“If it had been us, I’d have killed whoever directed that soap commercial with my bare hands,” Rocco said somberly. “Hitchcock he wasn’t.”
Manny and Rap exchanged glances. Was Rocco going into another of his occasional phases which they privately called yearning-for-print-freakouts? When the two of them had lured him away from Condé Nast three years ago it had been the hardest selling job either of them had ever gone through, including the battle to get the Chevrolet account. Rocco hadn’t wanted to admit that magazines were dodo birds as far as getting graphics to the attention of the masses was concerned. He had wanted to stay buried in print forever, Rocco had, until together they’d wrestled him out of his fixation.
Manny Lefkowitz, that brilliant copywriter, still remembered his winning argument. “Rocco,” he’d said, “it takes more time and energy and decision to turn the page of an ad, particularly when you’ve paid for a magazine, than it does to zap a commercial, since it is your right, as an American, to see a commercial coming at you for free every time you turn on the television. Who’s the bigger challenge to an art director? The willing consumer, the veritable captive audience of a magazine who’s intent on amortizing his investment, or the absolutely fed-up-with-commercials audience watching television who only wants the show to come back on? Don’t bother to answer—it’s obvious. So if you’re the best art director in the world, as Rap and I think you are, then television advertising is the only medium worthy of you. It’s your next step, Rocco, you can’t help but admit that.”
“I admit it … but I just don’t know … where’s the white space, Man Ray, where’s the layout?”
“On that blank screen, Rocco, and you know it. It means you’ll be grabbing people quicker and grabbing more of them … millions and millions more. And you have to sell them something, not just entertain them. The major difference, Rocco, is that magazine layouts are essentially the print equivalent of jerking off—all you’re doing is making pretty pages for the advertisers to plant their ads around … it’s pure self-indulgence. With commercials you live or die in that split second before forty percent of the viewing audience decides to zap you. So you have to be better than in print. Not just good, great.”
“Jerking off?” Rocco said, offended.
“With all due apologies to the magazine business, it’s a century behind its time. A page doesn’t move or speak to you and nothing is ever going to make it do so. Get off the pot, Rocco, don’t be like that guy who said nobody would ever go to talkies.”
“Yeah, Rocco, don’t be totally dumb,” Rap Kelly chimed in. He was the cat-burglar, business-getter of the threesome, who specialized in being indecently smarter than he sounded, and won many an account that too-slick talk had lost.
Rocco had looked at the two of them, Manny, the monster-talented chief copywriter and vice-president at BBD&O, and Rap, who was the king of the hill at Young and Rubicam, and realized that the adventure of starting a new advertising agency with these two advertising geniuses was irresistible. The top creative agency job that they were proposing to him had never before been offered to a Madison Avenue art director. Traditionally that job always went to someone who came up through the copy department.
He had been thirty-three then and, except for his brief experience at Amberville Publications, he’d always worked for Condé Nast. But his idol, Alexander Liberman, was going as strong as ever, showing no signs of age, and Rocco suddenly felt that perhaps the time had come to move away from the printed page, at least for a time; perhaps Manny and Rap were right about the challenge. To say nothing about the money. No one in magazines had a chance of making the money that he knew he could make in an ad agency and it was time to think realistically about money.
From the time Rocco and Maxi had been divorced, only a little more than nine years before, he had chosen not to think about money, knowing that it was un-American and unnatural and in some basic way ridiculous not to think about money, as if he’d taken some sort of vow. It was more difficult to work in New York and not think about money than it was not to think about sex or food, but for someone whose life had been as screwed up by money—Maxi’s money—as his had been, it was a revolting topic.
