Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (55 page)

DARK EYES
(1987)
Foreign / Drama (In Italian with subtitles)

Review:
“Mastroianni gives a tour-de-force performance as a once-young, idealistic, aspiring architect, who settled for a life of wealth and ease after marrying a banker’s daughter...and proved incapable of holding on to what’s important to him. A rich, beautifully detailed, multileveled film that’s at once sad, funny, and haunting. Based on short stories by Anton Chekov (One of which was previously filmed as
Lady with a Dog).” (Leonard Maltin’s 1998 Movie & Video Guide) Stars:
Marcello Mastroianni, Silvana Mangano, Marthe Keller, Elena Safonova, Pina Cei.
Director:
Nikita Mikhalkov.

BIG HEAT
(1953)
Noir / Suspense

Review:
“This sizzling film noir directed by Fritz Lang features [Glenn] Ford (in his best performance) as an anguished cop out to smash a maddeningly effete mobster (Scourby) and break his hold on a corrupt city administration. With sensational support from [Lee] Marvin as a sadistic hood and [Gloria] Grahame as Marvin’s bad / good girlfriend....Brutal, atmospheric, and exciting—highly recommended.” (
Movies On TV
)
Stars
: Glenn Ford, Alexander Scourby, Lee Marvin, Gloria Grahame.
Director
: Fritz Lang.

BELIZAIRE THE CAJUN
(1986)
Romance

Review:
“Belizaire the Cajun is a film that is atmospheric in the best sense of the word. The Louisiana bayou of the 1850s is richly recreated in a cadence of texture and deep, dark swamp-land colors, along with the rhythms of Cajun accents and full-bodied folk music (score by Michael Doucet). Armand Assante is Belizaire, an herbal doctor who finds himself in a mess of trouble because of his affection for his childhood sweetheart and his efforts to save a friend from persecution.”
(Video Movie Guide) Stars:
Armand Assante, Gail Young, Michael Schoeffling, Stephen McHattie, Will Patton.
Director:
Glen Pitre.

Finish this sentence: “Please don’t squeeze...” See? It’s obnoxious, but it’s unforgettable. That why it’s considered one of the most successful commercials of all time. Here’s the story of how the great American hero of toilet paper, Charmin’s Mr. Whipple, was born.

P
APER TRAIL

In 1957, Procter & Gamble bought the Charmin toilet paper factory in Madison, Wisconsin. It was the consumer product giant’s first move into the toilet paper business—and not a particularly auspicious one. At the time, Charmin was a regional brand sold in the northern, rural part of the state. It had a reputation, recalls one critic, for being a “rough-hewn, backwoods toilet tissue...a heavy-duty institutional, even
outdoorsy-
type toilet tissue.” In other words, you might put it in your bomb shelter, but you wouldn’t want it in your bathroom.

Procter & Gamble improved Charmin’s quality and launched an advertising campaign featuring a cartoon character called “Gentle the Dog.” The new Charmin was “fluffed, buffed, and brushed,” just like Gentle’s fur, the ads said.

LESS IS MORE

In 1964, Procter & Gamble researchers made a toilet paper breakthrough: they figured out how to make the paper feel softer. Instead of pressing water out of the wood pulp as it was being made into toilet paper, they dried the pulp with streams of hot air. The hot air “would actually ‘fluff it up,’” one internal memo reported. “This allows for a deeper, more cushiony texture. An added benefit...is that less wood fiber per roll is required to make the same amount of this improved tissue.” Less wood fiber meant the paper was cheaper to make than competing brands; the softer feel meant it could be sold for a higher price.

