Old Neighborhood (7 page)

“I don’t know what anybody else is hearing, but I’m hearing bullshit.”

“Steve will be making thirty-five thousand dollars a year,” Beverly said.

“I deal with people who make thirty-five thousand a month,” George replied.

“This is what I want,” Beverly told them. “These are my wishes,” she said, as she expressed what were
my
wishes.

Beverly and Cindy went out of the room to gather together some of the children’s possessions, leaving George to glare at me. Finally, he expressed himself.

“You
putz.
”

“George, this is an opportunity for me. You’re a man in business. You can understand that.”

“You come out here, you take away my daughter, and now when I got grandchildren, you take them away too.”

“We’ll see you. There are planes. We’ll visit each other.”

“She should have married Bobby Grenz.”

“Who is Bobby Grenz?”

“He’s in real estate. In San Diego. He pisses on thirty-five thousand.”

“George, it’s not only the money. It’s a way of proving myself—”

“
You faggalah!
You
tukus!
”

“George, you know you’re beginning to act like a
shmurck.
”

A man with that many horses’ motifs on his person must consider himself a physical type, and my father-in-law came at me full gallop, grabbing me, throttling me and trying to bang my head against his flagstone wall. I held his arms and managed to contain him, but he was still trying to push me against the wall. Finding myself in the midst of this rage and assuming George Hillman was not going to suddenly faint with embarrassment over his actions, I decided not to discuss the matter of his oedipal-based jealousy, and I tripped him with my leg. The two of us went down, knocking over an end table and bringing the womenfolk into the room in this scene from a Republic Western.

Cindy fondled George while she yelled, “What have you done to him?” George kept muttering, “I’ll kill him,” which I had understood from the beginning was his intent. Beverly functioned as the peacemaker, sending everyone off to separate rooms and finally extracting weak apologies from us both.

Later on, my children, tears in their eyes, said goodbye to their horses. “See what you’re doing to them?” George said, not a man for subtlety. A few weeks later there was a cold but civil parting at the airport. Freddy carried under each arm the farewell gifts from George and Cindy to their grandchildren, two huge pandas, nearly as large as the children themselves, a last, excessive gesture. Those stuffed toys were pathetic in their size and uselessness and I felt sorry for the Hillmans as I had not before. The children refused to part with the pandas at the check-in counter and after a discussion on policy with the airlines people, the pandas were allowed in the passengers’ cabin. The flight was underbooked and the pandas had their own seats, where they sat unblinking, symbols of how I had wrenched my children from home and grandparents. So I came flying out of the West with my guilt, my wife and children who were forced to become uprooted for my vanity and career advancement, with my gray-green and gray-gray suits, and the pandas.

We bought a home in Great Neck, Long Island, a colonial house old enough to have character. My children, suburbanites, made the adjustment from suburban life to suburban life. We located stables in the area and the Hillmans shipped the horses east. The reunion was something out of
National Velvet.

Beverly made plans to establish a nursery play group in the basement of our house and I took my place in the New York advertising scene. I was like a comic-book character—Pow! Bam! Splat! Take that! Take that for rejecting me in the first place! Take that because we were poor and I had to go to City College! Take that because the Ivy League boys got the best jobs! It was not enough for me to be accepted in New York. I had to prove that I was an Amazing New Discovery! Better Than 99 Percent of the Advertising Copywriters in the Field!

T
HE ADVERTISING AGENCY BUSINESS
in New York had changed while I had been away, the old line white Anglo-Saxon Protestant character of the agencies had been eroded, rock music played on radios in the art departments, beards were in evidence, Jews. Our agency even had a Jewish account executive, which in the 1950s would have been like assigning an Orthodox rabbi to the Schick razor account.

In the early 1960s, some of the smaller agencies began hiring Greeks, Italians and Jews for the art and copy departments and these first people through the door made an impact, their work was fresher and more creative than the basic material turned out for so long by the old line types. After a while the larger agencies joined the trend and hired the ethnics. By the time I returned to New York in 1969, kids were the next group that was “in”—young people barely out of college were being employed at large salaries because it was the era when young people were presumed to have The Answer.

He stood before me, the personification of the Youth Revolution, Frank, in his mid-twenties, wearing dungarees and a T-shirt that said “You are what you eat.” My job in the agency was to write ads and commercials and supervise the work of other writers in my product group. Frank had been assigned a television commercial for a wristwatch account, and he brought a storyboard into my office.

“This just needs your okay,” he said.

The storyboard showed a man on a street corner at night, looking at his watch. The man looked at his watch again, then again, and the commercial ended with the name, “Baldwin Watches,” on the screen.

“What is it saying, Frank?”

“I can’t explain it. I feel it.”

“It doesn’t say anything.”

“It’s a sense, man.”

“Well, I sense I have to turn it down.”

“Are you kidding me? Nobody turns my stuff down.”

“Frank, I like copy that says something. Maybe you could be more specific.”

“This is an award-winning commercial, man.”

“I’m sorry.”

He returned a few minutes later with another idea, a commercial that showed a watch on a dresser, just the watch, with the sweep hand running for the length of the commercial and then the name, “Baldwin Watches.”

“This is my best shot,” he said. “I’m drained.”

“It still doesn’t say anything.”

“It’s symbolic. The watch represents time passing.”

“Time passing? How long did you work on it, five minutes?”

“That is a great commercial.”

“Maybe it’s the change in time zones, but I don’t get it.”

One day I walked into the men’s room to see two copywriters smoking pot on a coffee break.

“Hi, fella,” one of them said to me dreamily.

“How are you?”

“We’re going to the movies for lunch. Care to join us?”

“No, thank you.”

“Fellini.”

“I’ll say.”

