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Authors: Nora Ephron
Tags: #Biographical, #Essays, #Nonfiction, #Retail
Q:
I read somewhere that you eventually became unhappy in the Washington bureau
.
BAKER:
I didn’t have a period of unhappiness where I was unhappy with the
Times.
I was just at the end of my rope. It wasn’t possible to deal with Washington in a very sophisticated way, and the
Times
was not a paper where you could be very creative or innovative. For a long time I was more than willing to trade all that for the education. It was the best graduate school of political science in the world. If you wanted to know what was going on in the Senate, you went up there and Everett Dirksen explained it to you. But I’d spent over seven years doing it. I knew the personalities. I knew what speeches they were going to make on any issue. I became restless. It was really a matter of discontent with myself—I knew the limitations of the
Times.
Then the editor of the
Sun
offered me a column, a blank check, really, any kind of column I wanted. I thought, Yeah, that’s what I want to do. It was a great out for me. There was an intimation it would lead to a bigger job at the
Sun.
We shook hands on it. I told Reston I was leaving and he was appalled. I was shocked that anybody cared. I went home and that night Orvil Dryfoos, the publisher, called and said, We’re not going to let you leave the
Times
, and then they began making offers to me, and that’s how the column began
.
Q:
And why did you decide to move to New York?
BAKER:
Basically it was because a pipe burst in my home in Washington on a Saturday morning. I was very depressed. I suddenly realized I was going to have to put a lot more money into this house, and I said, “Let’s sell the son of a bitch and get out of here.”
April, 1976
The other day, my sister Delia went up to the Bronx to buy a carpet from my cousin Arthur. I had last seen my cousin Arthur in 1963, when I went up to the Bronx to buy a carpet from my uncle Charlie, who is Cousin Arthur’s father. Uncle Charlie and Cousin Arthur used to be in the carpet business together, but Cousin Arthur left the family business some years ago to go off on his own, largely because he did not get along with Cousin Norman, who was also in the family business and whom no one in the family gets along with except for Uncle Charlie, who gets along with everyone. Anyway, when my sister Delia came back from the Bronx, having bought a very nice carpet at a very good price, she called up.
“Guess who Cousin Arthur is?” she said.
“I give up,” I said.
“Cousin Arthur is Uncle Art,” she said.
Actually, as I later found out, Cousin Arthur is Uncle Art only some of the time; the rest of the time a person named Jeremiah Morris is Uncle Art, and that is part of the problem. Still, Cousin Arthur is Uncle Art more than Jeremiah Morris is Uncle Art, and if you don’t know who Uncle Art is, that’s either because you haven’t had
to buy a discount carpet in New York lately, or because you’re not in the carpet business. Uncle Art is to the carpet business what Frank Perdue is to the chicken business: in short, he has his own commercial.
“My name is Art Ephron,” read the first of Cousin Arthur’s Uncle Art advertisements, which ran, along with a large picture of Cousin Arthur himself, in the New York
Daily News
in 1972, “and I’ve been in the carpet business for, oh, longer than I care to remember. And every few weeks it seemed one of my relatives would say, ‘Uncle Art, I was wondering, well, uh, maybe you could get us a break on some carpet. You know, something
nice
. Cheap.’ So, one night, I was thinking. If I could do this for my relatives, why not for everybody?” The ad went on at some length, spelling out the special things about Cousin Arthur’s Redi-Cut Carpets outlets (coffee, no pushy salesmen, a money-back guarantee, free rug cutting), and it ended with what has become the chain’s slogan: “It’s like having an uncle in the carpet business.”
I was so stunned to discover that one of those people you see pitching their products on late-night television was a relative of mine that I promptly went up to the Bronx to see Cousin Arthur for myself. I found him on Webster Avenue, at one of his stores, and he turned out to be an extremely affable man. He was also, incidentally, the largest Ephron I have ever met (he is six feet tall and weighs two hundred ten pounds) and the only member of the family I know of who has a beard (although I haven’t seen my cousin Erwin lately, and for all I know he may have one too). In any event, we went out to lunch and he told me about his advertising campaign.
“I started this company in 1971,” Cousin Arthur began. “I’d been living in Detroit, working in the carpet
business, and I felt that carpet retailing was ripe for a plain, pipe-rack approach, sort of like Robert Hall. I’d had a run with regular carpet retailing. I’d worked for Korvettes.…”
“Is it true,” I asked, “that E. J. Korvettes stands for Eight Jewish Korean War Veterans?”
