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How was I supposed to know that? What writing? What wall? I was a junior copywriter holed up in a cubicle all day. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. He laughed. It wasn’t really a mocking laugh, but more of a knowing, condescending chuckle. There was a reason he had that vacation villa, and it wasn’t solely creative talent.

Having learned my lesson about burning bridges from the mink-coat-wearing wine magazine editor, I took a different tack and asked for a job. I thought about the laborers’ union and my father saying I told you so. I thought about my old boss in publishing and that this is what you get when you’re disloyal. My former creative director said he would look into it.

After I hung up, I immediately started dialing. Not to tell people that I’d been fired, but to find a job. Within two hours I had one, with a raise. It wasn’t at an agency (the one that had just fired me, incidentally, would have chains and padlocks on its doors by the end of the month) but as a senior copywriter for another book publisher. The person who hired me was my old boss, the queen of Feh! The woman who told me eight months earlier that I had made a horrible mistake, and had no sense of loyalty, and would never work for her again if I left, had left for greener pastures of her own and wanted me to come back to work for her.

A few months after that I got a call from a creative director at another small agency. A former client had recommended me, and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in doing some freelance ads on the side for him. I thought about the boss who’d just fired me and the hypocritical tendencies of the one who had just hired me. “Sure,” I said. “A guy’s got to make a living, right?”

He liked this answer so much he hired me.

*1 Not simultaneously, or necessarily in that order; plus, actually having sex versus being obsessed with wanting to have sex is a distinction that must be made.

*2 For the World Flatwater Championships, a.k.a. the General Clinton Canoe Regatta, my brother, two friends, and I used borrowed battleship-heavy Grumman canoes, did zero in-water training, and drank until 2:00 a.m. the night before the 6:00 a.m. start. In the worlds longest flat-water canoe race we finished a mere six hours off the pace.

*3 I was the only person on the sports desk at the Globe the day in January 1982 that Conigliaro, a onetime beloved Red Sox superstar whose promising career had been cut short by an ugly 1967 beanball incident, had collapsed in an airport and slipped into a coma. When famous people have near-death experiences or live a certain lifestyle, obits are written and standing by. I imagine, for instance, that there were times when someone was updating Britney Spears’s obit every hour on the hour. Conigliaro died in 1990.

*4 Several years later my brother would defy his own advice and attend law school.

*5 This, interestingly, would not be the case.

When Agencies Fall

Keeping everlastingly at it brings success.

—Francis Wayland Ayer

Casualty of the Phone Wars

The fall of the first American advertising agency began on a sunny morning in 1994 in a corner office on the thirty-fifth floor of the Worldwide Plaza tower on the west side of Midtown Manhattan. We were gathered in the spacious executive suite of Jerry Siano, the CEO of N. W. Ayer, dozens of anxious, optimistic employees who had put their outside lives on hold for the previous several months to work on a pitch to defend our most important client, American Telephone and Telegraph.

We were anxious because not only was Ayer the first and therefore the oldest advertising agency in America but its relationship with AT&T was also the nation’s longest-running client-agency partnership. Ayer was the agency that had created AT&T’s famous “Reach Out and Touch Someone” campaign, the agency that had introduced long-distance telephone service to America and, more recently, had taken on the upstart MCI Communications in a series of hard-hitting retail “phone wars” campaigns.