“Les apéritifs,” said Goodwillie.
In those days Timothy wrote that Goodwillie wore Brooks Brothers pink on social occasions and nothing but charcoal black, thin ties, white shirts, and gold cufflinks when he was on the job. He also sported a crew cut. A few years later he was wearing unmatched jackets and pants, enormous ties, bushy sideburns, long hair carefully tailored, and a goatee “that looked Christawful on Goodwillie because he didn’t have the right face for it.”
But that Goodwillie was smart Timothy never doubted. Under his leadership Campbell of Canada boomed as it never had before. What most intrigued Timothy was that Goodwillie was sincere. When he described himself as “really dedicated to this country,” he meant it. When he said, as he often did, that he had taken Thomas Jefferson for his model in life, he meant it. And when he said that Timothy’s work for the agency was right on, he meant that, too.
“And what a thought that was to carry around. And what did it say about my character that Mr. Campbell had never trusted me while Goodwillie kept telling me I was by far the best idea-man in the whole outfit.”
Glowing reports of Timothy’s work went down to New York, Goodwillie explaining that in Timothy the company had acquired just what it most wanted, a smart native with a natural instinct for the industry who knew how to readjust the usual Madison Avenue presentations so that they had a genuine Canadian look.
“That’s one thing we’ve learned,” Goodwillie said, “that the British never learned. You must never give a guy the idea you’re invading his territory. The British never thought about this and that explains why they lost their empire.” Then, his face serious, his eyes excited, he said, “I’ve been talking with Mr. Truscott and Mr. Truscott has a big thing in mind for you. We’re opening up in Iran. Mr. Truscott is in very big with the Shah. So how do you fancy this? He wants you to head up our branch there.”
“For God’s sake talk him out of it. That’s the last place on earth I’d want to work in. Besides, I’d have to learn Persian.”
So he stayed where he was and every year received a bigger bonus and more fringe benefits. He used to take Enid to the Costa Brava or the Côte d’Azur for quick holidays in the summer and to Val d’Isère for quick ski trips in the winter. He played squash regularly at the MAAA and once, when he and Enid were entertaining the Goodwillies to dinner, he even heard himself say that he’d never had it so good.
His work brought him into contact with the television people and that was how he met Esther Stahr. She was the first Jewish girl he ever knew and he was embarrassed to discover that she was much better educated than himself. He also learned that she felt sorry for him, as some people who have grown up poor feel for people who have grown up in a background like Timothy’s. With Esther he could talk about books as he never could with Enid or his old friends. The agency work was beginning to desiccate him and he became an omnivorous reader. Every Saturday after squash he went to the book stores and came home with some new paperbacks. He read novels, poetry, biography, history, anthropology, and even some works in popular biology. He dreamed of becoming an author and after one of his business sessions with Esther he gave her the outline of a play he wanted to write.
He never got around to writing the dialogue, but I found among his papers a sketch of the play itself. He imagined a set with a gigantic television screen forming the back wall of the stage. Across this screen there marched or posed a steady procession of newsmakers, together with the worst of the news scenes they were responsible for. Politicians with their mouths opening and closing as they made their pronouncements; commercials cutting into them constantly; sudden jets of pop music; bombings, riots, hockey and football games; panel discussions between politely wrangling college professors – “Everything in the news which adds up to the vast war of shadows and images the world has become.”
In front of this screen the actors on the stage itself were tiny. They were confined in a bare living room and were visible only in flashes when one of the roving spotlights caught them. They were ordinary men, women, and children trying to live with each other. He intended to give them no lines at all to speak. They were to mime their parts – making love only to quarrel, quarrelling only to give up and try making love again, much of the time just sitting with blank faces while the sound track boomed out from the screen telling them what to buy, where to go for their vacations, what to think, what to worship, what to do or not to do if they wanted to escape lung cancer, heart disease, bad breath, smelly armpits, or lack of love.
There were other characters in the play who would also be speechless. These were men and women dressed in the costumes of their times from Socrates and Jesus to just before the present. They moved in and out of the wings onto the stage. Longingly did the little mimes beg them to speak to them but they never did. Beg them to touch them but they never did. They came, they looked, and they disappeared.
This was Timothy’s play and later on he wondered whether his inability or unwillingness to write it “was responsible for some of the things I did after I myself became one of those voices from the shadow world.”
At first he and Esther had happy times just relaxing and talking together. She was the first person he had ever been able really to talk with. Enid did not even try. All she ever talked about, it seemed to him, was her children, her family, and prices.
After a while Esther decided that Timothy could become a television personality and in her quietly thorough way she spent more than a month preparing the boss of her section to let her set up a program examining the methods of modern advertising. She was a serious girl and she wanted to focus the program on a few serious questions. To what extent were American advertising methods responsible for the drastic change in the nation’s character since the war? Why had a people once thrifty become spendthrift? Why had a people once calm become so erratic in their emotions and behavior? Why were so many of them in debt all the time? Her boss, who voted for a bland version of a socialist party, finally told her to go ahead. As Timothy put it a year later, “Dear old CBC, liberal to the second-last breath.”
