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I looked at him and then I said, ‘I think I hear somebody calling me. I’ll be right back.’ I didn’t come back for two days. We still meet now and then and laugh about it. How many guys stab their telephones? He didn’t kid around with it, either, I mean he wanted to kill that phone. The funny thing is that even after he stabbed it, it still rang. Bill was much calmer after he stabbed it.

We had another art director at Daniel & Charles – I’ll call him Jack. One day Jack decided to leave his wife. He went home and told her, ‘I’m leaving you. I have a girl friend.’ His wife says, ‘How can you do this to me?’ Jack says, ‘I have a girl friend.’ His wife collapsed into a chair and started beating her breast, shouting, ‘Why, why?’ And he said, ‘Well, what’s wrong with having a girl friend? Look, all the other guys at the agency have girl friends. Why can’t I have one?’

She decided to go gunning for everyone at the agency. Somehow she got a list of the agency people with their home phone numbers and she decided that she would call all of the wives and tell them that all of their husbands were running around. Then Jack told us that she decided not to make the phone calls, but instead she was going out to buy a gun and shoot everyone at the agency. We all started to look around for a good place to hide when she showed up. In the back of the creative department there was a closet with a false wall, and Bob Tore and I decided that if we ever heard gunfire or anything going on we would jump into this closet and stay there until it blew over. You may think I’m kidding but she was quoted as saying, ‘I’m going to go up and get everybody.’

You can’t really compare Jack with a guy like George Lois, who uses his wildness to get a lot of things done. There are literally hundreds of George Lois stories around town. George is a big husky Greek guy who has a hell of a temper, plus the fact that he’s very, very creative and a hell of a good art director. All of these factors rolled into one tend to make things very exciting when George is around.

There are a couple of classic stories on Madison Avenue involving art directors trying to stuff their immediate superiors out a window. The way I heard one of these stories, an art director once tried to throw Norman B. Norman out of a window in the Look building, but the casement windows stopped him, along with an assist from another art director, named Onofrio Paccione.

There is a great, great nut in town I’ll call Riley. He was a very good copywriter for Doyle, Dane. One day he went out to lunch and got very, very drunk and started feeling sorry for himself. He finally said the hell with the whole business, and when he came back from lunch he started to bust up his office. You know, throwing lamps around, breaking the chair. His method of getting the whole thing over with was not to leave Doyle, Dane but to destroy everything that was in there. The desk was the last piece that he wanted to do the job on.

He lifted up the window and started to shove his desk out of it. Well, those desks can weigh anywhere from a hundred pounds on up. Anyhow, all the racket that Riley was making busting up the chairs attracted attention. People started running into his office and the first thing they see is Riley, about to get a hernia, with his desk halfway out the window and about to go all the way out. A couple of guys tackle him and another couple of guys tackle the desk and manage to save a few lives. For years people would talk about Riley and his desk, and one day I asked him if the story were true. ‘Hey, Riley, did you really try to do it? Did you really try to throw your desk out the window?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but it was only on the Forty-third Street side of the building.’ I mean, how can you help loving a guy who realizes that if his desk goes out on the Forty-second Street side it causes a lot of headaches, but it’s O. K. on the Forty-third Street side. That’s a very rational man.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that all the creative guys in town are crazy.