“Don’t ‘really, Gigi’ me! You keep on talking about ‘fat’ women when we use the word ‘abundant,’ you’re so damn condescending that I know that in your heart of hearts you don’t think they should be allowed to go swimming, and if that isn’t bad enough, you want to play it safe and give the client what you think it wants—if this is advertising, I’m in the wrong business!”
“I daresay you are,” Victoria drawled. “Perhaps we should go back and review the stuff Kerry and Joan did, as well as the work John and Lew produced. A lot of it wasn’t bad at all. We were too hasty to reject it, in my opinion. Or an FRB gang-bang may be in order, if Gigi and David can’t see their way clear to fixing their work.”
“Victoria!” Byron looked at her incredulously. “We hired Gigi for exactly the kind of work she and David have turned out here—what’s wrong with you?”
“Why don’t we have this little discussion in private, Byron? I think we can ask Gigi and David to excuse themselves.” Victoria remained calmly seated, fishing about in her purse, withdrawing her attention from Gigi and David.
“I’m not finished,” Gigi said, standing foursquare in her boots. “And I’m not a child you can excuse from the table.”
“Gigi—” Archie began.
“I’m not leaving, Archie. Davy and I will make the necessary changes to the Indigo Seas ads.”
“You will?” Archie asked, amazed at her quick surrender.
“No big deal,” Gigi responded, shrugging as she reined herself in. Some battles would keep, and whatever a gang-bang was at FRB, she didn’t like the sound of it. “There’s another thing before we’ve finished here. Two days ago I solicited new business from Ben Winthrop, the mall developer. I got him to promise me an eight-million-dollar account for an image-creating campaign for a chain of upmarket toy stores called The Enchanted Attic.”
“You solicited new business?” Victoria asked, drawing an incredulous breath and turning white. “Just who gave you the authority to do that, may I ask?”
“I gave it to myself, Miss Vicky.”
David’s jaw dropped. Archie and Byron froze at Gigi’s impudent and aggressive tone.
“And, Miss Vicky, if that’s a problem for you,” Gigi continued, “I’ll take the eight-million-dollar Enchanted Attic account away with me in my little pocket and find an agency that wants it and that appreciates my work. It’s my account, I developed it, and it goes where I go.”
“Oh, indeed. How enterprising of you. I wonder why I’ve never heard of this chain of stores,” Victoria asked the stunned atoms of air in the room. “Could it possibly be something you invented on the spur of the moment?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” Gigi said, her hands on her hips.
Jesus, David wondered, how’d she turn from a chimney sweep into a pirate in a split second?
“You’ve never heard of it,” Gigi continued, “because it doesn’t exist except as a hundred and twenty-two bankrupt stores called Kids’ Paradise, most of them located in Ben Winthrop’s malls. He’s going to invest in their business, retain their locations, totally reposition their marketing, redecorate from top to bottom, and advertise them as the equivalent of Scruples crossed with Tiffany’s for Kids’ gifts—places to find the ultimate in toys and clothes for babies through pre-teens.”
“So there actually is no Enchanted Attic account, is there?” Victoria pounced. “Much less an eight-million-dollar account. It’s all on the if-come, isn’t it? Before they have any reason to advertise, they have to totally reorganize, rebuild, restock, invest a fortune, and you have no guarantee that it’ll be done, do you? Even if it does happen, it’s many months down the road, a year, maybe longer. That’s not what anyone with experience would announce as new business.”
“I have Ben Winthrop’s agreement.” Gigi sounded more sure of herself than ever.
“And just exactly what would that be worth? Can we take it to a bank?”
“If it isn’t solid enough for you, just say so,” Gigi flared. “I’m satisfied.”
“Ben Winthrop,” Victoria drawled. “He’s related to your stepmother, isn’t he? You have pure nepotism to thank for this opportunity, if that’s what it turns out to be, which I somehow doubt.”
“I’m sure you know infinitely more about nepotism than I do,” Gigi answered, “or at least that’s what Ben told me when he filled me in on your background, Ms. Frost.” Gigi felt as deeply refreshed as if she’d had an excellent night’s sleep.
