From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor

by Jerry Della Femina

  These were top-money guys, account supervisors and management people, making fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year – the very top of the advertising business. None of them ever admitted that he was one of the fired people, but you know, they never had a secretary or anything. It was weird; they really didn’t know whether it was the ‘Floor of the Forgotten Men’ but they had a pretty good notion. They would run around for interviews and the telephone would ring and the messages might come in, and at the end of the day when they were back that one receptionist would walk into an office and say, ‘You’ve had messages.’ They were walking around, but they were zombies. What I can’t get over is that they never talked to each other about being fired. They all would show up for work at 9:30 in the morning, because that was the thing to do, and then they’d have to go to another floor to find the coffee machine because there wasn’t a coffee machine on the ‘Floor of the Forgotten Men’. Nobody ever said, ‘Hey, I got a lead on something over at Kenyon and Eckhart.’ A guy I know today was on that floor and he recently ran into another guy who was also on that floor at the same time. They started talking about it and they realized for the first time that they had been fired.

  At that same time, over at Interpublic, Marion Harper, the chairman, was about to become a Forgotten Man himself. He revolutionized the business. They used to call him ‘Marvel’ Harper, because he was. He took the concept that an agency ought to be an all-service organization and he built a gigantic company on this idea. He had a separate company to handle public relations for his clients, and he even had a research company to dream up new products which maybe were four years away from manufacturing. And then one day he got his. What happened was that six guys held a meeting in a conference room and they invited Harper to sit in on his own execution. And the amazing thing is, all of these guys had been brought in by Harper. They sat around and then one of them said, ‘Marion, it’s time. We want to take a vote.’ It was a shock because although things were going bad, Harper never had considered a vote. He always thought he was strong enough even if they put it to a vote. So they voted. Six zips: one abstention. Harper abstained. It was like a Mafia meeting where they hit their hand and they come down with their thumb. It was the business world’s kiss of death.

  You see, they still were underlings, but put together they made one big overling. Harper made them strong enough to kill him. The Harper case was very rare, so rare it made the front pages. And today, Harper is trying for a comeback – he’s still trying to put something together. (On January 30, 1970, it was announced that Marion was forming a new agency, along with Ron Rosenfeld, a copywriter, and Len Sirowitz, an art director.)

  How do they tell somebody at Ted Bates that he’s fired? I’ve had guys coming in to see me who say, ‘I’m going to get it. Do you have anything here for me? I know I’m going to go because there was a meeting today on the account and they didn’t invite me. They held an important meeting without asking me.’ You know, it could be an oversight, it could be some secretary left this guy’s name off a memo, it could be anything, but the guy immediately assumes that this is death, this is the end. Little by little, guys who thought he was great on new business don’t say hello any more. They meet in the hallway and it’s very fast. ‘Hi, how are you?’ and ‘How’s it going?’ These guys who suddenly feel they’re marked for death have to scramble to get attention again. They hustle around in hopes that they’ll find a new account and they’ll come back. They look for a chance.

  If there is a jungle part to the advertising business, this is it – when a guy is wounded and trying to survive. But the word goes out, and there are a lot of people around town who can smell a guy who’s going to die. And they jump him. They literally jump him. No holds are barred. The minute the guy looks like he’s dead, he immediately becomes the butt of a lot of jokes. ‘He could never do it; I always knew he was a bum.’

  One agency president I know has a master plan for his entire agency. The president knows exactly when each person is going to get it. This president understands that if an underling gets too powerful or controls too big a piece of the business, then he, the president, is in trouble. So he’s got a chart in his hand with a date of departure marked beside everyone’s name. I once talked to an account man working for this president and I told him, ‘You’re dead because in the master plan everybody goes, you included.’ This guy laughed. The last time I saw him he said, ‘You know, you were right. He does have a master plan. Everybody goes. One by one, everybody gets it.’

