Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [30]
“A lot of those words are his, too,” I told him.
Fenske groaned. “Does he have any children?” When I nodded, Fenske groaned one octave deeper. “That,” he said, “will make him more difficult to fire.”
The next few months didn’t get much better. Other than a handful of mostly younger creatives who had become his disciples, carrying around little idea journals of their own, sitting at his feet while he dispensed pearls of truth, we were all miserable. People were eviscerated in meetings. Women cried. Grown men felt like … well, the opposite. My misery had less to do with the type of work I was doing than with pride. It’s one thing to be twenty-five and learning from a master. It’s another to be thirty-five, seemingly on your way to having a fine career and being told that everything you’ve done to this point is banal.
And it is something altogether different to realize that maybe the son of a bitch is right.
One way I responded was to totally dedicate myself to the creative work while dismissing his “way” and what I considered the sycophantic behavior of his followers. After all, wasn’t copying someone’s every belief and gesture the opposite of the subversive creative ethos he espoused? The quest for originality and individuality?
“You should get yourself one of these,” he said to me one day, tapping his journal. By now everyone, even some account people, were diligently filling Fenske-approved journals with collages, poems, and art. Some were quite beautiful, but I resisted.
“No,” I said. “Pencil and a yellow legal pad works fine for me.”
I smiled. Fenske groaned.
Another day, one of the many Saturdays and Sundays we were required to work then, he looked me up and down outside his office. “You’re built like a wrestler,” he said. “Were you a wrestler?” I hadn’t wrestled since high school, but I wasn’t going to miss an alpha opportunity with the man who had derailed my career and turned my life upside down. In addition to being wealthier, more famous, and a better writer than I was, he was big enough to squash me like a lady bug. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve done quite a bit of wrestling.” So sad. So insecure. But it’s all I had.
I was miserable, resentful, and filled with self-pity. We worked late every night and most weekends, which was just great for my marriage and made my sixty-mile commute from the northern suburbs all the more fun. Fenske had taken up residence in a corporate apartment next to the agency and seemingly lived in the office. He watched football (with a group of Fenske-ites) in the conference room on Sundays. He had a margarita machine installed in his office and gave well-attended parties every Friday.
To many, these gestures signified change and a real chance for our agency to overcome its old, faltering image and show the world that we could make ads with anyone. For me, Fenske’s social events felt more required than optional, and signified that now there was no need to ever leave the office.
And yet … during the brief time I spent with Fenske, I learned more about copywriting and editing and professional standards and what makes an ad great than I would learn from everyone else combined in my career. Until that point I’d never written anything remotely like the scripts I was turning out under his watch.
It was Fenske’s contention that we were wizards, that we were making art, and he compelled each of us to take chances and plumb depths we had never reached. In some cases my ads had become more provocative and bizarre than any of the fiction I was wrestling with on the side. Advertising, Fenske said to a trade journal at the time, “may be the most powerful art form on earth,” and while I didn’t necessarily believe it, his words (an act of persuasive advertising unto themselves) did propel me to dig deeper and reach higher.
Fourteen years later, I still have some of the scripts: A young skier thinking of a long-distance phone call to his girlfriend while being swept