by Jonathan Dee
That was on a Friday. A week later, with the pitch in Philadelphia just three days away, Osbourne had not been in touch. Anxiety in the office had given way to gallows humor as the eight staffers faced the prospect of traveling together to Philadelphia and standing helplessly before the Doucette search committee with absolutely nothing to say. Roman bought one of those old desktop wooden labyrinths, with a marble one maneuvered around a series of holes, at a vintage toy store and played with it at his desk all day long. At two o’clock he announced that he couldn’t take it anymore and went home for the weekend. So John was alone in their office when the phone rang.
“John!” The voice was so lively and forthcoming that he didn’t recognize it right away. “How have you been? It’s Mal Osbourne.”
John glanced through the open office door to the empty hallway. “Fine, thank you,” he said. “I … well, how are you, sir?”
Osbourne laughed. “I can really hear the South in your voice, on the phone,” he said. “Listen, I won’t keep you, here’s why I’m calling: I’m driving down to Philadelphia for the thing on Monday, and I wanted to know if you needed a ride down.”
John swallowed. “Well,” he said, “that’s extremely kind of you. But the others are going down together, on the Metroliner, including my partner, and I already made plans to meet them. I don’t …”
“Sorry?” Osbourne said.
“I don’t think it would look right, for me to cancel on them, and arrive with you. I mean thank you for the offer, I’m sure I would prefer it. But just in terms of … decorum.”
“Ah,” Osbourne said. He sounded embarrassed. “You’re probably right. I hadn’t even thought about it. You’re right. Very thoughtful of you, very …Well, I guess I’ll see you at the Nikko on Monday then.”
“Sir?” John blurted out.
“Sir?” Osbourne repeated, with gentle mockery. Perhaps he was one of those people who were most themselves on the telephone, like Glenn Gould. “Mal.”
“Mal, I just wanted to ask quickly, while I had you on the phone, if you, which of the approaches, the four approaches, you decided to go with for Doucette.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Osbourne said. “Right. None of them.”
“None of them?”
“That’s right. Well, see you Monday then? Have a good weekend.”
Within a minute John realized that he had made a mistake by even asking: for, no matter what the answer had been, he would now have to ride with his seven colleagues on the train to Philadelphia knowing something they didn’t know. He couldn’t tell them what he had learned without explaining how he had come to learn it, and in the process estranging himself from their trust, through no real fault of his own.
They made the trip on the crowded Metroliner, sitting together in two adjacent double seats, empty-handed, plotting revenge for what they saw as their impending humiliation. Mick, a bald copywriter who had been at CLO longer than any of them – his work for Doucette had actually won a Clio three years ago – showed them a list he had made over the weekend of the most expensive restaurants in Philadelphia, where they might all go for an obscene blowout lunch on the company dime. The meeting was scheduled for 11 a.m., but since none of them had anything to say, they didn’t imagine that making a noon lunch reservation would present any problem.
A Daily Event Schedule in the lobby of the Nikko directed them to a tenth-floor conference room. It was ten-thirty when they pushed open the door and saw Osbourne standing in the center of the white, thickly carpeted room, at the head of a rectangular conference table. Behind him were arrayed four large easels, each covered by a black cloth. Osbourne wore black jeans above a shiny pair of cowboy boots, a blue silk shirt, and the same light floral tie he had worn that summer morning in Soho with John. He had shaved off his beard and mustache.
“Welcome, everybody!” he said brightly; and then, incredibly, “John! Good to see you again!”
“Mr Osbourne,” John said, horrified.
“Will you take care of the introductions?” Osbourne said.
Dry-mouthed, John introduced his seven colleagues to their boss, each of whom was staring at John in wary amazement.
“I’d like you all to sit over here, on either side of me,” Osbourne said, pointing to the side of the table opposite the windows. “We have a few minutes before the Doucette people arrive, so there’s coffee and bagels over in the corner if you like.” John wouldn’t have believed, from their only other encounter, that Osbourne had it in him to be so upbeat, so socially attentive. “Roman Gagliardi,” Osbourne said meditatively, and Roman, who was already seated with his head in his hands, looked up at him warily. “You’re the guy who did those excellent spots for Fiat, do I remember that right?”
“What the fuck is under those sheets?” Roman said.
Everyone turned to stare, but Osbourne either did not catch the impolitic hostility in Roman’s voice or was able to ignore it. “Not something that any of you have seen before,” he said genially. “Better it should be a surprise, I think.”
“But what if we’re asked questions about it?” Andrea said. “We’ll be asked to defend it, that’s the way these things work, isn’t it?”
“Often,” Osbourne said, “it is. But today I don’t want you to worry about that. It’s all taken care of. Your job today is simple: we all sit on the same side of the table and we project the unspoken impression that we’re all on the same team.”
Andrea frowned, but at the same time, John could see, she and some of the others were visibly relieved. If anyone was going to be put on the spot today, it wasn’t going to be them. Dale sat down in the swivel chair next to John and looked at him as if he had never seen him before.