Esther was the animateur of this show and she had invited two other guests besides Timothy. One was the inevitable professor of Sociology, the second was a poet with strong opinions about what the ad-men were doing to what he called the language of Shakespeare and Yeats. They both assumed that Timothy was there to defend the industry and he gave them the surprise of their lives. He also gave himself the surprise of his own life. For when he realized that thousands of unseen people were watching and listening, “Suddenly my alienation and self-contempt turned into a salt tide and I said to myself, to hell with them, let the chips fall where they may.”
Casually, as though he were telling the public what it knew anyway, he asserted that it was pure hypocrisy for liberal idealists to make the ad-man the goat for anything whatever. The ad-man had the same pedigree as any modern liberal you could name. Modern liberals were the outgrowth of nineteenth-century Wasp evangelicism, and what else was advertising but the logical conclusion of that? What were those old evangelical hymns like “Onward, Christian Soldiers” but singing commercials for the evangelical Protestant churches?
“We’re in the direct tradition with our singing commercials. They weren’t invented in the United States. They began in England. ‘Hark the herald angels sing / Beecham’s pills are just the thing.’
“Oh, so you want to know where we get our ideas? Some of them we dream up ourselves, but all of them have to fit into a general pattern programmed and computerized south of the border.”
What did that mean, one of the guests asked. “Split runs,” said Timothy. “We never heard of split runs.” “Then let me explain.”
“For instance,” continued Timothy, “we take an original commercial from New York and we make it Canadian without changing a shade of the original message. We simply substitute the word ‘Canadian’ for the original word ‘American.’”
Then he explained how they often impose
d on the original Madison Avenue layout a quick camera shot of some well-known Canadian beauty spot like Peggy’s Cove or Lake Louise, “so that your friendly filling-station man, who in real life is a bit-part actor residing in a New York suburb, seems to be filling your tank with that great-performance gasoline that sends you, a forty-five-year-old executive with grizzled hair but a trim waistline, purring along over the big Canadian land with that great performance and beside him the twenty-year-old blonde with blowing hair and the promise of a performance a helluva lot more interesting at the end of the trip.”
“Actually,” he went on, “the gas we use in our end of the Big Land is refined from just about the sourest crude you can get. Our own western crude is supposed to be the sweetest and maybe it is, but you can’t get it here.”
The poet, who had not known this, expressed wrath so extreme that Timothy guessed that the information had delighted his neurosis. The sociologist knew much more about what he called “the problem” than Timothy did, but he was so accustomed to being in opposition that he shifted his original ground and dilated to the poet on the dangers of economic nationalism. Are pollution and pornography any better, he demanded, if they’re produced here and not imported? Then he turned to Timothy and asked him the same question that Timothy was to put to General Sprott a few years later.
“But if you really mean what you’ve been saying – I mean, if you really do have so much contempt for your work – how can you sleep in your bed?”
“Why shouldn’t I? Without the kind of work I do the whole System would collapse and nobody, including yourself, would have any beds to sleep in at all. The System can no more run without us than an automobile can run without oil. That makes me the indispensable man.”
“Do you like the present System?”
“Do you?”
“I asked you the question.”
“Isn’t it all we’ve got?”
“And you sleep in your bed?”
“I love my mattress and my mattress loves me. One of our most reliable clients makes it, by the way. It combines the maximum of support with the maximum of relaxation. It’s been scientifically designed to be a mattress for all seasons and for all activities connected with mattresses.”
This remark provided the poet with an opportunity to press him on the sexual aspects of advertising and once again Timothy took over.
“Let me ask you gentlemen a question for a change.” He sighed and his voice was weary. “Do you really believe that old bromide that advertising is sexually based?”
“All you have to do is look at it,” the poet said.
“Then evidently that’s not what you’ve been doing. Oh, by the way, do you like sex yourself?”
“Well …”
“Why, man, it’s the only lyric they’ve left us with. Next to motherhood it’s the only human thing that’s encouraged and our business is to make your sex life ten times more expensive than it has any need to be. Do you really believe we’re so stupid as to think there’s any money in honest-to-goodness sexual love? Take the most successful publication of our time. Take Playboy magazine. It’s the most antisex magazine in the world. Not sex, but female meat. Do you seriously believe we’re going to let anything like good, honest, passionate, lusty, free, non-phony, poetic, liberating sex compete with our products? Bastards we may well be, a bastard I admit I am myself, but stupid we are not.”
The sociologist leaned forward and shook his head vigorously. He said that one of his graduate students had written a doctor’s thesis containing a careful computation, percentage-wise, of the sexual imputations in TV commercials over a period of six months and that his figures, scientifically tabulated, indicated a conclusion very different from Timothy’s.
