Tales from the Ad Biz…Part 2
FORTUNA UNLEASHED
Hyperbolized truth
(Names have been changed to protect
the incongruous)
…Very shortly, Mary Ellen, (the chrysalis of Fortuna) had a job feeding copy into a Wang, the most abused old Wang in a long line of dinosaur Wangs that serviced two floors of "creatives" in a cheerless advertising agency known all over town as "The Grinder" and "Where No Talents Go to Die" and "The Agency that Time forgot." The last epithet having to do with the fact that the agency hadn't gained a new account in five years, and was only holding onto the ones it had by threatening to leak things to the Jackals of the Press . The C.E.O. a meany, twice as blood-thirsty as God, had all the goods on all the top people at his important accounts: Juicy tidbits such as the procurement of girls for summer lawn parties--not the kind where you were floppy hats and finger your pearls, my dears. And, oh yes, things the SEC guys fell on, puny stuff--such as the usual boring dope info and cheating on brown leather wives--that provided grist for their Sunday barbecues where they wore Dockers and toted up their latest victims, all while waving their burgers in the air for emphasis.
Mary Ellen (Fortuna or Die!) did not know and would not have cared what midtown smartasses called her agency. She only knew that she was in New York and had a job right off. She didn't know the agency was the butt of endless sloganeering because everyone stuck around all day and all night, trying to write and draw and think up marketing plans that would "fly" for clients that snickered at their flip charts. At a recent meeting, an out-of-hand client had grabbed the marketing chief's collapsible silver pointer from him and done a number on the agency's carefully-thought-out charts, pronouncing, in authoritative tones, the exact opposite of what the charts read. In another meeting, a malevolent wisp of a client waltzed around the room, brandishing the pointer and tapping people on their foreheads with it, saying things like "Poof," I dub you Queen Mab," and "Poof, You are Charleton Heston" Mary Ellen (Fortuna-Or-Be-Damned) didn't want to hear negative things about her company or its C.E.O. But she couldn't help being intrigued when someone on the Wang lineup relayed some God-awful tidbit about him. Mary Ellen had a thing for menacing bigshots, and she fell for the C.E.O. on the spot.
But Mary Ellen was wallpaper. The man was pushing sixty and although craggy and still able to make snap decisions, unattainable. He lived in the good part of Larchmont with a wiry wife.
When the word went out that the C.E.O. was on their floor, senior lady copywriters, clutching their copy and yellowed layouts, flung themselves at him in the hallway, but the slippery bastard would duck around them, and call back hateful remarks like, "Missed me, Sucker!" or "Go write something that will sell something, for Christssakes!" or "Your hair looks like hell!"
If a valued lady writer faltered, the C.E.O. would send her to the hairdresser's for the morning, or to Bermuda, or invite her to join him for highballs in his office located in another building entirely, a downtown scrapeoff he owned and disguised, with a homey façade, as a residential hotel for "Seniors in Good Circumstances." The building was guarded by the newest laser alarms, and heavy-set writers and art directors who took turns standing in front of the door, fending off clients who were on to the address, and telling polite seniors the place was full up, but they were welcome to leave their names. (Usually, a male "creative" was on his way out when assigned to guard duty, and he knew it. But a job was a job.)
Over drinks, the C.E.O. and a lady writer would reason together about her downhill slide, and ponder whether her successful marriage, and three children in private schools had anything to do with her newly-mordant prose. The C.E.O. believed a woman could not lead a normal life, and still write the really great stuff. She had to suffer and have no outlets, or something pierced. He counseled divorce. But never for himself, greatness never being self-destructive. Like all men of large ambition, he kept his rudder in Larchmont, and his personal goal was to head up the entire Grinder conglomerate, while dogging it is London during the season.
Since Mary Ellen (Fortuna, God willing!) was only a Wang appendage for a foul nest of copywriters who thought they owned her, she got nothing but bum dope, all of it on the pipeline which was plugged into the lead Wang. She found out that the C.E.O. wore a rug, had a penile implant, and had screwed every lady writer on both floors, right down to the last dreary prune-face, whom he called in and fired the morning after having sent her one perfect rose. All miserable lies, in Mary Ellen's book. Concocted by women of little vision, women who left balled-up, damp hankies at their work stations, and who would never be anything but Wang people.
(To be Continued)
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9:04:42 AM 
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