with fascinated disgust. But I’d deceived myself, seduced by the lure of a gaudy lifestyle and expense-account mimicry of wealth. I was part of this world, I’d become one of these people myself.

  The flow of people leaving the square had halted. Beneath our window stood a solid, close-packed mass of demonstrators howling, ‘Come down, pigs!’ They’d forgotten the Embassy, we were the enemy.

  And then I saw Michael X among them. Got up like a tribal chief, whacked out of his skull and surrounded by a bunch of jiving, wild-eyed soul brothers, he was looking straight at me, shaking his fist and shrieking, ‘Eat the rich! Come down, pigs!’