Living Room (6 page)

“Yes,” she said, smiling.

“Get enough sleep last night?”

“Oh,” she said. “I was thinking.”

“Try to think with your eyes open, it makes a better impression.”

He had gone. If she kept her eyes open, she saw the rippled green glass partition in front of her and an empty desk. If she turned, she saw the girls in the typing pool. She’d have to buy a green eyeshade she could keep low on her forehead so no one would see her close her eyes to think.

And as her thoughts peregrinated through her head, the half idea became whole. She’d have to be sure. And so she took the sample of Ultra-Light they had left with her, and in the ladies’ room put it on her face and neck down to the top of her dress. It was light. Once it dried, you really couldn’t see it. Yet it did make the color of her face uniform. Was that good?
You don’t ask questions like that in business,
she decided.

And so she typed out a memorandum to Mr. Sealy in which she said that she thought that younger customers wouldn’t respond favorably to an advertising-type name like Ultra-Light. She suggested that the product be renamed for what it in fact was, Invisible. The art on the package should be the same as the art used in the advertisements, perhaps a model no more than twenty, and the copy line ought to be simple. “It doesn’t leave a line for him to see when he’s undressing you.”

She put the memo in an interoffice envelope marked for Mr. Sealy and went to keep a lunch date with Mary Wood, a friend from Barnard, to whom she confessed that advertising seemed an easy way to make a living, if one could judge from half a day.

When she returned from lunch, there was a penciled note on her desk.
Mr. Sealy wants to see you.

“Sit down,” he said. “Miss Hartman, you should have taken at least a week to think this through.”

“Why?”

“We bill the client by time and—”

“Well don’t send it to him for a week. Meanwhile I can be doing other things.”

“I don’t think so. It was not our assignment to rename the product. The name came from the client. And the name you came up with, if I may say so, shows a lack of experience. Who would want to buy something you couldn’t see? And that copy line is lascivious.”

“By yesterday’s standards?”

“What do you mean, Miss Hartman?”

“I thought ad campaigns were for use today and tomorrow, not yesterday.”

“Are you saying I’m old-fashioned?”

“I didn’t mean anything personal, Mr. Sealy.”

“Look, you’re mature for your age,” he said, “let’s be realistic. You and we made a mistake. It’s always best, really, to rectify errors quickly.” He seemed uncomfortable. “Perhaps if you took a secretarial job in some agency, you’d pick things up by osmosis to make up for your lack of formal training in the field. That would give you a solid grounding in what you do and don’t do.” He pointed to her memo. “I’d like to be fair. If we terminated your employment today, we’d of course pay you for the week. It’d be clean, as if you hadn’t really worked here. Much better than showing a short employment on your resumé, don’t you agree?”

She had practically nothing to clear out of her desk, but when she came upon her carbon of her memo to Mr. Sealy, she wrote on the bottom, “Hired 6/11, terminated 6/11,” and put it into an envelope on which she wrote the name of the president of the agency, dropped it into an interoffice mail receptacle, signed out at personnel,
and got her check.

The president of the agency, Selig Carrow, an entrepreneurial type who constantly complained about being saddled by an organization of “other people,” phoned the president of the cosmetic firm, who was an old friend, and without attribution told him of the idea on the telephone. As Selig Carrow could have predicted, the client liked the product name and slogan
for
the ad as well as he did, and they laughed over whether the client should fire his ad manager, and decided they couldn’t, since he hadn’t seen the proposal, and then whether Selig should fire Sealy, and being men of age and experience, they laughed over the decision not to fire anybody but to get the damn product retitled, get the campaign into production, and find that damn girl Shirley Hartman and hire her back to work on the account under someone other than Perry Sealy.

Shirley wasn’t hard to find. And the personnel director, who had faced similar situations, offered her apologies and a ten percent increase in salary if she would come back. Shirley jumped at the chance mainly because working at that agency would mean that, inevitably, she would pass Perry Sealy in the hall from time to time, and she could be extra polite and smiling and charming, which would be an acceptable way of holding up a finger at him.

*

Shirley’s second opportunity came a few weeks later when, as part of her training, she was asked to attend as an observer a meeting of the senior people at the agency who were trying to brainstorm their way out of a dead end on an account that billed six million dollars. The men sat around the long oval table, Selig Carrow at one end, a stenographer at the other. And in chairs behind their chairs, a number of other agency observers, none female except Shirley.

She watched and listened, and what she observed was that they were not coming up with a solution to the problem but reinforcing positions previously taken, amending just a bit, improvising, but not facing up to the hard fact that they were doing a Mexican hat dance around a defeated proposal. She could see Selig Carrow getting impatient, so she raised her hand.

Sealy whipped his head around in her direction.

“Miss Hartman wants to say something,” said Carrow. “For those of you who haven’t met her, she’s the copywriter who came up with the Invisible campaign. And the product name.”

Carrow noticed with satisfaction the color in Sealy’s face.

Those around the table who knew Carrow, knew he had found a new white hope.

As an organization, nothing inspired intramural viciousness more than a bright star not previously on the horizon. Shirley was astonished at the expressions she saw in the room. Nervous, she spoke briefly and to the point.

As she talked, Carrow was troubled by two things. Her idea was practical, certainly better than anything that had come up so for. But this was an automobile account, and the people in Detroit hated having women work on their accounts.

