Up the Agency

by Peter Mayle

  It’s a heady and worthwhile ambition. Agency networks have been talking about it for many years. Some have tried, and some are trying. None has so far succeeded in burying the demented housewives and the other grotesque characters who appear on television every night to mug us in the living room, though there’s always hope.

  Any one of the reasons listed above might be enough to convince the most stoutly independent of agencies that big is beautiful, and when added together they have proved irresistible. There are today more than twenty agency conglomerates whose billings total a billion dollars or more, and there are no obvious signs that this passion for size will lessen over the next ten or twenty years. It keeps the shareholders and the agency principals happy. It keeps the clients happy. It keeps Concorde more or less full. Voltaire had the right idea: “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” He should have been in advertising.

  Tribal Customs

  Sociologists have always been fascinated by the habits and behavior of small groups who create worlds of their own that are, to a greater or lesser extent, detached from what the rest of us call real life. From the lost tribes of the Amazon basin to the members of the New York Yacht Club or the Royal Yacht Squadron, it is possible to see how these groups attempt to structure a private environment, complete with its own private rules and rewards, inaccessible to outsiders.

  Advertising is just another example, although so far it seems to have escaped the attention of the learned gentlemen who publish studies on behavioral oddities. They’re missing a treat. Not since the court of Louis XIV has there been such a ripe blend of intrigue, self-promotion, and rampant consumption, the more conspicuous the better.

  This is not confined to any particular nationality, and the traveling advertising executive will find kindred spirits in New York, London, Paris, Düsseldorf, or Melbourne. The languages and accents may change, but the aspirations and expense accounts will be every bit as grandiose as they are back home. Unlike the Amazon tribes, this is an international group, and it is motivated by an international urge. The pursuit of status, in all its delightful variations, is advertising’s favorite game.

  In broad terms, it can be divided into visible affluence or recognized professional excellence (which, as we shall see later, is a preserve dominated by the creative side of the business). In a way, it is a touching example of an industry’s belief in what it does—the high priests of promotion and consumption practicing what they preach and loving every minute of it. Since so much time and effort is expended during the working day on selling the benefits of novelty (the word new being used whenever you can get away with it), it is not surprising that advertising people are suckers for the status conferred by new toys. In the distant days when cordless telephones were in their primitive evolutionary stage and were not generally available, it was an odds-on bet that the man in the restaurant making ostentatious phone calls from the comfort of his table was an advertising man. The apparatus might then have been a cumbersome box with a whip antenna, and not soupproof if a waiter should trip over it, but nevertheless… nobody else had one, and it marked him as a man apart. (It was also an agency chairman who pioneered the refinement of installing two phones in the car so that the chauffeur could tell all incoming callers that his lordship was on the other line.)

  The mobile telephone is, or was, a perfect example of achieving status by gadgets, because other people couldn’t help being aware of it, and if you have ever had the disagreeable experience of sitting next to an advertising man “giving phone” in an otherwise-pleasant restaurant, you will undoubtedly remember the occasion. But after all, what is the point of having a private, unseen gadget? As someone unkindly remarked about those self-congratulatory corporate advertising campaigns, it’s like urinating down your leg in the middle of a dark forest at midnight. You might get a warm feeling out of it, but nobody else notices.

  Almost as perfect an accessory, and certainly less noisy, is the Filofax, which has become so much a physical appendage that babies born to advertising parents will shortly start to enter the world clutching them in their chubby fists. The Filofax has a lot going for it: Too big for a pocket, too fat for many handbags, and too small to justify an attaché case, it needs to be carried in full view. It can very easily be made to bulge, and while the owner may know that the bulge is largely made up of unpaid bills, the outside world can be led to believe that it is made up of privileged information: the personal numbers of captains of industry, the details of hectic international commitments, Mick Jagger’s address in the Loire, and all kinds of other elitist jottings that are hinted at but never disclosed.

  A popular addition to the bulge is the wad of airline tickets protruding from the back so that we know the owner is just about to go somewhere exotic or important. And the final obligatory touch is that the cover should look scuffed and well-traveled. Only amateurs and junior brand managers would dream of displaying anything as gauche as a stiff new Filofax. The single permissible exception to this is the millionaire’s model, with a cover made from crushed baby ostrich or the soft underbelly of a peccary, priced at a thousand dollars and up and explained away with mock embarrassment as the gift of a grateful client. (Actually, it went down on expenses as office supplies.)

  But these are merely fringe items, marginal trifles that have lost most of their cachet now that they have been devalued by wider and cheaper availability. When your office messenger has a bulging Filofax and your hairdresser has a cordless phone, it is time to move on—and up.

  Cars, of course, are to the advertising business what jewels are to the professional courtesan: public and instantly recognizable signals of success. More often than not, the cars preferred by the rising executive are unsuitable or inconvenient, or both. To the uninformed, it might appear curious that a man who lives and works in the middle of the city needs a four-wheel-drive Range Rover or a 160 mph Porsche Carrera to negotiate five or six miles of congested streets every day, but that’s exactly the point. The last thing one wants to be seen driving is a practical car. Sales reps drive practical cars.