“I hate to interrupt your heart-to-heart here, ladies, but don’t you think that you could wait for another time? Don’t we all have work to do?” Archie asked desperately.
“I’m finished for now,” Gigi said, impervious to the consternation in the room. “Come on, Davy, I’ll buy you lunch.”
“How long will we have?” Gigi asked David several days later, as they left his car with the valet parker at the Beverly Wilshire. Indigo Seas had taken two meeting rooms at the hotel for the occasion, one for the pitches themselves and one in which their executives could confer privately. The senior members of the pitch team, Victoria, Archie, and Byron, pulled in behind them.
“Indigo Seas said an hour and a half maximum. But we’re going right after lunch. That means they’ve heard two pitches this morning, eaten lunch, and haven’t had time to get tired yet: It’s ideal timing.”
“So they’ll hear four pitches in all, one after us?”
“Don’t know. They might have asked four more agencies to pitch tomorrow. Or yesterday. Or they might have scheduled three for this afternoon … they never say.”
“Is this like being rushed for a fraternity?” Gigi was fastening on the details of this new experience, unlike any other she’d ever had, in an effort to quiet her stage fright.
“Do I look like someone who’d try to join a fraternity?”
“No. Do I look like someone who’d get into a sorority?” Gigi had adopted an outfit that she hoped would convey creative punch with a proper awareness of the client’s importance—indeed, the importance of the entire swimwear industry. She’d put together some of Prince’s pieces from various Scruples Two catalogs, a slender green wool skirt that flared out at the hem, a finely striped green and white blouse with poet’s sleeves, silver buttons, and a collar that hinted at the Tyrol, worn with a small red velvet vest hanging casually unbuttoned over her antique chunky silver Santa Fe belt. At the last minute, that morning, she’d added a pair of dashing red lizard cowboy boots that made her look taller.
“You look like something out of The Sound of Music crossed with Shane.”
“My God, I never thought of that,” Gigi said, horrified.
“No, no, that’s good. Great! Everybody loved The Sound of Music. It’s infinitely reassuring. A subliminal coup. Even Victoria didn’t say anything against it when you wore it for the rehearsal. Do you think my one and only suit’s okay?”
“You look like Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. You’re absolutely beautiful.”
“So are you, Gigi, darling, beautiful.” Good God, David thought, he’d even go to a pitch every day in the week if it gave him a legitimate opportunity to tell her she was beautiful and call her “darling” without making her diabolic pointed eyebrows jump with surprise.
“When will they let us know?” Gigi demanded for the tenth time that week.
“That’s another thing we can’t project, Gigi darling,” he responded as he had ten times before, knowing that she was too distracted to notice the second endearment. “They’ll let it be known who gets the account in their own good time. Today, tomorrow, or two weeks from now. Whoever gets it, the news will travel with the speed of light.”
“There’s something profoundly sinister about all this,” she said.
“Nobody pitches a seven-million-dollar account without suffering, that’s the price of getting into the game. It’s sadistic, but I bet every industry has these little cruel rituals.”
“Not at Scruples Two.”
“But that
was family.”
“Do you think we should pray?”
“I’m a Congregationalist, we don’t pray for business success. Or at least I don’t think we do.”
“What’s a Congregationalist?”
“A mild, liberal sort of universal Protestant, we love everybody, Gigi, especially you,” David said fervently.
“Does this elevator not run or what?” Gigi asked impatiently as Archie, Byron, and Victoria joined them in the lobby, Archie and Byron natty in full-throttle Armani, Victoria more chastely businesslike than ever in a perfectly plain navy suit that could have been cut by Balenciaga with his own hands if he hadn’t elected, at his peak, to stop making clothes because the few women he deemed worthy of his talents no longer existed.
