by Don Potter
“What do you want me to do, Vince?”
“I want you shoot her.”
“Apart from shooting her.”
“That’s a disappointment. We’d both be better off if I shot her.”
I laughed. Vince’s wry sense of humor was such a valuable part of him. It helped lessen the weight of any problem. “No, don’t do that.”
“Maybe if I just wing her it’ll slow things down?”
“No.”
“Okay, last choice. Nail one of her feet to the ground so she can only go in circles inside her own office.”
“I’ll give that some serious consideration, Vince. Meanwhile leave the Glock at home.”
“How’d you know I had a Glock?”
“What else would a man like Vince D’Angelo own? Later.” I hung up and waited for Nancy’s call. This was passive and the wrong thing to do, so I called her instead.
“So what’s your beef with Vince?” I asked.
“He goes crazy if he’s not the center of attention.”
“Are you working together or rattling your sabers and shouting war cries across the trenches?”
“That’s such a male image. I’m trying to do public relations for the agency, that’s what I’m hired to do, and I do it very well. But Vince wants to put his thumbprint on anything that goes out for ad clients and gets obnoxious if he doesn’t get his way.”
“Is that the only problem?”
“For the most part.”
“Vince is just trying to do his job too. Maybe he’s being a little protective. Like you, Vince is very good at what he does. He’s a New Yorker through and through, which makes him by nature difficult at times. You’ve handled difficult personalities before. I know you can do it again. I want you to try working together with Vince and include me in the process until we smooth things out.”
“How are you going to do that from LA?”
“The three Fs: phone, fax, and FedEx.” I chuckled and she ignored my little play on words.
“Good luck with that.” Nancy hung up before I could respond.
I was tired, I felt old and swamped. Everything, personal and business, was flooding over me. Just a little respite would help. I didn’t get one. The phone rang and my secretary announced, “Your father’s on line one.”
I picked it up. “Dad?”
“I called your office in Pittsburgh, and they said you were in California. Your mother fell down and broke her hip,” he said, his voice hoarse. “It’s serious. You’d better come home right away.”
43
Colonel Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter are indicted for conspiracy to defraud the US government. McDonald’s opens its first hamburger restaurant in a Communist-run country, Yugoslavia. Michael Jackson releases Man In The Mirror. And Rob has complicated family issues.
* * *
Dad looked old. He was old, well into his eighties now, but this was more of an end of life, worn-out old. We sat in silence in the living room of their Fox Chapel home. A clock ticked quietly away on a shelf. Otherwise, there was only silence. Dad was the first to speak.
“Are you based in New York now?” he said.
“We are. I moved corporate headquarters there from Pittsburgh. New York is still the center for advertising, and if the agency is going to survive, we need to be in the middle of the action. I’m still dealing with things in LA for a little while.”
“Why?”
I was hoping he wouldn’t ask that question. “We have offices all over the country and I have to make regular visits. LA’s our biggest one.”
“No, I mean what about your family?”
“They’re in LA.”
“And you’re going to be living in New York. That’s even further away from them than Pittsburgh. Are you happy with that arrangement?”
“Could be better, but we bought the house we’d been leasing right before I made the office move. Ginger is settled there. Schools and things for the kids, you know. I’m there as often as I can be.”
“A man needs a family and they need him around. Kids grow up fast and need a dad.”
“I do my best.”
“You’ll be sorry you missed so much of them growing up.” My father shifted in his chair and grunted. “I’m done here, and so is your mother.”
“What?”
“This house is too big and once your mom recovers we’re moving.”
“To where?”
“Out to California so we can see and enjoy our grandchildren.”
“That’s unexpected. Ginger and the kids will love it. There’s plenty of room for you at our house.”
“No, we’ll find a nice comfortable retirement place nearby where they feed us and maybe give me back rubs on a regular basis. Would you mind if we were in the neighborhood?”
“We’d love it if you were close.”
“No more freezing my ass off in the winter and your mom will just love chatting about all sorts of nonsense with Ginger. I remember how much those two women liked to talk.”
An image flashed through my mind of Ginger sitting fixed, mute and frightened while the family swirled around her. “Yes, Dad, those women always did like to talk.”
I sat across Doctor Scanlon’s desk at the UCLA Medical Center and wondered how it felt to constantly be the bearer of bad news, life changing and destroying news. Did he go home at night and slam down a couple of martinis, or did he run six miles a day, or maybe he built furniture in his workshop? What did he do to lessen the pain? Of course, he could be a latent sociopath and other peoples’ tragedy didn’t affect him. But what he was saying certainly affected us.
“Ginger appears to have early on-set Alzheimer’s,” he said.
“But that’s an old people’s disease,” I said.
“No.” He offered a sympathetic smile. “Patients much younger than your wife have Alzheimer’s. I’m so sorry for both of you.”
Ginger couldn’t speak and I didn’t know what to say. But Scanlon was talking and I wished there was a way to shut him up.
“There’s more,” he said.
