Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [241]
“Clint, that’s enough.”
“You know what I once did, Judy? I helped that nasty old man lift a half-million tons of oil and rice and fly it over the highest mountains in the world. We did it through monsoons and low freezing levels and on muddy airstrips. We put more material into China by airplane than trucks did on the Burma Road ... more than the ships brought into their ports. We did it with airplanes. By God, I was somebody in those days.”
“You can’t live that for the rest of your life. You’re a big boy now. We’ve worked too damned hard to get what we have.”
“Have? We deserve this. This is why Judy Loveless was a hashslinger to put her husband through college. All for this ... phony, overpriced suckersville down there.” He belted the drink down and refilled his glass. “You’re right, Judy, that nasty old man shouldn’t have come. He shouldn’t have said ... Clint ... we need you ... he shouldn’t have said that.”
Chapter Ten
THE NEXT DAY CLINTON Loveless sported a fearsome purple hangover. His swivel-hipped secretary patched him up as best she could with a limited supply of drugs and coffee and followed him, pad in hand, to the sacred inner sanctum where J. Kenneth Whitcomb III was about to conduct a top-level think session.
As the brain trust gathered, the level of tension mounted. Pudge’s father inherited railroads, lumber acreage, and oil holdings from his own tycoon father, a robber baron at the end of the last century.
During the 1920s Pudge’s father was dissatisfied with the way many of his products were being sold and so created Whitcomb Associates as his own ad agency to sell a better corporate image. The advertising agency was never designed to be other than a minor holding. Pudge was the family black sheep; at will-reading time it was the perfect inheritance for a son held in low esteem.
Pudge proceeded to fool all of his contemptuous brothers and sisters by becoming a business phenomenon and the first of the clan to make the covers of both Time and Fortune. Whitcomb Associates took on the new accounts that made his father scream from the grave and turned losers into winners. He was an American success story.
The seat of Pudge Whitcomb’s genius lay in his ability to exploit other people’s brains. The inner sanctum proved this point. Counter-clockwise there was Dick Buckley, a lawyer who could be described only as brilliant and who, in his youth, dazzled as a court-room performer. His days were now spent weaving a maze of verbal gymnastics designed to keep Whitcomb Associates and some of their borderline accounts within the hair-split of the law. He was immersed in keeping the Pure Drug and Food people off their backs “because it was run by those Pinks in Washington.”
Next to Dick sat Jerry Church, who, in younger days, won fellowships for biochemical research. He was over his eyeballs in a home in West Hampton and all of his talents became vented in one direction, self-survival. The colors mixed for pre- and after-shave lotions dominated his research.
Charlie Levine was next in line. Charlie once had a love affair with the English language and believed in finding talent to perpetuate its beauty. As an editor he had to prepare twenty-five to thirty books a year by established authors, mostly bad. There was the business of making contracts with literary agents, fighting the blood-curdling inner-office political wars, giving razz-matazz speeches at sales meetings, belting down two and three martinis at luncheons with visiting royalty among the authors.
Once in a while Charlie ran across a promising manuscript, one that would need a few months of dedicated work. Charlie was too damned tired and overworked to give it the devotion it needed.
Charlie took a dislike to himself upon realization that most books were mediocre and a publisher would push a bad one because of its exploitation value. Not that this in itself was evil. It was the pretending of standing on a pedestal that was evil, when one was really just