He took a drag and stood, making no pretence that he was six feet eight inches tall. He leaned over and crushed his cigarette, then reached for the pack and absent-mindedly took another. Standing on his dais, he glared down at me. ‘You’ve got until Wednesday. Now don’t you let me down, Koo. It was nice to be asked by the Americans, and they were pretty keen when I told them we had an art director in the office who was a Chinaman. Feather in our cap, what?’
I winced inwardly. You’ll keep, you racist bastard. ‘Sir, like I said, I’ll have to think about it.’
‘Think! Think about what? I’ll tell you what to think, Koo, a red-blooded young bloke like you.’ He winked again. ‘Think pussy.’ He reached down for the Ronson table lighter, lit up, inhaled deeply then exhaled, his head almost disappearing behind the smokescreen. ‘Hop along now, Koo, can’t keep the client waiting.’
I wanted to jump him, smash his nicotine-stained teeth down his scrawny turkey throat. Instead I turned and meekly left. I could hear him coughing as I nodded to Miss Grace, and before she could open her mouth I made a quick exit and headed towards the lifts.
‘The chair! You forgot to bring back the chair!’ she shouted after me.
I pretended not to hear, reached the lifts and pressed the button hard several times. The light above the door said it was on the ground floor. The three other lifts were all on different floors but none of them near the tenth. Miss Grace came flying out of her office and marched up to me. I jumped back as she glared down at me, ablaze with powder, rouge, mascara, cheap perfume and righteous indignation. ‘You forgot the chair, Mr Koo!’ she hissed through clenched teeth.
‘Sorry.’ I turned and sprinted back through her office and into the chairman’s. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I cried.
‘That was quick. You’ve decided to take it,’ he rasped.
‘Yes, no, sir!’ I pointed and said, ‘The chair,’ grabbed hold of it, then ran from his office and dropped it beside Miss Grace’s desk.
She was standing at the door of her office. ‘It doesn’t go there!’ she snapped.
‘I’m late for a Wills meeting,’ I gasped. I heard the lift finally arriving and the judder, then clunk of its doors opening. This time it was her turn to jump out of the way.
‘Rude!’ she shouted. I copped a second whiff of perfume as I tore down the passageway to the lift, arriving just in time to squeeze through the rapidly closing doors. Kaboom! Then the electric motor kicked in and whined as the lift descended. I was safe from the Dragon Lady. She was a good match for the chairman and I would henceforth think of them as ‘the gruesome twosome’. It was six minutes past two o’clock. Shit! Shit! Shit! Exactly an hour. The worst of my life!
I skipped the Wills meeting and sent one of the guys in my group to attend and to present the layout. Fuck ’em. I’d had enough punishment for one day. Later, when I’d calmed down somewhat, I made a mental note. It was the 4th of July 1966, two days after the full moon, though it was still the 3rd in New York. Tomorrow would be Independence Day, a holiday in America. That little bastard upstairs knew all along it was well past business hours in New York. It was why he’d given me until Wednesday to make up my mind. The call to Miss Grace to get him the New York office was simply a ploy to put further pressure on me. I silently castigated myself. I’d done a bloody good job of underestimating Chairman Charles Brickman OBE.
The following day I bought Odette lunch (I needed more information from her than I’d get from a couple of drinks at the pub). She proved reluctant to talk about Graceless Gertie and the chairman, dismissing the subject with a sigh and sudden lift of her dark Spanish eyebrows – women’s shorthand for ‘I know but I’m not going to say’. It was plain that she and Gertie were not especially fond of each other. She also showed distinct ambivalence towards Charles Brickman, admitting he was an irascible bastard, but protesting that ‘he has his good points’. She wouldn’t elaborate.
