by Bruce McCall
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My girlfriend for a year and a half was a secretary in another ad agency in the GM building. She was petite and pretty, divorced, with a seven-year-old son. I spent summer afternoons and evenings with her at her parents’ house in Royal Oak, Michigan, verbally fencing with her resolutely far-right father, a highly successful building contractor. Mom was a chatterbox, firing off opinions that were devised, I quickly saw, to needle and occasionally draw blood from her hubby. Although the domestic atmosphere teetered on the brink of explosion, for me, having nursed a lifelong ache for warmth and security in family life, even that fractured household provided a sense of comfort.
We took advantage of the city’s offerings: Nichols and May, the Weavers, Joan Baez, all live. Dinners in the London Chop House and a swanky little restaurant, Jimmy’s. Drinks at a bar on Woodward, listening to the cool, jazzy duet Jackie and Roy. Our mutual appetites for top-notch entertainment were sated. Our sex was also plentiful. My carriage house served as our den of iniquity. Sometimes—seldom conveniently—the copulation urge surged past all physical obstacles. My advice: Don’t even try doing it on the passenger well of a ’60 Corvette. It can be done. It was done. I walked with a limp for a week afterward. Her back hurt for a month.
The Corvette was more car than I’d dreamed of. Driving it broadcast the pleasures of self-indulgent excess. But in the mid-sixties, attention in the enthusiast world beyond Detroit was shifting to the other end of the spectrum. The age of the overachieving runt had dawned, led by a wacky little English box-on-wheels called the Mini. Front-wheel drive and an engine mounted crosswise meant a 1,400-pound car less than twelve feet long with plentiful space for four adults, a flyweight running circles around everything else. Tuning the small engine to the gills generated a shockingly potent seventy-one horsepower and a sublime power-to-weight ratio. This undersized brat ascended overnight to superiority in rally and racing competition. I had to have one.
And I got it: the hottest available version, a British Racing Green Mini Cooper S. Its Corvette stablemate gathered dust as I giggled at the Mini’s freakish agility, making geniuses of stupid drivers. The English Disease—outdated design, hilariously careless assembly, and cheapjack components—dogged the Mini. But even if things fell off it as you drove, its phenomenal talents earned it forgiveness.
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After two and a half years, my euphoria at having been given a professional home and the early makings of an advertising career had tapered off. I had learned just enough to start feeling restless. With an increased understanding of the creative side of the business, my work felt more and more like treading water.
Fueling my growing discontent were the recent defections of a couple of disenchanted copywriting friends to New York. Not only New York, but the hottest agency in New York and arguably the world: Doyle Dane Bernbach. DDB’s Volkswagen work alone, studied and envied by creative people everywhere, heralded a brash new dogma that suddenly made big, conventional agencies seem constipated. John Noble’s and Marv Honig’s ambitions couldn’t be slaked by annual predictions of an imminent Campbell-Ewald creative renaissance, so they decamped, and when they got to DDB they thrived there.
America’s profound cultural shifts of the sixties were beginning to discombobulate every institution. Doyle Dane and a handful of boutique agencies smelled something in the air. They aligned themselves with the fresh new cultural norms, mocking the mastodons’ research departments, mission statements, focus groups, and “safe” advertising: the intended target was a “consumer,” hidden amid demographic charts and age levels, ad nauseam. Instead there arose a blasphemous sidestepping of social science, a practice of going straight for the jugular. The ads thus produced were ones that copy and art admirers tacked up on their walls.
My impatience to be one of Doyle Dane’s stars forced me to join the throngs of job applicants before I was ready. I did up sample ideas that mimicked DDB style: fake Queens accent, clever puns, short copy ending with a funny kicker. The kindly rejection letter was not unexpected, and it failed to break my heart. It did strengthen my resolve—the first resolution being to get out of Sleepy Hollow, i.e., the Chevrolet copy group and Campbell-Ewald and Detroit—before the comfort and the lack of challenge permanently dulled my mind.