I snorted a cold laugh. “How could there be more?”
“I would like a few more tests for confirmation, but I am reasonably confident in my diagnosis. Here at UCLA we have a special scan that checks the proteins in the brain, and that’s where the Alzheimer’s first showed up.”
“Let’s cut to the chase, doc. What’s the more?”
“Ginger appears to have a variant condition known as Primary Progressive Aphasia, commonly referred to as PPA. This is what causes her to lose words and jumble up sentences.”
“And eventually?”
“Eventually she will be unable to communicate verbally or through the written word. And as it progresses Ginger’s cognitive abilities will fail too.”
“What’s the treatment?”
“PPA is a relatively rare condition so very little research time or money has been devoted to it.”
“And?”
“Ginger is physically healthy and we can prescribe medication to hopefully slow the process down, although it is not a cure. You both have many more years ahead, but not necessarily together.”
We drove away in silence. I called the office to say I wasn’t coming in, went home, and downed a few martinis. They might have worked for Doctor Scanlon, but didn’t work for me - the pain was still there.
44
Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart is caught in a sex scandal with prostitutes. The Soviet Army withdraws, after failure, from Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is founded by Osama bin Laden. Rob has 360 degrees of problems.
* * *
I was under non-stop pressure from the Board. Economically times were fragile and they wanted a company-wide report of where we were and projections for the immediate future. This meant I would have to visit each office. My parents would be coming out in a month and we had more doctor visits lined up for Ginger. Her condition varied wildly. Sometimes sh
e seemed just fine and the next moment her thoughts were somewhere else. Other times she would hum a non-descript tune as if happy then burst into tears.
This was the worst time to leave LA, but I had already stretched the Board’s patience by not tending to corporate business. So I left on a quick mission. Los Angeles was doing fine with the Acura account as its mainstay. Dallas remained static. Chicago was improving after picking up the Kraft Foods foodservice account once Philip Morris bought the iconic company. New York was headed for a pretty good year. And the Pittsburgh office was suffering severely from a series of ongoing losses. Carlson Public Relations, under Nancy Gates, continued to grow profitably.
I landed in Pittsburgh prepared to give what was basically a positive report on the company’s overall health. We met there rather than in New York, because most of the Board members still were in the Pittsburgh office.
Mitch Cochran, the local creative director, collared me as soon as I entered the office. “I gotta talk to you,” he said, hurrying alongside me.
“Any chance of me taking off my coat first?”
“Sorry, yes.”
He followed me into my office, waited impatiently for me to take off my coat and get a coffee before blurting out, “Heinz is in trouble. We’re gonna lose all the business if we don’t do something. This is this office’s biggest account.”
“I know that. The question is why?”
“Seems Pittsburgh is suddenly provincial. The new head of marketing at Heinz is from New York and doesn’t think he can get edgy stuff here.”
“Have you shown him any edgy concepts?”
“I thought we had some good stuff but obviously he didn’t.”
“So let’s put Vince D’Angelo, our favorite New Yorker, on the job.”
“Okay, but can we keep Vince churning out work for us once we solve the immediate problem?”
“I’ll see that he does. Anything else I can help you with? If not, thanks Mitch. I have a busy day.”
Mitch left and I pressed the intercom. “I want to see Vince D’Angelo right away. Yes, I know he’s in New York. He needs to be on the next flight to Pittsburgh.”
Vince and I had an early dinner together in a little Italian place not far from the office.
“Here’s the scoop, Vince,” I said over a cup of espresso. “Ad budgets are getting bigger, but agencies are merging so the pie is getting sliced into fewer but bigger pieces.”
“Fewer pieces, bigger mouths. That makes it harder for us to get a bite.”
“True. Carlson is still a second tier agency. We need to demonstrate our creative prowess coupled with marketing astuteness and personal service that the mega-shops may not be able to deliver over a significant period of time.”
“What did you just say?”
“I had a bunch of words I hadn’t used in a while and just strung them all together to see if they’d make a sentence.”
“Sentence, yes, sense, no.”
“Bullshit over. Overall we’re doing okay, but the ad side of the business is tenuous, while PR is going gangbusters.”
“Nancy open-up-dem-pearly Gates. Maybe that’s how she does it.”
I moved to the main reason I wanted to talk with Vince. “You’re busy, but I need you to work on Heinz. Give ‘em something ballsy. They’ll turn it down and go for safety, but they’ll feel like they were brave and maybe we won’t lose the account.”
“Done,” Vince said and paused. “Can I ask you a a personal question?”
“As long as you’re not asking for money or a big wet kiss.”
“I’ve heard rumors, is Ginger’s okay?”
I sat back in my chair and exhaled. “Could be better.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Knock the socks off the new guy at Heinz and I’ll be happy.”
“You got it.”
“Let’s talk later. I’m going to a party at the Duquesne Club to see a gal about some pearly gates.”
