The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “But how does it help the client if they don’t get mentioned?” Meg asked. “I remember that part in the movie where Marilyn’s singing and she says”—now she struck a pose, her voice turning smoky—“ ‘Tiffany. Cartier. Talk to me, Harry Winston, tell me all about it.’ But she didn’t say De Beers.”

  Ham laughed. “What was that? I must say I enjoyed it, whatever it was.”

  “De Beers owns all the world’s diamonds, more or less,” Frances said. “A vote for diamonds is a vote for them. They’re the ones who get the stones to Tiffany or Harry Winston.”

  “Oh!” Meg said. “How clever.”

  She seemed genuinely interested. She was a smart girl. Frances wondered what she did at home alone all day while Ham was at work. Meg was a traditional woman, but before she got married she had worked as an air hostess. She had once told Frances that she would have liked to continue, at least until she had children, but the company had a strict policy against employing married women.

  “I used to fly at thirty thousand feet, and now Ham won’t even let me drive the car,” she had said, but she laughed as she said it to show that it didn’t really bother her.

  “What was Marilyn like?” she asked now.

  Frances thought it over. “Stunning, of course. Shy.”

  “Shy? Marilyn Monroe?”

  “Yes. Jane Russell had to walk her out onto the set every morning. She was scared to death of the cameras.”

  “Poor thing.”

  They had been invited onto the set to watch the scene by a producer friend of Dorothy’s. The two of them stood in the darkness with their clipboards, surrounded by crew members, everyone staring. It was such a thing to behold! Women dressed in clingy black hanging from the chandeliers. Pretty girls in pale pink ball gowns spinning around in the arms of handsome young men. And Marilyn Monroe at the center of it all in her hot pink silk gown and gloves, dripping with diamonds, ascending a red staircase, surrounded by boys in tuxedos, saying, No, no, no, no in her tiny baby voice, then switching to an operatic lilt, hitting a line of potential suitors with her fan one by one, until they all shot themselves in the head and dropped to the floor.

  Later, between takes, Frances watched Monroe and Russell sit on those same stairs, Monroe drinking a bottle of Coke, Russell checking her powder. Their long legs seemed to grow straight out of their spangly showgirl skirts.

  When Frances went to see the film the day it premiered, she stayed in her seat long after the lights came up. She had been there. She had seen this happen. How many people could say a thing like that?

  “Frances wrote the company motto, ‘A Diamond Is Forever,’ ” Ham said now. “It’s a good one. You wrote it, what, five years ago?”

  “Eight.”

  “Eight! And they’re still using it.”

  Meg looked impressed. “I bet that made you the star of the copy department.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Frances had gotten a small bonus for the line eventually and word that Sir Ernest was pleased, but that was all. No one ever made a fuss about it. It was just part of the job.

  Watching Marilyn Monroe sing in the cinema that day, Frances had noticed a line in the song that sounded a lot like something she would write, only a hair more blatant: Time rolls on and youth is gone and you can’t straighten up when you bend. But stiff back or stiff knees, you stand straight at Tiffany’s.… Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

  Yes, that was the idea—that the diamond would last even if the love did not. Even though youth would not.

  Meg wore a large round diamond on her ring finger. Almost all the girls did nowadays. Eight out of ten American brides. When Frances caught sight of them—at the grocery store, or in the pews at church—it gave her a tiny burst of pride. They didn’t know why they wanted diamonds, but they wanted them all the same. There was no tradition, not really. But she had convinced them otherwise.

  There had been only two years on her watch when diamond sales did not increase over the last: marriage rates peaked in 1946, but started decreasing in ’48, and that paired with a recession scare slowed sales for a bit. They had to get creative. Realizing that the engagement market could only ever be as big as the number of girls marrying in a single year, they turned their attention to something more elastic, which they called “Later in Life” diamonds. These fell into two categories: jewelry for anniversaries and other occasions, and deferred engagement rings, for already-married people who had never gotten a diamond or who might want to replace a small stone with a bigger one.

