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The Peru guy used to show up in New York every so often and Shep spent hours trying to teach the guy media. The Peru guy says, ‘You have to go in this magazine, El Commandore.’ Shep says, ‘What about this other magazine, El Fig?’ (You had a choice of two magazines in your Peru marketing plan.) The Peru guy says, ‘El Fig is no good because it’s never on the newsstands. You can’t advertise in it.’ Shep says, ‘Why isn’t it on the stands?’ He’s figuring maybe they’re having union trouble with El Fig down in Peru. The local tells Shep, ‘The minute El Fig comes out it disappears from the stands. But El Commandore, it’s always around on the stands.’ Shep says, ‘Do you understand that people are buying El Fig and not buying El Commandore and that’s why El Fig is never around and El Commandore is?’ The Peru guy said, ‘Oh.’ We ran ads, we ran commercials, and we made a lot of bread. If you got the Indian to make the down payment, you were breaking even. The rest of the stuff was gravy.

The best presentation I ever took part in also was at Delehanty. We were getting ready for a presentation to Chemway, Inc., which makes Pretty Feet. Usually, the night before any presentation Shep would come in and suddenly decide that everything was wrong and we were not going to get the account. True to form, he came in the night before the Chemway pitch and said our stuff was garbage and we wouldn’t get the account. Well, we had a terrible fight. Shep and I were always having terrible fights – but this one was worse. Marvin Davis, who also would be in on the pitch, said something about one of the ads and I went berserk. I had been working very hard and I just flipped. I climbed over a table after Marvin. People had to pull us apart because it was turning into a real brawl.

I was so uptight about what had just happened that I went out drinking for the whole night. It was a very wild night and I woke up at seven o’clock in the morning in a strange place not knowing what to do for clothing because my clothes were a shambles. I knew that I had to make a presentation and my shirt looked as if somebody had thrown up on it – maybe it was me. I had to find a shirt, if nothing else. The presentation was scheduled for nine o’clock. No store is open at 8:30. I had a car and I couldn’t remember where I had parked it. So I left the car wherever it was and jumped into a cab and told the guy to take me down to the West Side waterfront. Down there the Army-Navy surplus stores are open all night. I bought a denim shirt and a solid blue tie and figured it wouldn’t look too bad. I was still hung over, terribly so, and I took the cab back to the office to make the presentation.

During a presentation the top-ranking officer from the agency starts the pitch and then everybody around the table says his piece, including the creative department. And now it comes time for me to do my speech and somebody had given me a cup of coffee. The alcohol must have been condensed in my body, because the minute I got the coffee down I was drunk again. But I got up and made the best presentation I’ve ever made in my life. It wasn’t that I thought I was good; people came up to me at the end of the presentation and said, ‘I’ve seen you at a presentation before but I’ve never seen you so buttoned up.’ Well, the buttoned-up part was that I was afraid to open my mouth and really talk because I figured if I did open up my mouth I would throw up. So I talked very quietly. Afterward everyone said, ‘Usually you get very excited. This was so nice. You didn’t move, you didn’t jump around. This was just the way to present to these people.’ Little did they know that if I had jumped around my head would have fallen on the table.

They gave us the account on the spot. I ordered champagne for everybody but I wouldn’t serve any to Shep or Marvin. We got drunk the same day. It was like one twenty-four-hour binge, the whole place just went crazy.

Once, at Delehanty, we made a terrific presentation and the president of the company we