by Jane Heller
Boy, she had a set of balls, didn’t she?
Without missing a beat, each person identified himself, humoring her, I assumed. Among the star attendees of the meeting were Frank Terwilliger, president and CEO of Fin’s Premium Tuna; Gregg Hillman, vice president of marketing for Fin’s; Louise Cardoza, vice president of product development for Fin’s; Peter Sacklin, vice president of Wylie & Wohlers Advertising; Julie Denton, creative supervisor of W&W; Susan Hardaway, W&W’s art director; and Larry Franzen, a copywriter at W&W. All professionals in their field. My mother wasn’t intimidated by that fact, either.
“Thank you,” she said, stepping further into the room and planting herself next to an easel. It held a poster depicting a large can of tuna that appeared to be swimming in a body of water by virtue of its cute little fins. “First of all, I want to thank Mr. Beasley for responding so quickly to my letter of complaint.” She nodded at Corbin. “But most of all, I want to thank Mr. Terwilliger for allowing me to get a few things off my chest.” She nodded at him, too, but she accompanied the nod with actual finger pointing in his direction. He flinched slightly but let her keep talking. “I was visiting my daughter Stacey one afternoon and suggested I prepare us both lunch. I rummaged around in her pantry and found a can of Fin’s premium solid white albacore tuna packed in water, the brand our family has always preferred. As I was emptying the tuna into a bowl, prior to adding mayonnaise and other seasonings, I spotted a large bone. That’s right, Mr. Terwilliger, a bone. The kind of bone you don’t always spot because it blends in with the tuna, color wise. The kind of bone you can swallow accidentally. The kind of bone that can become lodged in your throat and cause you to choke. The kind of bone that can kill you, Mr. Terwilliger.” She let her words sink in, for effect, the way she always did with me. “Now, I don’t mind telling you I was furious at Fin’s, because I trusted your brand, was a loyal customer, stayed with you even though you were the last tuna company to come out with single-serving-size cans. In other words, I believed in Fin’s and yet this is how you reward me? By nearly killing me?” I glanced around the table to see if there was eye rolling, snickering, squelching of laughter, but everyone was riveted, apparently. Either that or they were asleep with their eyes open. “However,” she went on, “after my tour of the cannery today, after inspecting your operation, after observing the safety and health features you have in place, after watching the women slaving away on that assembly line—those good, decent, hardworking women—I have reached the conclusion that your quality control is what it should be and that the bone I found was an honest mistake and that I can probably make a tuna sandwich for my daughter without fear.” She paused again, this time to press her hand to her heart and heave a deep sigh. “Surely, you can understand how mothers strive to protect their children,” she said, regrouping, gaining momentum. “It’s our God-given impulse. Our biological need. We can’t live with the thought that the contents of a can of tuna fish might harm our loved ones. We must have a sense of security when it comes to our food. We must have a sense of confidence in all our consumer products. We must and we should and we will, if I have anything to say about it!” She stopped to raise her fist in the air, a Jewish Erin Brockovich. “But the person with the power to fully restore my confidence in Fin’s is Mr. Terwilliger. So, I’m going to shut up now and let him have the floor.”
There was silence, nothing but dead air for about a second or two. And then, before Mr. Terwilliger could utter a single syllable, the executives at the table applauded loudly, wildly, as if my mother had just delivered the State of the Union Address. One of them—I think it was the ad agency’s creative supervisor—even gave her a standing ovation. I was astonished by their reaction, amazed that they would respond positively to her browbeating when I had always responded negatively to it. What in the world was going on here?