And he’d been right about the money he’d make. CL&K, as their new agency was known, was a gold mine from the day it opened its door. They pulled down out of trees clients that supposedly belonged to the venerable giants of Madison Avenue as if they’d been ripe bananas; fickle advertising directors of Fortune 500 companies beat at their doors before they’d finished raiding the other agencies in town for much of their prime talent, for Cipriani, Lefkowitz and Kelly had something extra going for them that no other agency in town had: all three were bachelors without attachments. And much of the prime Madison Avenue talent was female. Man Ray Lefkowitz was a jolly redheaded giant with violently blue eyes which he insisted were a sign that he was of some special tribe directly descended from the Queen of Sheba; and Kelly was a redheaded Irishman with violently blue eyes who had been an all-American quarterback for UCLA and could sing tear-bringing whorehouse tenor when he wanted to, and all three of them had never lost a hair off their scalps or been rude to a lady or failed to observe Valentine’s Day. Last year their bill for Valentine’s Day flowers from Robert Homma had been over eighty thousand dollars. They had sent his antique Japanese storage jars filled with tall, graceful branches of flowering quince, and it had come back to them as Kelly reverently said, “a million fold.”
“Let’s go get drunk,” Rocco said suddenly, when the Pepsi sign blinked on. “Didn’t we just get the Cutty Sark account?”
“Last week …” Rap Kelly answered. “It wasn’t easy prying them loose from that old boat. I thought you hated Scotch, Rocco.”
“Not if they’re a client. I’m going to develop a taste. Come, kids, it’s that time of day.” He put on his tie and jacket and led the way, while behind him, Lefkowitz and Kelly exchanged worried glances. Rocco rarely drank.
“Just a touch of delicious New York vulgarity—just short of actually rough, a hint, merely a hint, of tough chic,” said Leon Ludwig, one of Maxi’s interior decorators.
“I don’t agree. We’re talking middle-America; all Mumsy and English country-cottage, tons of glazed floral chintz, and slightly tatty settees,” replied Milton Bizet, the other half of Ludwig and Bizet, the decorating team Maxi had used for her last two town houses and the renovation of the Earl of Kirkgordon’s castle in the Border Country.
They had not, nevertheless, been able to really impose themselves on the Trump Tower apartment. Their efforts rejected the geometry of the building, since Maxi insisted on keeping favorite pieces bought in her wandering, the spoils of a careless, rich nomad with the instincts of a bazaar keeper. They’d opened up the walls of the adjoining apartment she acquired and done what they could, but the job had left them feeling that their client had not been satisfactorily tamed or subdued.
“Boys,” Maxi interrupted, “hold it right there. We’re talking office furniture, we’re talking state-of-the-art steno chairs. We are not trying to make a design statement.”
The three of them were approaching the area in which the office of Buttons and Bows was located and when Elie stopped the limousine in front of the building off Seventh Avenue, Ludwig and Bizet stood on the sidewalk in disbelief.
“Here?” asked Leon Ludwig, recoiling.
“Here. The lease has three years to run, all the space on the rest of the floor is available, the rent is much lower than in any of the new buildings, and the neighborhood has associations for me,” Maxi said firmly.
“It isn’t even Art Deco,” Milton Bizet breathed in amazement. He’d never seen this part of New York before, not even on his way to the theater.
“It isn’t art anything,” Maxi snapped, “unless it’s Depression Repugnant. It’s a mess and it’s utterly inefficient … that’s what I want you two to fix up. I need it last week. I can’t use staff effectively until I have a decent place for them to work.”
“Maybe one of those companies that specialize in offices … those Itkins or whatever their name is—would suit your purposes better than …” Leon Ludwig ventured, unwilling to confide his elegant person to the interior of the building.
“Boys, I have no relationship with the Itkins and I assume you want to continue yours with me?”
“Naturally, Maxi, my delicious, but …”
“Then get your bodies upstairs and stop whimpering,” she said with her most alarming smile. “It’s going to be fun for you, making it all work on a budget,” she added thoughtfully.
“And just how much is the budget?” asked Milton arching his eyebrows. It wasn’t like Maxi to talk of budget except as something disposable that they would throw guiltlessly to the winds as they went along digging up blissful things without which she couldn’t live. He’d known there’d be trouble, ever since Trump Tower had come into her life.
“Half of the rock bottom minimum you can come up with,” she answered.
“Funny girl,” Leon purred.
