From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [18]
Even if it’s more fiction than fact, it still figures that the account guy in this case will probably go through life terrified to get in an elevator. The story also shows the kinds of craziness that go on on Madison Avenue and how fear can grow. In 1967 and 1968, when a large agency was going through a very, very tough shakeout to save their skin, they must have fired about six hundred people. Many of those six hundred people were secretaries, clerks, and so forth, but there must have been several dozen biggies. They all were on one floor – and that floor was called ‘The Floor of the Forgotten Men’ by people in other agencies around town. The floor was manned by only one girl, who sat out front answering phones to give that last shred of dignity to those guys so they wouldn’t have to answer their own phones. These were the Forgotten Men. They all had offices and they all were working out the employment contracts they had with this large agency.
These were top-money guys, account supervisors and management people, making fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year – the very top of the advertising business. None of them ever admitted that he was one of the fired people, but you know, they never had a secretary or anything. It was weird; they really didn’t know whether it was the ‘Floor of the Forgotten Men’ but they had a pretty good notion. They would run around for interviews and the telephone would ring and the messages might come in, and at the end of the day when they were back that one receptionist would walk into an office and say, ‘You’ve had messages.’ They were walking around, but they were zombies. What I can’t get over is that they never talked to each other about being fired. They all would show up for work at 9:30 in the morning, because that was the thing to do, and then they’d have to go to another floor to find the coffee machine because there wasn’t a coffee machine on the ‘Floor of the Forgotten Men’. Nobody ever said, ‘Hey, I got a lead on something over at Kenyon and Eckhart.’ A guy I know today was on that floor and he recently ran into another guy who was also on that floor at the same time. They started talking about it and they realized for the first time that they had been fired.
At that same time, over at Interpublic, Marion Harper, the chairman, was about to become a Forgotten Man himself. He revolutionized the business. They used to call him ‘Marvel’ Harper, because he was. He took the concept that an agency ought to be an all-service organization and he built a gigantic company on this idea. He had a separate company to handle public relations for his clients, and he even had a research company to dream up new products which maybe were four years away from manufacturing. And then one day he got his. What happened was that six guys held a meeting in a conference room and they invited Harper to sit in on his own execution. And the amazing thing is, all of these guys had been brought in by Harper. They sat around and then one of them said, ‘Marion, it’s time. We want to take a vote.’ It was a shock because although things were going bad, Harper never had considered a vote. He always thought he was strong enough even if they put it to a vote. So they voted. Six zips: one abstention. Harper abstained. It was like a Mafia meeting where they hit their hand and they come down with their thumb. It was the business world’s kiss of death.
You see, they still were underlings, but put together they made one big overling. Harper made them strong enough to kill him. The Harper case was very rare, so rare it made the front pages. And today, Harper is trying for a comeback – he’s still trying to put something together. (On January 30, 1970, it was announced that Marion was forming a new agency, along with Ron Rosenfeld, a copywriter, and Len Sirowitz, an art director.)
How do they tell somebody at Ted Bates that he’s fired? I’ve had guys coming in to see me who say, ‘I’m going to get it. Do you have anything here for