The Side of the Angels (6 page)

In his single days, Ron liked to hang out with the World Bank cocktail-hour crowd and tell stories about sneaking into Havana or
taking secret video footage of Mexican factories violating NAFTA by dumping toxic waste. (The truth, I suspect, is that Ron was just a glorified delivery boy, getting cash into the right hands but not clued in on anything else.) Among D.C.'s plentiful Euro-snobs and embassy hangers-on, he became a ubiquitous lounge lizard. Women in those circles would smile dismissively when his name came up: “Oh, yes, I know Ron.
Everybody
knows Ron.”

Then he met Dana in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Dana was a stunningly attractive child psychiatrist with a firm yet sympathetic air ideal for managing Ron and, I assumed, her small clients. Dana knew malleable raw material when she met it. Three months after their first dinner together, Ron was married to Dana and living in a split-level in Bethesda. Six months after that, he was promoted to account exec at the prestigious PR megafirm Swinton McClaine. And four years later, he went out on his own.

Ron's character was flavored through and through with a conniving sleaziness, but his wife, who had few illusions about him, kept his worst excesses in check. If it weren't for Dana's restraining influence, I wouldn't have gone to work for Ron. Even so, there had been plenty of times when I regretted my decision. For example, the week I first came on board with him as “creative vice president,” renouncing my secure berth as a copywriter at Swinton, Ron shook my never-very-robust faith in him by entertaining the possibility of the Mothers in Motion account.

Mothers in Motion was a group of right-wing female fundamentalists leading a thousand-woman journey from California to Capitol Hill to lobby for private school vouchers, an end to sex education, and a return to the values that made this country great. Unfortunately, on the third day of the walk, a few of the more overzealous Mothers had the inspiration of throwing smoke bombs and firecrackers into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Nevada, leaving MiM in need of some speedy damage control. Ron received a hysterical early morning phone call from a Florida senator with uncomfortably close ties to this posse of Mrs. Cleavers.

“You can't be serious,” I said, when he broached the idea of pulling MiM's irons out of the fire.

“What do you have against motherhood?” said Ron.

“Nothing. I just have a problem with felons in flowered aprons.”

“Those were just a handful of fringe members.”

“Save it for the press statement.”

“Shouldn't feminism mean that all points of view are embraced?” said Ron, quoting perhaps from some Heritage Foundation radio program he'd turned on by accident once in the car. Like all good PR men, Ron was a magpie. Without being especially thoughtful or perceptive, he could pick up snappy phrases like this and retrieve them when the occasion called for it.

It was only by pointing out to Ron that our left-leaning clients were likely to blacklist us if we started shilling for MiM that I persuaded him to pass on the project. In the past few years, I'd slowly managed to convince him that since we couldn't compete for the kind of big-dollar accounts the major players went after, we should carve a niche as the plucky little firm that gave its offbeat, affordable best to every noble but underfunded cause from carpal tunnel syndrome to the rights of circus elephants.

In our first year together, we won a few big victories that put us on the map. We got a pro-gun-control state senator elected in Montana. We kick-started the fund-raising efforts of a well-meaning but naive women's health services collective, raising enough money to open a shelter for victims of domestic abuse in downtown Memphis. Ron enraged me by calling it “Tempura Home for Lightly Battered Women” in private, but he drummed up a million to open its doors.

“I told you, you wouldn't regret it,” Ron said when he took me out for sushi on the anniversary of my first year with him and handed me a bonus check that brought my Advocacy, Inc. salary up to nearly two-thirds of the one I'd left behind at Swinton McClaine. It was typical of Ron that on this occasion he chose a sushi bar, never inquiring if I had any taste for raw fish (I don't) or saki (I do). I ordered shrimp teriyaki and let myself bask in the five-minute glow of Ron's gratitude.

“When did I say I didn't regret it, Ron?”

“Nicky, Nicky. Working with you has been an adventure. We're like Lewis and Clark.”

“I'll be Clark. I think Lewis had syphilis.”

“You know, if I weren't married, Nicky, I could really go for you.”

