Princess Daisy (36 page)

“I’ll make every effort, but I can’t guarantee it—not on what you pay me,” Daisy retorted. It was a never failing source of irritation that although she was the “producer” of the commercials, and in charge of coordinating every detail of every shoot, her job was nonunion and she was paid less for working more hours than anyone else in the studio. North ignored her remark, as he always did, refusing to acknowledge the fact that Daisy’s clothes made good sense.

Soon after she had learned her trade she discovered that since someone was always looking for her to solve a problem, her jeans and work shirt made her difficult to spot in the denim-clad multitude of the crew. She had worked out an outfit that had three virtues: it was cheap, practical and highly visible. In cold weather she wore U.S. Navy, World War II, ordinary seaman’s pants with their complicated set of thirteen buttons and their sturdy fabric. In summer she wore white Navy bellbottoms. To go with these basic trousers she had a dozen boys’ Rugby jerseys in the boldest stripes and brightest colors she could find. In the huge, grubby confused studio she always wore tennis shoes and thick white socks, and braided her hair into one fat pigtail that fell over one shoulder, but at least it stayed out of her face.

If it’s ladylike you want, North, she thought, I’ll give you ladylike till your fillings fall out. The meeting ended while Daisy was planning her look for tomorrow—the 1934 Mainbocher suit, she thought, high heels, a tight chignon and
gloves
, you rotten bastard.

No matter how she railed at North in her mind, Daisy never failed to be astonished as he unpacked one fresh idea after another from the inexhaustible stock he seemed to possess, closely folded in his mind. His highest praise after a complicated, difficult commercial had been completed was to say to her, “It’ll probably work,” yet, for these three words, like a horsewoman trying out for the Olympic jumping team, she was game to attempt any fence, no matter how high. She could understand, she told herself in an attempt at fairness, why so many models insisted on telling her how devastatingly, divinely attraetive
her boss was, but then they didn’t know him as she did. How could they begin to imagine the hardness of the man, the lack of warm humanity? His brilliance gleamed, but with a cold light. Nevertheless Daisy was unable to keep herself from trying to please him in her dedication to her job. As she had mastered her skills over the past years she took a craftsman’s pleasure in her work, in each full, clean, well-organized day of shooting, the details of which, without her, would never have come together. She gloried in the flashes of inspiration that enabled her to solve the inevitable emergencies that plagued any shoot. With all modesty, she knew she was very, very good at what she did. Damn him, if only, just once, he’d
admit
it!

It is not often that the creative people who make television commercials have a chance to break the rules. Normally they are limited, almost entirely, to working in a world in which moldy grout can ruin a woman’s life, while at the same time, perfectly white teeth can guarantee her love and happiness; a world in which her husband’s morning is destroyed by a weak cup of coffee yet his virility can be validated by the brand of beer he drinks; they inhabit a cosmos in which thick, bouncy hair is life’s dearest treasure and moist underarms are a constantly lurking menace; a territory in which best friends exist only to make critical remarks, and the choice between one kind of tampon or another is the difference between a carefree, athletic existence or being haunted by relentless anxiety. It’s a threatening world in which the only real hope is the right kind of life insurance or a new set of steel-belted radials; a world of unending physical effort in which perfectly nice women are given life sentences in which they must produce immaculate floors, pristine toilet bowls, and even impeccable laundry; a world in which the people who depend on iron supplements to give them vitality barely look old enough to vote, in which the best filled medicine cabinet is certain to lack that one particular preparation which will make pain and head colds not just bearable but almost enjoyable. When this world isn’t scary, it is frustratingly filled with too-healthy people having impossibly delightful fun in far away places, all thanks to an after-shave lotion or the right eye make-up. In advertising land it’s quite all right to use obscenity to sell cigarette lighters—they couldn’t dare mean anything dirty by “Flick my Bic,” could they? But bra ads can’t show women
wearing bras, navels don’t exist, and a pregnant woman may never seem to have the desire for physical contact with a man, not even her husband. There is even a regulation preventing a woman from sucking her own forefinger on camera. Singing cats can sell cat food better than any other commercial in history and creative advertising men write their copy in a cold sweat of fear and angst, not knowing whether a new idea will make them a hero or get them fired. With ten-second commercials becoming more and more popular, with research showing that viewers don’t remember commercials that contain more than one single message, and with prime
seconds
on television costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, the opportunity to make expensive mistakes continues to multiply and the pressure to play it safe grows.