“Mrs. Reiser,” said Mr. Terwilliger after the applause had died down. He was a thin-lipped man with sunken cheekbones and a dour expression. I had a hunch he wasn’t a picnic to work for. “I’m sorry that you were put through such anguish over our product, but I’m a man who appreciates bluntness and you were blunt here today. I won’t promise that there will never be another bone in a can of Fin’s premium tuna, but I will promise you that we’ll continue to do our best to cut down on the problem. It’s customers like you who remind us that we’re not just catching fish and canning it and shipping it out to faceless individuals, but that we’re providing healthy, nutritious meals to real human beings with real concerns. As a matter of fact, you’re exactly the kind of person we’re trying to reach with our television advertising. That’s what we’ve been doing here all morning, you know—talking about our advertising. Our agency seems to think our customers are morons, as evidenced by the crap they wanted us to go with today.” He glowered at the easel with the poster of the tuna can doing the backstroke. “It’s an embarrassment, isn’t it? So now that I’ve rejected it, they’ve got exactly two weeks to come up with something we won’t be ashamed to put on the air.” He glowered again, this time at the W&W folks. “Well, this isn’t your concern, Mrs. Reiser. Helen.” He rose from his chair and shook my mother’s hand. Mine, too, although he didn’t call me Stacey; he didn’t call me anything. “Thanks for stopping by and reading us the riot act We could all use a little cold water thrown at us from time to time.” He turned to Corbin. “See that we send Helen a complimentary case of tuna, would you, Beasley?”
Corbin said he would, then hustled over and escorted us out the door of the conference room. “Wow. You were a big hit,” he told my mother during our stroll back toward the lobby of the building. “Mr. Terwilliger doesn’t usually dole out parting gifts. He’s on the frugal side, just between us.”
“We won’t tell a soul,” I said, dying to get away from this bizarro tuna company and wondering why I consented to be dragged along in the first place.
We were chitchatting with Corbin and giving him my mother’s mailing address and inching toward freedom when one of the men from the ad agency sprinted down the hall and rushed over to us.
“Don’t go, Mrs. Reiser,” he said breathlessly, grabbing her hand and pumping it. “I’m Peter Sacklin, a vice president of Wylie and Wohlers. I’m the W and W executive in charge of the Fin’s account and I wonder if you’d mind coming back into the conference room for a few minutes.”
My mother’s eyes narrowed. “What for?”
“We’d like to talk to you about the television advertising we’re doing for Fin’s.”
“Talk to me? What do I know about that kind of thing? It’s my daughter who knows about commercials. Personally, I never watch them—except the ones she’s in, of course.”
Peter Sacklin gave me a puzzled look, as if trying to figure out what she could have meant. Obviously, he’d missed me as the Irish Spring Lady, the Taco Bell Lady, etc.
“If you’d just give us a few more minutes of your time, Mrs. Reiser,” he said, “we’ll explain everything.”
My mother shrugged in resignation. “Sure. Why not? I’ve got nothing else to do today.”
Peter Sacklin smiled, took her arm in what I thought was a rather courtly gesture, and walked her back toward the conference room. I, meanwhile, was left standing there with Corbin Beasley, feeling like I’d been turned down for parole.
“Are we supposed to go with them?” I asked.
“We could,” he said. “I’m curious about what they plan to talk to your mother about, aren’t you?”
Was I curious? A little. I just figured that since Terwilliger appreciated my mother’s bluntness, he wanted her blunt opinion of the agency’s ideas. Mostly, I was just glad I wasn’t the recipient of her bluntness for a change.
Corbin and I followed them back into the conference room, pulled up a couple of chairs, and listened.
“Sorry this is so impromptu,” Peter Sacklin was saying to my mother, who had been given a prominent position at the head of the table, to Mr. Terwilliger’s right. “Obviously, we
haven’t had time to prepare a storyboard, let alone a script. But as you heard before, Mrs. Reiser, our client has rejected our latest TV ad campaign and our backs are against the wall here. We need to go on the air with something dynamite and soon—something that will gain market share for Fin’s, something that will really grab the public. Star-Kist has Charlie the Tuna. Chicken of the Sea has the mermaid. And Bumble Bee has the bumblebee. What we want—what we need—is for Fin’s to have you, Mrs. Reiser. Just you, talking to the camera in the same tough, no-nonsense manner that you used with us.”
I bolted up in my chair, felt my stomach tighten, felt my eyes bug out of my head. They wanted my mother to star in their commercial? My mother, who didn’t have a nanosecond of experience as an actress? My mother, who was, well, my mother?