“I have this sinking feeling that she s not joking,” Milton said in unfeigned horror, observing the strangely serious expression on the face of their favorite, if marginally difficult, client.
“I’m not. This magazine is going to take a pot of money to produce and I don’t want to see it wasted on the walls of the office. On the other hand, cows give more milk in happy surroundings, as do people, so it’s essential that the whole office be cheerful, gay, fun to work in. I want windows that open, no fluorescent lighting except where it’s absolutely necessary, a smashing reception room—do it with mirrors, cheap mirrors, Leon, no bevels …”
“Maxi, haven’t you ever heard that you have to spend money to make money?” Leon said in a last-ditch stand against the all too foreseeable agonies of a strict budget.
“Too often. The money will go into salaries. How else can I get the best people away from their present jobs to work on a new magazine? Well, here we are.” Maxi opened the door of the office. The reception room was empty and she vanished immediately in search of Julie. She didn’t like to watch grown men cry.
“Welcome back,” Julie said in relief. “I’ve got your keys right here, all the old business is wound up, all debts paid, my desk is cleared out, the phone’s still working, and the only thing still hanging around is a blank yellow legal pad and the pencils you left here last week.”
“What about my sweater?” inquired Maxi looking at her strangely.
“What sweater? You didn’t leave one here.”
“I know.” Eyes like slits, Maxi studied Julie’s new Perry Ellis sweater and skirt costume, the one that would set the standard of adventure for American ready-to-wear that year, two extraordinary ways to use cashmere; one a dazzling tunic, a tapestry of reds, blues, and yellows, inspired by the Cubist work of Sonia Delaunay; the other a longish wrapped black skirt that worked absolutely with Julie’s flat black shoes and magenta tights. The sweater, for Maxi too had bought one on Saturday, was eight hundred dollars, and it was too eye-poppingly, too specifically and memorably fall-of-1984 to be worn for more than one season. You couldn’t even wear it more than once every two weeks in an office. The skirt, at three hundred bucks, could become a classic, but the sweater was a bravura gesture, the sign either of someone so rich that she could afford it without thinking of price, or someone so clothes-mad that she would buy it, wear it a few glorious times, and then keep it forever for her private pleasure.
Julie Jacobson couldn’t be all that rich, Maxi calculated, or she wouldn’t have had to take a job as a secretary while she waited for her minor assistant’s appointment at Redbook. She had undertaken the dreary labor of funeral director of Buttons and Bows with tact, dispatch, energy, and remarkable good spirits, setting up her command post in what had been the old art department. As Maxi had fled from witnessing the vapors of Leon and Milton, she had noticed that the offices were now as spotless as they could be, granted their state of decrepitude. Julie was two girls and a half.
“I have a proposal to make to you,” Maxi said, sitting down next to Julie.
“No,” Julie answered shuddering. “Really, truly, no.”
Maxi ignored her. “How much are you going to be paid at Redbook?”
“A hundred and seventy-five a week, but that’s not the point.”
“The point is that you’ll be in the fashion department, as assistant to the assistant to the fashion editor.”
“Exactly,” Julie answered, her eyes gleaming with a vision of herself at some time in a far hazy future, sitting in the front row at the New York fashion collections, pencil poised to make notes of whatever she judged worthy.
“Have you ever played Monopoly?” Maxi asked. Julie nodded, still in her dream. “Remember when you got to pass ‘Go’ and whiz ahead on the board and collect two hundred dollars from the bank? Didn’t it feel good?”
Julie snapped back to reality. “Maxi, what are you trying to con me into? I don’t work for you anymore, thank God. As of last Friday I’m not even on the payroll here. What’s more there isn’t a payroll anymore.”
“But there is a payroll, a new payroll, and I’m going to be meeting it every week.”
“How many people are you employing?” Julie asked suspiciously.
“So far, none. Eventually dozens and dozens. Hundreds.”
“Doing what?”
“Putting out a new magazine.”
“But that’s exactly what you were planning to do last week! Oh really, Maxi!”