  In every garage, therefore, you will see a continually changing (it wouldn’t do to have last year’s model) selection of specialized and extravagantly priced transport, designed for either the muddy fields of Connecticut or the expressway. But should you be indelicate enough to ask the drivers of these machines why all this horsepower is necessary when most of the city is a vast, barely moving traffic jam, they will have the answer ready: It’s for the weekends, to get out to the country.

  A restless longing, something not unlike spring fever, attacks many advertising executives as soon as they have achieved sufficient wealth or creditworthiness to see beyond their mortgage. There is a yearning for simple bucolic pleasures, a need to return to the damp green bosom of the countryside, where the Porsche is seldom seen and the mournful hoot of the client is never heard. And so, months of weekends are devoted to the investigation of country houses, farms, deconsecrated Baptist chapels, barns, and picturesque pigsties until the perfect little retreat is discovered and snapped up. Back to basics! God’s clean air, birdsong at dusk, and not an Italian restaurant within fifty miles.

  Naturally, it is not enough simply to own a country property; other people must know about it, and one of the most satisfactory ways of telling them is through the medium of rustic accoutrements.

  For two days a week, providing there are no serious meetings, it is possible to arrive at the office dressed in outfits that smack of a horse show in Bedford. On Fridays (going out) and on Mondays (just come in), there is an excuse to put aside city clothes and come to work reeking of farmyard chic—the Ralph Lauren swineherd’s jacket, the Paul Smith corduroy trousers with genuine bone fly buttons, oiled Guernsey sweaters, moleskin jackets, hunting boots, tweed hats, mud-stained Barbours—anything that declares the wearer to be the owner of something more than a small co-op on the Upper East Side.

  And it goes on from there. Midweek deliveries to the of
fice of rough country wines, subscriptions (free, thanks to the Media Department) to Town & Country, prolonged telephone conversations, preferably overheard by other members of the agency, with Smith & Hawken and tree surgeons, meetings with red-faced men in tweeds who breed retrievers, and always, somewhere on prominent but casual display in the office, one or two objects that hint at rural pursuits. A brace of freshly shot birds is ideal except for the rather limited shelf life, but shooting sticks, binoculars, boxes of twelve-bore ammunition, and sailing paraphernalia are acceptable alternatives.

  As for the country house itself, more or less the same rules apply as for cars: Appearance is everything, and to hell with the cost and inconvenience. Consequently, the traditional country house is not given any serious consideration, being too small and manageable and normal. If true grandeur, such as an estate with its own park, is temporarily out of financial reach, the chosen property should be in some way extraordinary—a Gothic folly, a disused nunnery, a derelict brewery—and it should have enormous rooms. There is, after all, the full-size pool table to accommodate, as well as the half-acre Edwardian kitchen discovered in an architectural salvage depot. The rolling vista, indoors as well as outside, is essential. Anything less would fail to impress the fortunate few who will be invited for bracing weekends in front of a roaring television set watching football.

  Such is the pressure of advertising life that escaping to the country for the weekend is not enough. It was probably a mistake to put a fax machine in the mudroom, and office problems are not sufficiently far away to permit the recharging of the batteries that is such a vital part of the executive’s busy year. What he needs is time to unwind, a chance to step away from it all, to read—God, there’s never a moment to read—to contemplate broader horizons, to refresh the intellect a million miles from the gossip and intrigue of the business. And so he goes on vacation, frequently with other advertising people.

  They may not actually travel together, but they will usually choose a destination where there is a high possibility of bumping into one another. The reason for this is partly to avoid boredom but mainly to protect themselves from the horrors of anonymity. To be alone, unrecognized and unimportant among a bunch of foreign savages would be a severe setback to ego and status. A group, however, can create its own cocoon. The insiders’ club can continue to function, independent of the natives or the local environment.

  There are several parts of the world where, depending on the time of the year, groups of brightly colored advertising people can be found nesting in bars and restaurants overlooking beaches and ski slopes. And there is one favored spot that can be guaranteed to offer the observer a whiff of the essence of it all, a sometimes uncomfortably close view of the advertising man at play.

  St. Paul de Vence lies in the foothills of the Alps Maritimes, half an hour or so from Nice airport. The village is small and was once charming. It has now given itself up to the tourist industry, and the narrow streets are lined with shops selling folklorique souvenirs, every conceivable type of Kodak film, and clumsy artifacts made from olive wood. Buses full of cameras with people attached arrive at regular intervals throughout the season, and the old men who play pétanque in the little square outside the café have had their pictures taken so many times that they fall quite naturally into photogenic poses. An evil-tempered policeman is on duty to repel motorists, and it is not uncommon to see a dozen or more cars trying to reverse in unison as he sends them out the way they came in. One way and another, you might think, St. Paul is not quite the haven of calm a weary executive longs for after the bruising encounters of agency life.

  But in the midst of this seething mass of cars and trippers is a refuge—equally seething, to be sure, but seething in the right way, with the right kind of people. The Colombe d’Or hotel, which used to provide food and shelter for artists like Picasso and writers (James Baldwin was for many years an almost permanent fixture at the bar), now caters to the luminaries of the advertising business: directors of commercials, TV network bosses, top agency executives, photographers, the higher-paid writers and art directors and the occasional personal assistant, usually a young lady whose sunglasses are bigger than her swimsuit.

