The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Much of our market each year is made up of new people moving into the marriage age bracket. Future sales depend upon persuading millions of new individuals that an engagement diamond is essential. This is not practical as a short-term objective because it takes years for individual opinions to develop into a definite course of action—specifically in this instance into an insistent demand for an engagement diamond.

  —N. W. Ayer and Son, Annual Report to De Beers, 1952

  Older people—parents, other relatives, and friends—exert a subtle but strong influence on the market. For their expectation that the engagement will be symbolized with a diamond ring is an important influence in the maintenance of the engagement diamond tradition.

  To prevent young people from breaking away from the tradition, we need the support of these older people.

  Our advertising objective is to leave the impression with young people that the diamond is the only meaningful symbol of the love inherent in the engagement promise. The advertising should be targeted at these young people, but in such a way that it will encourage appreciation of the diamond engagement ring tradition by the entire public.

  —N. W. Ayer and Son, Annual Report to De Beers, 1966–67

  1955

  Frances drove up to the gates of Haverford College at nine o’clock. A dazzling sun cut through the haze, promising a warm, dry morning. Of course. In the twelve years since she was hired, it had never once rained on the company outing, much to her chagrin. The event was held each year on the second Friday in June. The Haverford students had gone home for summer vacation, and the employees of N. W. Ayer and Son descended on the place for several hours of games and bonding. Frances usually woke the day of with a certain tightness in her chest. She’d prefer to be at work given the option, but Ayer prided itself on its family-friendly atmosphere, and this included mandatory attendance here today.

  The company had a girls’ basketball team, a dramatic society, a baseball team, and an interdepartmental games club, all under the auspices of the House Recreation Committee. There was a cafeteria in the basement of the Ayer building with windows and curtains painted straight onto the walls by the art department. To Frances, these elements made the place seem more like a junior high school than an advertising agency, but she kept the thought to herself.

  She was fairly private around her coworkers, more conservative than most. Friendly, but from a safe, professional distance. She went to lunch if anyone asked her, and drank two martinis and told a few jokes. But besides Dorothy, none of them knew anything about her, really.

  Up ahead, she could make out the large welcome banner hanging between two pine trees, and a cluster of tables covered in red-and-white-checked cloths. She made a right down the hill into the parking lot, where Howard Davis and his wife Hana were gathering up their little boys into a red wagon. They gave her a wave and she waved back.

  Howard was handsome—tall and thin like Jimmy Stewart and a hopeless flirt, though he was still clearly smitten with his wife, a petite and striking German gal he’d brought back from the war.

  At the edge of the lot, Mitch Duncan and his wife stood before a cardboard sign nailed to a tree. He was pointing at an arrow for volleyball, and she was shaking her head, bouncing a fat baby on her hip. Mitch was a senior copywriter with a temper. He never let one of his lines slip away if he thought it was good. But now he shrugged and followed his wife and children to the crafts tent, kicking the dirt in defeat.

  Tom Williams stepped out of a Ford, squinting as he lit a cigarette against the wind. While he did this, his wife, Judy, came around the car, licked her palm, and smoothed his cowlick. Tom didn’t even react.

  Frances put a hand over her mouth. She was used to seeing these men in a restaurant at lunch, sipping scotch with their ties loosened, cracking crude jokes about the backsides of various members of the typing pool. To see how they behaved around their families was strange. Funny. Sobering. It was precisely the reason she had never wanted to be married in the first place. She had no desire to play the role of wifey-poo. She wanted to always be simply herself.

  She parked and got out of the car, brushing the front of her slim black skirt and pulling straight the shoulders of her cape. It wasn’t exactly picnic attire, but she and Dorothy had scheduled an afternoon meeting with an editor from Motion Picture Magazine, who, as luck would have it, was in town from California. They told Gerry Lauck that the meeting just couldn’t happen on any other date, and that they were hoping to secure an article entitled “The Day I Got My Diamond: How Six Actresses Played Ring-Around-a-Romance.” Shirley MacLaine and Jayne Mansfield had already agreed to take part. As a copywriter, it wasn’t technically Frances’s job to go to this sort of meeting, but thankfully Gerry didn’t protest.

  “Morning, Frances!” Tom shouted from across the lot.

  “Hello!” she called back. “Hi Judy!”

  His wife waved, but she wore a sour expression.

  It was Judy, wasn’t it? She felt quite certain it was Judy.

  Each year at the outing, Frances tried to act merry around the wives of her colleagues, complimenting them on their dresses and their adorable, well-behaved children, cheering as the urchins gave the egg toss their all, and making light of the ensuing tantrum when someone inevitably came in last in the three-legged race.

  Most of the wives were nice enough, though she knew some of them pitied her and she pitied them right back. Others treated her like an exotic pet—a woman of forty, who worked alongside their husbands, with no apparent interest in a husband or children of her own. They asked her silly questions, like who she telephoned when she came across a mouse or a very large spider in her basement, or whether the men she dated found a career girl intimidating. (She hadn’t been out on a date in years, but she kept this fact to herself.) They offered to have her over for a home-cooked meal, as if a single woman were incapable of turning on a stove.

  A few were downright awful to her.

