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By Root 381 0

The Klutz, and to this day I’ve never met a more fearful guy. I was really just a punk kid then, I couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and David used this man the way the Green Hornet used to use his trusty valet Cato. I would walk into David’s office to show him an ad, and David would always drive me insane because he would always come out and say, ‘I don’t like it.’ He never said, ‘I don’t like it because …’ Just ‘I don’t like it.’ And I’d say, ‘Come on, David, you must have a reason for not liking it. There’s got to be something there that you can put your finger on.’ Good old David would shake his head and say, ‘Jerry, this just doesn’t make it.’ Then he’d say, ‘All right, I’m going to prove it. I’ll call in Cato and let’s see if Cato likes it.’

He trusted Cato. Cato would come into the office and stand around, just like a buzzard, hovering over the ad. David always had a secret way of looking at Cato to tell Cato whether he really liked or hated the ad. David would say, ‘Cato, what do you think of this ad?’ I never could get the key word but Cato always could read David. Cato would look at David and read his face and say, ‘You’re right, David, it doesn’t make it.’ Or David would call him in and say, ‘Cato, what about this one?’ Quick as a flash Cato would pick up the sign and say, ‘Hey, David, that’s a great ad.’ Then David would turn to me and say, ‘You see, Jerry, I told you, it’s a great ad.’

One day I showed David an ad and he hated it, so he called in Cato, but evidently forgot to flash the signal. Maybe David would twitch his eyes, but this time he must have forgotten. David asked Cato what he thought and zap, Cato blew the signal. David was standing there and Cato’s trying to pick up the signal. But no signal. ‘Well, David,’ Cato started to say, and then he stopped. Meanwhile, David was getting impatient and kept saying, ‘What about this one, Cato?’ Cato is fumbling. ‘Let me read the headline again,’ he said. He’s reading the headline, and he’s looking at David trying to get some kind of playback and David’s standing there and no playback is showing up. The guy’s whole life was going before him. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.

I couldn’t stand watching this guy die any longer, so I finally said, ‘Cato, listen, David hates this ad. Thinks it stinks.’ It was like rescuing a drowning person. Then Cato went into his act. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Now the problem with this ad is the layout and …’ All he needed was to know how David stood on the ad and then he was able to fly.

I really don’t think creative people are afraid of losing their jobs at the whim of the agency, but there is one thing that drives them up the wall: fear of losing their talent, their abilities. Everybody I know feels this pressure. Is this ability something like magic? Will it ever just disappear? Will the day come when you sit down and suddenly you don’t feel the same thing working in you the way you used to? You can’t write any more. The words don’t go together.

One of the ways Charlie Goldschmidt of Daniel & Charles had of spurring his troops on was to play on this fear that copywriters have: he used to plague me with it and everybody else, too. ‘Well, kid,’ he would say, ‘what do you think? You haven’t had an idea in about three weeks. You’re starting to fake it, aren’t you? You’re trying to coast because it happens sometimes, you’ve got it one day and the next day it’s gone.’ And he would do this, he would pressure his people this way in the hope of shaking them up and getting them out of the doldrums.

Listen, somebody is paying you thirty-five, forty grand a year to do this thing, copywriting, or being an art director, and you’re bound to have this fear of going dry. A fantastic art director named Bob Gage at Doyle, Dane once made a speech on fear, what it was, how to combat it. He described it as the fear of going dry and then he discovered that you can never go dry, that there is no mystique, there’s no magic to it, you can’t turn off like that. Gage said that when he found himself going dry, it was a matter