From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [9]
At the swinging agencies – Wells, Rich; Doyle, Dane; Delehanty; Carl Ally, Papert, Koenig, Lois; Lois, Holland, Callaway; Smith/Greenland; Daniel & Charles; Spade & Archer – all of them are more casual, looser, more fun. Even the dress is a lot different. I’ve got a twenty-two-year-old art director who wears Uncle Sam pants, see-through shirts, and God knows what else. But he’s good, and as long as he’s good he can work naked for all I care. One day at Ted Bates, a girl wore a pair of culottes to the office. She really was great-looking, a beautiful chick. The next day there was a memo saying, you know, bug off, no more of this culotte jazz, this is an office of business. All of the giant agencies try to maintain their offices as a place that you would want to put your money into. It’s got to be very banklike, and very sleepy.
When I say things are looser, the average person immediately makes rampant orgies out of that statement. Everybody knows the story about the wild Christmas party they supposedly had at Young & Rubicam years ago. According to one version, the wife of the president of the agency walked into one of the offices and found a copywriter making it with his secretary. Well, I don’t believe it. But everybody on Madison Avenue swears it’s true. When I was working at Fuller & Smith & Ross it supposedly took place at Fuller & Smith & Ross. It’s probably apocryphal. I just don’t think that that many guys can get caught in the saddle. Another one of those stories: A guy used to go to work at six in the morning and make it with a chick on the conference-room table. Don’t believe it for a minute.
Take the president of one agency where I once worked. This guy always thought that we were making it in his office. He was very, very shook about that. Well, here’s a case of a guy who’s in advertising but he’s also living this vicarious life. He goes back to Darien every night, but he would like to feel that there is a lot of screwing going on in the business because it makes him feel happy to think that his boys are out there carrying on. He likes the idea of having a bunch of Peck’s bad boys working for him. He doesn’t do any of this carrying on, but he likes to talk about his crazies when he’s out at some party in Connecticut. It’s nice for him to say to himself as he rides home on the train: Gee, there’s a lot of screwing going on in my agency – why, right this second I’ll bet they’re making it on my couch. When he comes in the next day and finds a girl’s bobby pin on his couch he immediately decides that they were making it the night before.
A couple of summers ago we started playing a few games of strip poker in our office. Nothing serious, just for a few laughs. I was walking through the hall one day and this nice girl came running out of a guy’s office buttoning her blouse. I looked into the office and there was this guy, with a deck of cards in his hand and a smile on his face. He had said to her, ‘Do you want to play strip poker?’ She said, sure, why not, and she lost her blouse. So the mood in the office that week was sort of strip-poker-oriented. But nothing more serious than that.
A lot of people have accused the younger creative people in advertising of being a bunch of potheads. Let me say a few words about grass. As I walk around New York City, it seems to me that a good 50 percent of the population under the age of thirty looks like it’s either stoned, about to get stoned, or coming down from a high. None of the kids drink any more. All of the drinking at our agency is done by those of us who are over thirty. Throughout advertising, you’ve got a hell of a lot of young kids working who laugh at anyone who drinks. I guess you’d find that hundreds of the younger people have tried grass at one time or another – in advertising and out of it.
An art director I know had a freelance assignment to do some work for an avant-garde publisher down in the Village. While he’s sitting in their offices the other day, a secretary says, ‘Would you like a smoke?’ He says innocently, ‘Sure.’ And the