From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [93]
Pitching with Shep Kurnit was just as much fun as it was with Irwin. Kurnit is a brilliant guy. He could be very good. We compete pretty hard against each other but I like the guy. He’s got tremendous staying power. It’s hard to keep up with him. He stays. He claws, he scratches, he fights, but he’s there. He’s not a pushover by any means. One of his funny traits is that when he talks to you he’s got to touch you. When he makes a point, he touches you. The touching used to drive us crazy. One day Ron came out of his office and said, ‘I solved the problem. Whenever he comes near me and starts to touch me, I start lighting matches.’ Shep always used to back you in a corner. Ron said, ‘It’s easy. You stand there lighting matches and he never comes near you any more.’
One of Shep’s little idiosyncrasies was that during a pitch he usually would find fault with the product they were pitching. As I said, he’s very bright, and quite often during presentations he would take a look at the thing and automatically redesign it before your eyes. The problem was that you never knew when Shep was going to redesign the client’s product and this led to a lot of tension at new-business meetings at Delehanty. You never knew when Shep was going to drop the bomb. Maybe the client has been in business for fifty years and maybe his father had started making these widgets or whatever. This guy has lived with these widgets for years, he wakes up widgets, he sleeps and dreams widgets. Shep would come in, take one look at the widget and say, ‘You know what? If you took this handle off here, put the handle there, changed this, switched that, then you’d have a hell of a product.’ It was great because it gave you a chance to become reacquainted with your shoes. You would look at them and after a while Shep would be finished with redesigning the product.
The great thing about Shep is that he would drop a bomb on you in the unlikeliest places. Once we had to attend a Group W (Westinghouse) affiliates’ convention in Florida. Shep had given a little speech the day before, and on this day we were sitting around the pool having lunch: Shep, Marvin Davis (a vice-president of Delehanty), me, and the lady in charge of continuity for the Group W stations. She was a very prim and proper lady because if you’re in charge of continuity you’ve got to be at least a virgin, if not better. We’re sitting there eating and I’m waiting for the bomb to fall. We know it’s going to happen, so Marvin and I are trying to pick easy subjects to talk about. Marvin was picking good subjects like the weather, I was picking good subjects like baseball, we both were picking very good. The directress of continuity must have thought we were crazy, but little did she know! The minute he zapped in that this woman is in charge of continuity, he had to do continuity stories. He started off by saying, ‘I have a client who is a great guy, but I once had a problem selling him an ad for Talon Zippers that showed the Statue of Liberty with a zipper down her back.’ He goes into the whole story about how he has to create ads all day long on zippers, and I kind of looked over at Marvin for a second and he had a sandwich up to his mouth and his eyes rolled to the back of his head. We both knew something bad was going to happen but we weren’t quite sure what. I said to myself, ‘He’s not going to tell the old Statue of Liberty story – he’s not going to do that.’
Sure enough. He says, ‘We had this ad with the Statue of Liberty and I knew how the client would react to the Statue having her zipper in the back open. He could say it’s unpatriotic – but I remembered something I once saw on Forty-second Street.’
I said to myself, ‘Oh, oh, here’s where