The pitch team, not bothering to pretend to make conversation, found the third-floor meeting room in which they were to set up. Victoria was greeted at the door by a dignified middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Jane Fairbrother, executive secretary to the president of Indigo Seas, George Collins.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” Jane Fairbrother said with a pleasant and utterly impersonal smile. “The bosses are running a little late. Can I get you coffee or tea? No? There are pitchers of water at your table, let me know if you run out.”
Gigi surveyed the room. At one end was a group of chairs for the audience, at the other end a simple table with five chairs behind it and an easel at each side.
“Just sip the water,” Archie hissed in her ear. “It doesn’t help cotton-mouth, no matter how much you drink, and you don’t want to have to pee in the middle of this.”
Victoria sat down in the center chair, flanked by Archie and Byron, while Gigi and David, carrying the large leather portfolios filled with their carefully arranged mock-up ads, sat at each end.
After a short wait, a group of people entered from the connecting room. Victoria rose to make the introductions.
First came the three Collins brothers, who owned Indigo Seas: Henry, John, and George, who was the senior brother and clearly the most important of the three. Then came the marketing director and his male assistant and the advertising director with his male assistant. As the three brothers took their seats in the second row, three soberly dressed, dumpy older women sat down in the last row. They must be the brothers’ secretaries, for each of them held a Steno pad and a pencil. Victoria nodded graciously at them, but obviously she had never met them before, and no Collins brother introduced them to the FRB team.
The Collins brothers, Gigi thought, either hired their secretaries for their efficiency, or their wives hired them for their safety. As far as she could judge, the brothers were all in their early to middle thirties, and each of them, in spite of a strong family resemblance to each other, was a different variety of dark and handsome. And impassive. She had never seen such a lack of expression, neither friendly nor unfriendly, neither bored nor anticipatory, but empty of everything except the steady, almost unblinking attention of their dark eyes under their dark brows.
Their faces remained blank as Victoria went through her paces, explaining how Frost/Rourke/Bernheim, with its clever researchers and state-of-the-art media buying department, was uniquely qualified to determine and position the ads for Indigo Seas, how closely FRB would work with the San Francisco-based swimwear company, how any one of them was ready to get on a plane at a moment’s notice to work out even the smallest detail, how perfect a match FRB was for a company like Indigo Seas.
She was impressive, on target, strong and smooth, Gigi thought. She’d never seen this particular Victoria Frost, and she wanted to applaud when Victoria sat down. George Collins thanked her with the briefest of words.
Archie and Byron spoke second and third, presenting other aspects of the FRB story, including their own years of experience in New York, the youth and strength of the agency, its innovative handling of the accounts it had won in the last year, and their availability to the Collins brothers in their personal creative capacities. They mentioned Gigi’s work in creating the Scruples Two catalog and David’s three Belding Bowl Awards for artwork. Each of them was as convincing as Victoria had been, their different personalities meshing into such a desirable unit that Gigi found herself amazed that she hadn’t joined the agency the first time they asked. Obviously they had pitched her at a lower level of intensity than they reserved for potential clients.
As she heard Byron winding up, Gigi took a slow sip of water, wishing desperately for an ice cube to suck on. Her lips were glued together and she had no spit in her mouth. If only she and Davy had been seated side by side, he could have held her sweating hand under the table.
Gigi tried to focus only on the clients, looking at the brothers for some signal, something at all that would reveal that they were a tiny bit impressed, not just exceptionally polite speechless, expressionless mimes, but found nothing except dignity, solemnity, unmoving attention, and a level of grooming that far outdid Arch and By. Their suits, their shirts, their ties, their shoes, their haircuts, even their fingernails were all beyond perfection, if there was such a thing—beyond, Gigi thought, even the distinction and elegance cultivated by her own father, Vito Orsini.
Bella figura. As the words popped into her mind, she knew instantly that the Collins brothers were Italians by heritage. No American businessman without Italian blood would lavish the time, money, and attention that were necessary to look the way they did. To present a bella figura to the world, no matter what was going on inside, was an Italian tradition that reached from the nobility to the peasants. She’d seen her father maintain his bella figura when he was the laughingstock of all Hollywood, when he owed money everywhere and was barely scraping by on credit … Archie gave her an elbow in the ribs, and she realized that Byron had just said, “Now Gigi Orsini and David Melville, our creative team, will show you the ads we’ve prepared.”