Ridiculous, I scoffed. She’ll never do it. She hates show business and everything remotely related to it. They’ll have to hire some other complaining consumer as their pitchwoman.
“I’m very flattered,” my mother responded, “but I can’t imagine why you’d put me, an ordinary woman in her sixties with the crow’s feet to prove it, on TV. Not when you could get a young one like Heather Locklear.”
Everyone laughed. Everyone except me. Why didn’t she say, Not when you could get a young one like my daughter Stacey? Did she suddenly develop a brain cramp and forget that I did commercials for a living? Did it slip her mind that I was in a goddamn Jim Carrey movie? Did she go nutso during the tour of the cannery—someplace between the fog room with the 100 percent humidity and the thawing room with the smelly fish fumes?
“The reason we want you, Mrs. Reiser,” W&W’s creative supervisor piped up, “is because you’re so credible, so real. When you tell the public about Fin’s, they’ll listen. They’ll listen and they’ll buy.”
“Exactly right,” said Terwilliger, the big cheese. “You have that bluntness we discussed earlier, Helen—a directness that translates into trustworthiness. If you say Fin’s is the best tuna, everyone will believe you.”
My mother tapped his arm. “But I found a bone in my can of Fin’s,” she reminded him. “That’s why I came here in the first place—to complain about your tuna. Now that I’ve seen your operation and met your employees, I understand that mistakes happen every now and then, but it doesn’t mean I would I go on television and endorse your product. I have no intention of lying to the viewers. A bone is still a bone.”
“We don’t want you to lie,” said W&W’s copywriter. “Just the opposite. What we’re playing with at the moment is a problem-solution type of ad. You state the problem, which is that you found a bone in your Fin’s tuna, and then you explain the solution, which is that you visited the cannery and were so impressed with what you saw that you agreed to work for Fin’s, to be the public’s eyes and ears within the company, to make sure that those mothers you talked to us about—the mothers who need to feel secure about the foods they feed their loved ones—will never have to worry when they open a can of Fin’s premium tuna.” He leaned back in his chair and grinned. “I don’t know about everybody else in this room, but I think we’ve got an award-winning commercial on the drawing board. I think we’re looking at making Helen Reiser the next Clara ‘Where’s the Beef?’ Peller.”
There was nodding all around. I, however, was incapable of nodding. My neck was rigid with tension as I flashed back on Clara Peller, the woman in the old Wendy’s hamburger commercials, the one who became an overnight sensation simply by acting crabby. I was stunned by the possibility that my own mother might become an overnight sensation, too, absolutely undone by this odd turn of events.
“But you see,” she said to her new best friends, “I don’t care for show business, never have. I can’t imagine myself standing in front of a camera with a puss full of makeup.”
“Try to focus on the numbers of consumers you’d be reaching,” said the account executive. “We’re talking millions of people here, Mrs. Reiser. How empowering would that be for you to be able to speak directly to them and/or them? You’d be a consumer watchdog for an entire population of mothers just like yourself.”
That seemed to clinch it, that reference to empowerment. I could tell by my mother’s body language. She lifted her head at the sound of the word, tilted it up, rested her elbows on the conference table as if she were suddenly Somebody.
“You’d be great, Helen, really great,” Terwilliger added. “Please say you’ll do this. For our employees on the assembly line, those hardworking ladies you mentioned. And, of course, for the mothers out there, the ones you stand for so articulately and valiantly.”
“Oh, Frank,” she said. They were on a first-name basis now? “For years I’ve been sending out my complaint letters, hoping to create a better world in my own modest way. I suppose it would be nice to have a larger platform, to be able to reach so many people at once through the medium of television, to have my opinion matter for a change.”
To have my opinion matter for a change. That was a dig at me, obviously, because I’d ignored her advice for so many years. But was she actually saying yes to them? Accepting their offer? Agreeing to star in a national TV commercial? Maybe a series of national TV commercials? /
“Sounds like we’ve got a new ad campaign,” said Terwilliger, a big smile on his face as he offered his hand to my mother and helped her rise from her chair. “I, for one, couldn’t be more pleased. How about you, Helen?”
