Wheels

by Arthur Hailey

  “Couldn’t you come home nights, then go back in the morning?”

  “No, Dad, I couldn’t.”

  Barbara hoped this wasn’t going to develop into another argument in which it would be necessary to point out that she was twenty-nine, a legal adult who had voted in two presidential elections, and had a responsible job which she was good at. The job, incidentally, made her financially free so that she could set up a separate establishment any time she wanted, except that she lived with her father, knowing he was lonely after her mother’s death, and not wanting to make things worse for him.

  “When will you be home then?”

  “By the weekend for sure. You can live without me till then. And take care of your ulcer. By the way, how is it?”

  “I’d forgotten it. Too many other things to think about. We had some trouble in the plant this morning.”

  He sounded strained, she thought. The auto industry had that effect on everybody close to it, including herself. Whether you worked in a plant, in an advertising agency, or on design, like Brett, the anxieties and pressures got to you in the end. The same kind of compulsion told Barbara Zaleski at this moment that she had to get off the telephone and back into the client meeting. She had slipped out a few minutes ago, the men assuming, no doubt, that she had left to do whatever women did in washrooms, and instinctively Barbara put a hand to her hair—chestnut brown and luxuriant, like her Polish mother’s; it also grew annoyingly fast so she had to spend more time than she liked in beauty salons. She patted her hair into place; it would have to do. Her fingers encountered the dark glasses which she had pushed upward above her forehead hours ago, reminding her that she had heard someone recently deride dark glasses in hair as the hallmark of the girl executive. Well, why not? She left the glasses where they were.

  “Dad,” Barbara said, “I haven’t much time. Would you do something for me?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Call Brett. Tell him I’m sorry I can’t make our date tonight, and if he wants to call me later, I’ll be at the Drake Hotel.”

  “I’m not sure I can …”

  “Of course you can! Brett’s at the Design Center, as you know perfectly well, so all you have to do is pick up an inside phone and dial. I’m not asking you to like him; I know you don’t, and you’ve made that clear plenty of times to both of us. All I’m asking is that you pass a message. You may not even have to speak to him.”

  She had been unable to keep the impatience out of her voice, so now they were having an argument after all, one more added to many others.

  “All right,” Matt grumbled. “I’ll do it. But keep your shirt on.”

  “You keep yours on, too. Goodbye, Dad. Take care, and I’ll see you at the weekend.”

  Barbara thanked the secretary whose phone she had been using and slid her full, long-limbed body from the desk where she had perched. Barbara’s figure, which she was aware that men admired, was another legacy from her mother who had managed to convey a strong sexuality—characteristically Slavic, so some said—until the last few months before she died.

  Barbara was on the twenty-first floor of the Third Avenue building which was New York headquarters of the Osborne J. Lewis Company—or more familiarly, OJL—one of the world’s half-dozen largest advertising agencies, with a staff of two thousand, more or less, on three skyscraper floors. If she had wanted to, instead of phoning Detroit from where she had, Barbara could have used an office in the jam-packed, creative rabbit warren one floor down, where a few windowless, cupboard-size offices were kept available for out-of-town staffers like herself while working temporarily in New York. But it had seemed simpler to stay up here, where this morning’s meeting was being held. This floor was client country. It was also where account executives and senior agency officers had their lavishly decorated and broadloomed office suites, with original Cézannes, Wyeths, or Picassos on the walls, as well as built-in bars—the latter remaining hidden or activated according to a client’s known and carefully remembered preferences. Even secretaries here enjoyed better working conditions than some of the best creative talent down below. In a way, Barbara sometimes thought, the agency resembled a Roman galley ship, though at least those below had their martini lunches, went home at nights, and—if senior enough—were sometimes allowed topside.