A murky Toronto character who claimed a role in the Canadian industry phoned me one day in August 1964: Would I go to Japan and tour the factories of all the big players in the domestic automobile industry, all expenses paid, and write a report to be published in an automotive magazine I’d never heard of? My knowledge of and interest in Asia and Japan wasn’t deficient, it was nonexistent. Curiosity, and the certainty that another chance would never come, won out, and I flew to Tokyo on a two-week vacation. My research was a scholarly history of Japan by the late Nipponophile Lafcadio Hearn, who wrote in English but thought in Japanese. By the time my flight reached Honolulu, still stuck in the misty Japanese past, Lafcadio was likewise.
As it was, the Japanese present was confounding enough. Tokyo heat in August soaked me in near-liquid humidity. I’d arrived late on Saturday. Sunday morning I took a stroll and the exertion of walking a block plastered me to the pavement: I was the frying egg, the sidewalk the skillet. Japan on my first encounter left me feeling upside down, overwhelmed by the dizzying cultural difference; not even the men’s rooms felt familiar.
A driver conducted me every morning to another car factory and another stilted talk in a gloomy reception hall, my hosts and I sitting in plump easy chairs covered by loose white cloth as smiling girls served tea and pastries. The factory host then handed me a gift and a guide-man led me through the obligatory assembly-line walking tour, a march-through of more or less identical sights. A Toyota shunted into a booth to be robotically spray-painted and blow-dried. Flat sheets of metal fed into mighty stamping presses and emerging seconds later bent into Nissan doors and roofs. My notepad recorded a blizzard of boring factoids and statistics that would serve me well back home to stud my report with meaningful-sounding details.
Home, when I finally got there, felt sweetly welcoming and soothingly familiar. I later dutifully tapped out an article about my visit, probably the first and only story that found Japanese car factories funny. It may have been the last condescending pat on the head that that industry had to suffer: Japan at the time of my visit was about to scare the piss out of carmakers everywhere. I was chauffeured from Tokyo to Yokohama in an Isuzu Bellel, a diesel-powered copy of the British Austin Westminster. It had almost made it to our destination when it conked out. My guide called for a replacement. As we stood waiting by the roadside I noticed that our driver had vanished. The guide was unsurprised: the driver had lost face, he explained. At the Toyota test track in Nagoya, I watched a toylike, two-stroke Toyota Crown slog around on a test track, making loud noises disproportionate to its rate of speed.
Travel expands perspective. Back in the GM building, I was even more bullishly ready to move on. Chevrolet, and thus Campbell-Ewald, was a poor educational choice for an advertising neophyte. Chevrolet advertising might be okay in Detroit. In the eyes of New York admen it was dull and corny. The truth was that Chevrolet, too big to fail and too rich to take chances, had never been a hotbed of creative innovation and never would be.
I wasn’t mad at my employer or unhappy in Detroit. It was simply my time to charge the barricades, to test my brains and talents in the big leagues, in the most competitive arena extant. In New York. Such ringing phrases, and such clear ambition, lacked one thing: a job in New York to put them to the test.
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One gorgeous red-and-gold October afternoon in 1964 I was hanging around the paddock at the Watkins Glen racing course in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. A major event, featuring the cream of international racing stars, had drawn everybody who was anybody in automotive affairs. David E., who’d sin
ce decamped to New York, was in the midst of it, of course. He wasn’t in the least perturbed by my impending desertion from Campbell-Ewald. For a different set of reasons he’d made the same trip; I think he understood that Detroit wasn’t a goal but a stop on the way. He promptly introduced me to his former mentor, Barney Clark, now a creative elder on the Ford account at the J. Walter Thompson agency in New York.
Clark was a craggy-faced, avuncular older guy. He’d been the very first Chevrolet enthusiast writer, and a great one. As it turned out, nothing about my chance encounter with him involved chance: David E. had organized it. He had seen to it that Barney got a pit pass that allowed him to rub shoulders with the American motor racing elite and a respectable number of the great racing drivers of the day. I had the same open sesame. Denny Hulme, Bruce McLaren, and Ricardo Rodriguez stood around the pit area after the race, trading reports on their various drives. A gaggle of insiders, including David E., kibitzed. Barney Clark showed up and David E. introduced us.