  In 1950, when boys started shipping out to Korea, engagement ring sales spiked, and they had gone up every year since. A greater number of jewelry stores were selling rings of two carats and larger—70 percent more than just a few years earlier. And diamond wedding bands were popular now, too. Thirty percent of brides in America today wore one, in addition to the engagement ring, not instead of.

  Ayer would soon start their first ever international campaign for De Beers, attempting to expand the diamond engagement ring tradition around the world.

  They continued to push the ideas of gift diamonds and deferred engagement rings, since this market was made up largely of couples in their forties and older, with greater purchasing power than the average newlyweds. They added magazines to their preexisting stable, publications read by affluent people, like Town & Country, The New Yorker, Newsweek, and Time.

  Gerry Lauck was reading Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, and he said it had given him plenty of ideas.

  “It’s called ‘conspicuous consumption,’ ” he told her. “We ought to promote the diamond as the essential object through which a man can convey his success.”

  Gerry handed her a memo with the details. Frances glanced down and saw the description of the tone he wanted her to set: Should have the aroma of tweed, old leather, and polished wood which is characteristic of a good club.

  And so they ran a series of photographs of well-to-do-looking men in nice suits, with copy like: No other gift expresses you so well. Your discriminating taste … Your affectionate regard … Your discerning sense of values … Your place in the world.

  And: A diamond, most valued of gems, steadfastly suggests the measure of your devotion.

  Frances wasn’t sure a diamond was any more valuable than any other gem, but once she started writing it, it became a fact.

  They wanted the average Joe and his girl to see diamonds everywhere worth looking. Dorothy was just terrific at getting diamonds into the press. At least once a month she sent a release to all newspapers with a circulation of over fifty thousand that used photos on their fashion pages. It contained pictures of diamonds incorporated into the newest fashion trends, often accompanied by a news article. She regularly sent interesting tidbits about movie stars and their diamonds to press syndicates. These were placed with publications around the country, and each week they actually ran her stories as if they were news.

  Every year at Christmastime, she’d suddenly appear as a guest columnist in the Women’s Pages, writing under the name “Diamond Dot Dignam.” On the surface, these articles were about the basic fact that more diamond engagement rings sold in December than in any other month. But Dorothy would soon segue into celebrity mentions: Precious goods come in small packages and sometimes in rather peculiar ones. Frank Sinatra, in the blush of early romantic love, gave Nancy a diamond wristwatch in a 10-cent bag of jelly beans. Ellen Lehman McCluskey, New York society decorator, once designed a tiny fir tree to come in on the Christmas morning breakfast tray of the wife of a client. Just one ornament on the tree—a diamond bowknot.

  Dorothy was willing to try anything, which made the campaign a hell of a lot of fun. She was the person who had decided to sell Fords to women through Parisian fashion shows, in which the models draped themselves over automobiles. She now hosted diamond fashion shows in New York and Paris each year, too. She got diamonds on the covers of magazines, and live television news shows. She convinced oth
er high-end advertisers to feature diamonds in their ads so they would become synonymous with luxury goods.

  Dorothy even approached the British royal family, since they had a vested interest in promoting South Africa’s biggest export. She wrote dozens of releases about their love of diamonds. During the soon-to-be Queen Elizabeth II’s royal visit to America in 1952, Dorothy was the only person who had advance photographs of all the jewelry she would bring, courtesy of De Beers. Dorothy got to travel on the royal train and sent dispatches daily to the Associated Press. Not long after, she offered a story on the Coronation, with a focus on the diamonds in the British Crown Jewels. More than three hundred requests carried the tale to millions of readers. Dorothy’s snappy opening had made Frances laugh: The story is told that the first time baby Prince Charlie saw his mother, the young Queen Elizabeth, posing for a photographer in her diamond tiara, he chuckled and pointed and asked, “What’s that funny hat, Mummy?”