  She walked quickly down a corridor. In the austere Detroit offices of OJL, where Barbara worked mostly, her heels would have “tip-tapped,” but here, deep carpeting deadened their sound. Passing a door partially open, she could hear a piano and a girl singer’s voice:

  “One more happy user

  Has joined the millions who

  Say Brisk!-please bring it briskly;

  It satisfies me too.”

  Almost certainly a client was in there listening, and would make a decision about the jingle—aye or nay, involving vast expenditures—based on hunch, prejudice, or even whether he felt good or breakfast had given him dyspepsia. Of course, the lyric was awful, probably because the client preferred it to be banal, being afraid—as most were—of anything more imaginative. But the music had an ear-catching lilt; recorded with full orchestra and chorus, a large part of the nation might be humming the little tune a month or two from now. Barbara wondered what Brisk was. A drink? A new detergent? It could be either, or something more outlandish. The OJL agency had hundreds of clients in diverse businesses, though the auto company account which Barbara worked on was among its most important and lucrative. As auto company men were fond of reminding agency people, the car advertising budget alone exceeded a hundred million dollars annually.

  Outside Conference Room 1 a red MEETING IN PROGRESS sign was still flashing. Clients loved the flashing signs for the aura of importance they created.

  Barbara went in quietly and slipped into her chair halfway down the long table. There were seven others in the dignified, rosewood-paneled room with Georgian furnishings. At the table’s head was Keith Yates-Brown, graying and urbanely genial, the agency management supervisor whose mission was to keep relations between the auto company and the Osborne J. Lewis agency friction free. To the right of Yates-Brown was the auto company advertising manager from Detroit, J. P. Underwood (“Call me J.P., please”), youngish, recently promoted and not entirely at ease yet with the top-rank agency crowd. Facing Underwood was bald and brilliant Teddy Osch, OJL creative director and a man who spewed ideas the way a fountain disgorges water. Osch, unflappable, schoolmasterish, had outlasted many of his colleagues and was a veteran of past, successful car campaigns.

  The others comprised J. P. Underwood’s assistant, also from Detroit, two other agency men—one creative, one executive—and Barbara, who was the only woman present, except for a secretary who at the moment was refilling coffee cups.

  Their subject of discussion was the Orion. Since yesterday afternoon they had been reviewing advertising ideas which the agency had developed so far. The OJL group at the meeting had taken turns in presentations to the client—represented by Underwood and his assistant.

  “We’ve saved one sequence until last, J.P.” Yates-Brown was speaking directly though informally to the auto company advertising manager. “We thought you’d find them original, even interesting perhaps.” As always, Yates-Brown managed an appropriate mix of authority and deference, even though everyone present knew that an advertising manager had little real decision power and was off the mainstream of auto company high command.

  J. P. Underwood said, more brusquely than necessary, “Let’s see it.”

  One of the other agency men placed a series of cards on an easel. On each card a tissue sheet was fixed, the tissue having a sketched layout, in preliminary stage. Each layout, as Barbara knew, represented hours, and sometimes long nights of thought and labor.

  Today’s and yesterday’s procedure was normal in the early stages of any new car campaign and the tissue sheets were called a “rustle pile.”

  “Barbara,” Yates-Brown said, “will you skipper this trip?”


  She nodded.

  “What we have in mind, J.P.,” Barbara told Underwood with a glance to his assistant, “is to show the Orion as it will be in everyday use. The first layout, as you see, is an Orion leaving a car wash.”

  All eyes were on the sketch. It was imaginative and well executed. It showed the forward portion of the car emerging from a wash tunnel like a butterfly from a chrysalis. A young woman was waiting to drive the car away. Photographed in color, whether still or on film, the scene would be arresting.

  J. P. Underwood gave no reaction, not an eyelid flicker. Barbara nodded for the next tissue.

  “Some of us have felt for a long time that women’s use of cars has been underemphasized in advertising. Most advertising, as we know, has been directed at men.”