I asked her – trying to put it carefully – how anyone so socially dysfunctional had succeeded in building a significant advertising agency even before the Yanks came along and added their international list of clients. She laughed. ‘The war helped, contracts were awarded, he was a major in military supplies in Canberra. Then, after the war, he started out doing the political advertising for Bob Menzies’ new Liberal Party who beat Ben Chifley in the 1949 election. A lot of people reckoned it was a brilliant campaign, but even Charlie, who wasn’t shy about claiming credit, admitted it was probably Labor wanting to keep petrol rationing that really won the day. Then something blew up between him and Bob Menzies and he switched to Labor for the New South Wales state election in 1953. Everyone said Cahill, the Labor premier, hadn’t a hope of staying in, but they won. The credit once again went to Charles, and his subsequent campaigns kept them in until Askin toppled them last year.’ She giggled. ‘Knowing him, if he’d had the chance he’d have switched to Askin and the Libs last year.’ She leaned closer and said quietly, ‘I took the phone calls. He very nearly pulled it off with Askin, but Frank Packer, who was supporting Askin’s campaign, wouldn’t have a bar of Charlie Brickman.’
‘A man for all seasons, eh?’
‘You can say that again. He can sniff a wind change long before it’s a whiff of a breeze.’ She laughed. ‘In Canberra, among the Libs, his nickname was “Shit-a-Brick”; the Labor Feds call him “The Brickworks”. If you need to destroy someone’s reputation, he can build a solid foundation composed of lies and innuendo. He knows where the bodies are buried in both major parties, so should a company need a political favour, they know where to come.’ She shrugged. ‘The result is mutual back-scratching that leads to prosperity for all parties.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Got to get back to the switch.’ Reaching for her handbag, she added, ‘Here’s something to think about, Cookie. The chairman never does anything above the table.’
The previous night – Monday – I’d arrived home late from a darts game against another agency. We lost, mostly due to my lack of concentration. My mum was in bed, so thankfully I didn’t have to front her. She only had to take one look to know something was wrong.
That Tuesday night, I had a vital decision to make: do I or don’t I? ‘Don’t’ was beginning to win. I should really have called Jonas and sussed him out, but the New York office was, of course, closed for the holiday. I even wondered if Brickman had worked that into the equation, then realised I was being paranoid. The big decision was whether or not to tell my mum. If I stayed schtum (a Yiddish word I’d picked up from Jonas), how could she find out? But then again, Phyllis Koo was not easily fooled. She often called me at the agency, and she and Odette had become very chatty on the phone. (Mum had sent flowers when Odette’s mum died.)
I was thinking all this as I drove home to Vaucluse in the Vee Dub, bought as a sign of respect for the work coming out of DDB New York. My mum could react in a number of ways, none of them helpful. Should I or shouldn’t I tell her? By the time I reached Double Bay, a Little Sparrow voice from somewhere deep down spoke to me (my mum’s brainwashing from childhood). This was what she was saying (in perfect English, of course): Cookie, honourable great-great-grandson, you are twenty-nine. You still live at home. Are you going to be a mummy’s boy all your life? Your family is loaded. You’re safe, comfortable, going nowhere fast. No hardship, no challenge in life. You’re pure blancmange. Like it or not, you’ll probably end up as chairman of the family companies. What about your big artistic career? At work you’re stuck with tobacco as the major account in your group. The people at Wills insist you’re their main man in creative. You got a whopping great rise to stay when you told management you wanted to opt out of tobacco. They’re not going to let you go and jeopardise the biggest account in the agency. What will it be? You either put in your resignation and change jobs – go to another agency – or, paradoxically, Charles Brickman gets you off the Wills hook with this Singapore offer. How much longer are you going to go on drawing cigarettes poking out of packs? Accepting over-researched flacci
d headlines and body copy that are an insult to your intelligence? Maybe this isn’t such a bad idea after all? Time you left the nice cosy nest, anyway. Start your own creative department from scratch in Singapore. See if you’re any good. Okay, if they don’t have a creative department, it’s probably a pretty primitive set-up, but is that such a bad thing? Your ideas, your way, you take all the credit!
