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CHAPTER

FOUR

GIVE ME

YOUR

DRUNKS,

YOUR

WEIRDOS …

‘Advertising is the only business in the world that takes on the lamed, the drunks, the potheads, and the weirdos. You can’t make it as an account executive with a reputation for being a pothead, but you can probably last in the copy business or as an art director if your pupils are a little dilated. Eccentrics are drawn to the business and welcomed into it. Your best grade of eccentric is normally found on the creative side, among the copywriters and art directors …’

We get a great number of nutsy guys. Let’s say that there are hundreds – maybe thousands – of guys in this business who, if they were working for Bankers Trust right now, would have found themselves committed. You know, their boss would have sat back and decided, ‘This guy is really going,’ and he would call the guy’s wife up and say, ‘I think it’s time we committed him because, you know, he’s doing strange things.’

Take a good friend of mine, Ned Viseltear, for example. He’s really a legend. And yet he managed to get good job after good job.

Ned once worked for Grey Advertising for three hours. He had been hired as a copywriter and he goes into work at nine in the morning. Because Grey is a very straight-arrow kind of place, Ned shows up at work on the first day right on time – nine o’clock. He meets some people, fills out all the forms you have to fill out on the first day on a job and then around 12:15 he goes out to lunch. He had a date with someone at Daniel & Charles. Well, they had a nice lunch and the guy from Daniel & Charles says, ‘Why don’t you come to work at Daniel & Charles as a copywriter?’ They get down to specifics and Ned is offered a job – better than the one he’s got at Grey. So he goes down to Daniel & Charles, meets Danny Karsch, the other owner of that agency and the chairman of the executive committee, accepts the offer at about two in the afternoon.

But he couldn’t resist picking up the phone. He’s still up at Daniel & Charles and he dials Grey and asks for personnel. He says, ‘My name is Ned Viseltear. I was working for you this morning. I worked for you for approximately three and a half hours.’ And the woman on the other side says, ‘Yes, what can I do for you?’ Viseltear says, ‘I’m quitting Grey. I’m leaving and taking another job.’ The lady is getting a little uneasy with this guy on the phone, she thinks maybe he’s some kind of a nut and pretty soon he’ll start breathing heavily. Viseltear says, ‘Well, I just wanted to know, have I accumulated any vacation time? I know I’ve only been working at Grey for three and a half hours, but if there’s any vacation money due me I wish you’d send it to me in care of Daniel and Charles.’

In 1961 Daniel & Charles was like a school, except all the kids in the school seemed to be crazy. It was my first real job in advertising, I mean my first legitimate job. I had been out of work for seven months before going there and before I was out of work I had been writing hernia ads for a small outfit called the Advertising Exchange. I was living in Brooklyn and had no bread whatsoever. My relatives used to have my wife and me over to dinner. Sitting around the table, some uncle would say, ‘Hey, kid, I see by the Chief [the Civil Service newspaper in New York City] that they got some openings coming up in the Sanitation Department. Why don’t you forget this advertising bug and get yourself a job?’

I really didn’t have the heart – or the stomach – for the Sanitation Department. So I sat around in my apartment in Brooklyn and tried to get something going. I decided that Daniel & Charles was the agency for me. I had been going through a book called the Advertising Agency Register, which lists all of the agencies in the business, and I was down to the D’s. I started sending them in roughs of sample ads. I just sent them in to Danny Karsch, one of the agency’s partners, but without a name, just my initials, J.D.F. Anyhow, I kept sending those ads in and one day I called Daniel & Charles and asked