  She could have added, but didn’t, that her own assignment for the past two years had been to push hard for women’s point of view. There were days, however, after reading the masculine-oriented advertising (the trade called it “muscle copy”) which continued to appear, when Barbara was convinced that she had failed totally.

  Now she commented, “We believe that women are going to use the Orion a great deal.”

  The sketch on the easel was a supermarket parking lot. The artist’s composition was excellent—the storefront in background, an Orion prominently forward with other cars around it. A woman shopper was loading groceries into the Orion’s back seat.

  “Those other cars,” the auto company ad manager said. “Would they be ours or competitors’?”

  Yates-Brown answered quickly, “I’d say ours, J.P.”

  “There should be some competitive cars, J.P.,” Barbara said. “Otherwise the whole thing would be unreal.”

  “Can’t say I like the groceries.” The remark was from Underwood’s assistant. “Clutters everything up. Takes the eye away from the car. And if we did use that background it should be Vaselined.”

  Barbara felt like sighing dispiritedly. Vaseline smeared around a camera lens when photographing cars was a photographer’s trick which had become a cliché; it made background misty, leaving the car itself sharply defined. Though auto companies persisted in using it, many advertising people thought the device as dated as the Twist. Barbara said mildly, “We’re attempting to show actual use.”

  “All the same,” Keith Yates-Brown injected, “that was a good point. Let’s make a note of it.”

  “The next layout,” Barbara said, “is an Orion in the rain—a real downpour would be good, we think. Again, a woman driver, looking as if she’s going home from the office. We’d photograph after dark to get best reflections from a wet street.”

  “Be hard not to get the car dirty,” J. P. Underwood observed.

  “The whole idea is to get it a little dirty,” Barbara told him. “Again—reality. Color film could make it great.”

  The assistant ad manager from Detroit said softly, “I can’t see the brass going for it.”

  J. P. Underwood was silent.

  There were a dozen more. Barbara went through each, briefly but conscientiously, knowing how much effort and devotion the younger agency staff members had put into every one. That was the way it always went. The creative oldsters like Teddy Osch held back and—as they put it—“let the kids exhaust themselves,” knowing from experience that the early work, however good it was, would always be rejected.

  It was rejected now. Underwood’s manner made that clear, and everyone in the room shared the knowledge, as they had shared it yesterday, before this session started. In her early days at the agency Barbara had been naïve enough to inquire why it always happened that way. Why were so much effort and quality—frequently excellent quality—utterly wasted?

  Afterward, some facts of life about auto advertising had been quietly explained. It was put to her: If the ad program burgeoned quickly, instead of painfully slowly—far slower than advertising for most other products—then how would all the auto people in Detroit involved with it justify their jobs, the endless meetings over months, fat expense accounts, the out-of-town junkets? Furthermore, if an auto company chose to burden itself with that kind of inflated cost, it was not the agency’s business to suggest otherwise, far less to go crusading. The agency did handsomely out of the arrangement; besides, there was always approval in the end. The advertising process for each model year started in October or November. By May-June, decisions had to be firm so that the agency could do its job; therefore, auto company people began making up their minds because they could read a calendar too. This was also the time that the Detroit high brass came into the picture, and they made final decisions about advertising, whether talented in that particular direction or not.

  What bothered Barbara most—and others too, she discovered later—was the appalling waste of time, talent, people, money, the exercise in nothingness. And, from talking with people in other agencies, she knew that the same process was true of all Big Three companies. It was as if the auto industry, normally so-time-and motion conscious and critical of bureaucracy outside, had created its own fat-waxing bureaucracy within.

  She had once asked: Did any of the original ideas, the really good ones, ever get reinstated? The answer was: No, because you can’t accept in June what you rejected last November. It would be embarrassing to auto company people. That kind of thing could easily cost a man—perhaps a good friend to the agency—his job.

  “Thank you, Barbara.” Keith Yates-Brown had smoothly taken charge. “Well, J.P., we realize we still have a long way to go.” The management supervisor’s smile was warm and genial, his tone just the right degree apologetic.

