MASH 12 MASH goes to Texas
Page 6
(Babcock Burton & Company were firm believers in advertising. Stripped of taxes, it cost Babcock Burton & Company just under fifteen cents to deliver a package of cigarettes to the “final vendor.” Of that fifteen cents, just under ten cents was spent buying tobacco (or growing it themselves on their vast farms), drying it, roasting it, chopping it up into little pieces, making cigarettes out of it, wrapping the cigarettes and trucking them across the country. The balance of their cost, a little over a nickel a pack, was spent on advertising.
(There was a similar cost breakdown for other products. Four cents of the pre-tax eighteen cents that an Old Dutchman Corona cigar cost was set aside for advertising, and every time a snuff-dipper laid out his fifty-nine cents for a tin of Old Mountain Lion, Babcock Burton & Company plowed 8.9 cents right back into advertising.
(The advertising game works on a percentage of the money spent on advertising, and Sadie Prausnitz was still learning the ropes in the mailroom of J. Walter Batten-Barton, Advertising, Inc., when she computed that 8.9 cents times four million tins of Old Mountain Lion (not to mention the cigars, cigarettes and chewing tobacco) was a hell of a lot of money.
(One could not, of course, simply walk into the North Carolina corporate headquarters of Babcock Burton & Company, ask to speak to Mrs. Babcock Burton III, Presidentress and Chairperson of the Board, then announce that you wanted to handle their (more accurately, her) advertising. With such a pot of gold at the bottom of the Babcock Burton & Company rainbow, there was a lot of competition.
(It took years for Sadie Prausnitz, by then Sydney Prescott, to get inside the Babcock Burton & Company corporate headquarters with an advertising proposal that even slightly interested the most junior assistant manager of relatively unimportant product advertising.
(But, finally, to quote from Advertising and Little Me, Sydney Prescott’s autobiography, she was “given the chance,” and a contract was let for Sydney Prescott & Associates, Advertising, to assume advertising responsibility for one of the lesser Babcock Burton products, Old Billy Goat Snuff. Recognizing that opportunity had knocked at her door, and that it was unlikely to knock again, Ms. Prescott decided to devote the full efforts of Sydney Prescott & Associates, Advertising, to Old Billy Goat Snuff, to the exclusion of all other activity. Her cousin Maxwell was called down from his “ivory tower”* to lend his efforts to the project, which could make or break her newborn and heavily mortgaged agency.
(* At the time, Max Prausnitz, Sadie’s paternal cousin, was drawing the public’s attention to the fine products offered by Smiling Sam Shapiro’s Pre-Owned Motor Salon. When called to the Old Billy Goat Snuff project, he had been atop Mr. Shapiro’s flagpole, the highest in the Bronx, for thirty-six days, and the full-length dress and blonde Marilyn-Monroe wig in which he was attired were, frankly, getting a little ratty. But, although Mr. Prausnitz modestly declines to talk about it, he does hold the Bronx flagpole-sitting record for female impersonators atop flagpoles over thirty-five feet.)
(Sydney Prescott had noticed, with professional interest, an advertising campaign, mounted with some success by a competitor, which informed potential female cigarette customers that they had come, in Sydney’s quaint little paraphrase, “a long distance, Süssl.”
(She had already learned, at J. Walter Batten-Barton, Advertising, Inc., the two sacred principles of advertising, to wit: “Nothing Succeeds Like Success” and “Imitation Is Cheaper Than Imagination.” Thus, she was able to mount her first campaign with relative ease.
(Lance Fairbanks, a brilliant photographer whom Maxwell Prausnitz had met on the sand dunes of Fire Island, whence he had gone to commune with nature, and who was fortunately at liberty at the time, was thus able to go to work not only immediately, but on what Ms. Prescott described in her book as “a delayed compensation basis.”*
(* As Ms. Prescott put it to him at the time, “Elroy, you get yours when and if.” What she meant by this was that Mr. Fairbanks (still using, at that time, the name he was born with, Elroy Finley) would be compensated for his photographic endeavors when Sydney Prescott & Associates was paid by Babcock Burton & Company. The "if” was included in her statement because the cold truth was that she had not actually received a contract from Babcock Burton & Company to handle Old Billy Goat Snuff. What she actually had was a promise from the junior assistant manager of relatively unimportant products advertising, whom she had trapped in an elevator, “to look at whatever she came up with.” But, as Ms. Prescott always says at the slightest provocation, “If you can’t trust Babcock Burton, whom can you trust?”)