Luke Hammerstein had persuaded his bosses to go with his intuition on the Coca-Cola Christmas commercial, and intuition could mean disaster. If anyone had ever told Luke Hammerstein, when he was a wild, brilliant graduate of the wild, brilliant School of Visual Arts on 23rd Street in New York City that one day he would routinely send his most original ideas off to be tested in front of a carefully chosen
target
audience at Audience Survey, Inc.,
before
he elected to use them or not, he would have sneered in outrage. But that was in the early 1960s when boy wonders in Edwardian clothes were grabbed up by the big agencies and started as assistant art directors when they were just out of school, the free-spending, innovative, let’s-build-an-igloo-in-the-Mojave-Desert-and-see-if-it-melts days of commercials. Many of the other boy wonders didn’t survive into the tighter-money, harder-sell days of the 1970s, but just as Luke had seen the change in the spirit of commercials coming long before it happened, he had traded in the poetically dandified elaborations of his attire for severely tailored suits with matching vests, started to wear solid blue shirts with starched white collars and French cuffs, begun to sport a stickpin in his dark, plain tie, and grown the perfectly trimmed Van Dyke beard which lent the final touch of authority to his aesthetic features. The distinguished aura of a young Oxford don replaced the graces he had cultivated in his early days as he progressed, in an amazing ten years, from assistant art director to art director to art supervisor and finally to creative director, with fifty people working under him, and eighty million dollars of annual billing under his supervision.
Luke Hammerstein, only son of a conservative German-Jewish investment-banking family, was a superstar on Madison Avenue, even if his mother—who thought all advertising unnecessary and common—would never believe it.

Luke knew, from the beginning, that if an art director is ever going to advance in the agency business he has to be more than an art director; he has to also be a source of original ideas, a copy writer, a salesman and an expert on media and research.

Luke was in the center of the creative revolution when the power in the agencies passed from the people who created the words to the people who created the pictures. He had risen to a position of enormous power. But no power on Madison Avenue can survive unless it sells the product. The chance to do a Coca-Cola commercial without having to sell the product left Luke light-headed with the sheer freedom of it, and as antsy as he’d ever been.

Luke was almost never present at the shoot of one of his ordinary commercials, but during the four long days it took to finish the Christmas commercial, he showed up at North’s studio every day, accompanied by the account supervisor, the assistant account supervisor, the copy writer and the art director, all of whom had been involved in the working out of Luke’s (commercial before he ever truly believed he could get the client to go for it. His agency group arrived no earlier than 10:45
A.M
. although the cast and crew’s call was for 8:00. Wise to the ways of commercial makers, Luke knew that the first take couldn’t possibly take place before 11:00. In the words of one advertising immortal discussing the first three hours of every working day, “We shoot a commercial the way we used to build pyramids … everything is improved except the equipment … it’s two guys carrying things on their backs, like over the Burma Road … you pull and you push.”

The clients, the men from Coke, were there in force, too. Sometimes as few as six, invariably, just before lunch, as many as twelve. Although Daisy had been involved in dozens of shoots where the agency and client contingents—the “hungry worriers” as North called them—outnumbered the commercial makers, this time the cast, crew and observers were so numerous that the big studio was strained as it had never been strained before.

