Mug Shots (9 page)

Has he come good yet?

In the employment ads, which I scanned regularly, I'd always been attracted to the sound of advertising copywriter, and decided now was the time to try to be one, despite the remonstrances of my father, ever ready to draw on his inexhaustible store of apothegms. (‘Never give up a steady job.') He reminded me, unnecessarily, that I had a wife and four children to support, and this was not the time to jump ship (his phrase).

It was 1963 when I leapt from the railings. I was thirty-two, with a handful of stories published in magazines advertising people had never heard of. I was hired as a copywriter by the manager of an agency called National Advertising Services at £2500 a year (heady money for an ex-teacher). The manager, a charming man called Ron Walker, who looked like a more
dignified
version of Groucho Marx, was just back from Madison Avenue with a new way of writing ads that he'd learned from a hot agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach.

DDB (as those in the know called them) had developed a style so understated and clever the customer didn‘t think he was being sold a thing. In the middle of the shouting bazaar of the print ads was this silence, this sharp little half-tone. Picture: a Volkswagen. Caption: GET THE BUG. Copy: No frills. No fins. Just function.' And so on. Short sentences. Verbs? Forget 'em. Surbordinate clauses? Don't make me laugh. The art of the deafening whisper.

NAS had offices in smart St Kilda Road, and I exchanged a chalk-and-talk sports jacket for a new disguise: a sharp suit of hound's-tooth tweed. I was put in an office overlooking Melbourne Grammar with someone else Ron had gambled on: Morris Lurie. On my first morning, supersmart Barbara Robertson, who looked after the fashion side of the business, came in with a box of lingerie. She held up the unmentionables in turn—bras, panties, negligees—and said she needed something chic about each of them for a fashion brochure—and SAP.

‘SAP?' I said, turning to Lurie who, in his navy-blue suit, looked as short and sharp as a DDB sentence.

‘Soon as possible,' said Lurie. ‘How long have you been in the business?'

‘About forty minutes.' While I was lifting up the erotic underwear and gazing at them nonplussed, Lurie was already tapping at his typewriter, and in half an hour he'd done the lot.

Academic, prolix and bewildered, I was demoted to less demanding assignments. Paint-tin instructions for Dulux, VW dealer ads, copy for
Floor Cleaning Monthly
,
Quarry Mine and Pit
, and
Hardware Retailer
. For weeks I listened to exchanges I only half understood: letterpress, swing tickets, reverse type, fifty per-cent stipples, wet flongs, logo, repro and litho (wasn't he an Italian acrobat?).

The job tickets with copy requirements were brought into us by a begoggled and grinning office boy who knew a lot more about the business than I did. Ron Walker also thought Peter Carey might have possibilities, and when he wrote some Arabian-Nights copy about a new brand of perfume, he too joined the copy department, which was now moved to a flat further down St Kilda Road. Ron, who disliked the front-office meet-the-client charade, came with us. He was our copy chief, with a little office off our big one.

Lurie's Talmud, his guide to everything, was the
New Yorker
. He wore button-down Brooks Brothers shirts and cloth ties and bought Miles Davis records and read John Cheever stories, and while he dreamed of seeing his own fiction between the ads for whisky and pigskin luggage, he worked, as Carey and I did, on prose poems for shampoo and furniture and vinyl tiles, while Ron Walker turned out more copy than the three of us put together.

One day he opened the door to tell us Dunlop was launching a new range of golf clubs carrying Arnold Palmer's signature. Did we have any ideas? In half an hour he was back again, before we'd finished our morning coffee and jokes, with a piece of paper in his hand. ‘When You're The King of Golf'', he read to us, ‘You don't sign anything new until it's perfect.' We applauded. Ron Walker was the king of copy.

Lurie and Carey were getting better and better, while I didn't seem to be improving at all. ‘Ron's waiting for you to come good,' Lurie would tell me. Was he Ron's messenger or just being malicious? Probably both. Still, there was always the literary samizdat
Southerly
for an occasional story—and for Lurie, the
New Yorker
for the occasional rejection slip, often written in glowing terms. And then it was Peter Carey's turn. Tired of being the ninety-pound weakling on Literature Beach, he decided to have a go himself.

He called his novel
Wog
, and it was about a man who buries himself in a bunker. He showed us the opening chapter. It was unusual, not to say eccentric. ‘Keep going,' I said. ‘Don't bother,' added Lurie. ‘Wasting your time.'

Carey did keep going, and just as Lurie encouragingly predicted, no one would publish it. But he was reading and learning fast. At the time, Carmel and I were battling it out in our cold-water weatherboard in Carnegie. We had no TV, no stereo, no car, and four little kids. Peter used to pick me up on a nearby corner on his way to work, and I paid him by giving him the books I reviewed for the
Sunday Australian
, which formed the basis for his literary education.