(Among Elroy Finley/Lance Fairbanks’ social acquaintances was a rather tall young lady whose biological response to the male gender was every bit as wild and uncontrollable as Elroy/Lance’s biological response to the female gender.
(One afternoon, when they were sitting around the lady’s apartment killing time by doing each other’s hair, inspiration struck. Without even waiting for the Clairol Ash-Blonde to complete its work, Lance jumped up from his chair and posed the lady, whose name was Fern, but who preferred to be called “Fred,” against a poster for the Folies-Bergere, which Fred had hung there to conceal a hole in the plaster.
(In that now famous shot, Fred, attired in a denim shirt open to the belly button and a pair of cut-offs, held a can of Old Billy Goat Snuff so that the label could be clearly seen in her left hand, and she held her right hand, palm down, under her nose, in the manner of snuff sniffers.
(Lance immediately developed the film and printed it in ll-by-14-inch format. The prints were dried with Fred’s hair drier, and Lance rushed out of the apartment to have the copy lettered onto the film.*
(* As Lance reported later, he knew that the gods were smiling on his idea when a handsome chap answered his knock at the door at his shop, Greenwich Village Calligraphy Salon and Signs Painted. The handsome chap, of course, was Brucie.)
(The photograph of Fred, in her cut-offs and denim shirt, sniffing snuff while looking directly at the camera lens, and over the one, short, brilliant line of copy, “Up Yours, Honey!’ ” won the Kevin Farrell Award for Advertising Genius—“The Kewie”—at the annual advertising profession banquet.
(While the approbation of one’s professional peers was, of course, stimulating, more important was the check from Babcock Burton & Company, which accompanied the contract that gave them actual responsibility for the entire advertising campaign for Old Billy Goat Snuff. The check was for forty-five hundred dollars, representing six percent of the previous year’s gross sales, seventy-five thousand dollars, of Old Billy Goat Snuff.
(In what was described as a stroke of genius, Ms. Sydney Prescott spent the entire budget to have Lance Fairbanks’ photo of Fred sniffing snuff reproduced on oversized bumper stickers. She and Fred then spent long hours affixing them to mirrors in ladies’ rest rooms in Y.W.C.A.’s, Y.W.H.A.’s, singles bars and in certain Greenwich Village saloons recommended by Fred. Giving credit where credit is due, it was Fred who conceived the notion of offering the “Up Yours, Honey!” sticker/posters for sale in various “in,” avante-garde and women’s lib publications.
(The rest, of course, is advertising history. Sales of Old Billy Goat Snuff skyrocketed overnight. Within months Olde Billie Goat** was selling as much in thirty days as it had sold in twelve months, and when the campaign went national, sales exceeded even Ms. Sydney Prescott’s wildest expectations.
(** The change in name and spellin was Fred’s idea.)
(The result was a major shake-up of the advertising policies of the Relatively Unimportant Products Division of Babcock Burton & Company. Longtime advertising agencies were given an unceremonial heave-ho, and the work was reassigned to Sydney Prescott & Associates.*
(* The Associates now included, of course, Lance and Brucie and Fred, who was given the title of Executive Creative Consultant, although she continued to be the model for the Olde Billie Goat account.)
(But Ms. Prescott was still no closer to getting her hands on the real
ly lucrative cigar and cigarette accounts than she ever had been, and there seemed to be absolutely nothing she could do about it.
(And then there intervened what Sydney Prescott thought of as “fate” and what Mrs. Babcock Burton III thought of as “[expletive deleted] governmental interference with the free enterprise system.”
(Cigar lovers, incurable readers of fine print and the insatiably curious, but few others, are sometimes aware of an announcement placed in the smallest available print in the most obscure position on many cigar boxes. This announcement reads: “These Cigars Are Predominantly Natural Tobacco with Non-Tobacco Ingredients Added.” This somewhat horrifying announcement is printed on the boxes at governmental decree, following what the government considered to be a far too liberal interpretation on the part of cigar manufacturers of what actually constituted tobacco.