“It’s a base canard,” said Cousin Arthur. “The ‘E’ is for Eugene Ferkauf, the ‘J’ is for Joe Zwillenberg, and Korvette is the name of a subchaser in World War Two. To get back to what I was saying, I thought there was room for a no-frills approach to carpet retailing with remnants, so I called my friend Lenny, and he found a location in Mount Vernon, and we opened up. We hired a small ad agency in Scarsdale, and they came up with an ad that read: ‘Redi-Cut Carpets, a nice place to buy.’ We stayed with them for about a year. The business was growing, but we weren’t getting results from the ads. I’m a great advertising critic, but I can’t create an ad from scratch. So I called Cousin Mike and asked him what to do.” Cousin Michael Ephron is media director of Scali, McCabe, Sloves, the agency that created the Frank Perdue ad; he and Cousin Arthur had recently become friends on account of a carpet Michael needed for his den. “Michael didn’t want the account for his agency,” Arthur went on. “Big agencies hate handling retail ads. The detail work is incredible.” Michael suggested that Arthur and his partner Len Stanger go see a small creative agency called Kurtz & Symon. “They made a presentation,” said Arthur, “and we got married.”
Kurtz & Symon went to work and came up with the Uncle Art ads; in addition, the agency had Uncle buttons printed for all the salesmen at Redi-Cut. Even Cousin Arthur’s wife, Hazel, got a button that said Uncle Hazel.
The ads worked. Pictures of Cousin Arthur as Uncle Art filled New York and Westchester County papers. Business got better. More branches were opened. And Kurtz & Symon began to press Cousin Arthur to take his advertising campaign to television. At the time, a man named Jerry Rosenberg, proprietor of J.G.E. Enterprises, a discount appliance store in Queens, had become a household word in New York because of his commercial, delivered in an unrelenting Brooklyn accent, that began: “So what’s the story, Jerry?” It was logical for Cousin Arthur to go on television too. But it didn’t work out that way.
“I got scared,” said Cousin Arthur. “I’m no actor. I’m impatient. I’d gotten really annoyed with the amount of time it took just to do the print ads. They were doing these photo sessions of me where they roped off half the Mount Vernon store for two and a half hours just to take a picture. I was losing business. I was going crazy. And I didn’t think I’d be any good on television. Lenny could have done it. Lenny’s a real ham. Maybe the campaign should have been Uncle Len. But I didn’t think I could do it. Suppose I blew it? So I said, Let’s get a professional guy. They got an actor named Jeremiah Morris. Jerry’s about five inches shorter than me, ten years older, he’s bald and has no beard. Outside of that, he looks exactly like me.”
Kurtz & Symon brought Morris and a toupee and a false beard up to the store to shoot the commercials. “I’m Uncle Art from Redi-Cut Carpets,” Morris began, and Cousin Arthur became upset. He began to complain to both Don Kurtz and Jim Symon. “He kept trying to change the actor’s performance,” said Jim Symon, whom I spoke to about all this. “Most of his complaints had to
do with the fact that he, Arthur, was more handsome than the actor, and that he, Arthur, was taller. Then we showed him the ad when it was done and he complained some more. He said the actor was playing it too much like Jerry of J.G.E. By that time there was so much money committed to the ad it had to be run. It was an academic discussion.”
A few weeks later, in the fall of 1973, the commercials went on the air. Cousin Arthur would sit in front of his television set, switching from one non-network channel to the next, watching Jeremiah Morris come on as Uncle Art six times a night. “I would look and listen and I would sort of resent the fact that he really didn’t look or sound like me. It really began to bother me.” Every so often, he would make his wife, Uncle Hazel, sit through yet another viewing of the commercial. “After it was over, I’d ask her, ‘Do I really sound like that? Do I really look like that?’ She’d say no. But everyone else thought I did. I began getting calls from people I’d known for years. ‘I saw you on TV last night,’ they’d say. No one ever said to me, ‘Hey, that wasn’t you.’ Tell me. You’ve seen the commercial. Does that look like me? Does that sound like me?”
In fact, it doesn’t. But in any case, the commercials worked. Soon there were four of them on television, and soon Cousin Arthur and his partner Lenny owned eight carpet outlets. Cousin Arthur could hardly complain. Or could he?
“There’s something I think I should tell you,” he said, lowering his voice so that no one in the Red Coach Grill at the Cross County Shopping Center could hear. “I think I’m getting a divorce from Kurtz and Symon.”
“What?” I said.
“I’m thinking of dropping them and going absolutely gigantically big into radio.”
“Why?”