Unlike Lurie, I've always been an encourager—so I arranged for Carey and Leigh, his then partner, to meet the publisher John Hooker and his wife at dinner at our place. By that time, Hooker would have read the novel and be in a position to offer some comments. When suitably lubricated, he offered only one: ‘I've read your manuscript, and my advice to you is that you're not a bad writer—you're not a writer at all.' Carey and Leigh, indignant, then left, leaving Carmel and me to put up with Hooker's fulminations. Later, when in bed, we were awakened by a phone call. It was Carey: ‘I want that bastard's address.'

‘Why?'

‘So I can throw a brick through his window.' I thought it wise not to give it to him, but it didn't matter. Later, as Carey became more and more successful, metaphorical bricks went hurtling into the Hooker house, each heavier than the last.

On top of the world

Ron Walker waited eighteen months for me to come good. Then I gave notice and joined a bigger and duller agency—George Patterson's, where the account executives and their clients were harder nosed and snappy captions regarded as fancy. The hardest of the noses were attached to the flinty faces of Holden advertising managers. ‘Don't give us clever,' they'd say. ‘Give us punchy.'

The agency regarded their copywriters as tradesmen, to be tucked away at the end of a long corridor in a windowless attic out of sight of their clients. In this merciful isolation I joined Geoff Taylor, novelist and ex-bomber pilot. Our attic was directly above the Regent Theatre in Collins Street, and the soundtrack from afternoon movies would often beguile us as we toiled over our prose.

Because of its remoteness, our office attracted agency malcontents, who'd come up to have a smoke, tell a dirty story or, once it emerged that I was a Catholic father of four, spread
Playboy
centrefolds on my desk.

The Holden executives thought, rightly, that we were also remote from automotive reality, and one day we were taken on a tour of the factory at Fisherman's Bend. It was an experience I've never forgotten. We paused at a door to be given protective glasses, and entered a roaring vastness, a jungle of pipes and cables. Liver-red engines floating high on circuits, intricate organisms waiting to be born. And beside us the assembly line begins, rising from the floor like a secret spring, taking the vehicles' bones on the long, slow road to completion.

Men go hard at it from every angle, screwing, riveting,
hammering
. They have time only to spare us a glance, lest the car inches out of their reach. Then the spray tents, then the drying ovens. Above us the engines dip and dive slowly down to be winched into the chassis. Conception: a Holden is formed. We were peering into capitalism's intricate guts, the intestinal line where the machines were created—that we, the admen in our pressed suits, had to polish into product. I felt guilty. We were the ones with the dirty hands.

Coming good was not hard at George Patterson's—there was no good to come to, just hard-selling copy. My main task was to write material for a magazine called
The Accelerator
, which promoted Holden spare parts to dealers under the NASCO brand. It was tedious work for both Geoff Taylor and me, and it was in reaction to this that a satirical home movie was planned.

Geoff brought in his old bomber-pilot helmet and leather jacket, Ridgway of the TV department provided a video camera, and Ramsay of radio did the lights and sound. At Ridgway's shout of Action!, Taylor, goggled, helmeted and Hitler-moustached, began a lunatic German gibbering in front of a map of Europe. At that moment, Dick Cudlipp, the general manager, came in to introduce a new member of staff. There was a brief freeze-frame, after which no possible explanation could be offered. ‘I see,' said Cudlipp, and he did see. There was no foreman material here.

It was job-ad time again. There was one for an advertising copywriter in what looked like a safe haven—the Department of Overseas Trade. I collected my sad little advertising samples and presented them to the head of the Publicity Branch, a lean, mean and unsmiling man called A.C. Forrest. He flicked through my proofs without enthusiasm, then said he noted in my application that I'd published stories in magazines he'd never heard of. I explained that they were literary magazines. The word ‘literary' seemed to set him off. ‘You can forget about all that if you join us.' True to one of my maxims—agree with whatever is demanded of you and then ignore it—I replied,
‘Of course.
'

Always cover yourself

I got the job, and joined the confraternity of the public service. Trade Publicity was a journalists' graveyard where publications of varying degrees of dullness about Australian export products were produced. But I was the only copywriter, so I could set my own pace.

I wrote prose-poems about carpet sweepers, potato peelers, Nomad aircraft, swizzle sticks, eucalyptus-scented lavatory deodorants, dried fruits (‘Australian dried fruits contain 15% more lactose and fructose than dried fruits from other countries'). If Australia exported it (or hoped to) I wrote copy for it: radio commercials for canned fruit in Swahili, ads in Japanese papers for toy koalas with pouch transistors that played ‘Waltzing Matilda', passionfruit cordial in America, stainless-steel urinals in Peru.

