“Well, Mr. O’Rourke,” said Cyril Hawkesworth, the head of the agency, in his usual pompous manner, “we are anxiously awaiting your suggestions for the new ad campaign.” Hawkesworth and O’Rourke were like oil and water. Hawkesworth bore a remarkable resemblance to John Houseman as he portrayed Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase. He loved wearing double-breasted suits and droopy dickie bows and often walked around the office with a book clutched to his chest. He was also quick to remind everyone of his family’s wealth. Once O’Rourke had stood behind him in a crowded elevator and imitated in the perfect Houseman pitch for the Smith-Barney commercial he had created: “We make money the old-fashioned way—we inherit it!” Hawkesworth was not amused.
Now what to do? Thoughts of Ambrosia and Rome were rattling around in O’Rourke’s brain-cell challenged mind. All of a sudden there came a vision. Divine inspiration had struck.
“Well,” said O’Rourke, “I’ve put a lot of thought into this and I think that American Express needs to spruce up their image a little bit. People are sick and tired of Karl Malden, his hat and nose, and his dire warnings of muggers and thieves. American Express has to think positively. It needs a little glitter.” O’Rourke paused for effect. Looking around the table everybody was nodding soberly. O’Rourke had them in the palm—he loved the pun—of his hand.
“Yes, gentlemen,” O’Rourke continued, “glitter. Some big names. And a format. Well, the first one will be terrific. We’ll get ah, ah....” His tongue was now out of control. He couldn’t stop himself.
“Gentlemen, we take the pope—you know, Paul VI—and we put him in the Sistine Chapel. The pope is dressed up in his white cassock, satin red cape, and papal stole, white zucchetto”—he knew he must be impressing these five WASPs and one Jew with his Catholic terminology and he was sure glad he had been an altar boy—“and as the camera zooms in on him he says, ‘Do you know me? Here in the Sistine Chapel everybody knows who I am. But when I leave Vatican City sometimes it isn’t always that way.’
“Now,” continued O’Rourke, “we have the viewer fascinated.” The gentlemen were beginning to shift uncomfortably in their chairs, but O’Rourke couldn’t stop. “So we go into the whole spiel about where the American Express Card is accepted by everybody all over the universe and then we shift back to Pope Paul and the Sistine Chapel. This time he has a blank card in his hand and at this point we print his name, in Latin—PAULUS PP VI—on the card with a real zap, zap, zap kind of special effect. Then the Pope ends it with the tag-line: ‘The American Express Card. Don’t leave Rome without it!’”
Hawkesworth coughed, and Coolville, the chairman of the board of American Express, cleared his throat. The rest of the gentlemen just stared straight ahead with their mouths open. But O’Rourke wouldn’t let up.
“And the great thing about this format is that you can get different celebrities to do it. It’ll be terrific.”
“Thank you, Mr. O’Rourke,” said Hawkesworth, “that will be all for now.”
Later that afternoon O’Rourke was made—as Hawkesworth succinctly put it—“redundant.”
When Pepoon returned from London the following day, there was hell to pay. When he was told that O’Rourke had been canned, Pepoon—totally out of character—had burst into Hawkesworth’s thickly carpeted office with its panoramic view of the East River and shouted at him:“You asshole. Nobody, but nobody, not even the chairman of this goddamn firm, fires one of my people. You can take this job and shove it. I quit.” Pepoon turned on his heel, ignored pleas for calm and reason from Hawkesworth, and headed back to Sag Harbor. He was damned if he was going to take this kind of abuse from some guy who knew nothing about the ad business except that he was supposed to reassure clients by looking grandfatherly.
O’Rourke handled his unemployment in another way—he went out and got shit-faced for two weeks. After that he calmed down and collected his unemployment checks and drank afternoons and evenings at the Moat. One evening about three months later as he was preparing to go out to the Moat for his second drinking shift of the day, he turned the television set on and, as he sat reading his mail, he heard the voice of Benny Goodman utter the familiar words, “Do you know me?” O’Rourke couldn’t believe it. By the time Goodman had uttered, “don’t leave home without it,” his phone was ringing. It was Pepoon.
