From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [28]
I found that the whole place was filled with young guys who suddenly discovered that somebody was going to pay them a lot of money for the rest of their lives for doing this thing called advertising, and all of us got caught up in the insanity of it and went crazy. A whole group of people slowly went out of their skulls.
The first day I was at work we were sitting around in an art director’s office and a guy came running into the office, screaming, ‘Channel Eight, Channel Eight, there’s something on Channel Eight.’
With this the room, which was full of guys, emptied. They literally ran over me. They ran down the hall and I followed them and when they got to the end of the hall they opened the doorway that led to the stairwell. Daniel & Charles was located on Thirty-fourth Street, about ten feet away from an apartment building. It was almost as if they were connecting buildings. From the stairwell these guys were able to look right into the apartment building, and they had designated the various apartments as Channel One, Channel Two, and so forth. Channel Eight was a very zaftig-looking young girl who happened to be walking around in her bra at the time – and nothing else. And like everybody was standing there, you know, commenting on the chick, throwing lines like, ‘I don’t think she’s as nice as Channel Five.’ This was my initiation into advertising.
There were guys at Daniel & Charles who were so addicted to those windows that they spent hours keeping an eye on the channels. The funniest sight and the funniest sound in the world was when we would be working late at night – after 10:00 p.m. – and you would hear a copywriter, Evan Stark, pushing his typewriter table down the hall to the stairwell and setting up the typewriter so he could write and watch at the same time. Bob Tore, the art director Evan worked with, would sit on the steps and the two of them would stare out the window and work on ads, but keeping an eye peeled to see what they could find. Evan would sit there and think of something and he would type because he would never work with a pencil. He would sit there and type a headline, always checking the windows, and finally one day Charlie Goldschmidt caught everybody.
There was a great confrontation, and because Charlie used to blame me for most of the crazy stuff in the agency he called me down and said, ‘Well, Jerry, you and your gang have finally done it. The neighbors have called the cops and they say I’ve got an organization of Peeping Toms working here.’ And I said, ‘Charlie, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And really, I didn’t understand. He says, ‘Well, you and your guys finally did it.’ ‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘you’re out of your skull.’ He said, ‘You better go up and tell your gang they’re in a lot of trouble.’
I ran upstairs and the first guy I saw was an art director named Bill Arzonetti, and I said, ‘Bill, we’re in trouble. Charlie says that there’s an organized gang of Peeping Toms at Daniel and Charles.’ Bill looked at me with a straight face and said, ‘Gee, that’s the first time I ever belonged to anything organized.’
Bill is an unusual guy. Very quiet, very good art director. One day I was working with him, and actually it was the first time we really had done any ads together. Anyhow, we’re working away and his phone started to ring. Bill is a very uptight guy when he’s working and he keeps working and ignores the phone. Couple of minutes pass. The phone is still ringing. I look at the phone but since I’m new I figure maybe Bill likes a phone to ring for five minutes before he picks it up. It’s still ringing and he still doesn’t answer it but I can see he’s getting tenser and tenser, and he’s just building up to an explosion. Finally he looks around and picks up a pair of scissors and he stabs the phone. Not simply cut the wire or anything like that. I mean he stabbed it, right from the handpiece all the way through the rest of