I changed into low gear to get round the final twist on Rose Bay hill, turned down Vaucluse Road at the convent and I was two minutes from home. Shit, do I tell her or don’t I? My dad was probably stonkered in his study, watching the Tuesday night rugby league show on TV or at one of our restaurants in Dixon Street. It would be nice to talk to someone, get a second opinion, but I wasn’t sure it should be my mother. I hadn’t even mentioned it to Ross, who, as creative director, should have been the first to know of the offer. He’d want me to stay, anyway. I could hear him already: Cookie, there’s New York, London, us and then there’s bugger-all. Zilch! Keep your powder dry. Don’t disappear behind the bamboo curtain. Leave the Asians to fuck up in their own inimitable way. A great advertising idea has never come out of Hong Kong or Singapore, and the Brits have been there Christ knows how long. I could see him grinning. Besides, we need you in the darts team, mate.
‘Right then, Cookie!’ I said to myself above the Vee Dub’s frenetic engine whine. ‘It’s Tuesday. Tell her at dinner tonight.’
While I’ve mentioned Little Sparrow’s influence on our childhood, I haven’t mentioned the influence her dream had on us. You might be wondering how an illiterate Chinese peasant woman’s dream could possibly have endured and remained intact for a hundred years. Well, as a matter of fact, it didn’t. It was, as these things are in Australia, largely forgotten. Nothing endured intact, only bits and pieces, hanging on over the decades by a memory thread. These fragments were what inspired the company names: Gold Chisel Caskets, Blue Lotus Funerals, Valley Properties, although Little Sparrow, the name of the restaurant chain, went back to the founding Australian generation and Little Sparrow herself. Of the dream, nothing but these scraps of memory remained until my mum discovered a record of it among the family papers written in excellent copperplate. Having the obsession with signs and portents common to almost every Chinese, my mother immediately saw that the wealth the family had acquired over the generations could be attributed almost entirely to the dream.
I personally attributed the family’s wealth to a degree of sagacity and good luck, but mostly to the qualities identified by Alfred Deakin in his warning to parliament in 1901: ‘It is not the bad qualities but the good qualities of these alien races that make them dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.’
Yet another Little Sparrow-ism telepathically received by my mum across the ages concurs with part of Deakin’s view: Life is not about winning or losing, but about being the last one hanging on. She would say that in business, tenacity was everything. Business was like an endless race to climb an impossibly steep cliff face; the winner was the last climber still hanging on when all the others had crashed to the valley below.
The endurance to which Deakin referred was still evident in my family, but the low standard of living was long past. The 28-roomed mansion built on an acre of private headland jutting out into Vaucluse Bay was a far cry from the mud-brick hut in The Valley, although, as a reminder of our humble beginnings, our present property has persimmon and pomegranate trees around its perimeter that bloom gloriously every spring. Porky Pimm, the head gardener, and his three assistants – referred to by my dad as Mow, Clip and Digger – spent a fair amount of their time protecting them from the salt air.
The main house was bigger than some luxury boutique hotels, and two-thirds of the rooms were now empty, but I didn’t choose to live in it. I had my own private flat and art studio built above the eight-car garage, and I could come and go as I pleased, my only filial duty to dine with my mother once a week, usually on a Tuesday, and with my father if he was home or sober, which he rarely was. So when I said I still lived at home at twenty-nine, I did and I didn’t.
Why hadn’t I moved out? I’m aware that I was privileged, a little rich boy with indulgent parents, but I still hoped to make it as an artist someday and so I spent a good deal of time in my studio, which is not the kind of facility you can pick up in a rented property. Naturally, like Susan, the eldest of my three sisters, I would move away when I married.
The entrance to the flat is through a private gate that leads directly to the road, and it has a stairway through to the garage. My mum no doubt could tell when I was home, because she could see when the lights were on, but she knew better than to simply drop in without first phoning.
Yes, I did have female company quite often and, yes, they did stay the night. But when they woke in the morning and looked out into the garden over at the big house and out to the harbour, I could see they were gob-smacked. After that they’re never the same again. I guess great wealth is a privilege, but, believe me, it can also be a pain in the bum.