“Tone, old chum,” he said, “I think we have them now.” With not too subtle threats from Pepoon’s lawyers, O’Rourke found himself within the week holding a check for $75,000 for “consultation fees.” Right then, O’Rourke knew that he would never again have trouble finding and holding a job, no matter what a classic fuck-up he was.
Neither Pepoon nor O’Rourke would be unemployed for long. Soon Pepoon bought the long vacant Northern Dispensary building at the corner of Waverly & Waverly in the Village and set up Northern Dispensary Associates, which specialized in ad campaigns, and many of his old accounts came over. Then luck took over in the form of Harris Landsdown, Pepoon’s classmate from Harvard, who was running for the Republican nomination for Senator in California.
Landsdown was in trouble. He was terrible on the stump and all he had was money. But Cranston, the Democrat incumbent, was thought unbeatable, so there were few who wanted the Republican nomination. In any election, Landsdown thought, there was always that chance of winning. And he wanted that chance. There was only one thing between Landsdown and the nomination—Charlton Heston, who was also looking for the Republican endorsement.
Landsdown turned to Winthrop Pepoon for some media advice. Pepoon wasn’t quite sure what should be done. He called in O’Rourke. After being introduced and told the situation O’Rourke was blunt. “I don’t work for Republicans,” he said. “Sorry.”
“For Christsakes, Tone,” said Pepoon, “Harris here isn’t a bad guy. Look at Heston. He’s a lackey for the goddamn NRA.”
“Okay,” conceded O’Rourke. “I’ll help you this time, but only against Heston. I’m for Cranston in the general election.”
“That’s fine,” said Landsdown. “I can live with that.”
“But you have to do what I say,” said O’Rourke. “Okay?”
“I’m in,” said Harris Landsdown. Winthrop Pepoon began to feel uncomfortable.
O’Rourke sent a researcher to find pictures of Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. When the researcher returned, O’Rourke flipped through them, selected one, and went to the typewriter. He typed less than thirty seconds before pulling the paper out of the machine and showing it to Landsdown. In it was Charlton Heston in a G-string, his back to the camera. He handed the paper to Landsdown. It read: “Isn’t it time we put Charlton Heston behind us? Vote Landsdown on primary day.”
Landsdown started laughing. “What do you want me to do with this?”
“I want you to put this up on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard, as big as possible. You won’t have to worry about Chuck Heston any more,” assured O’Rourke.
“I can’t do that,” said Landsdown.
“You can’t beat this guy one-on-one. He’s got the recognition factor, he’s smooth, a professional actor, for Christsakes. He’ll kill you. You have to shame these guys. You can’t believe the egos on them. This will work.”
“What do you think, Winthrop?” asked Landsdown.
“Let’s face it, Harris. It’s worth a try. You’ll be spending your money for nothing if this guy builds up momentum.”
Harris Landsdown did as he was told and Charlton Heston decided that he had to go to Australia for the summer to make a made-for-TV movie. O’Rourke had literally laughed him out of the country. Harris Landsdown won the nomination for the U.S. Senate and was beaten by Alan Cranston in the general election. And Northern Dispensary Associates got a reputation.
“I killed Moses,” bragged O’Rourke.
As the word spread about O’Rourke’s campaign, other politicians came looking to O’Rourke for salvation. Pepoon, always the astute businessman, split the business in two: half ad agency and h
alf political consulting, which was under O’Rourke’s wing. O’Rourke only did Democrats and referred Republicans back to Pepoon. They began to make money hand over fist.
The reputation of the firm continued to grow when they saved the Dannemora Brewing Company from bankruptcy. Charles Hodding’s family had owned Dannemora Brewing for nearly 100 years. Pepoon had been their account executive going back to the 1960s. He had come up with the immortal tagline that was heard on radios all over upstate New York:“Things Go Better with Dannemora,” sung to the tune “How Are Things in Glockamora?” from Finian’s Rainbow. When O’Rourke heard it for the first time he told Pepoon, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I thought it was rather good,” said Pepoon.
“You would,” replied O’Rourke.