  The boom of suburban living had created a trend toward more casual clothing and fewer opportunities for people to wear and see diamonds on a daily basis in real life. So it was their job to make sure that everyone saw diamonds on the women they aspired to be, or to be with. When it came to diamonds, Dorothy always said, “The big ones help sell the little ones.”

  Frances wrote an entire campaign around socialites, to date perhaps the biggest headache of her career. In-house they called them “the role models” for the middle class, but she could think of a few other choice names for them. They all had opinions on how they ought to dress and pose. Each advertisement in the series showed a portrait of a bride, showcasing the ring on her finger by having her hold a fan or a cigarette or something. And then her name, single and married, along the lines of: Mrs. Washington Irving, the former Miss Frances Schmidlapp of New York, painted by Gerald Brockhurst.

  Brockhurst was an artist of some renown among society types. He had painted the likes of Marlene Dietrich and the Duchess of Windsor, so the girls clamored to have him paint them, too. After one ad was prepared and approved, Frances received a hysterical phone call from its subject, who reported that she had suffered a broken engagement.

  “Please don’t cancel the ad,” she sniffled. “Please! I’ll be engaged again by the time it appears.”

  Below each portrait would be Frances’s hopeful, yet instructive words. In the fair light of an engagement diamond, the joy and beauty of life’s most important pledge are endlessly reflected. Because tradition does endow it with such special meaning just for you, your diamond, though it may be modest in cost, should be chosen with care. You will need the advice of a trusted jeweler.

  Every jewelry store in the country benefited from the De Beers ads, from Tiffany to some small family business in Arkansas. Ayer developed the Diamond Promotion Service, to keep them interested in selling diamonds, through all sorts of tricks.

  The lecture series was an essential part of this. A woman named Gladys Hannaford had been giving talks to youth groups, high schools, colleges, and women’s clubs since 1944. She could reach ten thousand students in a week. Along with Dorothy, she had written a series of classroom lectures for various courses: geology, gemology, business economics, geography, fashion, retailing, merchandising, and design. Whatever the label of the course, Gladys always focused the talk on the engagement diamond in the end.

  With themes like Who Sets the Fashion in Diamonds, Histories of Famous Diamonds, Secrets of the Diamond Experts, and Diamonds with a Past, she brought along samples of the rock formation in which diamonds are found, rough gems, and, most important of all, a selection of modern engagement rings for the girls to try.

  They expected a surge of marriages in the sixties because of the baby boom of the forties, and it was never too early to start targeting those future brides and grooms.

  Meg Patterson touched her shoulder. “Will you join us for croquet?”

  “Hmm? Oh sure, love to.”

  The three of them walked through the grass, and Frances began her pitch. “So Ham, Meg. You belong to Merion, right?”

  But they were interrupted now by that snake Janey Welch and her awful children, who wanted to play too. Frances passed the next two hours smiling through gritted teeth.

  Over lunch, Harry Batten addressed the assembled crowd and gave the usual speech.

  “I couldn’t be more proud to be the chairman of this great company. The inventor of the advertising business. Headquartered in the greatest city on earth: Philadelphia.”

  Most people whooped and cheered, but Frances saw a few of the boys from the New York office roll their eyes.

  Batten became president in 1937, and had been promoted to chairman a few years ago. He started at the firm as a printer’s devil, and worked his way up to head of the copy department. He was obsessed with Philadelphia. He spent all his time and money buying up town houses around Washington Square and throwing his support behind the most popular local politicians.

  Batten didn’t give a damn what was going on in New York. The advertising business had begun to shift, so that some believed being there was almost essential. But he saw no reason for Ayer to change. They were the best in the business and always had been.

  He prided himself on not having a big-city attitude like some of the New York agencies. At Ayer, only the business side was based there. If you so much as said the word “Manhattan” in Batten’s presence, he’d start in about all those bozos at J. Walter Thompson who were out of touch with America. You’ve got to be inside the consumer’s head! To want what he wants, and to know why he wants it. Why, do you think these New York admen on Madison Avenue have ever even been to Coney Island? They’re not real Americans, that’s all. How do you think we got the Bell System? Because we’re the only non-socialists in the business!

