From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [54]
Look at these people at the supermarket. They’re pushing market baskets piled high with beer, a couple of packages of hot dogs, and that’s it. Eighteen cans of beer a night except on Friday, which is party night when they switch to a clean undershirt. And on Friday you’ve got to figure that the guy is going to double his weekday consumption.
I went to a Yankee game one night last year and there was a real beer drinker in front of me, the genuine thing. I was watching him, and he made the night for the kid selling beer. He stopped once for peanuts, but that was a mistake because he didn’t finish them. He knocked the beer off just like pills – I swear he must have drunk ten or twelve cans during that nine-inning game. He didn’t get up for the seventh-inning stretch, which doesn’t indicate that he wasn’t a Yankee fan. It was simply a matter that his legs weren’t moving too good at the time. There he was, sitting and drinking, and when the game was over he showed that he was a true fan. I got up to leave and he was still sitting there. Sitting there and looking out at the field, but he was staring straight ahead. A real beer drinker, with a real beer belly. Now you know if I had come up to him after the game and said, ‘Hey, buddy, do you know you just knocked off three thousand calories in all that beer? Why don’t you switch to something that won’t make you fat?’ – do you know what he would have done? He would have punched me in the mouth – that is, if he could have gotten his hands free.
Now it is theoretically possible to sell Gablinger’s Beer. It’s a good idea, but not for Bohack, or A & P, or Piggly Wiggly. You sell it to Gristede’s because it’s a carriage-trade product. The lady who shops in Gristede’s might pick up one six-pack because she likes the notion that it’s low on calories.
The beer business is very strange. Go into Costello’s, which is an old-time bar on Third Avenue in New York – go into there any night and pick the guy who has just staggered out of the men’s room and is trying to climb back on his bar stool. Go up to this cat and ask him what he thinks of Rheingold Beer. He doesn’t know zip about Rheingold Beer but he’ll focus his eyes and swear to you that Maureen Harrington got cheated out of winning the Miss Rheingold contest back in 1961 because a lot of votes for the girl named Beverly came in from Brooklyn on the last day of the contest. You think I’m kidding? There are guys in New York who went into mourning the day they discontinued the contest in 1965.
Interesting thing about the contest. One of the marketing geniuses behind the campaign was supposedly trying to make it with almost every Miss Rheingold who came down the pike. That is one hell of a lot of Miss Rheingolds. But practically every one of them. And this marketing genius one day woke up and couldn’t feel his legs. So he went to Europe to dry out. I mean, he’s probably thirty-three or thirty-four now, but he can’t walk. He’s sitting there in his wheelchair with a little gray shawl over his legs and one hell of a lot of memories. He got tired of the contest. Bored. It can happen; he’s entitled. So Rheingold went to Doyle, Dane and they produced those ethnic commercials – Doyle, Dane, let’s face it, does not have a stunning beer record in New York City.
The ethnic commercials were beautifully done. Not only did they not sell beer; they antagonized a lot of people. Let’s say our beer drinker is an Italian. They had an Italian commercial with a lot of people running around and dancing and saying ‘Mamma mia’ and things like that, and during the commercial the Italian beer drinker was very happy. He had a nice warm feeling for Rheingold. Then, one day he’s watching television and a group of Poles show up dancing a polka and carrying on a lot. This drives the Italian up the wall. He says, ‘I won’t touch the same beer those lousy Poles are drinking.’ They had a Jewish commercial,