A Polaroid of Peggy

by Richard Phillips

  But this – even I could not deny – was a sign!

  A less insecure man, a more self-assured man, a man with maturity, might have seen the funny side. But, as we have discussed, I was not he.

  Peggy saw it though. She creased up. Ah, the pleasure I gave that girl.

  *

  Is there anything more absurd, more destructive, more completely pointless, more self-defeating than jealousy? But, as motivational tools go, it’s unbeatable.

  I adored Peggy from the first – within seconds of clapping eyes on her in the elevator in McDonnell Martin, I was utterly besotted. She had exactly the looks – black, glossy, wavy hair, long lashes, sweetheart lips, wry smile, but, above all, those dark, deep eyes – that, for some reason, I thought of as my ideal. (Curious that I ended up marrying a carrot-top. Although it’s true, that, at the time, I thought I loved her too.)

  And then there was Peggy’s neat figure, her tight little body, her perky, pointy tits – it added up to just about the perfect package as far as I was concerned. But then, you might say, yes, but there are a million girls like that in New York and you probably wouldn’t be more than a few hundred thousand out.

  Looks matter, you can’t deny it – when you first see someone across the room, what else is there? – but, once I knew her a little, it was much more than that. It was Peggy’s very particular take on life, her quiet independence, her sparky irreverence, her amused scepticism, her capacity to surprise, her sudden invention, her unreproducible Pegginess, that so entranced me. And let’s not forget that she laughed at my tee-shirt, got all my jokes, and totally liked me. That may have helped too.

  But as much as I worshipped the ground she walked on, and needed no added incentive to place Peggy front and centre of my life, I had one: my jealousy of Miller.

  It was, I realise, looking back, ridiculous – beyond ridiculous. Yes, she had had a relationship that I knew, if I cared to think about it, must have had its carnal side. And I knew that it had lasted for a year or two – actually more like two than one. And yes, one had to assume, that, at the beginning there had to have been a certain enthusiasm on her part.

  Now, if you look at this logically, deductively, where do you end up? Peggy is a truly wonderful person who says she totally likes you. But once upon a time she must have felt something similar for Miller. You trust Peggy’s judgement implicitly. Q.E.D: Miller must have his good points. She probably got his jokes, just as she gets yours. And if she got his jokes and she gets your jokes, then probably you’d get his jokes also. If you only got to know him, you’d very possibly end up in a close, meaningful relationship with Miller, which, if things had gone a different way in or around puberty might even –

  Only that isn’t the way it works. Not with a love rival. You don’t think, if she liked him he can’t be all bad. You think what a total, utter slimeball he is. You think he’s an untrustworthy, scheming Svengali who’s somehow gulled this sweet, sensible girl into behaving completely out of character and into falling, like a drugged-up Moonie, for his devious, dastardly ways. How else to explain what she ever saw in him?

  And you think something else too. You think, ‘I must save her from Miller’s evil clutches’. Even if you don’t actually think it, in quite those terms. And even if, by this time, she’s pretty much got out of Miller’s evil clutches all on her own.

  Actually you don’t think that. You don’t think at all.

  What you do is leave work early on a day you haven’t arranged to see Peggy, and hang around outside the office – but not too close, on the next corner in fact – until she comes out of the revolving doors. Then, doing what you imagine a gumshoe would do – keeping your distance, holding a newspaper that you pretend to be reading, making sure you’re near a pillar you can stand behind or a doorway you can nip into – you follow Peggy down onto the subway and get on to her train. Then, hoping you’ve correctly remembered which stop she mentioned that she gets off at, you wait until the very last second before you get off the train. Then you sneak a look around the emptying platform, pray you don’t walk straight into her, and, would you believe it, you catch sight of the back of her as she pushes through the turnstile.