“This has nothing to do with last week. You were absolutely right about my idea for Buttons and Bows. It was youthful folly. Since then I’ve aged a thousand years in wisdom and experience.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Trust me.”
“I never trust people who say ‘trust me.’ ”
“That was a test,” said Maxi smugly. “And you’ve passed. Therefore I’m officially offering you the job of fashion editor of B and B combined with the job of my chief personal assistant in charge of all other details until I find someone who can take them off your hands and leave you totally free to plan the fashion pages.”
“ ‘All other details’? Why do I smell snake oil? What is B and B? Another remake of Buttons and Bows? How many fashion pages would there be? And how much authority would I really have? And what about salary? And what if the magazine doesn’t make it and I blow the job at Redbook?”
“Three hundred a week, to start with, you go wholesale for your clothes, absolute authority within the basic philosophy of B and B, which is simply that women are great the way they are—you can’t argue about that, can you?—and, oh, there you are! This is Justin, your photographic consultant, Justin, this is Julie Jacobson, the new fashion editor of B and B. You two will be working closely together.”
Julie spun around and gaped at Justin who had soundlessly materialized in the doorway and stood leaning against the wall with such compact and tightly coiled power that it looked as if he were holding the building up with his shoulder. He advanced toward Julie, who was hypnotized by the battery of Nikons that he wore as familiarly as if they were a scarf tossed around his neck, took her hand and shook it.
“Justin, the Justin, is working for this magazine too?” Julie gasped.
“The Justin. I said trust me. That didn’t necessarily mean that you couldn’t,” Maxi laughed. “And here—’hi guys’—as Mary Tyler Moore used to say—here are Milton Bizet and Leon Ludwig who are designing our offices—come in, boys, and greet Julie Jacobson, my fashion editor. She’ll be going over your bills, so be nice to her. Julie, you don’t have to be nice to them at all. In fact, I would advise the utmost caution. Leon, what color office do you see for Julie, assuming that she doesn’t change her hair?”
“A forest atmosphere, lots of batik, tapa on the walls, obviously a kilim on the floor, fishtail palms …”
“Leon, I meant the color of the paint. We do not have fabric walls at B and B, we do not h
ave fabric anywhere. Fabric is too expensive and gets dirty. The fabric-free office is about to make interior design history, isn’t it, Justin? Zen and the art of office maintenance. It might get you a story in Architectural Digest and then again it might get you the cover of Plastics Weekly … it all depends on your imagination and talent. If you show enough of it, I may make the two of you my decorating editors, but first you have to prove yourselves.”
“An all-white office,” Milton offered, deeply offended, “with a large box of Ajax and a gross of sponges.”
“Can I just bring one white rose in a white bud vase for my desk?” Julie begged, blushing with excitement. Wholesale! Justin!
“I’ll supply the rose,” Justin announced.
“I’ll lend you an onyx vase,” Leon announced. “White vase indeed.”
“Hmm,” sniffed Maxi, “I rather thought I’d like an all-white office to go with the streak in my hair. We can’t have two.”
“Julie gets it,” Leon decreed, feeling much better. “She’s the only one we have to be nice to now.”
“Pavka, I’m so glad you asked me to lunch. I haven’t seen you in, oh, much too long.” Maxi had rushed into his arms in an effervescent swirl of plaid pleats and a sweep of her fine limbs that proved forever that the knee is, under some circumstances, far, far from an unlovely joint.
“I’ve missed you, but I knew you were busy,” Pavka said, careful not to sound reproachful. He was perfectly aware that she had been avoiding him. There were rumors all over Amberville Publications about Maxi’s plan, but no one had a single solid detail to contribute.
“We’ve been painting the office,” Maxi said demurely.
“Well … that’s a beginning.”
“I think so.” Maxi studied the menu at the Four Seasons Grill Room which had developed into a virtual club of the top executives and agents in publishing, people so important that their perks included the limousines which jammed Fifty-second Street off Park Avenue as if a gangster’s funeral were going on inside. As well it may have been, in certain subtle senses of the phrase.
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