Barney never got an opportunity to dissuade me from leaving Detroit, even if he’d wanted to. As the original Campbell-Ewald enthusiast writer, he hardly needed my sweaty entreaties. J. Walter Thompson ran the Ford account out of its New York headquarters. Any copywriting job would do. Barney was taciturn by nature. The usual adman blather about a brilliant creative team, a great client, and such froth never escaped Barney’s lips. Had there been any negative murmurs, my lust for a place in New York blotted them out. If J. Walter Thompson was sacrificing virgins, spying for the USSR, and paying its people in Canadian quarters, I didn’t care. My mind had frozen on the idea of me as an official New Yorker.
Once again, the fix was in. Once again, a mentor exercised a personal connection on my behalf. Thus, no interviews with Human Resources. No tear sheets in a portfolio. No sparring about money. A week after our chat at Watkins Glen, Barney called from New York. I was hired.
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Leaving Campbell-Ewald and Detroit tinged the palpitations felt on the verge of new adventure with a familiar sense of melancholy. I’d passed my first test in advertising, although I felt I still hadn’t had the chance to truly prove myself as a copywriter. The life I’d carved out for myself as a young bachelor hadn’t brought anything close to my expectations; my lifelong social timidity and awkwardness stifled initiative.
There was a bar at the foot of my street full of people my age milling around on languid summer evenings. I could never quite overcome the nameless, pointless fear of . . . what? . . . and join the crowd. Relations with my girlfriend had cooled. She’d begun talking about marriage, which provided a rationale for my refusal, and anyway, I realized I didn’t love her. I wasn’t even sure I liked her.
A more naggingly painful issue in leaving concerned Hugh. He and I had grown up as close as two brothers could be. Same bedrooms. Same jobs (Windsor Advertising Artists). Same interests (cars). Same friends (Alex). Except that they were all my friends, my interests, my life. Hugh was missing an ego, an identity, a sense of himself as a freestanding personality. I was indeed my brother’s keeper.
Leaving Hugh behind in his empty life in Windsor, alone, felt like leaving a puppy at a shelter. To assuage my guilt I passed the last evening before my departure in Hugh’s depressing apartment in a woebegone corner of town. He had taken up cooking—for something to do, I surmised—and cooked a decent beef Stroganoff for dinner. I sat on the living room couch, deliberately intent on drinking way beyond excess for the first time in my life. I guzzled enough straight-up Manhattans to float RMS Berengaria, blabbing my head off to avoid the impending issue, staying as late as I could.
I drove far too fast and carelessly back to Iroquois Avenue at two a.m. in a fit of drunken recklessness, a berserk attempt to blot out the pain I knew was going to descend on Hugh from the moment I stumbled downstairs that night and left him to his crummy fate.
By rights I should have crashed my Mini into the tiled wall of the Windsor–Detroit tunnel. Or gotten grabbed by the neck and yanked from behind the wheel, reeking of booze, at U.S. Customs. Or been pursued by cops until luck finally abandoned me. By rights I should have pushed the Mini just beyond the laws of physics into a flip, a somersault, and a barrel roll. The car should have come to rest and caught fire. The conflagration could have been seen from across the Detroit River, in parts of Windsor.
My brother Hugh would have gone to bed and missed the show. But then, he’d missed out on so much in life.
The planes I’d drawn as a kid led to a career in satire, starting with this piece in Playboy.
Chapter 6
Scared by Success
My triumphal entry into New York fell flat the moment I flopped down on my bed in the Lexington Hotel. The antic saga of getting there, of losing myself in preparation, was finally ended. I was here. Now what?
Good question! I knew as much about living in Constantinople as I did about coping with New York. I lay there on my bed, cursing myself for cruising into the biggest city on the North American continent as if it were Ottawa, capital city of Canada and home of somnambulance. One belated question after another tumbled out of the mental closet where I’d stashed and promptly forgotten them: Where should I live? How do I begin looking? What about furniture? Do the even-numbered streets run east or west? What’s the Avenue of the Americas? Where, exactly, is Staten Island?
My postcard visions had overlooked matters of substance, as in, I didn’t know even one of my seven million new neighbors. I faced the evaporation of my gossamer fantasies, which were already fading in reality’s harsh light. The excitement of the move swiftly transformed itself into a less gung ho challenge. I’d have to turn in my Mr. Magoo spectacles. The idea of New York as a cheery Disney metropolis had to be put on indefinite hold.