  What draws them here, apart from the obvious lure of seeing one another, is that the layout of the Colombe d’Or might have been expressly designed to accommodate a group of people who want to be seen to be privileged. It is the perfect enclave, prominent and yet sealed off from the common crowd by a high stone wall and sufficiently small in scale for intimacy with other guests to be unavoidable. Privacy is not easy to come by at the Colombe d’Or, but then privacy is not what the guests are looking for.

  The hotel is, however, extremely pretty, with a large terrace overlooking a long and spectacular view. And it is on the terrace under the bleached canvas umbrellas that the refugees from the advertising world take their ease over a protracted Sunday lunch.

  But first, an aperitif. As the bar fills up, cries of delight fill the warm, scented air: “David! Sally! Tony! Jane! What are you doing here? Managed to ditch the client? What a nice surprise!” The real surprise, of course, would be to enter the bar and not see a familiar face, but luckily there’s no chance of that on a fine Sunday in July.

  The bartender, a man of scrupulous surliness, mixes endless kirs royales as the gossip mingles with the cigar smoke. Old Barry has been spotted having a clandestine dinner with his hot-lipped secretary in Mougins. Louise and Adrian were overheard having a flaming row in their room last night, and they haven’t appeared since. Terry—what a brat!—left his filthy sneakers outside the bedroom door to be cleaned and the chambermaid threw them away. Serves him right. And, as the kirs royales go down and the noise level goes up, plans for lunch are compared. You’re eating here? Terrific. So are we. The food’s not great, but it’s that view that matters, isn’t it? Why don’t we share a table?

  They drift out in groups of four or six or more, baying for blanc de blancs and ice buckets, and settle themselves around the terrace, Ray-Ban sunglasses glittering, panama hats cocked rakishly over one eye, clothing fashionably rumpled. This is the life! Here we are, among our own kind, getting away from it all.

  Before any consideration can be given to the food, there are a few obligatory minutes of table-hopping, cheek-kissing, and backslapping as contact is made with anyone who was missed at the bar, and loud arrangements are proposed for dinner. The other people eating lunch, civilians judging by their clothes and their curious interest in the menu, look slightly bemused. They assumed they had come to France, but instead find themselves in deepest London.

  The waiters are used to the antics of their Sunday customers, and often visibly bored by them. Unlike the Italians, who are temperamentally equipped to treat lunch as a circus, the French take the business of eating more seriously, and they disapprove when food is picked at, dusted with a fine coating of cigarette ash, and then pushed aside. But they keep the wine coming and console themselves with the thought that the season can’t last forever.

  Neither can lunch. Indeed, he who lingers too long over the coffee and marc risks arriving at the hotel pool too late to find a parking spot. Anyone who is familiar with France will know the tall glass boxes that are placed out in the street with dripping rows of slowly revolving chickens on display to tempt the passerby. Take away the glass box and substitute human bodies for chickens, and there you have the Colombe d’Or pool on a Sunday afternoon. It is not big. One overweight TV producer jumping in the deep end can spray half the sunbathers who are packed, oily haunch to oily haunch, along the flagstones surrounding the water. But this lack of space, which some might find claustrophobic, has a social plus: You can continue your lunchtime conversation with your friends even though they’re on the other side of the pool. You have to shout a bit to make yourself heard, but that’s all part of the fun.

  Eventually, as the shadows lengthen, the sunbathers drift off to prepare themselves for the rigors of an evening on the Côte d’Azur, and the pro
cess can begin all over again. Knots of revelers wait in the bar or on the terrace for taxis to arrive and lost cars to be found, and the attractions of various restaurants are discussed. Food is of minor importance, ambience is all. Is it the kind of place people like us should be seen in? The groups roar off, taking their ambience with them, and the only couples who dine alone are either having problems or having an affair.

  Perhaps the only thing lacking in an otherwise-ideal world—the only thing one misses, really—is that the office entourage can’t come on vacation as well. There are too many of them, because as the advertising man leaps up the ladder of success, he collects around him a team of retainers, and the size and composition of this team is a measure of his importance in advertising society.

  The ultimate aim is to be able to say, in a jocular and self-deprecating way, how completely useless one is at dealing with the mundane details of daily life. The pinnacle of uselessness can be achieved, of course, only if there is a small army at beck and call, a human infrastructure to service our hero as he deals with matters of corporate state.

  There must be at least two secretaries, and between them they should administer and to a certain extent control every waking minute of their boss’s life—not just his business appointments but his personal responsibilities, from making sure he pays the school bills to reminding him of his mistress’s birthday. He should not be expected to remember anything, so that he can fully enjoy the role of the absentminded dynamo. “Where am I next week? Oh God, New York.” His feigned ignorance of his own movements is useful protection against questions he may not wish to answer and appointments he may not wish to keep. After a while, his staff realizes that it’s a waste of time talking to him without consulting one of his ladies-in-waiting first, very much like the system employed by royalty.