  “You sure do,” J. P. Underwood said. He pushed his chair back from the table.

  Barbara asked him, “Was there nothing you liked? Absolutely nothing at all?”

  Yates-Brown swung his head toward her sharply and she knew she was out of line. Clients were not supposed to be harassed that way, but Underwood’s brusque superiority had needled her. She thought, even now, of some of the talented youngsters in the agency whose imaginative work, as well as her own, had just gone down the drain. Maybe what had been produced so far wasn’t the ultimate answer to Orion needs, but neither did it rate a graceless dismissal.

  “Now, Barbara,” Yates-Brown said, “no one mentioned not liking anything.” The agency supervisor was still suave and charming, but she sensed steel beneath his words. If he wanted to, Yates-Brown, essentially a salesman who hardly ever had an original idea himself, could squash creative people in the agency beneath his elegant alligator shoes. He went on, “However, we’d be less than professional if we failed to agree that we have not yet caught the true Orion spirit. It’s a wonderful spirit, J.P. You’ve given us one of the great cars of history to work with.” He made it sound as if the ad manager had designed the Orion singlehanded.

  Barbara felt slightly sick. She caught Teddy Osch’s eye. Barely perceptibly, the creative director shook his head.

  “I’ll say this,” J. P. Underwood volunteered. His tone was friendlier. For several years previously he had been merely a junior at this table; perhaps the newness of his job, his own insecurity, had made him curt a moment earlier. “I think we’ve just seen one of the finest rustle piles we ever had.”

  There was a pained silence through the room. Even Keith Yates-Brown betrayed a flicker of shocked surprise. Clumsily, illogically, the company ad man had stomped on their agreed pretense, revealing the elaborate charade for what it was. On the one hand—automatic dismissal of everything submitted; an instant later, fulsome praise. But nothing would be changed. Barbara was an old enough hand to know that.

  So was Keith Yates-Brown. He recovered quickly.

  “That’s generous of you, J.P. Damn generous! I speak for us all on the agency side when I tell you we’re grateful for your encouragement and assure you that next time around we’ll be even more effective.” The management supervisor was standing now; the others followed his example. He turned to Osch. “Isn’t that so, Teddy?”

 
The creative chief nodded with a wry smile. “We do our best.”

  As the meeting broke up, Yates-Brown and Underwood preceded the others to the door.

  Underwood asked, “Did somebody get on the ball about theater tickets?”

  Barbara, close behind, had heard the ad manager ask earlier for a block of six seats to a Neil Simon comedy for which tickets, even through scalpers, were almost impossible to get.

  The agency supervisor guffawed genially. “Did you ever doubt me?” He draped an arm companionably around the other’s shoulders. “Sure we have them, J.P. You picked the toughest ticket in town, but for you we pulled every string. They’re being sent to our lunch table at the Waldorf. Is that okay?”

  “That’s okay.”

  Yates-Brown lowered his voice. “And let me know where your party would like dinner. We’ll take care of the reservation.”

  And the bill, and all tips, Barbara thought. As for the theater tickets, she imagined Yates-Brown must have paid fifty dollars a seat, but the agency would recoup that, along with other expenses, a thousand-fold through Orion advertising.

  On some occasions when clients were taken to lunch by agency executives, people from creative side were invited along. Today, for reasons of his own, Yates-Brown had decided against this. Barbara was relieved.

  While the agency executive-J. P. Underwood group was no doubt heading for the Waldorf, she walked, with Teddy Osch and Nigel Knox, the other creative staffer who had been at the client meeting, a few blocks uptown on Third Avenue. Their destination was Joe & Rose, an obscure but first-rate bistro, populated at lunchtime by advertising people from big agencies in the neighborhood. Nigel Knox, who was an effeminate young man, normally grated on Barbara, but since his work and ideas had been rejected too, she regarded him more sympathetically than usual.