  “They think you want their husbands,” Dorothy whispered last time around. “Or worse: that their husbands want you.”

  Frances found this laughable. She had overheard herself described by these men as a Plain Jane a hundred times. Once Randolph Spears had called her “borderline pretty,” and that was supposed to be a compliment. She didn’t do anything to try to change their opinions, either. She dressed in dark, solid colors with high necks and wore no makeup. She could drink any one of them under the table, and they knew it. In the eyes of her coworkers, Frances was practically a man. A girl in this business had to be, or else she’d get eaten alive.

  She shouldn’t have thought she’d give any wife cause for worry, yet such women truly did exist. Janey Welch was one—a wispy little thing with white-blond hair and eyebrows, and four tiny towheads to match. She seemed to believe it was only a matter of time before Frances fell victim to the seductive powers of her husband Ralph, a roly-poly fellow on the business side who desperately clung to the four remaining strands of hair atop his head as if they were keeping him alive.

  “It’s not natural for a woman of a certain age to want to work in a stuffy office with men all day, if you ask me,” Janey had said last June when she knew full well that Frances was within earshot. “There’s something unsavory about it, am I right?”

  Two months later, Frances was not particularly sorry to see Ralph Welch locked in an embrace with his secretary at a tucked-away table at Shoyer’s.

  The truth was, she had never wanted to marry or have children. As a girl she didn’t see any way around it. Growing up, she had one childless great-aunt named Doreen. Everyone acted like Aunt Doreen was insane for choosing a spinsterhood full of novels and lapdogs over a life of domestic bliss. The only women in the family who were allowed to remain single without suspicion were nuns.

  “Who will take Doreen for Christmas?” she had heard her mother ask once. And, more times than she could count: “Poor Doreen. What will become of her?”

  For a long time, Frances had
simply believed what they said, but as a teenager it dawned on her that Aunt Doreen was perfectly content. It was everyone else who couldn’t understand how. The instant she realized this, Frances felt free.

  When she and her parents moved back to Pennsylvania after she graduated high school, Frances found work at a local paper and went to night school at Charles Morris Price and to the University of Pennsylvania on Saturday mornings, where she took every English course they offered. Like everybody else, she was planning to write the Great American Novel. It was through Charles Morris Price that she got her first real job, as advertising manager of Steiger Walking Shoes. That gave out, and next she got a position with a small agency down in Wilmington that handled all sorts of retail accounts.

  Her goal was to work in Philadelphia, but not at Ayer. It was too big and imposing a place. Frances intended to always work at a small agency where she would do everything. But in 1943, she went to one such office and the man was so impressed with her work he said, “Well, I don’t think you belong here, but before I give you an answer I want you to go to Ayer.” He told her to see George Cecil, head of the copy department, or else Harry Batten himself. And so she made a telephone call on the pay phone in Wilmington, and talked to a man by the name of Pierce Cummins, Cecil’s second in command. He said Mr. Cecil was out ill but he would be glad to talk to her. But the man had told her to talk to Cecil or Batten, so she hung up, put another nickel in the phone, and called Mr. Batten. And he said, “Well, as a matter of fact, we just lost a woman copywriter. We might be very interested. Call Pierce Cummins.”

  She went to see Cummins on a Friday in July, but when she arrived he wasn’t there. Cecil was. By this point, Frances had just about had it with all the foolish back-and-forth. She didn’t have enough sense to be scared of these men. She wasn’t afraid of anybody.

  She marched into Cecil’s office and said, “I’m your new copywriter.” She had no intention of actually taking a job, but they were ecstatic about her samples and offered her a position on the spot at one hundred and forty dollars a week.

  She worked under a white-haired lady named Betty Kidd. Frances liked Betty fine, but she was eager for the day when Betty would retire and all her accounts would be passed down. The day came after just a year, and Frances felt that her career had begun.

  Since then, an entire world had bloomed around her. She had a lovely group of single girlfriends. Together, they had taken ski trips to Vermont and Quebec, and visited the beaches of Mexico. She had a busy work schedule: after twelve years at Ayer, she was a senior copywriter, the highest position a woman could hold on the creative side. She was active in her church. She lived alone, in an apartment in Drexel Hill. A year ago, she got a Great Dane named Charles, from a breeder friend of her mother’s. On weekends, she took him to her parents’ farm and let him run to his heart’s content while she rode horses and did chores and helped her mother with the most recent litter of baby goats. Her parents were in their early seventies now. It pained her to see them growing old. But for the most part, Frances felt quite pleased with her life.

  During the war, she sent gifts to everyone in her extended family back in Hamilton: ration items that cost a pretty penny in Philadelphia, and were impossible to find in Canada. Nylon stockings in the right size for her aunts, a hot water bottle for her pregnant cousin, and candy for all the children. She felt proud that she had spending money, and that she didn’t need to ask anyone how she could or could not spend it.

  Frances only remembered that others found her odd every now and again: At the holidays, visiting her cousins in Toronto, watching them fuss over their kids. Or here at the company outing, when she felt herself being quietly judged, observed, by other women.

