From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [94]
Shep came through, all right. He did not say the Statue of Liberty had the thermometer in its backside. He said, ‘So when I took the client this Statue of Liberty with a thermometer shoved up its ass I told him if they can shove a thermometer up the ass of the Statue of Liberty, you can take a zipper down in the back.’ Like it was the first time someone really said a prayer after a meal. Everybody had their heads down at their plates, reading their parsley.
You can’t underestimate Shep. One day he was flying back to New York from I don’t know where and he happened to be sitting next to the advertising manager in charge of Singer Sewing Machines of Peru. Shep talked to him during the plane ride and the guy got to like Shep and he gave Shep the account. It was one of the most beautiful accounts in the history of advertising. We were selling sewing machines to Indians who couldn’t run them because they had no place to plug them in. Shep went out and researched things and we found that the best form of media in Peru was to put a sign on a boat that floats down the Amazon River – or whatever river flows through Peru.
Singer of Peru was a great experience. I once wrote an ad that said, ‘The machine you buy your mother on Mother’s Day will last until Father’s Day.’ It went to the client off in Peru and it came back with the note, ‘We have no Father’s Day in Peru.’ We had a girl in our office who was a student from Colombia and was some kind of an Indian and she knew the kind of Spanish that they spoke in Peru – at least she said she did – and she would translate everything we did and then we would send it down to Peru.
A crazy account. We had an American who understood the language to shoot commercials for us, so we wrote this one commercial which showed a young man and a young woman walking into the local Singer Sewing Center. Well, our man in Peru gets the storyboard for the commercial and he didn’t know where to go to hire the models for the shooting. So this guy did what he thought was a logical thing. He went to a local movie studio and hired a couple of young out-of-work actors. The next day as our guy got ready to go out to shoot the commercial, he happened to glance at the local newspaper. There, staring back at him, was the face of his male model on page 1, and across his chest was a string of numbers. It turned out that the actor had just been picked up by the local police when he had attempted to hold up the National Bank of Lima. Our cameraman called us up in New York and informed us that the commercial we were waiting for would have to be held up for three to five years.
I had written a nice little commercial which showed a bullfighter sitting in the middle of a ring, sewing himself a cape. They let the bull out and the bullfighter starts sewing like a son of a bitch. Then the commercial cuts to the bull, back to the bullfighter, back to the bull, until the last moment when he finished the cape just in time to give the bull a pass and save his neck. The way it was shot, the opening scene showed the bullfighter wearing a black suit and in the next shot he was wearing a white suit, and in the third shot he had on a suit with a lot of crazy decorations on it. They just found some stock film and put it in wherever they could.
You wonder why Peru is mad at us. We were selling them machines and the poor Indians were buying machines without power. On time, yet. We got a letter from a guy who was trying to make a collection from a couple of Indians who had bought a sewing machine. They were stuck away on a mountain someplace and the collection guy spent four hours going through swamps, jungles and who knows what else trying to reach them. He was able to see them but he could not get to them. He could never reach them and he couldn’t understand how they ever got down off their perch to get the sewing machine