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By Root 375 0

three years. I’m sure that if she was alive she would have turned us down. Finally, the word comes from one of those endorsement outfits that Dorothy Provine, the television star, would do the commercial for $50,000. There was much rejoicing in the agency when Provine said she’d do it. Even though $50,000 is a lot of bread, we would have the only commercial on the air that will be able to get past all the things that the Code says you can’t say. You can’t even mention sex but Provine is sex. You can’t say attractive but Provine is attractive. My theory was that when the competition looks at our commercial and we really start to fly and take off in sales the competition is going to say, ‘We’ve got to get a star too to neutralize these people.’ I figured out as I looked around that the only star left for them to get is Arthur Godfrey. He’s doing Axion commercials now, but I mean he’s the only star left.

We shot the commercial out in Los Angeles in a big mansion. We’ve got a great photographer, a director, script girls, dozens of people running around, and we’ve got a lot of bread tied up in this thing. I go into this mansion, which must have had forty rooms in it, to talk to Provine, and when I saw her I almost fainted. She was under the hair dryer and you know, this is not a good place to talk to a lady because ladies usually look lousy under hair dryers. I went downstairs feeling very uptight and nervous. I mean, here we are with a crew of twenty-five people, spending $50,000 for Provine and maybe another $25,000 for the commercial, and what are we going to do?

Finally, the time comes for Provine to come down. And she’s beautiful. A fag makeup man has put her together and made her into something. I started talking to her and I said, ‘I want you to give this a Sandy Dennis reading.’ She said, ‘What’s a Sandy Dennis reading?’ I said, ‘A Sandy Dennis reading is as though you were mentally retarded for the first eighteen years of your life and you just learned how to talk but you can’t remember words too good. So you say things like “This is the first time I’ve … uh … ever done … a … commercial.” ‘ I said, ‘It’s got to be natural, like Sandy Dennis, you know – fake natural.’

She did it and she did it very well. There’s one part where she comes on and says, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever done a commercial. It’s about a product that I … ah … feel very strongly about…. It’s a feminine …’ And she gave us a terrific Sandy Dennis reading. A marvelous commercial. Then our troubles started with Miss Cheng.

The offices of the National Association of Broadcasters are very deceptive. It’s like another business office. You walk in, and there’s a girl behind the desk and you say, ‘Miss Cheng, please.’ And out comes Miss Cheng. She’s very soft-spoken, very nice, and I don’t know, maybe she’s the brains behind the whole thing. Her title is Senior Editor. All I know is that I’ve never seen many people up there. All you do is show your stuff to Miss Cheng. She always talks vaguely about people in the back she has to consult with but I’ve never seen more than one of those people. She goes away, and then she comes back with some of the stupidest decisions I have ever seen in my life.

You usually go up to Miss Cheng with your storyboards – those cardboard things with the various shots of the commercial drawn in and the audio typed out. With the Feminique commercial Miss Cheng did such a job on the storyboards that she knocked two-thirds of it out. Miss Cheng says we cannot say ‘It’s safe.’ But we can say ‘It will make you feel safe.’ ‘Well, doesn’t this mean that the woman is safe?’ ‘Yes, but you can’t say that it’s safe.’ Miss Cheng also does not like the use of the word ‘feminine’ three times in the commercial. ‘Is feminine good enough to use once?’ ‘Certainly, you can use it once.’ ‘Well, why can’t I use it three times?’ ‘Well, when you use it three times you’re stressing it’ Plus: ‘You’re not allowed to use your competitors’ name, even though you’re saying something nice about them.’ Plus: ‘You’re not allowed to use the phrase “feminine