Within a few months I had reached the point in the agency where people at a water cooler scattered when I came down the hall. I was called “Mr. California” behind my back, as cutting a pejorative as New Yorkers could express. Coming in from the outside, it seemed to me that the work being done in New York was excessively clever. I did not like advertising that was so cute it called attention to itself. If I disliked the advertising, it is fair to say that the people creating it came to dislike me. Parker took me out to lunch to tell me about the morale problems in my group.

“The younger people—they feel you don’t relate to them.”

“They’re children of television. Some of them have thirty-second attention spans.”

“We’ve got a mixed bag on our hands, Steve. The clients are reasonably happy with your work, but some of
our
people are not, very frankly.”

“Maybe I have different standards.”

“Since you’re from California, they thought you were going to be looser. They call you ‘Mr. California.’ Did you know that?”

“I didn’t know.” And I started to laugh.

“Why does that amuse you?”

“I graduated from CCNY.”

“Really?”

“City, Downtown.”

“Oh, my! We never hired anybody from
that
school,” he said, in a recidivistic response.

The kinds of campaigns I recommended to our clients and the ads I wrote were very competitive, as competitive as I was. Agencies had always referred to other companies’ products as “Brand X” or “Brand Y.” I started placing the competitors’ products
in
the ads, full labels showing. The advertising trade papers began to write about this and letters appeared, pro and con. Our agency, in pursuit of cleverness, had been employing a cute headline and a few short sentences in the print ads. I began to lengthen the size of the copy, adding more technical information and more details about the products we were advertising. The writers in my group rebelled because they were required to spend more time learning about the clients’ products. We had arguments within the agency, and some of the arguments I won and some I lost. Eventually one of our accounts, dissatisfied with my approach, dropped the agency, and at the end of the second year of my contract the agency dropped me. I was “controversial,” but more trouble than I was worth, “very frankly.”

I had a new job in one week. Young & Rubicam hired me as a creative director at $42,000 a year and set up a product group specifically for my approach: advertising that was directly competitive and that contained specific information about the products.

Consumer-rights groups had been focusing on vague and misleading advertising—and here I was, an advocate of the public’s right to be informed. I ended up having it both ways, with the reputation as a maverick advertising man
and
a consumer advocate. I had the prestige, the money and the better suits that went with the job; I also had the moral position. My name appeared in the advertising columns, I won awards, Beverly and I went to industry dinners, I made speeches to the trade on “Truth in Advertising,” and the story should end right there. I take the salary, the stock options, my wife and I build additions to the house, and as an advertising notable, I write a book on advertising which the students read at CCNY, bringing my career full circle.

But I was a very competitive man. I had to be good, better, best. I could advance only to a limited degree within any advertising agency that hired me. As I moved up the corporate ladder, I would have been obliged to answer to the needs of the corporation, to work on campaigns and products I thought were unacceptable. So in 1972 I joined with Ray Tolchin, a media expert at Young & Rubicam, and we formed our own advertising agency, Robbins and Tolchin. A
New York Times
article called us “The Truth in Advertising Agency.” On the basis of our reputations we signed several accounts to our roster. At thirty-eight I had become the president of my own advertising agency and that year my wife joined a consciousness-raising group. They ended up having equal weight in our lives.

“I’ll give you Brownie points for taking care of the children. You’ve always been good about that.”

“So I
have
helped.”

“Helping is an obsolete word. Sharing is what we’re after.”

“We are?”

Beverly insisted that although her work with the play group was nearly a full-time job, she still had to run the household, deal with the plumber and the roofer, look after the children, who were now twelve and ten, see to their riding classes and their dance lessons—that the house was basically her account.

She met with her group every Wednesday night: Beverly, three housewives, a single woman who owned a dress shop, and a teacher. I thought that the group might have given me credit for being faithful to my wife. My partner, Ray Tolchin, was making such use of his secretary’s time, he found it more convenient to leave his wife for his secretary. I had followed Colby’s practice, my secretary was efficient and sixty-one years old. The group decided that I was merely a faithful sexist. Men such as I, who were out of the house much of the time, were to begin undertaking specific duties each week on the order of calling the plumber and doing the shopping for a certain number of meals.

“Bevvy, it’s like I’m back in Bunk Chickasaw. You want Monday morning, mop bathrooms, Wednesday, straighten cubbies?”

“I want you to take over two meals a week. I want you to make all babysitting phone calls. I want you to do all the Saturday shopping for the house.”

“Bevvy, I gave at the office. The secretaries won’t bring the men coffee anymore.”

“I’m serious, Steve. The girls will have to do more, too. We’re going to get their little consciousnesses raised also.”

Her arguments were unassailable and eventually I became a more liberated man. Even the group thought so, Beverly reported to me, and I took over many of the chores that automatically had been assigned to Beverly. However, I resented the group deeply, not over the issue of equality in our household—there I conceded Beverly had been right. I resented Sisterhood, the late night phone calls she conducted with other people, the very length of those conversations. I never talked to anyone on a nonbusiness subject for such periods of time. Ray Tolchin was a business friend. We saw enough of each other during the day that we did not care to socialize when the day was over. I was friendly with people who worked for me, but we had sports page conversations. Except for a few neighbors with whom I shared lawn talk and zoning talk and occasionally dinner-party talk, I did not have any close friends. This is what I resented most, the intimacy Beverly had with her group members, an experience that excluded me and for which I had no equivalent.

I was like a child peering into a toy-store window.

“What’s going on in your group these days?”

“Nothing much that I can talk about.”

“Well, what’s your latest topic?”

“Oh, sex.”

“What do you mean, sex?”

“Sex—the having of it, the not having of it.”

“In detail?”

“Steve, the idea behind a consciousness-raising group is for us to
share
our feelings and our experiences.”

“Bevvy, have you been sitting in that group talking about
us?
”