Body Copy - Michael Craven [19]
“What about if he didn’t like your ideas? How did he act?”
“He told you. There were plenty of suggestions of mine that he didn’t like. Believe me, plenty. He’d just say so.”
“When you worked with him, did you get to know him at all, personally?”
“Not really. It was actually kind of funny. We’d work all day and never really do any small talk. Nothing. I tried to get him to talk about stuff other than work, you know, what he did on the weekends or whatever. He’d just kind of look at me. All he wanted to do was work. He was just totally consumed. It was amazing.”
“Did you ever see him outside the office?”
“No. I couldn’t get him to talk about stuff outside of work, much less make plans with me.”
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“No, I mean, did you ever just run into him randomly?”
“Once. I saw him at a restaurant.”
“Who was he with?”
“His wife. I didn’t say hi. I was too intimidated. It was before the H&R Block thing.”
Tremaine considered this kid, Matt Bishop. Just a young successful guy who has a tremendous amount of respect for Roger Gale. Tremaine wondered, though, if Matt was just going to tell him a series of Roger Gale Was Great stories.
Stuff he could read in an ad magazine or online. But this kid did know the man, a little. He certainly offered more insight than Mary.
Matt was still talking. He said, “You know how committed Roger Gale was?”
Tremaine shook his head no.
“Okay, check this out. Roger found out Gale/Parker was going to be invited to the Ford pitch. This was years ago, when Gale/Parker was just starting to really explode.
Anyway, they weren’t going to be formally invited for a month or so, but Roger knew they were getting the nod.
So, to research the company, to get a feel for it, Roger moves to Detroit and gets a job in one of the Ford plants.
Not on the assembly line, nothing too technical, but still, doing manual labor in a plant. Busting his ass forty hours a week, working for Ford. He kept the job for more than a month, lived in Detroit, hung with those guys, the whole deal.”
Tremaine looked at Matt. Watched him as he told the story of his idol with enthusiasm, even passion.
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“Then the pitch rolls around,” Matt said. “And Roger moves back to L.A. so he can work on it. Everybody here goes gangbusters for another month or so to prepare the creative. Then, the actual presentation rolls around. Roger presents the work, then goes on to tell the top brass at Ford how well Gale/Parker knows their business. And how he knows—personally—how hard the guys work to put the cars together. The grand finale was Roger pulling out his pay stubs, showing everybody that he’d taken a job at their company. Showing everybody that Gale/Parker wasn’t full of shit when it came to understanding what goes into making Ford cars.”
Tremaine said, “I’m assuming you guys won the business.”
“They awarded the account to Gale/Parker that day.”
Tremaine thought about the story, thinking, man, that’s really going far out of your way to communicate your passion. Dramatic too, Roger Gale using the fact that he worked for Ford as an exclamation point to his pitch.
Ta-da! Expecting a big guffaw from the room, almost. Not even considering that this might seem a little obsessive, a little invasive, a little weird. Maybe he just didn’t care what it seemed like.
Tremaine said to Matt, “That’s an impressive display of commitment. Risky, too. You never know how someone’s going to respond to something like that.”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “Passion, creativity, with a little risk thrown in. That’s what Roger Gale lived for.”
Tremaine talked to some of the other creatives, some account execs, and Roger Gale’s long-time assistant. They 59
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added to the image of Gale forming in Tremaine’s head but didn’t give him anything to sink his teeth into. No real knowledge of the man outside the halls of Gale/Parker.
That changed when he sat down with a man named Jack Sawyer.
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Jack Sawyer was a man Laurie had told Tremaine he had to talk to. When Tremaine got to Sawyer