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By Root 383 0

account and the bagman for President Alemán of Mexico shows up to hear the pitch. The idea was if you got your pitch past the bagman, then you got to pitch to the top tamale himself. The pitch went on for a hell of a long time, something like two hours, and David was a marvel. He sat there, not saying a word, and I was beginning to feel sorry about the way we yelled at him. ‘He’s great,’ I said to myself, ‘he’s behaving like a real gent. I’m sorry we bugged him before the meeting about his behavior.’

For two hours he was beautiful. The meeting ends and I say to myself, ‘Thank God, we made it, the meeting’s over and he hasn’t blown it, he hasn’t insulted the guy, he hasn’t done anything.’ So David puts his arm around the bagman, whose name may have been Pedro or José or whatever, and as they’re walking out the door – out the door – David says, ‘Pedro, you’re a nice guy. We’re going to be working together, I’m sure, and you’ll see we’re nice people, too. If you keep up the niceness, José, maybe we’ll give you back Texas.’ I knew right then and there we were dead.

Because there is so much craziness in advertising, you live for great lines. A funny line literally helps you get through the day. One of the best lines I ever heard was thrown when I was at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller. We were making a pitch to the American Enka Company, which was run by a beautiful blond George Macready type, the kind who was on the other side in World War II movies. Making the pitch was Shep Kurnit, the president of the agency, Marvin Davis, a vice-president, a guy named Tully Plesser, who is a market-research man, and a couple of others, including me. Without getting too ethnic, the faces were basic Jewish and Italian. The pitch went well, Kurnit and Davis were fine, and then the blond guy retired from the room to discuss the agency with some of his people. He walked back in and said, ‘The account is yours if you can produce Delehanty.’

CHAPTER

FIVE

DANCING

IN THE

DARK

‘What account guys have to do to survive today is dance. By dancing, I mean they’ve got to be agile, with very, very good footwork so they don’t get shot down easily. You see, they’ve got nothing to sell. Your copywriter, no matter how young or how bad, has his book – his portfolio – to show. An art director also has a portfolio. Or they’ve got reels, short presentations containing all the commercials they’ve ever shot. But what does the account man have to show? Nothing …’

The people I sympathize most with in advertising are the account guys – the fellows who are the middlemen between the creative troops and the client. Account guys have to put up with the craziness of the creative people, work out marketing and campaign plans, and then sell the package to the client. Under the best circumstances, it isn’t easy. Here is your clean-cut account guy, mortgaged up to his ears in Chappaqua, trying to deal with a zonked kid writer who is maybe twenty-three or twenty-four and is living in a loft in the East Village with twelve other acidheads. The account guy has to get the ad out of the kid and then sell it to the client, who is pretty tough himself. There are a lot of guys crying themselves to sleep up there in old Chappaqua because they’re caught in the crazy middle.

The Hucksters wasn’t all that far from the truth. It’s been written up that the Lucky Strike account, when George Washington Hill was acting every bit as bad as Sidney Greenstreet, had something like twenty-one account supervisors on it in a two-year period. During that time some six or seven guys had heart attacks, several had cases of nervous exhaustion, and the last guy had a complete breakdown. Then in came Fairfax Cone, young, tough, bright, and takes over the account and holds it and solidifies it and becomes The Man, you know? And then Frederick Wakeman writes a book about it, except in the book the guy goes into Sulka, I think, and spends his last twenty dollars or so on a sincere tie. I assure you no sincere tie ever made any impression on George Washington Hill.

What account guys have