  You follow her out of the station, across the lights, up the street and then stop about twenty yards away and carefully observe – whilst hoping like hell that Miller isn’t watching you out of the window – as she turns the key in the brownstone and walks in. Then, feeling slightly soiled and ashamed of yourself, but also slightly elated and a bit like you’re drunk, you turn round and go home, and you spend the evening watching telly, during which time you have to sit through about six Miller commercials – “It’s Millertime!” – as though the great media buyer in the sky – not that you believe in any great thing in the sky – has deliberately gone out of his way to cause you deep psychological pain.

  And then the next day, you take the morning off, take the subway back up to Peggy’s place, figuring that that slimeball Miller is an actor, and we all know what actors are like, the lazy bastards, they don’t have regular jobs so they sleep all day. Then you ring every buzzer by the door and ask if Miller Prince is there – you’re gagging to say Miller Pronski but you manage to restrain yourself – until somebody with a very deep, dark brown voice says, pleasantly enough, “Yes, I’m Miller Prince.”

  And then, although you’d had some vague, half-arsed plan to ask Miller Prince/Pronski to come out and be a man, and tell him that you loved Peggy and that he was nothing to her anymore and, and, well, you didn’t quite know what after that, you suddenly realise in the yawning silence after he’s said ‘Yes, I’m Miller Prince’ that you’ve taken complete leave of your senses and that you need to get out of there pronto.

  And then you run off down the street and keep running for about six blocks until you’re knackered and sweating and wheezing like a man of eighty and you realise how unfit you are, and you make a brief mental note to do something about it, not that you ever do. And then, having got your breath back, thinking ‘well, that told him’ while at the same time feeling like a complete pillock because it clearly hadn’t, you find yourself muttering, in some weird, meant-to-be-menacing Clint Eastwood-y whisper, “Just you wait, pal. Soon it really will be Miller-time!”

  And then you go back to the office, make some feeble excuse for being late and disappear into Brett and Bart’s office, persuade them to get the bong out, not that that takes a lot of persuasion, and get as high as a kite.

  *

  That night Bart and Brett dragged me off to a party at a photographer’s loft somewhere in the meat packing district. I was already several sheets to the wind or whatever the druggie equivalent of that is. Now – I want to set the record straight here; despite the impression I may have been giving, drugs aren’t and never have been my thing. Despite being a teenager in the sixties, I was one of those who remember it well, and thus, as they say, couldn’t have been there. I didn’t have a joint until I was twenty-three, never took LSD or any chemical drug as I was unshakable in my conviction that if anyone was going to attempt to fly off a building it would be me, and although I was, later, to attempt to snort a line of coke, it did sod all for me and I never tried it again. In London, prior to my going to New York, I did used to enjoy a spliff with some friends in Hammersmith who grew their own and dried it in an airing cupboard, but it was nothing more than the mildest sort of giggle prompter and munchie inducer.

  When I came to New York and was drawn into the orbit of Brett and Bart and one or two others, my intake did increase a notch or two, and the stuff was a whole lot stronger than I’d been used to. But, frankly, compared with most people I have known in the media world – of which advertising is, I suppose, a bit – I was, and am, and have always been, a total amateur.

  So when we rode up in the big industrial elevator into the party in the photographer’s loft, I was as the proverbial babe in the woods. Actually, having already had
a good go at Bart and Brett’s bong I wasn’t even possessed of the danger sniffing faculties that even the most innocent and unsuspecting of babes would have had upon entering the world, never mind the woods.

  Beer in hand – I was so out of it, it might even have been a Miller – I launched myself into the blurry groups of models and fashion people and hairdressers and hangers on. I was ready for anything and prepared for nothing. Someone handed me a joint and I took it. In all, I suppose – I really wasn’t counting – I had about half a dozen puffs and then I began to feel absolutely terrified. I staggered out into a corridor, found some steps and slumped on them. The world was turning through its axis and for the next six or eight hours the bubble in my personal spirit level zipped up and down like a pinball. Eventually, somehow, I found my way back home, and fell asleep, totally shattered.

  To this day, I have no idea what was in that joint – I suspect it was laced with something called PCP which I believe is a pig tranquilliser – but I do know that if that was the case, and I were a pig, I would make damn sure that no pig psychiatrist ever came near me with it.

