From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [50]
The dilemma is that the good writers in this town are those who are really not afraid. You’ve got to be loose. It’s the one business where you’ve got to be so loose when you’re sitting down to work that you can’t sit there and worry about what’s going on next door or am I going to lose my job. And there are very few people like that in the creative end of advertising. Practically none. Most copywriters have the same background: middle class to lower middle class. All the copywriters in town have read Portnoy’s Complaint and they all say, ‘That’s my life. I was Portnoy except that I would never do such a thing to a piece of liver.’
Everybody in advertising in mixed up – but especially the creative people. Your whole life is screwed up. You’re not the same kind of guy once you get into the business. It’s hard to describe a business that really gets into your blood the way advertising does. After you’ve worked in it for a while, you’re not the same person that you ordinarily would be. I often wonder how I would have been or how I would behave if I had gone into the aluminum-siding business.
What happens to some guys is – well, I’ll draw the analogy to sports again. Baseball has its hot players and the next year the hot players cool off, and what happens is that their salaries drop and they get optioned out to Toledo.
There was a really good creative director in New York a few years ago who either lost it, blew it, or God knows. Anyhow, the next thing you hear he’s out in Chicago working for an agency. When you go to Chicago that’s like being optioned to Newark if you’re playing for the Yankees when the Yankees were the only thing going in baseball. I don’t know where you go after Chicago. He’s making a lot of money but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s still Chicago, the minors. Some guys go to Pittsburgh, the minors. You go to Cleveland, you’re still in the minors. When you talk about the major leagues you’re talking about New York, with Los Angeles coming up fast. In between New York and L. A. you have very little except for Leo Burnett in Chicago.
It’s very strange out of town, especially when a guy from New York is invited by some locals someplace to make a speech. There’s real hero worship. They all want to grow up and come to New York, and when you show up in their town they expect you to turn the water cooler into a wine cooler. They look at you and they say, ‘Jesus, he’s here. He’s going to tell us how to do it.’ And then you find they know everything about you.
I was down in Charlotte, North Carolina, one time to make a speech and I sat next to a guy who said, ‘Remember when you did that ad for Esquire Sox?’ I didn’t even remember ever working on Esquire Sox, much less the ad the guy was talking about, but this guy wouldn’t let up: ‘Don’t you remember the ad? There’s a man in the ad who is talking and the girl is standing in the background …’ And then the ad came back to me. But this guy had like literally collected these things and was following me, and it’s crazy but I’m a scrapbook someplace in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A friend of mine once went out to Cleveland to make a speech and when he came back he called me and said, ‘There’s a guy in Cleveland who knows more about you than your wife.’ He mentioned the guy’s name and of course I’d never heard of him, and my friend says the guy from Cleveland has a scrapbook on me with every ad I ever wrote, every speech I ever made, and every advertising column I ever wrote for Marketing/Communications. This is the out-of-town story.
The standard word around Madison Avenue is that the out-of-towners love to be put down. If you want to make a speech out of town you’ve got to tell them that they’re no good. If you ever tell them that they’re good, they’ll hate you for it. They really sit there waiting for you to come in and say, ‘Boy, are you guys bad. I mean, are you bad. You know, in New York none of you would ever get a job.’ And they sit there and say, ‘Yeah, that’s New York advertising talking.’ It’s crazy.
In Los Angeles, the guy they’ve promoted to sainthood