  But this year, she didn’t care. For this year, the outing would not be merely several hours to endure, but rather the means to achieving an important goal. She had stayed up late the night before, rehearsing exactly what she would say to Ham Patterson once she got him alone.

  Frances walked slowly up the hill now, breathing in the sweet, fragrant air, looking around for Ham. She made her way to the cluster of tables set up on the grass in front of a large stone dormitory. Boxes of doughnuts and thermoses of coffee were being passed around. In just a couple of hours, they’d be replaced by burgers and franks. The men would sneak out flasks of whiskey, and she’d wish she had remembered to bring one herself.

  She took a paper cup of Hills Bros. French Roast from one of the wives doing the pouring. She sat down on a wooden bench. This was one of the few times each year when she felt how unusual her situation was. At work, they were all alone, each one an individual—yes, she knew they all went home to their families at the end of the day. But it never quite sank in until she was right in the thick of it. Was she lonesome? No, not exactly. There was an art to being alone, and she had mastered it. But sometimes it might be nice to be part of a team. She shook her head at her own thought: Part of a team. How romantic, Frances!

  She watched as a girl of four or five worked diligently at the edge of the baseball diamond, wordlessly scooping sand into her baby brother’s hair. Frances glanced around halfheartedly, in search of an adult to tell, but then just looked away and sipped her coffee.

  She lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly to calm her nerves.

  “Howdy there,” someone said.

  Frances glanced up to see Paul Darrow standing over her. He was a lovely man, widely considered the best art director in the country. He did the art for all the De Beers ads that she wrote, although they never interacted much at work. Paul was short of stature, and had a very severe tick—blinking that never stopped. Sometimes she found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying, between the blinking and the fact that he always smoked his cigar so far down to the nub that you’d swear he ate it.

  “Nice day, huh?” he asked.

  “Swell.”

  They chatted a few minutes, before he moseyed off to the tennis courts.

  A while later, at last, Ham came up the path. His wife, Meg, followed close behind, carrying a casserole dish, wearing high-waisted Capri pants and a bandanna in her hair. Frances adored them both. Ham was a sweet fellow of twenty-nine, with a giant laugh. His wife was a lot of fun, and she liked Frances too. They had gotten to know each other at the company Christmas party and several long client dinners.

  The two were clearly crazy for each other, but they had no children, which seemed unusual for a couple who’d been married a few years already.

  Frances got to her feet. “I was looking for you!”

  Meg kissed her on the cheek. “Wonderful to see you, Frances. You look lovely.”

  “You’re a little overdressed for all this, aren’t you?” Ham asked.

  “Honestly,” his wife said, hitting him with her glove. “Is that any way to talk to a lady?”

  Frances smiled.

  “I’ve got some business that I’ve got to deal with this afternoon. A meeting.”

  “On the day of the company outing?” Ham said. “You do realize that’s sacrilege.”

  “Yes, the golf team will have to soldier on without me.”

  Ham’s face lit up. “They have golf here this year?”

  “Oh well, no, I suppose not. But speaking of—”

  Here was her chance! But Ham interrupted, “Frances, I was just telling Meg about the time you got to meet Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Is it true?” Meg asked, beaming that pretty smile of hers.

  “Yes,” Frances said, though they hadn’t really met. But they’d been in the same room, and that seemed close enough. “For our diamond client.”

  “De Beers,” Ham said.

  Frances nodded. “You know the tune from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’?”

  “Of course!” Meg said. “You wrote that?”

  “No darling, I’m a copywriter, not a lyricist. We saw Carol Channing do it on Broadway a few years ago, that’s all,” Frances said. “Dorothy Dignam and I were
there on opening night. From the start of the show’s run, Dorothy began publicizing the idea of the song. When all the fashion editors came to New York that summer to see the new fall lines, we took them to an evening performance and entertained them afterward at a supper, where they got their pictures taken with Carol Channing. She wore the original diamond tiara of the Empress Josephine. The event was a huge success.”

  “What fun!”

  “Yes. And when we heard a big Technicolor version of the play was coming, we persuaded the people at Fox to show Marilyn Monroe wearing gobs of real diamonds in the film. I shouldn’t take any credit. It was really Dorothy who thought it up. Anyway, the two of us went out to California and had a ball.”

  “Oh! I didn’t know you did things like that.”

  “We never had before.”

  Frances recalled sitting at a crowded table, full of men, with her at one end and Dorothy at the other, trying to explain why it made more sense than using just prop pieces. Smoke filled the room and martinis sloshed on the dark carpet as she wondered whether their plan would work.

  Dorothy was still quite pretty, even in what Frances guessed were her late fifties. She dressed to the nines. She wore a wide-brimmed hat with a feather, even in the office. She gave all the new girls the same piece of advice: Women in advertising need to keep a stiff upper lip with some lipstick on it. She also liked to remind them that if Ayer wanted just a copywriter, they’d hire a man. They hired women to write copy for women. Because women knew what other women wanted, at least in theory.

  “Now we do it all the time,” Frances said. “We loan diamonds out for actresses to wear to the Academy Awards, the Kentucky Derby, you name it. Sometimes the client pays for them to pop up in a film, or around Elizabeth Taylor’s neck.”