Producer

by Wendy Walker

  No matter what occurs and when, there is no crystal ball to tell us which direction we should take. There is no instruction book to turn to or anyone who has the answers. It’s basically up to me and my staff, so we have to keep up with everything all the time to make the best decisions we can. We try not to second-guess ourselves. I go with my gut (it’s usually all I have), I depend on my staff, and we book the best show we can produce. When it all looks impossible, I try to be the calm in the midst of the storm. Our reward is that each day, whether last night’s show was great or mediocre, the palette is clean and we get to start all over again, a little wiser for what we learned yesterday. And a little bit more trusting of ourselves.

  FREAKING OUT IS NOT AN OPTION

  When you have to make an important decision and there are a variety of ways to go, the only clear path is to channel your intuition. Check in with your gut. We all have that intuitive gift to some degree. My psychic friends assure me of this, and I know it’s true. Some people just have it honed better than others.

  So, when the stress-o-meter hits ten, remember that losing your cool is not going to help or change the situation. When things get confusing and you feel frazzled and upset, try taking a deep breath and calming yourself down. Do whatever it takes to accomplish this. You may need to leave the room, sit in a quiet place with no music where you can’t be disturbed, and take a moment to go inside yourself. Then ask yourself, What do I really want here? What feels right?

  When you lose your temper and freak out, that behavior negatively impacts others and can throw them off their game. Clearly, we all need to learn from our mistakes, and that includes reviewing the things that did not work, but it doesn’t make sense to upset the apple cart when you’re standing in the middle of it. You can’t stop in the midst of a situation to figure out what happened in the past, because you have to be present and look forward. Once it’s over, you can take the time to figure out what went wrong so it won’t happen again. But screaming and freaking out will only take you further away from your goal of working things out. Losing it will intimidate people and push them away, which is counterproductive to what you are trying to achieve. The truth is that no one wants to work with a screamer, and that kind of negative energy never does any good for anyone.

  When you take some time to get in touch with your feelings and you can hear yourself think, consider both the short-term and the long-term repercussions of any decision you might make. Ask yourself, What will this decision mean to me tomorrow, five days from now, five weeks from now, or five years from now? No matter the nature of the decision you need to make, go with your intuition. If it feels right, go with it. If it doesn’t, walk away.

  I once knew a woman who had five psychics at the ready whenever she needed advice. If the first one didn’t tell her what she wanted to hear, she called the second one, and so on. At the end, she was still confused and she had no ability to make her own decisions.

  Not that you should be isolated and never check with anyone else. Sometimes after you make a decision that feels right, you might want to clarify by checking with a smart friend who really knows you, understands your situation, and absolutely will tell you the truth. For the most part, however, when you go inside and trust yourself, you’ll be amazed at how much easier decisions become. When you stay calm and take all the elements into consideration, a confusing situation will generally turn out a lot better than you might expect!

  CHAPTER 2

  Be Someone Others Want to Be Around

  When I graduated from Hollins University in 1975, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, and neither did most of my friends. Back then, we really didn’t plan our careers like college students do now. In fact, when I think back about my childhood, we didn’t plan much. It was a sign of the times for girls to think more in terms of jobs than careers, and it all followed a somewhat logical plan, with marriage and children usually being the end goal.

  But I was a little different. When I graduated from college, I wanted to leave home and work. My mom would have preferred for me to settle down in Jackson, Michigan, where she and Dad were living. But that didn’t appeal to me. I had already lived in Paris and I wanted to move away and live on my own—despite a terrifying experience.

  It was during my junior year when I joined a program called Hollins Abroad, an opportunity to spend a year in Paris and study art, which was my passion. I went to Paris with two friends, Torrey and Cynthia, and we all lived in the home of a lovely French family. I got pretty fluent in the language and I felt very grown-up, being on my own for the first time and traveling all around the city on the metro.

  One afternoon, I was thrilled to meet Thomas, a cool American guy who suggested he and I meet at La Madeleine, a famous Roman Catholic church, to hear some music. I should have asked him to pick me up or meet me at my place so I wouldn’t have to travel alone through the streets of Paris. Our dean at Hollins had warned us to be careful about being tricked and abducted, and he suggested we always travel with someone else.

  Still, I threw caution to the wind. I hailed a cab by myself and got in. “L’église Madeleine, s’il vous plaît,” I said in French, feeling very cosmopolitan. As the cabdriver began to ask me questions in French, I felt proud of myself that I could answer him—until the nature of his questions began to concern me.

  “What are you doing here in Paris?” he started quite innocently.

  “I’m going to school,” I answered him in French.

  “Do you live in a dorm?” he asked. What business was that of his?

  “No,” I answered quickly. “I live with a family.”

  “Do they wait up for you?” he wanted to know.

  Now I was beginning to feel anxious. “Yes,” I said, “they wait up for me. Could you hurry, because my friend is waiting for me right now and he’s probably getting worried and making some phone calls.”