  I awoke the next day, sweating and scared, but with just enough brainpower left to realise that I had to get a grip and fast. The problem wasn’t Brett or Bart or the bong. It was me. It was New York. Or rather it was me in New York. New York is a city of extremes. Extreme buildings. Extreme weather. Extreme noise. New York is a place to set the pulse racing, so if you want to stay sane and in control, you want to start off nice and slow. But I hadn’t, and I was seriously concerned that I had begun to lose my bearings.

  I got up and showered, and struggled down to the diner. As I sat on the bar stool at the counter drinking the so-called coffee and waiting for my very late breakfast to be plonked down in front of me, I started to think about Peggy and wondered if she wasn’t part of it too. No, not quite that. I wondered if my extreme reaction to Peggy wasn’t part of it too. Was this intensity of feeling that I had for her not partly, at least, due to the effect of being in New York? If I had been anywhere else – certainly in London – wouldn’t I have been much more measured? Context is everything, isn’t that what they say? On the other hand, when I tried to concentrate on her and only her, and zone in on what I truly felt about her and shut out everything else, I still felt the same. I was nuts about her. Simple as that.

  And that’s what I remember about that day. Drinking this foul coffee. Batting these ideas around and around. And never being sure what I really thought.

  I also remember a line I read somewhere around this time:

  If you’re going to get carried away, New York is the place where they are going to come and get you.

  Chapter 7

  Mid-air, Cote d’Azur and Richmond Upon Thames, 1999

  The air hostess or flight stewardess or cabin attendant or whatever they called them in 1999 smiled at me sweetly as she stretched down and across the empty seat next to me to hand me my complimentary pretzels.

  “I like your suit, Monsieur,” she said, eyebrows arching slightly as she caught sight of the scarlet lining of my unbuttoned jacket. “Tres chic.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and was about to generously add ‘it was a present from my wife’, when I stopped myself. First, why was I telling this to a complete stranger? And second, well, because I suddenly became acutely conscious that I was travelling alone – i.e. without my wife. Somehow that seemed significant.

  This time the Air France plane had managed to get off the ground and would carry me, I sincerely hoped, to the South of France. (Is there any place anywhere with a name more evocative of glamour and privilege? Just to say you are going the South of France makes you feel all jetsetty inside. If you want bonus points on the E to P scale, there’s no better place to be seen to be going.)

  It was early June, and that meant it was time for the world’s greatest freebie – also known as the annual advertising festival in Cannes. I say ‘freebie’ because I was a one third shareholder in BWD and so, technically if indirectly, would be putting my hand deep into my Ozwald Boateng pocket to pay for the very splendid junket that I and quite a few other BWDers would be on this week. But it always felt like a freebie; perhaps it was because, to ad folk of my generation, this was the ‘Cannes’ that was embedded into your subconscious when you first went. Invariably, as happened with me, you would be sent off there at a juniorish stage in your career as a reward for some good work you had done. (I don’t mean ‘good work’ as in ‘good works’, I mean ‘good work’ as in a good press campaign or TV commercial.) It amused one’s world weary superiors to see young Andrew’s eyes opened to the free lunches and free dinners and free hotel rooms – with room service! – and to the non-stop parties and the waterskiing and to the waiters in bow ties bringing champagne to your sunbed – always assuming you could take any more champagne – citron presse if you couldn’t. (“Don’t know what it is but I’ll have it anyway, it’s free isn’t it?”) A few free days in Cannes gave you a brief glimpse of the goodies that might really be available behind the golden doors of the inner sanctum, and acted as a useful incentive for you to give the agency just a few extra drops of your blood. And not to be sneezed at was the added bonus that it made all the other young wannabees in the Creative Department as jealous as hell that you’d been chosen to go and they hadn’t.