Throwing Ideas Around

But how would Procter & Gamble get the word out about Charmin’s new-found fluffiness? The company’s ad agency, Benton & Bowles, experimented with ads showing Gentle the Dog going to
court to change his name from Gentle to “Gentler.” But test audiences hated the ad, so Gentle the Dog was put to sleep. What could they replace it with? A three-person creative team was assigned to come up with something. They had a roll of Charmin with them to serve as inspiration, but it didn’t seem to work—no one had any viable ideas. “It was one of those Grade B movie situations,” creative director Jim Haines recalls. He continues:

We were having a think session, you know, a frustration session and we were not only kicking ideas around, we were tossing the roll around, and we started to get the giggles. John Chervokas [the junior copy writer] caught the roll and started to squeeze it and somebody said, “Don’t squeeze it,” and John said, “Please don’t squeeze it,” or “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin,” and it just happened. The thing just rolled off his tongue.

The team immediately sketched out a commercial that would have supermarket shoppers trying to squeeze Charmin the same way they would squeeze produce for freshness before buying it...and an angry store manager who tries to get them to stop, only to get caught squeezing it himself when he thinks no one is looking. “In an hour and a half,” Chervokas recalls, “America’s most universally despised advertising campaign became a reality.”

FINDING MR. WHIPPLE

Procter & Gamble, a conservative company, was reluctant to be associated with an ad that had people waving and squeezing rolls of toilet paper on TV. But they agreed to pay for three test commercials. B & B’s creative team realized that the entire campaign depended on finding the right actor to play the grocer, whose name was Edgar Bartholomew.

“I was originally thinking of an Edmund Gwennish kind of character—you know,
Miracle on 34th St.
A lovable little fraud, maybe a little dumpy,” Chervokas says.

What he ended up with was one of TV’s biggest drunks. Until he got the Charmin part, Dick Wilson had enjoyed a long career in Vaudeville, movies and TV, playing mostly drunks. “I must have done over 350 TV shows as a drunk,” Wilson recalls. “I’m the drunk on
Bewitched.
I was the drunk on
The Paul Lynde Show.
I did a lot of Disney’s drunks.”

Wilson still remembers the call he got from his agent about the part:

My agent asked me, “What do you think of toilet paper?” And I told him I think everybody should use it. “No, no, no,” he said, “I’m asking you how would you like to do a commercial for toilet paper, there’s an audition tomorrow.” I said, “How do you audition toilet paper?” and my agent said, “Please go and take a screen test.” And I said a screen test would be a permanent record. But I went.

The Name Game

Wilson got the part right away, and five days later the first Charmin commercial went into production in—believe it or not—Flushing, New York. But they ran into trouble even before they started filming.

When agencies use a fictional name in an ad, it’s standard procedure to find a real person with the same name and license it from them for a nominal fee—usually $1. That way, the agency can fend off anyone else who might claim their name is being used without permission. But this time, to their astonishment, the agency’s lawyers couldn’t find a single person named Edgar Bartholomew.

“So we looked through the Benton & Bowles employee list to see if any name there tickled our fancy,” Chervokas says. “And, it just so happened that the late George Whipple, then head of Benton & Bowles’ public relations department, was picked. He sold his name for a dollar.” A few days later they taped the first ad, “Digby to the Rescue,” in which Mr. Whipple calls on a policeman named Officer Digby to help him restore order to the toilet paper section, which is overrun with Charmin-squeezing women.

TRIAL RUN

The agency tested the first ad using what is known as a “Burke recall test”—they ran it during a television show on one TV station in the midwest, and then called viewers the next day to see if they remembered any of the commercials. Earlier advertising concepts scored as high as 27 points or as low as two points. “Officer Digby to the Rescue” scored 55 points, the highest recall score of any commercial ever tested.

The ads were just as successful when they hit the airwaves in 1964. Over the next six years Charmin shot up from zero percent of
the toilet paper market into first place, beating out Scott Tissue for the number-one spot.

PROS AND CONS

The Mr. Whipple ads aired for 21 years, making it one of the longest-running and most successful advertising campaigns in history. And it made Dick Wilson a wealthy man. He was paid a six-figure salary, and only worked about 16 days a year.

