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By Root 359 0

agency people, account people, the usual tremendous mob. Anyhow, they shoot the commercial, and it comes off okay and everybody packs up and starts walking to the dock to get the next ferry back to New York. The mother is still putting on the producer, telling him what a great actor her kid is; the cameraman is telling the director what a terrific job of camera work the commercial is; the copywriter is telling the account man what a great script he wrote – the usual nonsense from everyone concerned. Everybody gets to the ferry and they’re starting to get on when somebody turns around – and it wasn’t the mother, either – and says, ‘Hey, where’s the kid?’ Well, everyone starts looking high and low for the kid and it turns out they had left the kid back on the beach. Just left him there, playing in the sand.

When I was working at Bates, I happened to be walking through the reception area one day when suddenly I found myself surrounded by little Chinese boys. I mean, the place was jammed with them. There must have been at least fifty Chinese mothers there too. Now the Chinese are a very stable group; they’re probably the sanest group of people in New York. Yet there were enough crazy Chinese mothers to fill up the halls of Bates with these little Chinese kids, all looking for their job. Again, one Chinese kid is needed – and think of the rejections. Fifty Chinese kids could start a revolution if they got rejected enough.

You’ve got to go crazy to be a model. During one of the periods when I was out of work I shot a commercial on spec using my own kid because I couldn’t afford to hire a kid model. As we walked out, I noticed my kid was high. She was up. She was so spaced out that she wasn’t a kid any more. She was way out of it almost as if she was on pot. She couldn’t talk, she was breathing heavily. It’s a crazy experience for a kid to have to do this. It gives them the idea that they’re better than normal people because they’re in an ad.

When I was working for Fuller & Smith & Ross, I happened to be on the agency basketball team. One night our team had a game scheduled with a group of male models. Invariably the word is out that all male models are fags. It’s not true that all of them are, but quite a few of them are a little too cute for words.

Anyhow, here come the male models, and five of the most beautiful guys in the world come out and run across the floor. We were staring at them, that’s how beautiful they were. And, like we figured, you know – male models – we’re going to kill them. We forgot one thing: quite a few of the male models are ex-jocks out of colleges. It was a great scene. The game gets started and pretty soon I get a break and start dribbling toward their basket. I’m all alone, or I thought I was alone. I’m going up for a lay-up, and as I go up one of these guys – he was six foot four, so help me – one of these beautiful, beautiful guys comes down on me with his elbow and catches me across the top of the nose. I fell to the floor and I couldn’t see for a second, the pain was so unbelievable. Blood was gushing out of my nose, all over me, the floor, everything. As I was bouncing around on the floor I remember I was shouting, ‘My nose, my nose!’ And this beautiful guy just looks down at me and says, ‘You call that a nose?’ It was so funny that I was laughing and bleeding at the same time.

I could give you all the disclaimers in the world, but people are still going to look enviously at the advertising business. I just don’t understand it. In the average insurance office there must be a lot of fooling around going on, and yet the average insurance office isn’t as glamorous as the advertising business supposedly is. Many years ago when I was flat broke and selling toys in Macy’s and then bathrobes in Gimbel’s basement, I used to think about all the jazz in the advertising business. Just recently I heard about a book called Seventh Avenue, in which everybody in the garment business was chasing to beat the band. I tell you, when I was sitting there in Gimbel’s basement, it didn’t seem so glamorous to me.