I couldn’t miss the un-Disney-like indifference, inseparable from hostility, radiating from my cabdriver and the sourpuss faces in the lunch-hour streams of pedestrians on the sidewalks. Maybe it was my hypersensitive temperament acting up during the overnight transition from nowhere to the center of the universe. Some years before, back in my teens, the barber’s shifting of the part in my hair from one side of my head to the other triggered a woozy discombobulation that lasted days. I interpreted this as a miniature example of a profound larger truth: Change jangled your life. Avoid it when you can.
All that was required for my recently acquired Detroit savoir faire to wither faster than Dorian Gray’s face was an overbearing deskman at the hotel check-in counter. He was tall and he loomed. Blue suit and brown shoes, a Junior Teen necktie, and a manner that expected a “No!” before I asked a question betrayed my origins. An identity formed in a land where spices would ruin a meatloaf and a pair of neatly creased trousers drew a muttered “Clotheshorse” singled me out as a Canadian.
Yet the simple knowledge that I had made it to New York would soon fortify me. Granted, I might have come from the wrong side of the forty-ninth parallel, but I was entitled to be and act like a New Yorker: cool and tough, taking no shit from anybody (such as snotty hotel clerks). Until I found an apartment, my room in the Lexington Hotel would be a temporary home. I hadn’t expected much and got less than that: a gloomy chamber that was dark even in daylight, as is often the case when the room’s only window faces an air shaft. I paid for it with my total fortune, which was not enough to warrant a TV set or more than a single bath towel.
My first Sunday in New York, a spanking-bright early November afternoon, I decided to amble around the city. Five blocks later, I surrendered to a force greater than my spirits could deal with and returned to my cheerless room. The scale was too large, the buildings too high, and the streets too narrow. There was no relief for the eyes from the overwhelming busyness. I felt squashed, insignificant, ignorant, and stupid. Holed up back in my room, I lay on the bed reading a Mordecai Richler article about emboldened French-Canadian Montrealers sticking it to the snobby Anglophones who had ru
led the city forever and now had to take their lumps. Boning up on Quebec politics failed to accord with my bold program to take Manhattan by force of personality. Solitary exile was the direct opposite of the likeliest means of achieving it.
Alas, solitary exile was the sole option. The bullish optimism that had launched me on this decisive quest was gurgling down the drain. Nobody was around to stiffen my spine, deliver a pep talk, kick me in the pants, and banish the mystery of how to belong. Fear was seeping back into my soul. Pretending otherwise, lying to myself, denying the core knowledge that wimpiness had been sabotaging my hopes of normalcy for much of my life, I’d never have the guts to change.
David E. Davis, my mentor and life guide, lived over in Brooklyn Heights. If I rushed there with my tale of woe and admitted to having fumbled my fresh start so soon, confessing that I’d left a big chunk of my ambition cooling down back in Detroit, David E. might find my conundrum not the cri de coeur of a tortured soul, but a whiny bleat. He’d been known to inflate into high dudgeon when disappointed with people, and could take my panicky dilemma as a sign that I might not be the front-runner he’d imagined—and that, as a result, I was as worthy of his friendship as a truck full of chickenshit. A classic nightmare scenario.
No, no more frigging self-pity. I made a trip to Brooklyn Heights (after some coaxing from David E.), where, in the living room of the Davis home on Henry Street, Sunday salons were held. Cocktail parties, I guess you could call them, but less formal. Here David E. was in his element: genial host to every famous European racing driver passing through town, American heads of imported car brands, automotive writers and photographers, and most of the staff of his booming magazine, Car and Driver. The salon wasn’t a salon without the louche characters David E. had collected here and there. One was a blond gamine, dance-crazy and the wife or girlfriend of a slippery Brit, a professional hanger-on who was always about to take a job too secret to talk about. Pookie was her name. She did the Twist amid a forest of moving legs. Norma, David E.’s wife, served hors d’oeuvres. The Beatles, the Mamas & the Papas, and the Lovin’ Spoonful warbled distantly, behind the conversational hubbub. I didn’t yet belong there.