Playing Mr. Whipple had its downside, though. As Dick Wilson the man became synonymous with Mr. Whipple, his life changed forever. “The face is so identifiable, I can’t really do other work,” he says. “And I’ve given up shopping in supermarkets. When I go through the toilet paper section I get some very strange looks.

He added, “I’ve guarded Whipple. I never go into blue movies or into sex shops. That wouldn’t look nice, would it?”

SO LONG, MR. WHIPPLE

In 1985, Procter & Gamble discontinued the Mr. Whipple ads in favor of something fresher. Can you remember what they replaced Mr. Whipple with? Neither can anyone else—Procter & Gamble experimented with forgettable new campaigns for years after, and although they remained dominant in the toilet paper wars, they never found a campaign as memorable.

Likewise, Dick Wilson never had another success to match his long run as Mr. Whipple. He once did a spoof of the Mr. Whipple character in an A&W ad—he can’t pick up a can of root beer without squeezing it and spilling it all over the place—but that was about it. A few years after the Whipple gig ended, Wilson retired from acting.

Not much more was heard from Wilson until 1996, when for no apparent reason, his lifetime supply of free Charmin stopped coming in the mail. The story made USA
Today
about a month later; the day after the article appeared Procter & Gamble resumed the shipments. “He IS Mr. Whipple, and always will be Mr. Whipple,” a company spokesperson told reporters, “and certainly we want to make sure nothing but Charmin goes in his bathroom.”

Here’s more proof that Andy Warhol was right when he said that “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”

T
HE STAR:
Jessica McClure, an 18-month-old infant in Mid-land Texas.

THE HEADLINE:
All’s Well that Ends Well in Texas Well.

WHAT HAPPENED:
In 1987, McClure fell 22 feet down a well while playing in the backyard of her aunt’s home. It was only eight inches in diameter and rescuers feared the well would collapse if they widened it. So they decided to dig another hole nearby and tunnel through solid rock to where Jessica was trapped.

After 58 hours, rescuers reached “Baby Jessica” and brought her to the surface. She had a severe cut on her forehead and gangrene on one foot that cost her her right little toe, but she was in remarkably good condition. The entire country watched the rescue unfold live on television. (At the time, it was the fourth-most-watched news story in television history.)

AFTERMATH:
The McClure family was flooded with donations during and after the crisis. They used some of the money to buy a new house, then put the rest—an estimated $700,000 to $1 million—in a trust fund for Jessica to collect when she turned 25.

Baby Jessica, 12 years old in 1998, emerged from the experience unscathed (except for a few scars and the missing toe). She doesn’t even remember the incident, and knows about it only from looking through her family’s scrapbooks. The McClures divorced in 1990.

THE STAR:
Fred Tuttle, a 79-year-old Vermont dairy farmer.

THE HEADLINE:
Man
With a Plan No Flash in the Pan.

WHAT HAPPENED:
In 1996, Vermont filmmaker John O’Brien decided to make a film called “Man With a Plan,” about a dairy farmer who runs for Congress because he needs the money. The farmer’s campaign catches fire and he defeats the Democratic incumbent. O’Brien cast his neighbor Fred Tuttle, a retired dairy farmer, in the
lead. The movie was a low-budget art house film, but it caught on in Vermont. Tuttle became one of the most recognized celebrities in the state.

AFTERMATH:
When PBS made plans to air the movie nationwide in the fall of 1998, O’Brien suggested that Tuttle run against millionaire Jack McMullen for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate as a publicity stunt to promote the film. Tuttle agreed to do it. “We thought McMullen was tremendously unqualified,” O’Brien said, “but Fred’s tremendously unqualified, too. So we won’t hold that against McMullen.”

Tuttle pledged to spend a total of $16 on his campaign. And since he was recovering from knee replacement surgery, he spent most of the campaign on his front porch, sedated with Demerol. He won the primary anyway, beating out a “carpetbagger” millionaire who’d just recently moved to Vermont. He went on to face incumbent Sen. Patrick Leahy in the general election. (He lost in a landslide.)