“I spend thirty percent of my budget on agency fees,” said Cousin Arthur. “On radio you spend nothing. The radio station writes the ad for you. And my selling will be done by disk jockeys like Bob Grant, William B. Williams and Julius LaRosa.”
“But what will happen to Uncle Art?” I asked.
“That’s a problem,” said Cousin Arthur. “We may be at the crossroads for Uncle Art.”
“Have you talked to Cousin Michael about all of this?” I asked.
“No,” said Cousin Arthur.
“I think you should,” I said. “I think what all this is really about is that you wish you’d done the commercial yourself.”
“I do wish I’d done it,” said Cousin Arthur. “I can’t get angry at anyone about it, though. I could have done it. It was my fault I didn’t. But you want to know a thing I really regret? I had a chance to be head of a giant record company once. That I really regret. For five hundred dollars I could have owned twenty-five percent of Elektra Records. You know why I didn’t?”
“Why?”
“My father talked me out of it.”
That didn’t surprise me. Thirty years ago Cousin Arthur’s father, who you may recall is my uncle Charlie, told my parents it was a good thing they were selling their house on Turtle Bay in Manhattan, because the United Nations was being built and property values in the neighborhood were going to drop.
Cousin Arthur shook his head. “I should have done
the ad,” he said. “It would have been a thrill to see myself on television. Let’s be honest about it. Everyone wants to be recognized.”
“But you
are
recognized,” I said.
“Only by family and friends,” said Cousin Arthur.
“That’s not true,” I said. “My sister Delia’s cabdriver recognized you.”
“What did he say?” said Cousin Arthur.
“He said, ‘Isn’t that guy on TV?’ ”
“That’s what I mean,” said Cousin Arthur. “That’s not really being recognized.”
May, 1976
At the CBS Washington bureau, they are trying to keep straight faces over what has happened to Daniel Schorr, but it’s not easy. Schorr is not a popular man, and there are a lot of people who are thrilled that he has been caught committing the journalistic sins of coyness, egomania and self-service. These sins are, of course, common to all journalists, which is no excuse for getting caught at them. Nonetheless, his colleagues might have gritted their teeth and supported Schorr but for one thing: he panicked and attempted to shift the blame for what he had done, tried to implicate one of his co-workers in the deed, and that gave everyone the excuse they needed to abandon him entirely.
The issue of character probably should not intrude on a First Amendment case, but when it comes to Dan Schorr it’s difficult to leave it out. Schorr insists that his problem ought to be shared by the journalistic community, that we must all hang together or we will most assuredly hang separately. As he put it recently: “It serves CBS, and it serves me, and it serves you—because whatever happens to me will someday happen to you—that we preserve a united front now. I really feel
a little bit like the alliance in World War Two, where De Gaulle and Stalin and Roosevelt and Churchill sit down and say, You know, we’re going to have some problems, but let’s lick the Nazis first.…” This is an extremely peculiar metaphor, but the part that interests me is not the equation of Nazis with the House of Representatives but the phrase “whatever happens to me will someday happen to you.” It is quite probable that what happened to Dan Schorr happened to him precisely because he was Dan Schorr. There are elements of the story, in fact, that are reminiscent of
Appointment in Samarra
, or any novel the theme of which is that a man’s character is his fate (or, put another way, that the chickens always come home to roost). The plot is a simple one: a reporter whose obsession with scoops occasionally leads him to make mistakes develops an obsession about a secret document and makes several terrible blunders that lead to his downfall. What happened to Dan Schorr is a real tragedy, but only because he did so much of it himself.
To recapitulate: Schorr, fifty-nine, a CBS reporter since 1953, managed to make a Xerox of the Pike Committee report on the CIA a few days before it was scheduled to be released. He broadcast several stories based on it. Then, a few days later, on January 29, the House of Representatives voted not to release the report. Schorr discovered he was the sole possessor of it, and set about getting it published, preferably in a paperback edition for which he would write an introduction. He asked his boss, CBS News head Richard Salant, whether any of CBS’s publishing subsidiaries were interested and sent Salant a Xerox of the report. After a few days, Schorr realized that CBS was dragging its feet, so he contacted the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The committee put him in touch with its lawyer, Peter Tufo, who was also a board member of New York Magazine Company, which owns
The Village Voice
. Tufo and Schorr’s business agent, Dick Leibner, struck out at two paperback houses—neither of CBS’s publishing subsidiaries was contacted by them or Salant—and Tufo then made a deal with
New York
editor Clay Felker to publish the report. Felker agreed to make a voluntary contribution to the Reporters Committee, which he subsequently failed to do. In any case, the Reporters Committee had reversed ground and said it would not accept payment.