  The master plan works this way: ‘This guy can take me up from a fashion agency to package goods where the real money is, but he can’t take me past package goods. And this other guy, who got me a piece of cosmetic business, is my best friend and he’s saved me and he’s helped me make an agency and I love him and he’s great, but if I ever get to be a fifty-million-dollar agency and Henry Ford walks in the door with his account, this guy can’t carry it.’

  Usually the large agencies have a killer to do the firing. Most agencies have one killer; the bigger agencies might have two killers. At Ted Bates & Company the agency killer was a little guy I’ll call Billy, who started with Ted Bates when the agency opened in the early 1940s. He lived right through up to his retirement a few years ago. He fired hundreds of people in his lifetime and literally was the cause of more unhappiness than any man I know. From the outside, it didn’t look like he had a big job at the agency, but he was the killer. And this guy did a job on everybody. He really was powerful, and he got his power by being close to Bates, the real Ted Bates. Who, by the way, really exists. Most people don’t know that. The real Ted Bates is supposed to be very quiet and very shy and doesn’t like to see people. He’s the Howard Hughes of advertising. Most people think that Ted Bates is a guy by the name of Ted who met another guy by the name of Bates and when they got together they said, ‘We’ll call it Ted Bates.’

  Rosser Reeves was the flamboyant genius who was out front. The guy who caused all the trouble was Billy. When he retired, they threw an enormous banquet for him and gave him a golden stiletto as a going-away gift. I’m kidding about the stiletto, but they were frightened of him. The Bates killer reportedly walked away with a cool million when he retired. Plus the golden stiletto. (People don’t realize that advertising is the greatest welfare state going in the world. If you stay in one place long enough, you’ve got to pick up an enormous amount of bread. They may give you 5 percent of your annual salary and put it away for you in the profit-sharing plan, and this on top of the enormous salary and expense account.)

  The Bates killer could fire anybody – and he had balls, too. He decided that he knew as much about writing and art directing as any creative person and that he would fire guys in every area of the agency. Guys lived in fear of him for years. He was considered the ultimate killer.

  When I worked at Fuller & Smith & Ross they had a killer who was a combination killer and faggot. He really was. He would kiss you to death. He’s dead now, but I don’t hear many people grieving for him. Now this killer was the agency bookkeeper, the guy who was in charge of the money coming in and going out.

  At one point they kept insisting that I fill out my time sheets – so many hours worked for such and such a client, that kind of thing. I insisted that I wouldn’t fool around with the time sheets. Finally, it came to a point where petty cash owed me one hundred and fifteen dollars and I really needed the money. So I went to the faggot-killer and said, ‘Joey, you know I’d like to have the money you owe me.’ The killer said, ‘Well, you’re behind on your time sheets.’ I said, ‘Forget it. I’ll give you a time sheet tomorrow. But give me the money now.’ Joey said, ‘No. Absolutely not. You’re not getting your money until I see every time sheet here.’ So I said, ‘O.K.I’ll leave and I’ll get my money.’ He said, ‘How do you intend to get your money if I won’t give it to you?’ I said, ‘I’m going to hock my typewriter.’

  So I picked up my typewriter, put it under my arm, and started to walk o
ut of the office. The faggot-killer spots me and starts screaming, ‘I’ll have you arrested if you take that typewriter.’ Well, the creative director hears all this screaming – and nobody can scream like a faggot-killer – and he comes running out of his office and there was a big meeting. They decided to give me my money, but it was a draw because two days later I had to turn in my time sheets.

  I think most agency killers pick the job for themselves. Nobody walks up to them and says, ‘You look like a nasty bastard, you can be the killer here.’ He doesn’t have to have the power, that’s the interesting part about it. Killers do things that eventually get them the job. Like they’ll show unnecessary zeal in screwing a company out of fifty cents on some bill. Occasionally, killers split up their territory. One killer, for instance, will handle the account area and maybe media, and the other killer will take on the creative side of the agency. Very efficient, the agency killers. Sometimes, when an agency starts going downhill, the killers are so busy they can hardly keep up with the work.