“There's a thought to keep me awake at nights,” I said. Ron took this as a compliment. He liked to flirt with me in the hammy way that reformed rakes adopt, but I never felt threatened for a minute by his smarmy glances and regretful allusions to his lost single state. If Ron were to be, say, run over by a bus, Dana would grieve but she would go on, personally and professionally. Ron might stray occasionally—though I had no firsthand knowledge that he did—but, if the reverse happened, Ron would wind up a wreck of a man, living with his married sister in Wisconsin, selling used cars or model homes.

Why did I work with Ron, whose morals were flexible on a good day and priced for quick sale on a bad day? Probably because he didn't care that I wasn't a real public relations professional. He knew that I'd gotten my start at Swinton when, after I'd temped there for six months, they decided to keep me around rather than go to the trouble of training a new junior copywriter. Ron knew I had no ad agency experience, no communications degree. He didn't care, because as a business team we were perfectly complementary. Ron could put together long-range media plans as beautiful and inventive as da Vinci's blueprints for a flying machine. He was a fountain of what that brilliant adman David Ogilvie called “big ideas,” the overarching concepts without which no campaign is truly a campaign. For my part, I turned out snappy copy that combined sincere emotion with low-key credibility. I laid out ads and brochures for clients who couldn't afford a real graphic designer. I even pinch-hit as an events planner when I absolutely couldn't get out of it.

While I would never have Ron's flashy way of pitching a story, I grew to know a reliable handful of reporters at key dailies and magazines who'd return my calls because I tried not to waste their time, and who could be counted on to give our side a fair shake in their coverage. Once in a while I hit lucky with TV coverage. Ron was our star media relations guy, but he'd taught me enough that I could back him up when his plate got too full. The whole setup worked far better than I'd hoped.

“Because we're small, we do it all” was the motto Ron wanted to
put on our stationery, until I convinced him it made us sound like a rental car company.

Trade union clients like the Toilers were a fairly recent development for Advocacy, Inc. Back when big labor really
was
big labor, the unions didn't need much help from spin doctors. Now, with union membership down to 18 percent of the workforce and with some politicians putting unions on their hit list right up there with single mothers and evolutionists, a few of the more forward-thinking honchos in the AFL had begun to realize that something was needed.

We'd come to Weingould's attention a few years ago when we helped win a first contract for the janitors and maintenance workers union at Windsor Real Estate, the owner of luxury high-rises across Pittsburgh. Ron came up with a “Custodians with a Conscience” campaign, in which lovable members of Local 802, dressed in caps and denim overalls, picked up litter in city parks. This feel-good gag so won the public's sympathy and the media's praise (“Big Labor Cleans Up Its Act,” ran the approving editorial in the
Steel City Clarion
) that the janitors wound up with a 6 percent raise and family health insurance benefits. Weingould was impressed with our performance, and one meeting with Ron convinced him that together they could turn the Toilers into the little union that could.

“Can Wendy handle your other assignments for the next two weeks or more?” Ron asked, as Phyllis phoned up to the Big Guy to announce our arrival.

“I guess so. She'd work twenty hours a day if we let her.”

“Pack heavy. It's cold and it's damp,” Ron said.

“I'll charge my new longjohns to the office account.”

“You seem less than enthusiastic, Nicky. It's not like you.”

“It's just that this strike couldn't have come at a worse time,” I said. “We've got the Campsters thing, and the Joseph's Kitchen canned food drive, and the Reading Ready adult literacy fund-raiser. I don't know
what
we're going to do for that.”

“Wendy suggested a book-themed house tour. Get six or seven of
the board of directors who have fancy homes in Georgetown or Dupont to lend them out and deck each mansion out in a theme from some famous book, like netting and harpoons for
Moby-Dick
or fake Spanish moss for
Gone With the Wind
.”

“I don't think that Tara had Spanish moss, Ron. And I have trouble believing Wendy's ever read
Moby-Dick
. Or
Gone With the Wind
, for that matter. I'm not sure she has the mental staying power even to sit through the movie.”