  It seemed to Frances that they were forever trying to prove that somehow Philadelphia was closer to New York clients than the New York agencies were. She had worked on the Lever Brothers account last year. She would have to go up to New York in the morning and present advertising and listen to the product man, then return late, getting home after midnight. She’d be back in New York the next morning for coffee.

  Batten continued now, “N. W. Ayer was founded in 1869 by Francis Wayland Ayer. He named the agency for his father, a country schoolteacher. In 1892, Ayer employed a full-time copywriter, and this was the start of the first-ever agency copy department. Some of you youngsters probably don’t know that before the turn of the century, advertisers wrote their own ads and the agency’s job was just to be the middleman between publisher and client. Ayer changed that. And our copy department was only the first in a long line of innovations. Ayer was the first agency to arrange a radio broadcast program on behalf of a client, in 1924. The first agency to work in television. Starting a decade ago, we began producing telecasts for Atlantic Gasoline, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, AT&T, United Air Lines, the Army and Air Force recruiting services, and others.”

  Frances sighed. They had all heard this before. She had to leave in half an hour, and she still hadn’t gotten her chance to ask Ham.

  “None of our success would mean anything if it weren’t for our integrity,” Batten went on. “We have always refrained from using celebrity appeals, or playing on people’s insecurities. Others in the business might call us sticks in the mud, but in reality we have only tried to avoid the abuses of advertising and be truthful.”

  A large round of applause went up. Frances doubted that anyone was so moved by what he said; they just wanted him to shut up so they could enjoy their lunch. Though she thought it was true that they all felt a real sense of pride working at Ayer, knowing this was where it had all begun, the agency that stayed on top. Complaints were inevitable, the way you might complain about your own family. They didn’t really mean it.

  She felt someone touch her back, and turned to see Dorothy, deviled egg in hand, wearing her trademark hat and a long swinging skirt that pulled in tight at her waist. “Sticks in the mud? These fellas?
Never!”

  She winked and popped the egg into her mouth.

  Frances hugged her. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, darling.”

  “Likewise. Do you want to hear some of the latest questions the boys around the New York office have asked me? Just to pass the time?”

  “Of course.”

  Dorothy pulled a sheet of paper from her pocket and unfolded it dramatically, clearing her throat. “Do women ever make automobile slipcovers? What’s the difference between a party call and a party line? Does a woman know when to change oil? What do you give a girl graduating from a convent? How high is a continental heel? Would men use a flesh-tinted body powder? Would you have any feelings about seeing a horse in a bed-sheet advertisement?”

  They laughed. There was no one else who understood Frances’s day-to-day life the way Dorothy did.

  Dorothy had been the one to tell her about the pay. No one at Ayer ever talked about how much money they made, and Frances had never given it any thought. But over cocktails in New York one evening a few weeks back, Dorothy had told her. “You know we make half of what the men do. And we’re kept out of lots of the serious business. All of the most important meetings in this company happen on the golf course at Merion.”

  “Merion?”

  “Well, yes. What defines you as a member of Main Line society is a membership to the Merion Golf Club, or else the Merion Cricket Club, and bully to the man who has both. Most of the senior Ayer men belong.”

  Frances thought about the pay issue that night. The general consensus in the business was that women came second to men. They were only there to handle the ladies’ products that were beneath male sensibilities, and so they got paid less. She reasoned that there wasn’t much she could do about that. But she kept thinking of what Dorothy had said about Merion.

  The next day, she went straight to the country club.

  It was a swanky place, to say the least. It had hosted the U.S. Open back in 1950. The grand building was marked PRIVATE. But Frances wasn’t intimidated. She thought of her relatives in Canada—these people were no greater than any of them. She passed the main dining room, with its Oriental rug and plush chairs. There was a fireplace on one wall and a trophy case directly across from it.