From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [48]
Then I met a guy at the party, and I knew him fairly well. He’s a very good writer and kind of a strange kid, very quiet, but nothing unusual about him. He was making about thirty thousand a year. At that party he was very uptight.
What was it all about? He’d been fired that morning. And he said, ‘I’ve got five hundred dollars in the bank, I make thirty thousand a year, and I pay two hundred and eighty-four dollars a month in rent.’ Who knows where his money went? Clothes, apartment, chicks, I don’t know. But he’d blown all his money and there he was, thirty-one or thirty-two, and I tell you he was a desperate kid, he really was. I had never seen him like that. ‘What am I going to do?’ he asked. ‘How about some free-lance?’ I said. He shook his head. He must have made twenty calls that day because every time I said, ‘Did you call Ned, did you call Ron, did you call Ed?’ he’d shake his head yes. He’d called everybody worth calling. So he’s run out of names to call and he’s only one day out of a job. Now he starts with the headhunters and asks them to start setting up appointments for him.
He’s a good writer. That’s the scary part of it. He blew his last job essentially because he’s a very tough sport. He won’t take any garbage. He had been working for Leber, Katz & Paccione, and Patch finally couldn’t take any more lip from him. So out he went.
Before Paccione he had worked for Daniel & Charles and got fired because he couldn’t get along with Larry Dunst, who then was the creative director and now is the president. The job after Daniel & Charles fell apart the same way.
On about the fourth job out, he’s not going to be so quick to be such a smart-ass. He mentioned to me that he had called a small agency which is really not an advertising agency but rather a dress house; they do all of that Seventh Avenue advertising you see in Women’s Wear Daily and the Sunday Times magazine section. Very big on girdle and bra ads. Anyhow, the owner of the agency told him to come on by on Monday, that is, the guy said, ‘I’ll see you Monday if you want to come in and say hello.’ Now this agency is one of the all-time bad places – it may be the worst agency in America. And he’s thinking seriously of going there for a lot of bread – if they’ll have him. So he’s scared, he’s got a bad weekend ahead of him, and when I left him he was quaking he was so scared.
Paccione already had replaced this guy. He found a twenty-two-year-old who thought advertising was the living end and hired her for eight grand a year. I had talked to her a couple of times about coming to work for us. No sooner do I finish talking to the guy who’s out of work when I run into this kid. ‘Hi,’ she says, full of life, ‘I got my job. I’m working. I’m starting with Leber, Katz, Paccione on Monday.’ ‘That’s terrific,’ I said, and I started to figure it out. Patch hired this kid for eight grand, and he’s saving twenty-two grand a year already by getting rid of the thirty-grand guy. Plus he’s gotten rid of somebody who was a pain in the ass to him. And this young chick now is on her way to making a lot of money. Her next job she’ll be able to grab off ten grand, the one after that fifteen grand, then twenty-one and then up to thirty a year. And then she’ll find herself in the same position as the guy who just got fired. And she’ll start to get a little nervous because there will be somebody else hot coming up.
It’s really not unlike baseball. You don’t have that many good years to perform in. You’ve got about seven, eight, or maybe nine years when you’re hot and everything you do works and they’re calling you for a job and the headhunters are crying for you, and then there’s that long downhill slide. Which is why the shrinks are making out so well. And everybody knows that day is going to come to them. It used to kill me that I never saw a copywriter over forty. Very, very few. There are one or two