“Oh, John!” Osbourne said suddenly. “I meant to tell you. I bought the shark!”
John smiled wanly.
At five of eleven a group of young men and women in unfashionable suits entered the conference room, and fanned out uncertainly by the door. The nine CLO representatives stood politely behind their chairs. This was the fourth of the five presentations the Doucette marketing executives would hear in this same conference room in a two-week period: John was unsure why they should seem so nervous. Behind them walked in two older men. The younger of the two, who was nearly bald and wore small, round, horn-rimmed glasses, went straight up to the table and extended one hand to Osbourne, holding back his necktie with the other.
“Mal, I presume?” he said. “We appreciate your coming down today. This of course is Mr Harold Doucette.”
John had trouble suppressing a smile at that sycophantic “of course”: but then he realized that to these junior executives at a family-owned company, and to their own employees, that stony, white-haired, large-featured, clear-eyed visage was probably as scarily omnipresent as a portrait of Mao.
Osbourne walked around the table to shake Mr Doucette’s hand. “We’re honored by your presence here today, sir,” he said.
Doucette nodded curtly. “I was surprised to hear your request,” he said, taking a seat. “If request is the word. This is the only one of the five presentations where my presence was considered necessary.”
Everyone was seated now except Osbourne, who continued talking as he made his way back around the table. None of the Doucette people had touched the food, or even poured a cup of coffee; no one wanted to be seen ingesting in the presence of the old man himself. John saw their surprised expressions and discreet nudges and could overhear some of their critical whisperings about the absence of any slide projectors, any TV and VCR, any sound system. Just the four black-draped easels, like a high school science fair. It was not uncommon for agency spending on a pitch for a major account like this to go well into five figures. In the last week or so, John knew, these same marketing people must have beheld some sweaty, script-holding ad execs wearing lots of Doucette clothing and otherwise making clowns of themselves in this very same conference room.
“I wanted you here,” Osbourne said, “because we ha
ve some very serious issues to discuss, issues that are at once fundamental to doing business in the fin de siècle and also somewhat of a departure in terms of past strategy, past ideas; and, with due respect to Mr Gracey here, I didn’t want you to hear these ideas filtered or secondhand.” He sat down across from Mr Doucette.
It was not lost on John that he alone might have reason to find Osbourne’s assured, charismatic manner, his easy command of the room, strange or even ominous, given the amazing contrast it presented to his moody, insular silence when they had last met. All that was strange about it, though, was how connected the two states seemed. It was as if Osbourne were emerging from a sort of chrysalis of personality: developed, brilliant, natural, and inexplicable.
“Doucette’s sales have gone up,” Osbourne said, “in each of the three years since Canning Leigh & Osbourne took over its national advertising account. However, that’s not good enough for you. I understand that. I understand that, at your level, competition, more than money, is the nature of the game. You blame CLO’s advertising for the plateau Doucette seems to have reached in terms of its growth percentage. Well, such cause-and-effect relationships are notoriously hard to prove, but I will agree with you on one thing: our advertising for Doucette stinks. It’s lousy. I can hardly stand to look at it.”
He rose and walked over to the first easel. Pulling the cloth on to the floor, he revealed a blowup of a six-month-old magazine ad for Doucette’s Oxford shirts. It featured a black and white Bruce Weber–style photo of a well-known young movie actress, wearing the shirt with most of the buttons undone, and with the tails tied into a knot at her midriff. “Wear What You Like,” the copy began. John recognized it right away as Dale and Andrea’s work. He didn’t look over at them.
Osbourne stood there gazing at the sample ad for as long as a minute – an expansive silence, as if he had forgotten the others were waiting for him. Then he looked back at Mr Doucette.
“Let me tell you something about myself,” he said, in a softer voice. “I hate advertising.”
John felt his heart racing. He wondered if what he was witnessing was going to cross the line from humiliating failure into a kind of larger-than-life disaster, a Hindenburg of ad pitches.
“I hate it so much I want to kill it. Have you ever hated anything that much, sir?”
Mr Doucette wasn’t sure where to turn his eyes. No one said anything.
“I see something like this, and … and you have to multiply it by like a billion, that’s the problem, to get an idea of the cultural noise, the mental noise, advertising like this creates, you have to look at this ad and then close your eyes and imagine a billion images just like it, all speaking at the same time, all of them saying nothing. A huge, overwhelming, stupefying nothing. Images like this open their mouths and nothing comes out, and yet the noise they make is deafening.”
Jerry Gracey, who had lured Mr Doucette to this meeting with the promise of meeting one of the legendary geniuses of the ad business, had made a tent out of his hands and was looking inside it.
“What I’m proposing today,” Osbourne said, unruffled, “is not advertising.”
“It’s not,” Doucette said, with the indulgent air of a man who is holding his wrath for later.