“Give the kid a break,” said Ron.

“You give her a break. It's your ass her uncle is saving from being dragged through an audit.”

“What do you think of her idea, though?”

“They'll like it. Who doesn't get a kick out of looking at rich people's homes? No facility rental costs, either. Our Wendy comes through in the clutch again.”

“I realize that she gets on your nerves, but you know you're lousy at the adorable stuff, Nicky, and she always nails it.”

“You're right. Wendy's great. She's great. She really is.”

There, I had done my good deed for the day. So what if Wendy would just as soon throw herself into planning a book-
burning
bash, if that had been what the client wanted? So what if her enthusiasm was undiscriminating and her mind a shallow turquoise pool with goldfish darting and pennies winking? She gave her all, and she was, in her own way, irreplaceable.

“Ron,” I said, “I've worked three strikes with you, but I've never worked a strike on my own before. I'd say I have the potential to really screw up.”

“You can do it. It's your sort of thing. Storming the barricades. Fighting the good fight.”

“Going down with the ship.”

“They can't be much worse off than they are already, so nothing you do can hurt them any,” said Ron.

“Gee, thanks. I feel better now.”

The elevator, bouncing on its frayed cables, carried us up to Wein-gould's office. Its inspection notice was three years out of date. Wasn't there someone in the city government in charge of these things? Who
was I kidding? In this city, it had been cause for prolonged celebration when the murder rate finally dropped below New York's.

As Ron adjusted his pocket square and assumed the entirely misleading air of competence and alertness with which he greeted clients, I had a feeling of impending doom that, as it turned out, was entirely accurate.

W
EINGOULD
was on the phone when we walked in, but he motioned us to the couch and waved an ink-stained hand to indicate that he'd be with us in a minute. Unlike many of our clients, Wein-gould tried to keep his appointments on schedule. Unfortunately, he agonized over the simplest decision, and it slowed him down. Like a doctor, he was always lagging behind by midafternoon.

The couch, as usual, was stacked with folders, contracts, and the yellow legal pads he scrawled ideas on and then forgot about. We cleared space enough to sit, Ron barely refraining from dusting the crumbly leather before it made contact with the seat of his pants.

Weingould's long-suffering secretary, Mary Bridget, handed us “Proud to Be Union” mugs of acrid coffee and a paper cup full of packets of lightener mixed in with a few venerable sugar cubes. What seemed from its aroma to be soy sauce stained the bottom of this cup, which was clearly the receptacle for condiments of all kinds. I decided to take my coffee black for a change.

Weingould was wrapping things up.

“Okay, Bill, let me make sure I've got this. You're saying they can't get the phone list ready until the twentieth. We're paying them twenty goddamn thousand dollars for a quickie poll and they can't do better than that? They can't make it the eighteenth? We wait much longer, the Teamsters'll be in there handing out free windbreakers and then we're really screwed…. Okay, okay. Tell them if they can manage the eighteenth, we'd appreciate it…. Okay, just do your best. I've got a meeting now, but you tell them from me the eighteenth would make all the difference. God Almighty, I'm sending this guy's kids to college with what I pay him, he could move his butt for a change….
Okay. Okay…. Yeah, I know it's a long shot…. Okay, I'll speak to you when I speak to you.”

This was a typical scene. Weingould, a victim of the age of office technology, lacked focus, and I had never entered his office for an appointment without sitting through the tail end of his frantic, pacing phone calls. He loved to shout into his speakerphone while scrolling down the ninety-two e-mails he got every hour, ripping open overnight-mail packages, and dictating memos to one of the three secretaries who indulged him and ran his life. Rumor had it that Wein-gould had remained on the telephone throughout his brief honeymoon, consummating his marriage only with the help of one of those headband receivers long-distance operators wear.

Weingould was heavily built but not overweight like so many of his cohorts—the reason being that he could not eat and talk at the same time. His ties were always crooked and his shirttail was always out, but his clothes were beautiful, tailored to a perfection Ron only aspired to. His wife picked them out, for Weingould never left the office until after all the stores closed.