  The cabdriver picked up speed as I had requested, but that only made me more anxious. Then, all of a sudden, he pulled over to the side of the road two blocks away from the church. I grabbed the door handle to jump out of the car but he turned, reached into the backseat, and placed his hand firmly over the lock. A small car pulled up behind us and stopped. A man jumped out of the car behind us and opened my door from the outside. He reached for me as if he were about to pull me out of the car when the driver stopped him. “Ce n’est pas bon. On ne peux pas faire ça,” he said. “This isn’t good. We can’t do this.”

  In an instant, the man who was trying to pull me toward him let go of me and slammed my car door shut. My driver took off, sped forward for two blocks, pulled up in front of the Madeleine, and I dashed out, slamming the cab door behind me. No one followed me as he sped away and I was breathless, standing in front of the church, scared to death. I had just come so close to being abducted I could hardly breathe, and I was grateful to be alive.

  Despite my near abduction, I decided to leave the security of my family in Michigan and go to Washington DC, anyway, rent a cheap place with some friends, and find a job. I had lots of interests and I wanted to experience life and the workplace so I wouldn’t end up being bored or boring. My father understood my desire to break away and he gave me the grand sum of forty dollars to get started on my new life. “Go to Washington,” he told me. “If you don’t find a job in two weeks, write yourself a check for a plane ticket and come back home.”

  When my five friends and I arrived in Washington, we found an inexpensive apartment to share in Georgetown, just outside of DC. That took care of my forty dollars, so I headed straight over to a popular clothing store called Brooks Brothers (it was very posh at the time) to apply for a job in sales. I needed some money coming in right away so I could eat. I wanted to continue at school to get my master’s degree in art. But if I did, I would have to pay for it myself.

  The job interview was my first real one, and I tried to present myself in a good light. I knew the position was competitive, so during my interview I made sure to be frien
dly, positive, and to look like I had something on the ball. After all, I had lived in Paris! I must have done okay because I was hired on the spot as a salesperson for Brooks Brothers. Although I knew this job would be temporary, at least I had a paycheck coming in. I had bigger goals than sales, but this was exactly what I needed to do right now.

  I concentrated on being the best salesperson I could be. In the midseventies, there were very few women on the floor at a primarily men’s store, not because men were considered better than women at sales. There was no way to know, because in the posh clothing stores back then, it was considered improper for a woman to ask a man, “What side do you dress on?” when he was buying pants that needed to be hemmed. I actually didn’t know what that meant until a fellow salesperson told me. It seemed that any reference to a man’s genitals was out of the question for a woman at the time, so we could not fit the men in suits.

  Of course, that was where the money was. While a suit might cost a couple hundred dollars and in many cases, up from there, a shirt cost about $18.50. Ties, undershirts, and handkerchiefs were inexpensive and we worked on commission. I did the math and realized that I would need to sell a load of stuff to make any money at all, so that was exactly what I set out to do.

  I served many a VIP during the time I worked at Brooks Brothers in Washington, including Ethel Kennedy, Nancy Kissinger, and Eunice Shriver. I always made sure I approached them with a good attitude. I was a popular saleswoman because of that, and I remember my very first customer, a distinguished man named Clark Clifford, former US Secretary of Defense. When I approached him on the floor to say, “Can I help you?” with a nice smile, it turned out that he wanted a large number of custom-made shirts with monograms. They were quite expensive, and my very first sale totaled a couple thousand dollars.

  When a veteran salesman saw me serving ex-Secretary Clifford, he sized me up as a “just out of college chick,” and he came over to rescue my sale that did not need rescuing. I did need him, however, to help me ring up the order since I was unfamiliar with the system as yet, but the commission was mine. Buoyed by making such a strong first sale, I continued my efforts and I swiftly became the highest earning salesperson on the staff, man or woman, without ever selling a suit.

  One afternoon at about 4 p.m., after the manager of the store, Bob Mallon, had finished an afternoon cocktail, he called me to his office. “Okay, Wendy,” he said, “how are you doing this? I want to know exactly what you’re doing.”

  “Well,” I said, “I walk up to a customer. I smile, and I say, ‘If you need anything, I’ll be right over there.’ And I walk away.”

  “Why do you do that?” Bob wanted to know.

  “I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I don’t like to be bugged when I’m shopping at a store. I hate it when someone starts following me around. If I greet them with a smile and tell them where I’ll be if they have any questions, they find me and ask. And they don’t feel bugged or pressured.”

  “That can’t be all,” he said. “What else do you do?”

  I thought for a moment. “Some of the sales staff don’t go out of their way to make a sale for just a tie or a scarf that costs only about ten dollars. They prefer to talk with one another instead of waiting around. But in my mind, ten times ten equals a hundred dollars. I see each sale as important, and I make the customer’s experience a good one. I don’t care how many times I ring up a ten-dollar sale. I just know it adds up.”

  Excited, Bob went to a sales meeting in New York and told his bosses about this interesting saleswoman who was making more than most of the men. I ended up working at Brooks Brothers for the next two years, earning annually about thirty-four thousand dollars in commissions, an unheard of amount at the time, especially for a woman who was not allowed to sell suits. I was thrilled, able to go out to dinner when I wanted, and I did my artwork, my first love, on the side. I had no idea how long it would be before I ever matched that salary again, and at the time, I took it in my stride. My dad, however, hoped I would stay on at Brooks Brothers for a good long time because he got tons of new shirts every month!

