Tales from the Ad Biz…
FORTUNA UNLEASHED
A Short Story (Names have been
changed to protect the innocuous)
When she got to New York City, Mary Ellen Trueblood changed her rinky-dink, small town name, started the ball rollng by petitioning the Court to change it to Fortuna Massey. Fortuna Massey! Her own carefully plotted-out code for "masses of fortune." All good, of course.
Absolutement! Certainment! Naturellement!
She would, however, resist using her snippets of French, lest she be pounced upon by Francophiles during many future rewarding conversations with the city's literati, entertaining in their gracious old Franny and Zooey apartments with the dusty Steinways bearing, in mellow silver frames, photographs of loved ones and generations of lustrous family friends such as John Dos Passos and Louise Fazenda; and in glassy penthouses where women with shoulder blades would wear backless gowns and talk of everything and anything as they sipped cassis and patted their smart little 30s-style bobs.
Accomplished men would hover and regard their women tenderly, pleased that their beautiful wives and lovers were, among other things, eloquent and brainy. They looked upon them as treasures, even markers, but who cared? These were men who stayed in the goddamn room instead of wandering outside to lean against pickups and drink beer and have pissing contests.
Free at last of soggy Mary Ellen and filled in by certain visionary publications, the magical Fortuna would know exactly how to dress and comport herself in the city, the only city that mattered.
Summers, she would remain cool and self-possessed in pale linens and floaty chiffon with innocent arm holes. She would play down accessories; her shoes would be bone, not churchy white. She would be cagey about makeup, opting for clarity over artifice. (Except on occasion, flashy Paloma Picasso lips.) She would have the squared off, unpolished, schoolgirl fingernails of an Achiever. As an executive at a top ad agency, she would sit behind an antique Herman Miller desk, flanked by matching Barcelona chairs; she would be properly removed; yet responsive to the needs of her people
In winter, having drinks with media cronies at Elaine's, Fortuna would shrug out of a fabulous thrift shop find--a man's military great coat--to reveal a little afterthought of a dress or, if in a mischievous mode, her nightie. She would have intellectual hair, cropped Dianne Sawyer hair, that every so often, in an endearing little tic, she would tuck back behind an ear as he leaned forward, lost in good conversation with good friends, oblivious to Woody Allen and Norman Mailer.
Worn like an amulet, her new name would help smooth the way, even protect her on the Mean Streets. The Fortunas of this world knew how to walk a city street, looking perfectly at ease, loose-limbed as athletes. But with a hint of a scowl, as if in a foul mood. They did not get mugged. They did not get dragged into alleyways and raped. They got home from work and drank restorative mineral water.
From the start, Fortuna would get it right--the right shoes, the right bag, the right intuitive handling of underlings--gently insisting on everyone's best and sacking whiners.
Fortuna! A woman aching to get the whole scenario going, to be born anew out of that smalltown shard of a person, Mary Ellen Trueblood, who, at the timely pleasure of a New York court, would be as dead as the dried roses she once relied on so heavily decorwise. To be replaced by Fortuna, whose God-given talent for pushing a product would result in her own advertising agency in a mere handful of years, opened, if need be, in a storefront, where her first art director would paint out the glass in smart graffiti-like graphics that would jazz clients. And she would call it simply, Fortuna. Or Massey & Company. Or Massey & Friends. Or perhaps just Fortuna Massey, Inc., cosmetic-y as it sounded.
As owner, she would have a personal secretary; ideally, a Brit, clipped, but kind to beseechers of favors. Back late from a time consuming client lunch, Fortuna would scroll quickly through her E-mail, dwelling on one or two and deleting others. She would hurry through her voice mail. She would be distracted, eager to get back to The Really Tough Babies that always seemed to find her desk.
Home from work--and eschewing trendy tech--her antique lawyer's briefcase laden with more work, and exhausted from pulling everyone's irons out of the fire, she would offhandedly punch her answering machine. As she peeled off the Armani, and paced barefoot around her apartment, perhaps, a loft, drinking designer water from the bottle, endless messages would spool out. Invitations to good dinner parties, women friends talking up movies, the pleadings of rejected but non-threatening men, who had never learned how to let go. The latter she would answer with great silences; she would call back a few "possibles," after wringing the stress out of her body, working with her weights.
Fortuna! A name that spoke of a career that was an arc in the sky, one that only an immensely talented women could hope to pull off. A name that one day would leap from the pages of "W," accompanied by, say, a fuzzy long-lens paparazzi shot of her, escaped from her grinding schedule, and now something of a vixen, romping on St. Bart's-- her hands shielding her naked breasts, a lush prize who might, at any moment, Gia-like, laugh and climb out a window. But smiling now, over her flute of untouched champagne, at an older man, an engaging hawk-faced person, enrobed in leather and Hermes, who manufactured custom automobiles in Italy; or perhaps there would be a glimpse of her with a man, far younger than she, caught staring murderously at someone off camera, or, possibly, pictured with a famous Walker, escorting her down Madison Avenue where she would buy de Lempika's left and right, right out from under Madonna. God. Madonna could sit on it. Once Fortuna became a player.
(To be continued)