She beamed right back at him, and pledged that she would take her role seriously and work as hard for Fin’s as the women who cut the bones out of the fish.
“Here’s to Helen,” the creative supervisor shouted, as the rest of them cheered and clapped.
I continued to sit there as if I’d been hit by a truck. Who would have believed this? I asked myself. How had a trip to a tuna fish cannery evolved into a life-altering experience for my mother (and, by extension, for me)? And why wasn’t I happier about it? After all, I’d been urging her to get a job, volunteer, do anything other than pester me day and night. And now she’d gotten a job—a great job, as a matter of fact—so what was my problem? What kind of a daughter was I that I wasn’t jumping for joy on this day that had turned out so serendipitously for her? Why wasn’t I thrilled, the way you’re supposed to be when something fabulous happens to someone else, especially to someone you love?
Okay, I knew damn well why. My mother was starring in a television commercial that I wasn’t even asked to audition for and I was jealous. Yeah, jealous of the woman who gave birth to me. It’s embarrassing to admit, but it was true. I was the actress in the family. I was the one who should have been hired. I was the one who had trained and paid my dues and earned the right to appear on television sets across the country, and yet she was the one they wanted.
Couldn’t she have gone out for the senior women’s golf circuit? Couldn’t she have gotten involved in saving the whales? Couldn’t she have written one of those books of helpful hints? Did the arena she decided to enter have to be my arena, for God’s sake?
If there was fairness on this earth, I failed to see it.
ten
“Oh, come on, Stacey. So it’s one measly thirty-second commercial that nobody will ever see,” said Maura, after I called to tell her the news. “It’s not as if tuna fish companies advertise on the Super Bowl. They don’t have huge budgets like Coke and Pepsi.”
“I realize that,” I said. “It’s just a weird feeling having my mother vaulting into my profession. It’s as if we’re in competition all of a sudden.”
“Not really. She’ll do the commercial for Fin’s and that’ll be the end of it, while you’ll go on to have the acting career you always dreamed of. And remember that you asked for this, Stacey. You kept saying, ‘If only she’d find something other than me to occupy her every waking moment.’ Well, now she’s found that something. You’re getting exactly what you wanted, so be gracious about it, huh?”
Maura was right. I should be gracious about it. I was gracious about it. I
was so gracious about it that I called my mother a few days after the trip to the cannery and offered to take her to meet my agent, Mickey Offerman. She would need representation, I figured, someone to deal with the financial side of things. She was a novice in the business, and I would do her a favor and show her the ropes.
“I already have an agent, dear,” she trilled after I’d made the overture. “Peter at the ad agency set me up with Arnold Richter.”
I was speechless. Arnold Richter was the hottest agent in town. I couldn’t have gotten a meeting with him if I’d chained myself to his desk.
“Arnold’s a lovely man,” she went on. “He told me he’s very close to his mother.”
Like he even had a mother. Agents like Arnold Richter were too consumed with dealmaking to have mothers.
“He’s got quite a reputation as a slick talker,” I warned, trying to be protective of her. “If you want me to, I’ll come with you the next time you meet with him.”
“Oh, not to worry,” she said breezily. “I’ve got a great manager now, Karen Latham. She’ll check over everything Arnold does. She handles the actor who plays Joe Isuzu, so she’s very familiar with the kind of work I’ll be doing.”
“Okay, fine. Then you don’t need my help at all.” Sheesh, another conflict of emotions. On one hand, I was relieved that she was being taken care of. On the other, I was hurt—well, not hurt, exactly, but definitely a little put out—that she hadn’t come to me for advice.
Now that I thought about it, she hadn’t called me since the trip to the cannery, hadn’t stopped by my apartment, hadn’t bossed me around. Hallelujah. Sort of.
“What’s the next step with the commercial?” I asked, swallowing the odd little lump in my throat. “When are they shooting it?”
