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By Root 386 0

I actually know of only one stabbing that ever took place, I mean besides the stabbing of the telephone. An art director named Angie once got into an argument with an account man over an ad and they started yelling at each other so Angie simply stabbed the account guy with a ballpoint pen. Oh, I guess there was a lot of blood and screaming, but the account guy lived. The agency decided they had to do something to Angie, so he was officially censured at a Plans Board meeting, which is composed of the most influential people in an agency. The account guy recovered nicely and then took out a Major Medical policy. I see Angie every now and then. I ran into him just the other day on Fifty-ninth Street, looking very strange. He was carrying his coat under one arm, his shirt was not tucked in his pants, he had a three-day growth of beard, and I don’t think he had been home for a while.

On the whole, there’s not that much violence. Once, on the New York Central, an agency president got into an argument about politics with the guy sitting next to him, and the next thing you knew, the president hit the guy a good shot in the mouth.

George Lois was involved in a small brawl with a friend of mine, Bill Casey. Casey had been working at Papert, Koenig, Lois and he was leaving. There was some kind of stock dispute about his leaving and so they scheduled a reconciliation meeting. Casey was the kind of guy who might have a couple of drinks in a bar and all of a sudden a brawl seems to erupt around him. Something went wrong at the reconciliation meeting and the first thing you know Lois vaults over a table and tries to take a punch at Casey. Secretaries were yelling, the usual chaos. It wasn’t the greatest example of a guy leaving an agency. Casey then sued Lois, Julian Koenig, the whole bunch of them, on the grounds that ‘an atmosphere of physical violence’ kept him from doing his work at the agency.

He might have had something, because back in 1965 there was a terrific fight at PKL during which an account supervisor named Bert Sugar slugged another guy, leaving blood all over the place. They used to call PKL ‘Stillman’s East,’ after the old fight gym.

If I were told to make a choice, I would say that copywriters are the craziest of all of the creative people. I once had a kid named Herb working for me when I was at Delehanty, a great nut. He was on everything in the world, you name it – speed, acid, grass, God knows what else. He used to come into the office looking very strange. It got to the point where if I had to stare into his dilated pupils one more time I would go crazy. I mean, he was bad news. But he was a hell of a good writer, so I kept him on.

The real problem with Herb was not the condition that he arrived in, but when he arrived. He used to come into the office at four o’clock in the afternoon. He used to tell me that he was afraid of the morning, that he hated the morning, so he would stay in bed until three or four and then go to work. It wasn’t that he was shirking or anything – he used to work until midnight or one in the morning – it was just that he was working a different schedule.

Well, the problems started. Art directors were constantly looking for him and of course he was in bed. Account guys were always trying to pin him down, and there he was, breezing in at four in the afternoon, more likely than not zonked out, and account guys never did know how to handle zonked guys. And then the other copywriters saw Herb and the hours he was working and they wanted to work at night, too, and sleep in the morning.

I used to tell him, ‘Herb, you’ve got to come in a little earlier. People are looking for you after ten in the morning, you know that, don’t you?’ Herb said, ‘I can’t help it. I’ll do anything else you want, but I can’t help it – I just have to come in at four or five in the afternoon.’ I said, ‘Herb, listen, you’re going to be fired if you keep it up.’ And he wouldn’t listen.

We finally had to get rid of the guy because he was causing too much trouble. The day I decided to fire him he comes into my office.