The idea was developed and committed to paper by a senior group in which Shirley was not included. She was rewarded with a small raise and a cash bonus.

Shirley didn’t mind being short-changed—she was still earning less than the executive secretaries in the firm—as much as not being involved in the execution of her own ideas.

One day Carrow asked her if she was happy. This was one of his ways with personnel. The answer he usually got was “yes” with a smile. Shirley said, “Not entirely.”

“What’s wrong? You’re doing fine.”

She explained about not being allowed to break out of the back room, as it were.

“Child,” said Carrow sympathetically, “even the President of the United States has advisers who are little known. You’re making your way very fast. Slow down a little, child.”

It was the second “child” that did it.

Though she had only been on the job for four months, rumors about her were beginning to seep around Madison Avenue. Maybe it was premature for a quantum leap. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. She put together a thin portfolio of her accomplishments, signed up with an employment agency, and spent a fortnight of lunch hours on interview after interview, none of them satisfactory because she was offered comparable positions at somewhat higher salaries. That was not what she thought of as a quantum leap.

Armon, Caiden, Crouch was a different story. Instead of being interviewed by a personnel director or copy chief or account executive, the employment agency said she would be seeing the president, Arthur Crouch, himself.

She thought about wearing a hat for the first time in her life. She decided against it.

Arthur Crouch was a great bear of man, a ruddy face under a graying thatch of thick, unruly hair. He greeted her by clumsily getting halfway up for only a second, motioning her to a chair, and staring down at her resumé, puffing his pipe. Finally he spoke in a voice that was authoritative and gentle despite its barrel tones. The instincts that wed people to people are not easily definable. That moment Shirley decided that Arthur Crouch was like a Gentile version of Philip Hartman, though the similarity would never be seen by anyone in the world except Shirley. As for Arthur, he thought Shirley more attractive than he had expected (why, he thought, had he expected less?), but he never confused such things in an interview. His way was solid investigation beforehand. He had of course heard that Shirley was responsible for the by-now successful campaign for Invisible and for helping to save an automobile account for her present employer by what may have been a fluke (Crouch had an automobile account and from time to time he needed flukes).

“Miss Hartman,” he said after a few preliminaries, “Selig Carrow is a pretty easygoing man for this business. Why would you consider leaving?”

“It was my first job.”

“I know.”

“I got hired and fired the first day.”

Arthur Crouch raised bear eyebrows in surprise. She told him the story and Arthur listened, tapping his pipe against the cork knocker in the ashtray.

“But they hired you back.”

“I’ll always be a beginner there. I’m not a beginner any more.”

“You’re ambitious.”

“Yes.”

“You’d like my job.”

“Not yet.”

He laughed.

“What I meant is not really. I like to work by myself. I don’t like the idea of supervising a lot of people who may or may not be good at what they do.”

“Or being supervised?”

She sighed, figuring the interview was nearly over.

“Never mind,” he said, reading her expression. “I had the employment people send over your portfolio before I asked to see you. It’s impressive. Not very much in there. What about the ones that didn’t work?”

“Everything I’ve done is in there. I just haven’t been around very long.”

What was stirring in Arthur Crouch was a dangerous habit of his, one he tried to control most of his life. It was the kind of impulse on which some men built their careers, but it frightened Arthur to gamble.

He got up and closed the drape where the afternoon sun was streaming in. “What do you think about,” he said, “when you first start working on an ad?”

Shirley thought of some garbage answers, discarded them. “I try to concentrate on what the reader of the ad is looking for, the benefit of the product for him. If there is a benefit.”

She liked Crouch’s bearish laugh. He reached behind his desk. “What’s wrong with this ad of ours?”

Shirley’s eyes studied the visual, then quickly read the copy.

“The last line’s good. Very good. Nobody’ll ever get to it.”

“How about this one?” He tossed the sketch in front of her. The copy was clipped to one side.

“Not bad,” she said. “It would make people who were already using that brand feel they had made a right choice, but it wouldn’t attract new customers.”

Crouch studied Shirley through the smoke of his pipe.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

She waited to be dismissed.

“William Penn,” she said, “was twenty-three.”

Arthur Crouch was studying the strange girl.

“I don’t mean to sound immodest,” she added. “Is age really relevant?”

“Not,” he said, “with regard to native talent and intelligence. It does count for experience. You have very little.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “if you studied the portfolio of someone with a lot more experience, you might find the same number of good ads as in my portfolio.”

“True.”

“Think of the cost of all the ones that didn’t work.”

“Now that’s immodest, young lady.”

“I’m not saying I’ll always get things right. I’m just reporting on what’s happened so far. If you were hiring a baseball player, would you be concerned about his age or about how well he played ball on the average?”

“Judging by this portfolio, your average—based on a very few games—is higher than any baseball player ever had.”

“You’re not offering a baseball player’s salary,” she said. “Yet.”

Arthur Crouch was thinking that she sold better than some of his account executives.

“What do you want out of your work?” It was a standard interview question with him.

“Fun. And a nest egg. In that order.”

“Why the nest egg at your age?”

“It’s like having mad money.”

Conflict of interest, thought Arthur. She wants an exit pass before she starts. We want to tie employees to the job. Was it worth it? She’s damn good. Or was he being influenced by her attractiveness?

“What do you do in your spare time?”

“I didn’t know you allowed employees spare time.”

Arthur Crouch couldn’t help laughing.