(There is more to a tobacco plant than leaves, just as there is more to a corn plant than succulent yellow kernels. In the not unreasonable belief that, since the ultimate consumer was going to burn the product rather than eat it, he (or she) would be unlikely to notice the difference, cigar manufacturers began to include in their product first the tough vein that runs down the center of the leaf; then the stem that affixes the leaf to the stalk; then the stalk itself. When the cigar manufacturers were discovered by an official variously described as “a miserable government snooper” and “a dedicated public servant” to be washing off the roots, then chopping them up for inclusion in the final product, the cry of “Enough is enough!” was heard, and the little line about non-tobacco products became required on cigar products.
(Babcock Burton & Company, which was recognized as a leader of the industry, had gone even further in interpreting the word “tobacco.” They came to the conclusion that anything green that grew in a tobacco field was, per se and de facto, tobacco.
(Among the things that grow in tobacco fields are weeds and various other plants, including a variant of Soja hispida. Soja hispida is, of course, the common soybean, described by some as one of God’s better beans. The variation of Soja hispida (Soja hispida Burtonosis, to be specific) growing in Babcock Burton’s North Carolina fields, however, was not your ordinary run-of-the-mill soybean. For one thing, it produced, compared to the other, standard, soybean, very little oil. For another, the only vegetable killer that worked on it was even more effective on tobacco plants.
(This posed no real problem for long years. Soja hispida Burtonosis was simply roasted, toasted, ground up and included in Babcock Burton’s cigars. And then the dedicated public servants/miserable bureaucrats spoke again. “Henceforth and forever more,” they said (or words to this effect), “no more Soja hispida Burtonosis in cigars, even with a disclaimer.”
(What the government had learned, after extensive tests, at God only knows what cost to the taxpayer, was that while there wasn’t very much oil in the bean of Soja hispida Burtonosis, what there was, when burned, like when ground up in a cigar, was nearly identical, chemically speaking, to JP-4 fuel. JP-4, for the uninitiated, is sort of a low-grade kerosene used to run jet engines.
(In the belief that the cigar smoker should not be inhaling the smoke from not-entirely consumed JP-4 fuel, the prohibition was issued, and no amount of money, no matter how liberally dispensed in the halls of Congress, saw the prohibition lifted.
(The result was that enormous piles of Soja hispida Burtonosis began to grow around Babcock Burton & Company’s tobacco warehouses. For some time, the North Carolina skies were dark with black clouds of smoke rising from enormous (haystack size) piles of burning Soja hispida Burtonosis. Then the Environmental Protection Agency jumped into the act, saying that the smoke was not only interfering with the ozone layer in the stratosphere, but making people throw up as far away as Winston-Salem, and that it had forced the 82nd Airborne Division to give up practice parachute-jumping at Fort Bragg. The burning was ordered stopped.
(It was at this point that Mrs. Babcock Burton III, after due deliberation, with her senior staff of executives gathered nervously before her satin wood desk in her oak-paneled office, took desperate action.
(“Send for that nutty advertising broad from New York,” she said.
(“Right, B.B.,” one of her executives said. “Immediately!”
(“Which nutty advertising broad was that, B.B.?” another executive asked.
(“The one who looks like Bella Abzug and has all the old maids sniffing snuff,” Mrs. Babcock Burton III replied. “If she’s crazy enough to come up with an idea like that, she’s liable to have an idea about this [expletive deleted] Soja hispida Burtonosis.'”)
Chapter Six
(In the belief that news of failure serves to do nothing but feed discouragement, Mrs. Babcock Burton III had not told her senior executive staff that she had just had news of failure. Her son, Babcock Burton IV, had telephoned only an hour before the emergency meeting to report that none of the pigs on the Babcock Burton Experimental Farm would eat Soja hispida Burtonosis, no matter what he did to it, and so far he had tried grinding, cracking, boiling, steaming, mashing and, just for the hell of it, mixing it with pig feed.
(“No use, Mother,” Babcock said. “They won’t touch it.”
(“Never say die, dear,” Mrs. Burton replied, then hung up.
