From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [32]
We fired him the next day.
Harry called me the other day asking to help get him a semiprofessional apartment. ‘Harry,’ I said, ‘I will be glad to write anyone, anywhere, anytime, that you are indeed a semiprofessional.’ ‘Thank you, Jerry,’ he said, and hung up, probably to sue somebody.
All the craziness doesn’t stay on the creative side. The account side, which is the direct link between the agency and the client, has its madness, too. The main difference is that the creative side takes advantage of its so-called creative reputation, and guys can grow beards at the newer agencies and wear see-through shirts and pants and dilate their pupils. The account side has to stay straight and narrow and wear Paul Stuart clothes and use Ban or Secret or Right Guard and bathe once a day.
The pressure sometimes gets to the account guys, however, and when they flip out it’s something beautiful to watch. I know a bunch of account guys who once had to make a trip to Batavia, Illinois, to visit the people who run the Campana Company. The Campana Company happens to be very big in the menstrual business: they make a little item called Pursettes. So here is this group of New York agency sharpies winging it in Batavia, Illinois, which, I guarantee you, is maybe one step below Des Moines. They spend the morning talking about the marketing plans of Pursettes and then they all go out to lunch. They’ve heard of martinis out in Batavia and the guys from New York load up – a bit too much. Back from lunch, the president says he would like everyone around the table to sit for a while and brainstorm about other uses that Pursettes can be put to. Expand the business, explore new markets, conquer new horizons, that sort of thing. The guys from New York are sitting there in a haze and one guy pipes up, ‘Hey, how about using Pursettes as torches for dwarfs?’ When you’re living in Batavia and you get fired by the Campana Company, there’s not many other places you can go to, so the tendency in Batavia is to downplay the cracks about Pursettes. The New York guys all break up at the idea of dwarfs using Pursettes as torches, but the president of Campana frowns and everybody shuts up.
They get through the brainstorming session, and the next item on the agenda is a tour of the plant. You can’t get out of Batavia without a tour of the plant. With the president leading the way, they drift through the factory and suddenly the group comes across a very strange, very strange-looking thing. The president proudly explains that this thing is an artificial vagina, in fact its name is the syngina, and naturally, it tests how good Pursettes are. The guys from New York are looking at these synginas and they’re biting through their lips to keep from laughing. The president keeps carrying on about how good these synginas are and finally one New Yorker says, ‘And if you’re real nice, they let you take the syngina to dinner.’ Here are guys collapsing on the floor of a factory in Batavia, Illinois, the president turning white with rage, the advertising manager petrified with fear, the agency guys still too stoned to worry.
I once worked for a vice-president of an agency whom we called The Klutz. The Klutz always managed to sit through a presentation and screw it up at the end. We used to make a book on when he would open his mouth and blow the pitch. We kept telling him – his name was David – ‘Please stay away from the presentations if you can’t stop insulting people.’ David would say, ‘I’m going to behave, I’m really going to be a nice guy.’ He had this awful tendency to insult the client and he was truly dangerous to have around.
One day we’re pitching for the Tourist Bureau of Mexico