Gigi got up, feeling as light as an arrow speeding from a bow. David was going to lift the heavy pieces of cardboard and she was going to talk the clients through them, since he was art and she was copy. But first, she thought, tingling, a little native pride. These brothers were three young Vito Orsinis and they didn’t scare her one little bit. Not one piccolo bit.
“My name,” she said, slowly and proudly, looking George Collins straight in the eye, “is Graziella Giovanna Orsini.” George Collins blinked. John Collins blinked. Henry Collins blinked. Even the secretaries, Gigi saw, exchanged a quick glance. David gave her a look of astonishment, but what would a Congregationalist know about the importance of being Italian?
In the next fifteen minutes she showed them a dozen ads, designed to incorporate all the copy points that Victoria had demanded, written in Gigi’s own intimate, one-on-one prose, and accompanied by David’s sketches of a woman who, although not actually bone-thin, could not have been more than ten pounds above a model’s ideal weight, a gently rounded woman, attractive, highly idealized, and acceptable to Victoria Frost.
They were good ads, but not great ads. Gigi knew it and David knew it. They were a great deal better than what Indigo Seas had been running, but they didn’t zoom. As she finished she watched the Collins brothers and saw George’s shoulders lift an all-but-imperceptible shrug. “Eh!” she could hear him thinking, dismissively. Gigi could read Italian body language instantly, and she knew he had judged the ads and found them far from exceptional. Not bad, just not exciting.
Gigi looked at David and gave him the wink they had agreed on. He turned and zipped open another portfolio. One by one, Gigi showed the audience the ads she and David had first created, never turning to look at the table behind her, where the rest of the pitch team was seated.
Each of the ads had been photographed on a beautiful former model who had developed more liberal abbondanza than either of them had originally imagined. She was … unquestionably overweight … even very overweight by the standards of every woman, but somehow on her the pounds looked good—firm and shapely and mysteriously right. Abundant The last t
wo ads were new. One showed the big, happy, luscious model halfway out of the swimming pool, grabbing the arm of a handsome, fully clad, and obviously fascinated cowboy. The copy line said, “Come on in—the water’s Abbondanza!” In the final ad, the model and the cowboy were immersed in the water up to their shoulders, hugging and laughing into each other’s eyes, and the copy line asked, “Are you happy to see me—or is it just my Abbondanza?”
A hush fell over the meeting room as Gigi finished. George Collins thanked her.
“Will you excuse us while we adjourn?” he added, addressing Gigi.
“Prego,” Gigi said. Prego, one of the few words of Italian her father had taught her, that most useful word you can never misuse under any circumstances, the word that means everything from “please be my guest” to “of course” to “excuse me” to “would you mind if I walked in front of you” to “by all means.”
Behind her she felt, rather than saw, Victoria beaming death rays at her head.
“We’ll wait to talk about this someplace else,” Archie said with a strangled sound. Archie, Byron, and Victoria sat in total silence. Gigi and David made an unnecessarily lengthy and neat production of putting the cardboards back into their portfolios, not daring to glance at each other for fear of falling into a fit of crazy laughter, since they had nothing left to lose.
The connecting door opened, and everyone from Indigo Seas returned to the room and settled in their seats, except for one of the secretaries, who sat down next to George Collins.
With a big smile, George Collins indicated the secretary. “I wish to present my mother, the Signora Eleonora Colonna,” he announced. “We all work for her. Mama?”
“I like your work,” Signora Colonna said with grave approval, standing up and sweeping her eyes over the FRB team. As soon as she spoke, her great personal power was evident. “My two younger sisters like your work,” she said, turning to indicate the two women who were still seated in the back. “My sons like your work. I am the originator and patent holder of the bra cup and the power-net panel, and you are the only agency to understand that no thin woman would wear them. There is no need to wait to tell you that you have the account. Welcome to Indigo Seas.”
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