“No, sir. Not as the word is understood. Because I don’t want to speak in that language anymore. Not that I don’t know it. Christ knows I’m fluent in it. But advertising, traditional advertising, is about nothing. It’s about—” he gestured at the exposed ad – “it’s about movie stars. Its great resources don’t concern themselves with anything important. It’s not about life and death. And I ask myself – why can’t it be about life and death?”
“Death?” Doucette said skeptically.
“It’s just a form, after all – advertising, I mean – and so the question of content is wide open. It’s a form for the massive production and global distribution of simple visual messages; staggering, really, if you think about it. Why should it be limited to the perfection of titillating people sexually? Mr Doucette, you’re a rich man. Because of that, and because of your position of power as the head of a large concern, you have the greatest means of communication in history at your disposal. How are you going to use it?”
“To sell casual clothing,” Doucette said, a bit more animated now. “What the hell do you mean, how am I going to use it?”
Osbourne put his hand over his mouth for a few seconds. Then, saying something to himself the others couldn’t hear, he marched over and tore the drapery off the second easel. The eighteen people at the table saw a large color photograph of a sparkling white beach, in the light of midmorning. At the left of the picture were two tanned, attractive couples, sitting in beach chairs, under a broad umbrella. One of the women had turned her head to the right, where, perhaps a hundred feet away, an inflatable life raft floated near the shoreline, filled to overflowing with a dozen or more dark-skinned, ragged, exhausted people, two of whom had climbed out to pull the craft the last few feet on to the sand.
“I submit,” Osbourne said, “that the only effective way to use it is to show people something other than what they are bombarded with every second of their waking lives.”
“What the hell is that?” Doucette said.
“It’s a photograph of a boatload of Cuban refugees landing on a south Florida beach.”
“Is it staged?” Gracey asked.
“The world’s a stage. Our plan is to run this as a kind of inaugural next spring in Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Elle—”
“You do understand, young man,” Doucette said, “that we’re trying to sell a product here?”
“Yes, sir,” Osbourne said patiently.
“And you understand the nature of that product? Casual wear, sportswear?”
“I understand it perfectly,” Osbourne said. “I just don’t think it matters.”
Everyone on the CLO side of the conference table was watching Osbourne motionlessly, as if they were all having the same dream.
“With all due respect,” Osbourne went on, “the product we’re talking about here is not one that’s unique to the market. The consumer knows, presumably, that Doucette’s jeans or boxers or what have you are attractive and not cheaply made; but there’s the Gap, there’s Banana Republic, there’s J. Crew and Lands’ End. When you really think about it, what could possibly be unique or distinctive, in the common imagination, about Doucette clothing?”
He smiled and lifted his hands in a gesture of self-deprecation.
“The advertising,” he said. “The advertising. Nothing else. Nothing but that.”
He unveiled the third image: a photograph of a vast herd of cattle in a holding pen just outside a slaughterhouse. Rolling hills and a deep blue sky were visible in the background.
“Transgressive images,” he said, “are your only viable strategy for rising above a market that’s frankly overcrowded, for making yourself heard above the cultural noise.”
One of the junior executives on the Doucette side of the table raised her hand; Osbourne nodded.
“I’m unclear on something,” she said, very earnestly. “I would have thought we’d given CLO time enough to prepare some finished materials. But how are these photos you’re showing us ultimately going to be incorporated into the finished ads?”
Osbourne raised his eyebrows; he looked behind him at the easels, then back at the young woman. “These are the finished ads,” he said.
The woman laughed – then, embarrassed, returned her face to its businesslike cast.
Mr Gracey leaned forward and reexamined the photographs through his glasses.
“There’s no logo,” he pointed out, and sat back immediately as if regretting having made this observation out loud.
“That’s correct,” Osbourne said, unable now to keep some excitement out of his voice. “That, if you’ll permit me, is the master stroke, I think, of the campaign we’ve devised for you. On one level, it’s a way of acknowledging the truth that any powerful ima
ge, whatever its provenance, once it’s released into the world, belongs to the world. There’s no claiming authorship of a picture like this, and it would be unseemly to try to do it. I mean, my name isn’t on it either. Imagine these photos you see here, two-page full-color bleeds, placed in magazines all over the world, with absolutely no attribution. It has a kind of guerrilla aspect to it, doesn’t it? And of course the paradox is that people all over the world will forget the other five hundred ads they see that day in their frenzy to find out who’s behind these anonymous images. Network news, the Internet, friends in restaurants, everywhere they’ll be talking about it. I guarantee a buzz the likes of which your product could never generate by any other means. And it should also be said that this approach will insulate you somewhat from the inevitable, benighted charges that you’re exploiting these images simply in order to sell more sweaters.”
With that, he pulled the cloth off the final easel. Upon it was an enormous close-up of a woman giving birth. She was shown from knee to knee; the baby’s head was fully emerged. The room erupted in gasps and oaths, and every single person twitched abruptly in his or her seat.