Now the Brewery was in sad shape. It was being squeezed by Anheuser-Busch and also by several Canadian breweries to the north. Their market was dwindling. Fifteen hundred jobs were at stake.
“I don’t want to sell out,” Hodding told Pepoon. “If I sell out to Budweiser, they’ll shut the brewery down. I’m the biggest employer in Dannemora, along with the prison. I have to do something.” Pepoon called O’Rourke in.
“What’s the problem?” said O’Rourke.
“I have a shrinking market,” said Hodding.
“Find a new market,” said O’Rourke.
“Not so easy,” said Hodding and Pepoon almost together.
Then the light bulb went on. “Queer Beer,” O’Rourke said.
“What?”
“The faggots,” said O’Rourke.
“What are you talking about?”
“Who has more money to piss away on themselves than anyone? Fags, of course. I see them in those bars on Christopher Street drinking Bud from the can until they’re absolutely polluted. Who’s vainer than fags? Nobody! They’d love to have their own brew.”
Hodding was that desperate. Within six weeks, the first Queer Beers rolled out of the Dannemora Brewing Company. O’Rourke pulled Juanita, the Puerto Rican transsexual from Pepoon’s mailroom, to be the first Queer Beer sales-whatever in New York. Within weeks, every homosexual on Christopher was standing outside their favorite joint with a Queer Beer in his fist. O’Rourke packed Juanita off to San Francisco where the response was also overwhelming. Hodding couldn’t brew Queer Beer fast enough. Within a year Hodding had beaten off Budweiser. To rub salt in Anheuser-Busch’s wounds O’Rourke was now referring to Queer Beer as “The Queen of Beers” in his ads. Hodding had even acquired one of the Canadian breweries that had been trying to acquire him. He couldn’t thank Pepoon and O’Rourke enough.
“Where can I go from here?” he asked.
“Dyke Lite,” replied Wolfe Tone O’Rourke.
7.
Tone O’Rourke, being the creature of habit he was, always arrived at Northern Dispensary Associates at precisely 6:30 a.m. For the next hour he read the four New York newspapers, the Washington Post, the previous day’s Irish Times, and immersed himself in the politics of the day.
“How’d it go this weekend?” asked Winthrop Pepoon, another early riser, as he stuck his head into O’Rourke’s pocket office.
“Lovely. Hardly remember it at all. How’d you like that stuff with the Virgin Mary and Congressman Swift?”
“Virgin Mary?” said Pepoon. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you get the papers?”
“Nothing about it in the Times.”
“Figures. Big news in the tabloids. Cyclops Reilly broke the story.”
“I didn’t think Cyclops was ever sober long enough to break a story,” said Pepoon haughtily.
“Don’t give me any of your Chablis morality,” said O’Rourke and Pepoon backed off.
It was time for Pepoon to change the subject. “When are you going to hire your new chief of staff? We have a busy primary season ahead of us.”
“You know, Winnie, I don’t like anybody sticking their nose in my business.”
“Jesus, Tone, who the hell is sticking their nose in your business? I just wish you’d hire someone. What is it now, for God’s sake, three months?”
It was more. O’Rourke was procrastinating. He hated hiring people. “Well,” said O’Rourke, “I’ll think about it.”
“Fine. I’ll have Human Resources call you later this morning.”
“Okay.”
At 10:00 a.m. the phone rang and it was Human Resources. Human Resources, thought O’Rourke, another euphemism for the solipsistic times. What ever happened to Personnel?
“I hear you’re still looking for a C of S, Tone,” said Mrs. Dooge, the HR Director. “Have you decided exactly what you’re looking for?” Mrs. Dooge was trying to pin O’Rourke down.
Resisting the cheap, smart answer, O’Rourke said he was looking for someone who was bright and had a passing notion of how the American political system works. O’Rourke was lousy with people who worked for him. He couldn’t motivate them and if they were duds, he almost had to beg them to do their jobs.
“In that case, Tone,” said Mrs. Dooge, “you may be in luck. I have someone here who just graduated from Columbia with an M.A. in political science. Also worked for Senator Schumer. When would it be convenient for me to send Sam McGuire up?”
