Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [26]
The easy out would be to blame it on Luc. Or the homegrown Calvados. Or the fact that for the last three weeks we were working incredibly long hours with little sleep. Or the fact that when things are going well, I’m always ready for a party. But most of it can be blamed on the excesses and unpredictability of American advertising, particularly at its first and oldest agency, on D-day plus fifty years.
When we got back to the château, Luc was there to greet us. He shepherded us into the parlor, where portraits of the count’s predecessors hung on the walls and a table was adorned with a fresh bottle of Calvados and several magnums of the count’s homegrown bubbly. We’d had parts of the previous two days off and had spent them (when we weren’t sitting in a service station because I’d put the wrong gasoline in our car) visiting Caen and the monastery at Mont-Saint-Michel and Bayeux, where we saw the famous tapestry. The night before we’d had an amazing group dinner at a Norman farmhouse restaurant (during which our creative director more than earned his keep with his deft handling of the wine list), and the night before that we even got to meet the count, who had driven up from Paris for a meal.
During our dinner with the count (a nice, fashionable man, not at all count-like), Luc was a clump of Norman nerves. He didn’t touch a drop of alcohol and hardly spoke. But tonight, with the count back at work in Paris, he was clearly relieved. For starters, he was drinking, and talking, and flirting with Betsy again. Because my wife and Kenny’s wife were going to be leaving in the morning, before our afternoon preproduction meeting and the actual shoot was to begin, Luc had planned a special dinner.
But first we had more drinks. I raised a few glasses—okay, shots—of Calvados with Luc, who continued to regale us about the history of the place. At dinner, we drank more estate champagne and wine. Luc was buzzed. Everyone was. Other than a steady rain that had been blowing in off the Channel for days (similar to the conditions that had threatened the invasion), things were going exceptionally well. Marcus Stevens, our director, was more logistically buttoned up and artistically passionate about the project than any other director I’d ever worked with. The locations were stunning. The client was happy. The commercial that no one wanted was going to kick altruistic ass, and our bosses weren’t scheduled to fly over on the Concorde and screw things up for another day. So far, so good.
After dinner we went back into the parlor for more drinks and stories from Luc about the paintings of dead people on the walls. I asked Luc to point out some people from his side of the family. He stared at the portraits in their gilded frames and then into his empty tumbler. Then he said that he wasn’t really the count’s cousin but was perhaps a very distant relative and that he was at the château not out of entitlement but to do faux-marble work in the old wing, as long as he didn’t screw things up. The fact that he was telling us this, a direct contradiction of his earlier, sober claims, led me to believe he was about to screw things up.
Royally.
Soon Kenny and I had to step out. We had a call to make back to the States to brief the composers Tom and Andy of tomandandy, the music company that would be scoring the finished commercial. Our producer suggested that we use the phone in the kitchen. But Luc wouldn’t hear of it. He stood up, staggered a bit, and waved for us to follow him. We went down a long hall to a back stairway. As he walked, Luc continued to mumble and gesticulate, but we couldn’t understand any of it. At the top of the stairs he took us down another abandoned hallway and then stopped outside a pair of large glass doors. French doors. We were at the entrance to the forbidden library.
“But I thought we weren’t allowed to