I never liked these kinds of parties, and couldn’t remember what this one was for. Probably some charity connected to one of our Pittsburgh clients. Nancy cornered me halfway through my first drink.
“You’ll never guess who I met,” she said showing off her shimmery dress, confidence and snowdrift-white teeth.
“Ronald Reagan?”
“Much more interesting. Your ex-wife, Shelly. I met her at a cocktail party on New Year’s Day. She has a beautiful townhouse up by Columbia.”
“It belongs to her parents.”
“They’ve passed on and Shelly lives there now with her new girlfriend.”
Shelly has a girlfriend? If the girlfriend is Black, Shelly could embrace two causes at once. I wanted to know more about my ex but decided not to go there and asked, “What was the occasion that called for your presence?”
“You remember Shelly was always active in the Civil Rights movement.”
“How could I forget? It screwed up our marriage.”
“Civil Rights?”
“It consumed Shelly and we grew apart.”
“No, he’s now active in promoting Planned Parenthood.”
“Hadn’t heard about that before. Are you involved too?”
“No, not yet. This was just a fund raising event. Shelly and I got along famously and she asked if Carlson Public Relations would be interested in doing a pro bono project with them. And since you laid down the law that all assignments, even freebies, had to have your approval, I decided to get your reaction.”
“I presume them means Planned Parenthood, not Shelly?”
“Both. Shelly is the one spearheading the project for Planned Parenthood’s pro-choice activities. It could be good publicity for the agency.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s political. That’s why I didn’t go for the lobbying thing or the DC office you were pushing.”
“Are you turning this one down just to snub the ex-Missus Fleming?”
“No. Tell her I said hello when you deliver the message that Carlson Communications will not be working for Planned Parenthood.”
“Okay, if that’s what you want. But I think we could work better together if you realized that Carlson Communications, in some ways, is like General Motors. You run the Oldsmobile business and I run the Pontiac division. Both of us are pretty much going after the same customers. We’re not partners we’re more like friendly competitors. Why won’t you just let me run my business and you run yours?”
“The Board has elected me chairman and CEO to run the entire company. I give you plenty of leeway to do your thing, but you still report to me. And I have the final word on who we work with or not. Got it?”
“You’ll have to excuse me; I just saw a prospect over there and I simply must talk to them.” Nancy left as if we never had the conversation that was just concluded.
Back in LA I met with Doctor Scanlon. He must be a terrific poker player because his expression never varied as he outlined the next step. He had asked that we meet without Ginger so that she would not be unduly stressed.
“Speech therapy might help your wife, as will involvement in word games from crossword puzzles to card games even Scrabble. Anything that might stimulate her mind is worth a try, as long as the activity is not so difficult it overwhelms her.”
“We can do that.”
“You might consider having a live-in caregiver instead of a housekeeper due to your work and travel schedule. Perhaps that person could drive instead of Ginger.”
“Isn’t Ginger capable of driving?”
“For now, but that will change, although we don’t know when.”
“She’ll resist. This is LA.”
“You’ll know the time. By the way, your wife might be a candidate for a clinical trial that is about to get underway. Would Ginger be interested if she qualifies?”
“I’ll ask her.”
“That covers everything. There’s no reaso
n for me to see Ginger for three months unless her condition changes. In the meantime, live normally and enjoy every moment with each other.”
“We’ll discuss these things this evening.”
It went better than I imagined. Ginger seemed almost relieved.
Maybe it would be best to ease into the doctor’s recommendations rather than jump in with both feet, even though she had scrapped the side of her twice in the last two months. I thought I could hire a caregiver and tell Ginger she was a full-time housekeeper. Deceptive, but why upset Ginger? “What about the therapists and the clinical trial?”
She nodded.
“Anything I’ve forgotten?”
She grinned. “Ice cream.”
Ginger had a bowl of her favorite ice cream, chocolate chip, before retiring for the evening. I went to my study and reviewed the credit card statements for the past several months and discovered the charges for the things she told me Uncle Bevan bought were actually purchased by Ginger. I assumed she invented an imaginary friend to make me jealous.
I was in the office early, well before my secretary and the other staff, so I called New York. I needed to know about Heinz. Vince answered on the first ring.
“Kemo sabe. Up early,” he said.
“How goes the ballsy Heinz concept?”
“Not as funny as your human beans, but it does have naked ladies, muscle-bound men and lots of fornicating.”
“Nothing different, then?”
“I surprise ‘em. I shock ‘em. And I always do my best to entertain ‘em.”
There was a hard knock on my door and I glanced up to see man about my age with a generous smile and piercing blue eyes standing in the doorway. His hair was slightly gray, and the suit and shirt were tailored to accent his solid frame. He was right out of central casting. He was an adman.
“Mister Fleming, good morning,” he boomed.
“Call you back,” I said to Vince and hung up. “Do I know you?”
“You soon will.” He entered, shook hands, then offered me a business card. It read: J. Randolph Wilson, III, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, ConCom Worldwide. Under the corporate name was the phrase Connecting Through Communications.