This, I thought, might be the job I've always wanted—no competition, very little pressure, steady, undemanding employment with little chance of the sack, working away quietly amidst verities that seemed to be timeless.

First, The Power of Numbers. Everyone is graded mathematically. I was a Class 8—a reasonably senior position in the Third Division which entitled you to a small office, with glass partitions (up to shoulder height only for Class 8s) and a rug underfoot—but not a carpet. Wall-to-wall came only with Class 10. You looked down on a 7, and up to a 9.

An 8 didn't have to sign the ordinary common time book but a more private one (where slightly more liberties could be taken). Class 9 and above didn't have to sign at all, but had to keep a diary of their arrivals and departures. As long as it was on record. As long as there was a piece of paper.

I was often late, and the personnel officer didn't like it. A meeting was called, and the complaint made. I explained that we now had five children and the mornings were difficult. The personnel officer, small, bald and fierce, was by now red in the face and banged the table: ‘It's not just that you're late, it's the way you loiter! I've seen you! You saunter!'

The officer, whose name was Dance, bore another grudge. In our section, all desks faced inward to the corridor, except mine. The irregularity infuriated him, but he couldn't find anything in the regulations to make me turn my back to the window—it was a feeble protest, a stand for individuality. Turn my desk around and I'd slot into the bureaucratic machinery with a final deathly click.

Second, The File is Everything, and Everything is the File. As the body is made up of cells, so the bureaucracy is made up of files. Files swell, reproduce and spawn others. Files were stored in the hanging garden of the Registry. One must never hoard them or take them home. Bureaucratic battles take place within them. The important thing is to Cover Yourself. Once I neglected to do this and left a flank exposed. An aide-memoire later appeared in the file that was sharply critical of me, signed by a man who always seemed friendly. I sought an explanation from the Office Sage as to why the man hadn't broached it with me personally. There is file life, said the wise one, and real life, and they need have no connection whatever.

Positions Must be Filled. It was decided that an export action advertising campaign be discontinued, and the journalist responsible for it resigned, because there was nothing left for him to do. But his position still existed, and applications were invited, and a replacement found.

For a while, before I had my own office, I shared one with the new appointee. It took him a couple of days to realise there was nothing for him to do either. After a brief period of incredulity, he adjusted. He would open a file, lean back in his chair, rest the file on his chest and fall asleep, often with his mouth open. Filing clerks would sometimes use it as an in-tray to wake him up.

How could this be? I asked the Sage. Simple, he replied. If the position isn't filled, it will be abolished and disappear forever.

Myth of the Smiling Minister. Mr McEwen was Minister for Trade at the time, and there was a photo of him, friendly and smiling, on the receptionist's desk. One of my fellow Class 8s, deluded by this, decided one Friday on a bold course of action. Needing the minister's signature on an urgent document, and knowing that he was paying one of his visits to his Melbourne office, he decided to take the paper directly to him, rather than go through the slow-moving bureaucratic hierarchy.

So he walked down the rarely visited ministerial end of the corridor and braved his Cerberus of a secretary, who agreed, reluctantly, to get the sacred signature for him. He came back in triumph, little knowing what tremors he had set off.

The minister, furious that a flunkey had shown such temerity, complained to the Secretary of the Department, who passed the censure to the Deputy Secretary, who passed it on to a First Assistant Secretary, and then on down to the Assistant Secretary of the Publicity Branch, the lean and mean Mr Forrest, who dressed down the Deputy Director, who told my colleague that such a thing had never happened before and, if he valued his job, must never happen again. The public service might now have computers, but its structure, I'm sure, still goes back to the days of Byzantium.

Public service days tended to be dull. I divided them into quarters, with morning and afternoon tea and a lunchtime walk in Fawkner Park in between. Sometimes my boss and I were taken to lunch by design studios that wanted our advertising business. Since there's nowhere to hide in the modern office, I'd recuperate in the toilet, leaning uncomfortably against the flush handle, which pressed into my back. About three o'clock, if I were still recuperating, I'd hear the foot-dragging limp of an elderly alcoholic journalist who'd make himself comfortable in another cubicle—then there'd be the pop of the cork of his whisky flask.

Worse: one of the Australian trade commissioners working in the United States came in over a long weekend, entered a cubicle, took off his belt, looped it over the railing above the door, got up on the seat, and jumped. A day later, the caretaker saw his suspended feet in the gap under the door. He had done quickly what was happening to some of us in slow motion. Under the pitiless fluorescence, layered in the files, powdered in the corners of desk drawers with the elastic bands and paper clips, lingered bureaucratic death, finer than dust.