  The trouble was that I got tired of being a sales clerk. True, I was earning a really good living and I was meeting interesting people. But there was only so far a salesperson could go. I wanted more. I wasn’t sure what that looked like until one of my customers told me he wanted to open an art gallery. He and I had discussed art and he knew it was my first love. So he asked me if I was interested in leaving my present job to run the art gallery he was about to open. I did it. I left Brooks Brothers to manage a small new operation called the Huber Art Gallery for five thousand dollars a year, a fraction of the salary I’d been making. Looking back, it seems like an impulsive move and not the smartest thing to do, but I couldn’t remain a sales clerk forever. I had started my master’s degree work at George Washington University, but I stopped when I left Brooks Brothers. I just couldn’t afford it anymore.

  When I began working in the gallery, I did as much outreach as I could, but very few people wandered in. When they did, they usually walked back out pretty quickly since we really didn’t have much interesting art to speak of. I spent most days alone, answering the few phone calls I received and keeping the place tidy, an easy job since we had so little foot traffic.

  I was sweeping the floor one morning (again) for lack of anything else to do, when the telephone rang. I ran to answer it and I was caught off guard by the voice on the other end of the line.

  “Is this Wendy?” asked a female voice.

  “Yes, it is,” I answered.

  “This is Ethel Kennedy,” she said.

  I paused. There was simply no way Ethel Kennedy would be calling me. But I had served her at the store and we had carried on lively conversations. In fact, I was so stunned that at first I thought someone was playing a trick on me. Now, when I think back, I should have suspected it was Ethel herself, considering the way my life has played out. It seems like fate has had a way of placing me in circumstances that are unexpected and extremely foretelling.

  Let me explain. It started when I was three months old and my family just happened to move into the same house in Chappaqua, New York, where the former president and Secretary of State Clinton live today. Then, about three years later, in 1956, we were living in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, when Richard Nixon was running for vice president for a second term.

  He was on a whistle-stop tour when my mother took me to the station to watch his train come chugging in and slowly stop. There he was, standing at the back of the caboose, waving at people. It was chilly and I had on a pink flannel coat with a fur collar. Mom always dressed me impeccably in very short dresses and lovely coats. On this particularly cold day, however, I was wearing a pink number I called my “fat coat,” because it was so thick and fluffy it made me look like a pink snowball.

  Apparently, vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon noticed it, too. When the train pulled to a stop, he scanned the crowd for a moment and then swooped down, lifted me from my mother’s arms, and held me up for a photo op. Mamie Eisenhower, the wife of the presidential candidate, was also on the train and she handed me a rose. Later, we dried it in an atlas where it remained for many years.

  Of course, I don’t remember the actual moment. I was only three. But what I do remember is seeing the newspaper the next day in Pennsylvania and there I was, in the arms of Richard Nixon in my fat coat. The man meant little to me at the time but I recall noticing that something could happen one day and end up in the newspaper the next. That was the first time I made that connection. Since his name was printed and mine wasn’t, was that an omen that my life’s work would be behind the scenes instead of in front of the camera?

  Back at the gallery, Ethel spoke again. “Are you the Wendy who used to wait on me at Brooks Brothers?” she asked.

  “Yes, that’s me. I served you. How can I help you?” I asked politely, starting to believe that she really was Ethel Kennedy.

  “How are you?”
she asked.

  “I’m fine,” I answered. “How are you?”

  “Great. Listen, I’m having a party tonight for Don Klosterman of the LA Rams. Would you like to come and be Joe’s dinner partner?”

  I inhaled sharply. The now late Don Klosterman (his name meant nothing to me at that moment) was a legend in the world of football, building winning teams in three different leagues throughout his career, I would learn later. Ethel Kennedy was asking me to be Joe’s dinner partner, her handsome and savvy son with her late husband, Robert F. Kennedy.

  “Can you come to dinner tonight at Hickory Hill?” she asked.

  “Okay,” I said haltingly.

  The very name, Hickory Hill, carried with it a sense of elegance and history. This colonial brick house in McLean, Virginia, built around 1815, was used as a temporary headquarters by General George B. McClellan during the American Civil War. The home had originally been bought by Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, who sold it to Ethel and her husband, Bobby. Who didn’t want to go to dinner at Hickory Hill?

  “Where do you live?” Ethel asked.

  I gave her my address in Georgetown.

  “I’ll have Caroline Croft pick you up and bring you to Hickory Hill.”

  I hung up the phone, wondering how on earth Ethel had found me. When the phone rang again (two calls made it a busy day at the gallery), it was my boss from Brooks Brothers. “Wendy, did Ethel Kennedy just call you?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Good. She was looking for you and I gave her your number. So what did she want?” he asked eagerly.

  “She wants me to come over for dinner,” I answered, hardly able to believe it myself.