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Complete silence. Dead silence. And then the art director went into hysterics, like he was hitting the floor. To him it was funny. One of the account guys who was smoking a pipe – well, his mouth opened up at the line and his pipe dropped all over him, and he spent the next five minutes trying to put out the sparks. The rest of them looked at me as if to say, ‘God, where are we, what did we do?’ They looked very depressed. I was pretty pleased. I thought it wasn’t too bad a line. Later in the day I repeated the line to the guy who hired me, did the same bit for him. The feeling wasn’t spontaneous as all that the second time around but it served its purpose. I know why I do these things: it sets the pace, it really tells people who I am, what I feel.

Now advertising is a small business, with a lot of gossip, and there are a lot of guys sitting around in their offices with not too much to do, so when they hear a funny story or a crazy line they sit and call each other up to pass it on. I became known as the Pearl Harbor guy at Panasonic.

I wouldn’t say that things went downhill for me at the agency after that first meeting. It really started to go to hell at Bates after my first creative review board meeting. One of the reasons that copywriters and art directors go crazy is creative review boards. Creative review boards are, first of all, the device of a very large and a very old-fashioned agency. It’s made up so a lot of guys who are over sixty can feel as though they’re part of an agency. A lot of these guys, they have nothing to do and they sit there. They’re professional second-guessers, and they sit there and they want the chance to-review the creative product. If somebody were to ask me what are the physical characteristics of a creative review board, I would say they are made up of guys with red noses and blue veins. And like they sit there and they look like they’re just about to have a coronary. They have this beautiful flush, most of them are gray and they’re maybe twenty to thirty pounds overweight. These are the guys who have survived to the point where they now make seventy-five, eighty, one hundred grand a year without doing very much. They show up at the office at 10:00 a.m. Maybe. They spend a couple of hours shuffling papers around on the desk and calling people up and making their lunch dates. They’re very concerned with their lunch dates. God forbid they should ever get caught without a lunch date. They wouldn’t know what to do. They make their lunch date. They show up at ‘21,’ which is the place they all go to, and they spend another two or three hours a day there at lunch.

They never talk about advertising. That’s a funny thing. These cats talk about advertising only at creative review board meetings. They get back to their offices around three o’clock and maybe they’ll call a meeting for no good reason and comes 4:45 they grab the train and go back to Rye or Chappaqua where they all live. They all live in the same valley as far as I’m concerned – the Valley of Death. Man for man, creative review boards are probably responsible for more waste in advertising than anything else. The Comptons have them, and the Thompsons, and the Bateses, and the Foote, Cones, and the Fuller, Smiths and just about every one of those old-line, heavy, overstaffed, fat agencies. The joke of the business is that an agency like a Compton has a creative review board. So they get together once a month, these killers, and they review.

Why should a Mary Wells have a creative review board, or a Doyle, Dane, or a Delehanty? They know they’re good, they don’t need any board to tell themselves so. The evidence is in their fantastic growth and in the awards they win each year for their work. I don’t believe that people should have their writing reviewed.

Now the creative review board at Bates was a new deal. Bates hadn’t had one before. A first for them. And to their credit I must say that they had some younger people in it. It wasn’t just the red noses and the blue veins. With one or two exceptions, they had some very young, very