“How about now?” said O’Rourke.
“Fine. We’ll be right there.”
Minutes later, when Mrs. Dooge and Sam McGuire approached O’Rourke’s third floor corner office that looked out onto Christopher Street, they were stopped in their tracks by a flying cell phone. “And keep your fuckin’ beepin’ cell phone out of my fuckin’ office. You couldn’t sell whiskey to drunken fuckin’ Injuns,” O’Rourke said as the hapless account executive scampered to safety.
“Is this a good time, Mr. O’Rourke?” asked Mrs. Dooge.
“As good as ever,” replied O’Rourke calmly.
“This is Sam McGuire.”
O’Rourke had a look of surprise on his face. For Sam McGuire was female, black, and beautiful. “Won’t you come in?” asked O’Rourke smoothly as he closed the door on Mrs. Dooge.
She certainly was different from the female Teutons—all Protestant Amazons, six-foot-two with flowing blonde hair and brilliant white teeth as big as tombstones—whom he had been forced to interview before. To say Sam McGuire was different was an understatement. She was immaculately dressed in a dark blue pinstriped skirt and a burgundy sweater that showed off her collarbone. Black boots rose to just below her knees. She looked a little like Leslie Uggams, her skin a radiant caramel. O’Rourke guessed she was in her mid-thirties. He examined her hands, which were bereft of jewelry, and her bosom, which looked ample. She squirmed her bottom in the chair, getting comfortable, before she crossed her legs, revealing shapely thighs.
“What the hell was that all about?” she asked with the most stunning smile O’Rourke had ever seen. He also liked her bluntness.
“Oh, he’s one of those Gen-X types I can’t stand. He’s not much of an account executive, but he has all the toys in the world. I hate fucking cell phones, and he’s always playing with his fucking laptop. Toys for the dopey generation,” said O’Rourke gesturing toward his corner window, which gave him a panoramic view of Christopher Park and the entrance to Hogan’s Moat. “I see him coming out of fucking Starbucks on Sheridan Square with a cup of shit corporate coffee. Then I see the dunce coming up Grove Street on a fucking scooter. Twenty-nine-fucking-years-old and he’s riding a fucking scooter to work! He also has braces. What’s with adults wearing fucking braces on their teeth? He’s even studying for an MBA, for Christsakes. The most useless fucking degree ever invented. Bunch of lazy fucks with fucking spreadsheets who think they know something about nothing. Christ, what a dopey, money-grubbing, dunce-ridden generation.”
“Are you through venting?” asked Sam.
“You’re a cheeky one,” said O’Rourke, laughing. “I guess I’m full of piss-’n-vinegar this morning.”
McGuire looked around O’Rour
ke’s office and noticed what was probably the last rotary telephone in the city of New York. She also spied O’Rourke’s trusty electric typewriter, circa 1974. There wasn’t a computer in sight. “Early Luddite,” she said to O’Rourke.
“You know what a Luddite is?” asked O’Rourke.
“I sure do,” she said. “There are a lot of positive things to be said about Luddites.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“No computer? How do you send emails?”
“I don’t,” said O’Rourke, “that’s your job.”
“I’ll change that.”
“You think?”
“Sure,” said McGuire, cocksure. “I hear you’re one of the great copywriters, right?”
“I guess.”
“Well, every writer loves computers. They make it easier to write.” O’Rourke looked dubious. “And you’ll love email.”
“Another distraction,” O’Rourke scoffed.
“Boy,” said McGuire, laughing, “you’re a confirmed Luddite.”
“Not completely,” protested O’Rourke, holding up his caller ID box. “I like this one. Allows me to speak to as few assholes as possible.”
McGuire looked at O’Rourke’s wall, which showed the story of his life. On it were photos of O’Rourke with many of the politicians he had dealt with over the years. There he was with Bobby Kennedy, taken just two months before the senator was assassinated. Another showed him wedged between Teddy Kennedy and Tip O’Neill. “Not bad company,” said McGuire, “I see you get around,” as she looked at O’Rourke with President Bill Clinton. “You were pretty cute in that picture with Bobby Kennedy,” she added.
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