From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [21]
It’s a little bit like the old West. A guy’s reputation is the first thing you hear about. Let’s say you’re brought to a new agency, and usually somebody walks up to you that first week and he says, ‘Hi, my name is So-and-so and I work here.’ Invariably, inevitably, the conversation gets around to ‘Watch out for that guy.’ Then your new friend says, ‘This is a nice place and I like it. You can’t get much work out, but don’t worry about it.’ Then, all of a sudden it’s like a prison movie: ‘That guy over there, that little bastard, watch out for him.’ This is the language of the business. Then you know that the guy he’s talking about is the killer. You know that he’s the guy who will do the job on you if the job ever has to be done.
Let’s say a creative director has got himself a bad art director who has to go. Since the creative director hired the art director, the chances are that he’s afraid, so he’s not going to go blabbing around that ‘I blew it with Joe over there, I made a bad decision and shouldn’t have hired him.’ The creative director is beyond all that. The agency president? He’s so far removed from everything that he’s really out of advertising. He’s spending most of his time with a couple of guys who run a boiler room who claim they’re going to take his agency public and make everybody a bundle. The account supervisor is so scared of losing the account that he can barely talk, much less think straight. So the actual job falls to someone between the account supervisor and the creative supervisor. The way it’s done is that the creative supervisor will mumble something to the killer which goes like this: ‘You know, Joe isn’t behaving too well lately.’ Then the account supervisor screws up his courage and he might stammer to the killer, ‘Yeah, Joe is acting up, he came in at ten yesterday morning and he was drunk. He’s got to go.’ The killer mops up.
Some killers eventually kill off so many people that the board of directors decides on a change of management. Then a whole new crew of guys is brought in, and the new guys don’t realize that they have a killer on their hands. That’s when the killers get it. Whenever a killer gets hit in an agency, or when he retires, there’s a celebration – a real party.
The retirement party for the Bates killer was marvelous. Practically the whole agency showed up for it. First of all, everyone had a great deal of respect for the guy – you know, here we have a tried and true survivor. And secondly, nobody’s going to screw around and not show up because who knows, maybe he’ll get bored by retirement and he’ll come back to work at the agency. Nobody wanted to risk a scene like that. Even in retirement the guy struck fear into people.
When I worked at Daniel & Charles there were so many going-away parties for guys who got fired that I figured out a way to ease the financial burden on those people who had to kick in five or ten dollars every week for the party. I decided to sell insurance. I went around to the creative department and said, ‘Give me three dollars out of your paychecks every week and I’ll book it. The next time somebody gets it I’ll pay for the party.’
There was a copywriter there named Marvin who was doing quite nicely with his accounts. One day he got into a conversation with some other people in the creative department who said, ‘Marvin, you’re being underpaid. You’re doing a hell of a job and they’re killing you when it comes to bread. Frankly, Marvin, you’re worth a lot more.’
Now they weren’t egging this guy on, they honestly thought that the guy was doing a job and deserved a better deal. Marvin says, ‘Holy shit, you’re right, I’m going to go in there and talk to Charlie.’ Charlie Goldschmidt was one of the two owners of the agency and is the chairman of the board. Well, he went in to talk to Charlie and