“Definitely, Timothy, I have to tell you that your statement doesn’t come near a correlation with these scientific findings. So what do you say to that?”
“I’d say it’s one more proof, Professor, of why so many people are wax in our hands.”
The poet wanted to know whether the advertising industry was the chief instrument in the American plan to take over the country and Timothy looked at him with one of those rueful expressions of his.
“The Americans? What do you mean by American, anyway? The Americans aren’t planning any take-over of this country. It’s not that way at all. They don’t even think about this country. It’s our own people who want to sell it to them and not even that is planned. It’s just one of those things that happens automatically. All kinds of nation-saving plans are floating around but what comes of them? Nothing. The beauty of the System is that it simply lets everything happen according to the engine that drives it.”
“Which is what?” the poet asked sardonically.
“Greed,” said Timothy.
The show lasted a full half-hour, during which Timothy revealed most of the trade secrets he knew, “which God knows should have been obvious to everybody,” and all through the program his voice was casual, judicious, or bantering with a fin de siècle acceptance of the situation in which he found himself.
When the show was over the four of them went to a restaurant where they were served by a waitress dressed like a shepherdess in the court of Louis XVI. The poet recited some of his latest verses and one of his phrases was so piquant that Timothy asked him if he would be willing to offer it to Campbell’s of Canada. The poet said he would indeed be interested if the agency would pay for it. When he suggested a fee of twenty-five dollars, Timothy laughed.
“With any kind of luck, I’ll parlay that figure into at least five hundred. Give me your phone number and I’ll call you in the next day or two.”
This turned out to be another of his unkept promises, for the following morning the atmosphere in the office chilled the moment he entered it. During the next few days hardly anyone spoke to him and no new material came to his desk. Then Goodwillie called him in, inquired after his health, asked him if he had rested well the night before, and after a gentle cough got down to what he called the nitty-gritty by informing Timothy that this was one of the darndest things. He had done his best, but the head office had been on the line to him several times – “Well, I guess you know what I’m referring to.” It was too bad that the head office tended at times to be remote. Personally he, Goodwillie, thought that Timothy’s performance had been beautiful, he’d never seen anything more natural, really spontaneous, really sincere, but there were times when Mr. Truscott’s funny bone wasn’t in a mood to be activated. However, over and above and beyond this, he found it only just to say that he’d been thinking for some time that Timothy would be happier in another organization.
“Am I being fired, Mel?”
“Now Timmie, you know I’m not putting it that way and we’re good enough friends for you to know I’d never think of putting it that way. It’s just like I said, give or take nothing from it either way, I think it’s in your own best interests to make a change. I’m perfectly sincere about that.”
“And I’m perfectly sincere when I say I agree with you.”
For he knew, as Goodwillie did not, that Esther’s office had been swamped with phone calls and mail and that the letters were arriving in such profusion that she and her assistant would be busy on them for a week. Who was this fresh, courageous young man who at last was willing to tell it the way it was? Esther was delighted, and though Timothy was pleased because he saw a new door opening, he was otherwise unimpressed.
“What the hell,” he wrote, “if you write or say anything really new you might just as well say it in Eskimo for all the attention anyone is going to pay to it. But if you say what millions of people have known for years without being told officially that they know it, they’ll call you a genius. The funny thing is that nothing makes people sorer than if you con them personally and later tell them you did, but if you con the whole country it’s entirely different. Expose something like that and it’s better entertainment than anything you could possibly invent. Of course, I didn’t expect my little
spit in the ocean of TV to make the slightest difference in the commercials or slay the sales of our processed foods and terrific cars. In the whole affair the only thing that interested me was the reaction of Taylor W. Truscott. He really disappointed me. He was as cynical an operator as I ever met and for God’s sake I’d made him boiling mad. He must have thought that enormous pile of reeking crap he produced was a throne for his own ego.”
A week later another ex-socialist who was a big bureaucrat in the network accepted Esther and Timothy as a team. He offered them a half-hour space one day a week for a public affairs and opinion program, in good time but not in prime time, and he gave them a guarantee of a six-weeks trial run.
I was unable to find out from the papers whether Timothy’s wife had divorced him by this time or was still making up her mind to do it. At any rate, he and Esther had not yet become lovers.
Their show got off to a shaky start. Timothy was nervous and his first guests were non-political people whom he admired, and he had yet to discover that his inspiration nearly always came from hostility. If he was sympathetic to a guest, and he was often extremely sympathetic, it was always because the guest had been badly treated by his boss or by the authorities, or simply by the System. Their break came when the secretary of a federal cabinet minister, who had been making personal appearances all over the country, called Esther to ask for space on the program. Esther put her off for a few days until she had checked the man out in Ottawa. She returned with a dossier that scared Timothy. He asked her if she was sure the facts were absolutely correct – a precaution that never much worried him later on. Esther said they were undoubtedly correct; she had obtained them from a high civil servant in the minister’s department.
Voices in Time Page 14