  In a lot of ways they’re very much like the guys in the Mafia. You know, hit guys are not bad guys at all. They’re friendly toward dogs and little kids; in fact, they’re real nice except for the fact that they kill. Killers for some strange reason usually aren’t top management. They’re either running a piece of the production department, or the media department, or, like the faggot-killer, in accounting and bookkeeping. They’re medium-level guys.

  Killers don’t make the actual decision to kill, but they’ll egg somebody on to make the decision. They’re the people who say, ‘You know, Harry over there hasn’t turned out a decent ad in the last six months. I don’t know what we’re doing with a guy like that.’ Harry, who’s uptight for his own crazy reasons, suddenly hears the word that he hasn’t turned out an ad for six months, which makes him so nervous that he then doesn’t turn out an ad for still another six months. At the end of the year, Harry’s out.

  Copywriters and art directors have cold periods. If they’re not professionals about it, they show it, and they’re cold out loud – I mean, they’re cold to the whole world. They just can’t come up with anything. Instead of cooling it and relaxing, they act cold and they lose it all. That’s the time when the killers move in. They smell it. They smell it better than anybody else does. They know when a guy’s about to die. Killers flourish best at agencies really on their way down and also at agencies growing like hell and getting bigger by the moment. So one killer is killing out of fear and the other type is killing out of, maybe, impatience. They want their agency to grow faster than Mary Wells has. And if every new guy who shows up doesn’t start producing immediately, the killer wants them taken care of. Killers are almost an integral part of an agency today.

  It’s a little bit like the old West. A guy’s reputation is the first thing you hear about. Let’s say you’re brought to a new agency, and usually somebody walks up to you that first week and he says, ‘Hi, my name is So-and-so and I work here.’ Invariably, inevitably, the conversation gets around to ‘Watch out for that guy.’ Then your new friend says, ‘This is a nice place and I like it. You can’t get much work out, but don’t worry about it.’ Then, all of a sudden it’s like a prison movie: ‘That guy over there, that little bastard, watch out for him.’ This is the language of the business. Then you know that the guy he’s talking about is the killer. You know that he’s the guy who will do the job on you if the job ever has to be done.

  Let’s say a creative director has got himself a bad art director who has to go. Since the creative director hired the art director, the chances are that he’s afraid, so he’s not going to go blabbing around that ‘I blew it with Joe over there, I made a bad decision and shouldn’t have hired him.’ The creative director is beyond all that. The agency president? He’s so far removed from everything that he’s really out of advertising. He’s spending most of his time with a couple of guys who run a boiler room who claim they’re going to take his agency public and make everybody a bundle. The account supervisor is so scared of losing the account that he can barely talk, much less think straight. So the actual job falls to someone between the account supervisor and the creative supervisor. The way it’s done is that the creative supervisor will mumble something to the killer which goes like this: ‘You know, Joe isn’t behaving too well lately.’ Then the account supervisor screws up his courage and he might stammer to the killer, ‘Yeah, Joe is acting up, he came in at ten yesterday morning and he was drunk. He’s got to go.’ The killer mops up.

  Some killers eventually kill off so many people that the board of directors decides on a change of management. Then a whole new crew of guys is brought in, and the new guys don’t realize that they have a killer on their hands. That’s when the killers get it. Whenever a killer gets hit in an agency, or when he retires, there’s a celebration – a real party.

  The retirement party for the Bates killer was marvelous. Practically the whole agency showed up for it. First of all, everyone had a great deal of respect for the guy – you know, here we have a tried and true survivor. And secondly, nobody’s going to screw around and not show up because who knows, maybe he’ll get bored by retirement and he’ll come back to work at the agency. Nobody wanted to risk a scene like that. Even in retirement the guy struck fear into people.

  When I worked at Daniel & Charles there were so many going-away parties for guys who got fired that I figured out a way to ease the financial burden on those people who had to kick in five or ten dollars every week for the party. I decided to sell insurance. I went around to the creative department and said, ‘Give me three dollars out of your paychecks every week and I’ll book it. The next time somebody gets it I’ll pay for the party.’