(Soja hispida Burtonosis aside, Babcock IV, known to his friends as “Bubba,” was Mrs. Burton’s greatest problem. A mommy of the old school, she believed it was high time that her first and only born should find the right girl and settle down in the home of his choice, either the villa in Santa Monica, the apartment in New York, the ski lodge in Vail, the pied-a-terre in London or, for that matter, right there in the cottage in Burton, North Carolina. While Mrs. Burton was aware that two families should not share one roof, she wasn’t entirely sure the rule applied to the cottage, whose roof covered one hundred twenty-eight rooms on three floors.
(He was, after all, old enough. He was twenty-two. She herself had married his father, then nineteen, when she was sixteen, and the memory of the four years of their marriage, before Babcock Burton III had, in his cups, fallen off the yacht, was her most precious possession.
(Bubba, in some ways, was just like his father. He was tall and blond and handsome, with a sturdy body and firm white teeth. And, like his father, he was just a shade wild. Like Daddy, he had quit college and run away from home. But Daddy had run away to get married, and Bubba had run away to join the army. He had spent three years as a sergeant in the Green Berets and then had come home with the announcement that, now that he had seen the world, all he wanted to do henceforth was run the farm.
(But, unlike Daddy, Bubba didn’t spend all of his time chasing girls. Quite the reverse. He spent most of his time avoiding them.
(“Mother,” he had told her when she brought the subject up as tactfully as she knew how, “things have changed since your era of long ago. It is now the girls who chase the boys, and while I find the attention paid me flattering, I want to be something more to the girl I ultimately marry than a sex object. Besides, I’m still young. Let me enjoy my innocent youth sky-diving with my pals over at Fort Bragg; let me spend as much time as possible with my pigs, while there is still time. Before you know it, the cutest piglet is an eight-hundred-pound boar. And, really, I am much too young to pledge my heart to any one girl.”
(Although it was costing Babcock Burton & Company more money than Mrs. Babcock Burton III, whose first name was Josephine, liked to think about, she was in a way pleased that the problem vis-à-vis Soja hispida Burtonosis had come up. It was the first corporate problem in which Bubba Burton had shown the slightest interest. She was as sorry that feeding the pigs with what she thought of as “that goddamned bean” had proved a failure for Bubba in his first attempt to solve a corporate problem as she was that it hadn’t done a thing about the mountains of beans that grew by the day.
(And so Josephine Burton was willing to listen to any suggestion, however wild, from whomsoever, however weird, had one.
(She was not prepared for the idea, however, that sprang from the purple-lipsticked lips of Ms. Sydney Prescott as soon as the problem had been put to her.
(“Why don’t you commission Sydney Prescott & Associates,” Ms. Prescott had replied without a moment’s hesitation, “to come up with a nice little package, and a campaign for the package, of course, and sell this stuff for people to eat?”
(Bubba, like his father, always liked a good laugh, and so Josephine Burton had, right then, put in a call to him at the farm. He was finally located on a tractor, and the conversation was carried on through the modern miracle known as C.B.:
(“Pigman, this is Little Momma. Got your ears on? Come back.”
(“Ten-four, Little Momma,” Bubba replied. “What’s your Ten-twenty? Come back.”
(“Little Momma’s at work, Pigman, with Weird Yankee Beaver. Come back.”
(“Little Momma, Pigman’s told you to stop finding beavers for me.”
(“This isn’t that kind of a beaver, Pigman. This is a funny beaver.”
(“What kind of a funny beaver? Come back.”
(“This one wants us to sell Soja hispida Burtonosis as food for humans.”
(“What’s so funny about that, Little Momma?”
(“Pigman, you told Little Momma yourself that the pigs won’t eat it,” Josephine Burton said. “Come back.”
(“Little Momma, Pigman has told you and told you that pigs are smarter than people. Your funny beaver may have something. Come back.”
(“You really think so, Pigman?”
(“Ten-four, Little Momma. Give her a shot at it. Seventy-threes to you and the funny beaver. Pigman going Ten-ten and standing by. King-king-queen, Seven-zero-one-zero, Mobile Unit Four, out.”
(Ms. Sydney Prescott was given a carte blanche contract that very afternoon to develop a campaign to get rid of the goddamned bean by selling it as food for human consumption, together with an understanding that if she were successful, Babcock Burton & Company would look upon her company with “special favor” when it came time to award advertising contracts for Babcock Burton & Company cigars and cigarettes.