Which brings me back to females, or rather, as they’re known in the agency world, ‘bunnies’. They were in plentiful supply, but I didn’t kid myself it was because I was some Lothario. It was due to the advent of the pill. Suddenly women were free to have a good time, get drunk, go home with someone without fear of falling pregnant after a one-night stand. So I got my fair share – an ad agency was thought to be a glamorous environment and was loaded with good-looking sorts who regarded themselves as emancipated. Or, as Ross Quinlivan put it, ‘Mate, we’re living through the second bunny plague to hit Australia – it’d be a shame to waste it.’
This would come to sound pretty arrogant, if not plain offensive, by the 1980s but the feminist movement hadn’t yet arrived on the scene. Betty Friedan had written her manifesto, The Feminine Mystique, three years earlier, but I knew of no women at the agency – or anywhere else, for that matter – who had read it, with the exception of Kathy, my middle sister, who was doing sociology at uni. She gave it to me to read after she’d quarrelled with my mum, who had referred to it as ‘a load of rubbish’. I don’t think it had ever occurred to my mother that she wasn’t liberated.
To be fair, even the chicks used ‘bunny’, as in: ‘He wanted me to be his bunny and party, but I said I had to go home, that it was my mum’s birthday.’ Or, ‘No way I was going to bunny him!’
Despite the bunny plague, I didn’t indulge as enthusiastically as did most of the single and a good few of the married blokes in the agency. While the reason was pretty self-revealing – even pathetic, I suppose – it was nevertheless very real to me, and I should perhaps shamefully confess it had nothing whatsoever to do with having a deeper respect for the opposite sex than the other men did. It had everything to do with my appearance. By Western standards – in fact, by any standards – I’m as ugly as sin, a peasant throwback, and almost certainly Li Chinese, although even they might disown me. I’m a hard worker, which the Li still value, but I’m also short, broad, flat-faced, slit-eyed, myopic, somewhat gap-toothed, with broad, flat feet like paddles. Ferchrissake, I’m five foot eight inches tall and take a size twelve shoe, great clodhoppers flapping like a clown’s feet at the end of my thick legs. Most Australian girls towered over me. You could almost lip-read people saying, ‘Look at that pretty girl with that short, ugly Chinese bloke.’ Ross sometimes referred to me as the Toulouse-Lautrec of advertising. I only wished I had his talent.
There was another problem, one that rich little boys are constantly made aware of; me, in particular. My family was loaded, and there was a good chance much of the money would come to me, which meant that to a certain type of female I was a very worthwhile catch. They came on big-time and I knew, or I thought I knew, it was not me they wanted. They were after the lifestyle my family’s money represented. Or that was what my mum had been saying for as long as I could remember. I
knew this was pretty damn pathetic, but I really did want to marry a woman for love; I wanted to love her and know in return that she loved me. It was another reason why I drove a Beetle and bought cheap suits off the rack and wore outrageous ties in truly bad taste.
Now, if true romance was going to be hard to achieve with an Australian woman, it was going to be damn near impossible with a Chinese one – that is, with someone my mum would like me to marry. In fairness to her, she made no bones about it: ‘Simon, better the devil you know. Rather a gorgeous Chinese girl from a good family (she meant rich) than a white one who sees you as an unlimited bank account,’ her point being that the Chinese don’t marry for something as ridiculous as love. Two families simply try to match each other’s wealth. Money marries money. While one family may have more than the other, the aggregated amount is what gives both families face. The conjoined are seen as a net gain for both families. Or, if you should choose (God forbid) a girl from a poor family, you’re simply marrying her family, who hope to benefit from your wealth. Love seldom, if ever, enters into the equation.
So there you go. I was the proverbial poor little rich boy who was silly enough to believe in love – a very strange and unacceptable idea to the Chinese, and very probably a trap where some Western girls were involved.
I shouldn’t have said that, I suppose. It was bloody pathetic.
If my Li Chinese looks were, in my own eyes, my greatest social drawback, to Phyllis Koo they were my strongest asset, given her ambition to reinvigorate the Chinese genes of the Koo family. My mum was very big on perseverance. She was frequently, though never to her face, referred to by my various uncles and cousins as ‘Chairman Meow’, which was not intended as a compliment. Never giving up was the single characteristic that most clearly defined her personality in both business and life.
FORTUNE COOKIE Page 7