  The official purpose of the Cannes Film Festival was to offer delegates a chance to see the best television commercials from around the world made in the previous year, and from these, the very best would be selected to win prizes – a noble purpose I am sure you will agree. The prizes, known as Cannes Lions – Bronze, Silver or Gold – would be handed out in the Palais de something on the closing Saturday evening before a packed crowd of paralytic Finns, South Koreans, Egyptians, Luxemburgers, Venezuelans and, for all I know, Inuits, who would cheer or hurl abuse depending on whether or not they approved of the Judges’ choices. The judges would be a small group of people, none of whom, as a rule, could speak the same language, who had the great good fortune to be stuck in a basement from dawn ‘til dusk, from Monday to Friday, yawning their way through a gazillion indecipherable spots from Burkino Faso to the Faroe Islands while the rest of us of were gallivanting about the Croisette. Having the esteemed honour of being asked to be a judge at Cannes was, I always felt, to draw the very shortest of short straws, and was a damn good reason to be nice to your PA lest she should decide to take revenge on you by accepting such an invitation on your behalf.

  Of course, in today’s world of the Internet and instant digital communications etc., you can, at the bash of a button, see all the commercials from Burkino Faso to the Faroe Islands that you might care to, and it is a measure of the true value of Cannes to advertising people that they still flock to the festival in their pissed-up thousands, global economic meltdown or no. (Sadly, I am no longer in a position to get my snout into the trough.)

  Cannes marks the end – in so far as it ever ends – of the advertising awards season, and this year had been a humdinger for BWD. We had picked up the usual horrendous bits of perspex and fake brass at ‘Creative Circle’, and the ‘British Television Advertising Awards’ – and oh, I forget most of the rest, but those too. One I could never forget was the Oscar of the advertising awards world – a ‘DADA’, an acronym for Designers and Art Directors Association, a stodgy sounding bunch to the uninitiated perhaps, but a ‘DADA’ was the crème de la crème. And “this year, the Silver Pencil for best thirty second television commercial” – yes, they awarded pencilly shaped prizes, like Cannes gave out Lion shaped thingies – “goes to Bradley Williams Dutton for …” – Do you know, I cannot, for the life of me remember the name of the product? Still, that’s advertising for you.

  What I can remember is that it was a cat food of some kind, that Will and Lucille had come up with the idea and written it, and that, as a result, their star in the London advertising firmament was waxing powerful strong, and that they we
re becoming increasingly poachable by our competitor agencies. This meant that sooner or later, we knew – and they knew – we would have to bung them a few extra thou to keep them. Rules of the game – we didn’t really mind.

  But by the time Cannes came around – possibly even because I had become a little distracted by the Polaroid of Peggy and associated personal matters – there were quite a few things I hadn’t yet got around to doing, and giving them their rise was one of them. This was an error, one smallish reason being that, having won a DADA Silver Pencil (hugely prestigious) they were hot favourites to pick up a Gold Lion (goldier but less prestigious), and this would give them another arrow in their cough-up-or-we-fuck-off quiver. Naturally, Will and Lucille would be amongst the BWD people swanning about Cannes this year, as they were all but certain to be called up for a gong and a bow.

  Being principally a festival about ‘creativity’, the ‘suits’ – the poor fools who were forced to deal with an agency’s clients – did not usually get to go to Cannes and were made to remain, embittered and muttering, in London. But should a piece of work – I use the phrase advisedly – which had been done for one of their clients win one of those coveted Lions, then they would be permitted to call the said client or clients – you would be amazed how many there turned out to be when there was a chance of a free trip to Cannes – and accompany them, whooping and hollering, to the glorious S of F to join us. Therefore, as the rules should have applied, we would, if things went as expected, get an advance call with the good news, and then transmit the signal to the relevant suit in London to grab the cat food clients and bring ’em on down.

  But, for a reason I was not yet to fully appreciate, Vince, who was not the relevant suit in this case, but, as Head of Account Management, the chief suit, as you might say, on all BWD accounts, had decided to come to Cannes, having unilaterally decided that he would be the one to do the requisite feting of the cat food clients. This was odd because a) he had never done this before, b) it was counting our cat food chickens before they had hatched, and c) the guy who was the relevant suit would, understandably, be more than a little teed off, and why upset him?