  There was a copywriter there named Marvin who was doing quite nicely with his accounts. One day he got into a conversation with some other people in the creative department who said, ‘Marvin, you’re being underpaid. You’re doing a hell of a job and they’re killing you when it comes to bread. Frankly, Marvin, you’re worth a lot more.’

  Now they weren’t egging this guy on, they honestly thought that the guy was doing a job and deserved a better deal. Marvin says, ‘Holy shit, you’re right, I’m going to go in there and talk to Charlie.’ Charlie Goldschmidt was one of the two owners of the agency and is the chairman of the board. Well, he went in to talk to Charlie and Charlie says. ‘Marvin, that’s very funny, I wanted to talk to you.’ And then Charlie fired Marvin. Marvin was going to be fired all along; if he had kept quiet he would have lasted a few more weeks.

  Charlie was doing a lot of firing those days. On one day there were account assignments coming out and Charlie had to pencil in assignments for everyone. He pencils in a lot of names and then when he comes to a guy named Dennis, he doesn’t pencil Dennis’s name in but rather he puts down ‘Mr. X’ to work on such and such an account. In his mind, of course, he was about to fire Dennis. The only problem is that on the list are Dennis’s accounts and next to Dennis’s name is ‘Mr. X.’ Of course he hadn’t gotten around to tell Dennis that he was out and ‘Mr. X’ was coming in. And of course his secretary, she doesn’t know anything, so she goes ahead, types the list out, and the account list is circulated throughout the agency. The next scene: Charlie running all over the agency trying to grab back these things from everybody including Dennis. Well, he wasn’t fast enough – the legs go first on an agency president – and when Charlie gets to Dennis’s office, there’s Dennis, white, looking at the list. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Charlie, ‘I’m sorry you had to find out this way.’ Charlie had not been able to find a replacement for Dennis and didn’t want to fire him until he did.

  Charlie liked me and when I told him I was leaving he was quiet for two weeks. On the next to the last day he came into my office and said, ‘Kid, can’t you change your mind? Kid, what can I do for you? Kid, you could own this place someday.’ Last day, he’s in my office again. I shook his hand and said, ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’ ‘Goodbye, kid,’ he says. ‘I wish yo
u luck, but you’re making a mistake.’

  I went downstairs for a going-away drink with everybody. A guy comes running down saying, ‘You got to go upstairs again. Charlie’s gone berserk; he’s firing everybody. So help me. Go upstairs.’

  And he was. Charlie had simply gone into the office of a fellow named Mike Lawlor and said, ‘Mike, are you going to follow Jerry?’ Mike says, ‘No, Charlie, I wouldn’t do anything like that.’ Charlie says, ‘Mike, are you going to take your book [meaning portfolio] up to Fuller & Smith & Ross?’ ‘I might,’ says Mike. Lawlor felt that the Bill of Rights allowed a guy to show his book around town. ‘Get out of here,’ says Charlie. ‘You’re fired. Pack up your things and get out.’ He then went into the office of a guy named Bert Klein and said, ‘Bert, you’re Jerry’s friend, aren’t you?’ ‘Yeah.’ Are you going to follow him?’ ‘Gee, I don’t know.’ ‘Did you ever have your book up to that agency?’ ‘Yeah, I’ve had my book up there.’ ‘Get out,’ said Charlie, ‘you’re fired.’ Still another friend of mine, a guy named Bob Tore, was coming out of the men’s room. He was a little wobbly because he had heard that Charlie was going from office to office firing people. Charlie grabbed this guy Bob and said, ‘You’re Jerry’s friend, aren’t you?’ Poor Bob. He starts to stammer, ‘Uh, uh, yeah, I know Jerry …’ Charlie got compassionate: ‘Never mind. You got two kids. I won’t fire you.’

  Charlie, who now is a good friend of mine, really did a job that day. I don’t know what the final head count was, but he put in a good day’s work. The next day he had four freelancers working up there to take up the slack. And the guys he fired were no slouches. Mike Lawlor went to Doyle, Dane, Bert Klein to Wells, Rich.