Looking back, after it was all over, Daisy couldn’t be sure what had been, for her, the high point of the whole
enterprise. Was it her canny method of casting kids who looked “real” but were actually professional models? She and Alix had spent four days searching out those unfortunate child models who’d had to stop work because of broken limbs, the early onset of acne, acute obesity problems, missing teeth, braces, growing out of their cuteness—even a month could do it—and just plain discipline difficulties, kids who were considered troublemakers. She winnowed out a gang of authentic misfits, none of whom could have sold a single box of cereal, no matter how sugar coated. These rejects provided enough difficulty on the set to convince North that they were normal, but without their foundation of professional training, the Nativity scene could never have been shot, not just in the agonizing day and a half it eventually took, but not in a week or perhaps not in a month.

Or was the best part, she asked herself, the satisfaction she had in casting Theseus as the dog in the car scene? Since North had wanted a difficult dog, Daisy reasoned there was no reason why she shouldn’t make the money which would otherwise have gone to a recognized dog
model
. It came to her share of two months rent and, as usual, Dani’s expenses had left her with no money to spare. She enlisted Kiki as dog wrangler for a day, with strict instructions.

“Keep him on the leash at all times until North signals for him. That’ll be when the family’s finally all stuffed into the car—one of the kids is going to whine, ‘We forgot my dog.’ Then let him go.”

North inspected Theseus superciliously. “Where did you find that beast, Daisy? I’ve never seen anything like him before.”

“Not to worry, he comes highly recommended.”

“But I wanted a more
annoying
dog, something really shaggy. Something sloppier,” he complained.

“This dog is guaranteed to be annoying,” Daisy assured him. Since she had carefully hidden tiny bits of raw sirloin in various pockets of the clothes worn by all the actors in the scene, clothes she had chosen for the fact that they had pockets that buttoned, she had total confidence in Theseus’s performance. With his hunting blood at boil he’d be all over those unfortunate people, loose in a lurcher’s potential paradise.

Theseus didn’t let her down. Take after take, he bounded into the packed car and wormed his way around the eight
“family” members, poking his nose into their most private places, wagging his tail in their outraged faces and amorously pawing all over them in an unceremonious delirium of confusion and quest. All around was the smell of meat—but where was it? At the end of each take, Kiki dashed in with the leash to lead him out, slipping him a piece of meat from a Baggie full of beef tidbits which Daisy had given her, so that Theseus wouldn’t get too frustrated—never enough to satisfy him but just enough to keep his
appetite
at its height.

By the middle of the day North said in admiration, “That’s the worst behaved mutt I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s driving them up the wall—perfect, Alix, perfect!” Naturally, thought Daisy, he doesn’t even give me credit for casting my own dog, the son-of-a-bitch! North was even more pleased when the model playing the mother of the family developed a violent allergy to Theseus and couldn’t stop sneezing.

“Write it in,” he told the hovering copy writer. And for the next twenty-nine takes, between constant sneezes, the woman had to say, “You
know
that dog makes me sneeze!” and the impossible teenage son had to reply, scornfully, “Oh,
Mom!
It’s just psychosomatic!” There was no question that Theseus was the star of the thirty seconds which everyone called “Over the Hill to Granny’s Pad.”

By the last day of the shoot, when they reached the tree-decorating scene, a childish spirit of fun had overtaken even the hungry worriers. They started to suggest lines and situations which weren’t on the story board.

“This is getting like the Yiddish Art Theater,” North told them. “Fellows, we have enough problems right here—nothing is going to go right, I promise you, so could I bother you guys for some fucking quiet?” He was prophetic. Nothing did go right. It took forty-five takes before the gaffers could manage to get the tree lights to blow all the fuses inside the set without having them blow all the lights outside the set as well, plunging the studio into total darkness each time.

Long after the Coca-Cola commercial had won a Clio, the commercial world’s Oscar; long after it had won the New York Art Director’s Club coveted annual award; long after it had been exhibited at commercial film festivals all over the world and brought back awards from Venice and Cork and Tokyo and Paris, Kiki had no doubts at all
about the high point of those four days. What were the awards compared to the moment she had met Luke Hammerstein?

Kiki had felt so sorry for poor Theseus, after he’d spent all day sniffing for hidden meat, that as soon as the scene was declared a wrap, she’d let him off the leash.