The Wrong Kind of Money (34 page)

It was a gamble on two fronts, of course. But Noah worked out a licensing arrangement with Angus Kelso whereby Ingraham would be given exclusive distribution rights to his whiskey in the United States, Canada, and Japan, the three largest scotch-drinking markets outside the British Isles. Why the Japanese were so fond of scotch was always something of a mystery. The Japanese even produced a “scotch” of their own, though it could not be labeled or sold as such outside their own country, except as “scotch-type” whiskey. Noah obtained rights to Kelso's water for the United States and Canada only since, for reasons equally mysterious, the Japanese had never been interested in bottled water.

Angus Kelso's terms were on the stiff side—ten percent of wholesale—but Noah agreed to them. And he accomplished all this in the face of considerable skepticism from his mother. Hannah worried that Kelso's whiskey, or whatever they ended up calling it, would undermine sales of their flagship label, Ingraham's V.S.O.P. But Noah argued that Ballachulish-15, the working name he had given to the whiskey, was aged for a full fifteen years, whereas V.S.O.P. was aged for only twelve. The new brand would be higher priced and positioned in a more upscale market. Also, V.S.O.P. sales had been flat for the past several years. Demographic studies showed that the public conception of V.S.O.P. was of an “old-fashioned” scotch; it was not appealing to the yuppie crowd of baby boomers.

Noah also pointed out the recent trend toward “lite” beers and wines and soft drinks, and “light” and “ultra-light” cigarettes. Whatever advertising program was worked out for Ballachulish-15, Noah felt strongly that this scotch's special lightness should be its theme. Finally, he reminded his mother that his father had always encouraged competition between various Ingraham brands. Competition made the brand managers, division heads, and even the salesmen work harder to keep their labels performing strongly in the marketplace. It was even possible that Ballachulish-15 could spur the market performance of V.S.O.P., and wouldn't that be a welcome development?

His mother was also dubious about the Ballachulish bottled-water tie-in. “The seven-and-seven thing was just a fluke,” she said. “Just a lucky coincidence. The makers of Seven Crown and Seven-Up had no connection with each other, and nothing in common except the number seven.”

“Let's think of this as a planned coincidence,” he said. And so, reluctantly, Hannah Liebling gave Noah the go-ahead on his two-pronged project. And now B-Day, as they had begun to call it, was at hand, and Noah had begun to feel that his future in the company depended on the success of this presentation and how the men responded to it. After all, other successes of the company had been brought about largely by his father. This one was his own. His mother even said so. “This will be your baby, Noah,” she said, and it was impossible not to detect a note of warning in her voice.

“Doesn't your mother ever appear at sales conferences?” Frank Stokes asked him once.

“She tried it once,” Noah said. “But you may have noticed that my mother doesn't exactly have a slap-you-on-the-back, hail-fellow personality. I think all the salesmen's figures went down the following year. She's a bit pigheaded, but I guess she figured there might be some connection.”

And of course, after the presentation, a great deal more would remain to be done. A final name, a perfect name, would have to be chosen for the brand, and Noah had decided that there would be a contest for the name among all Ingraham employees and their agencies—a contest with a fat cash prize. That meant that thousands of names would be submitted for consideration. Then labels had to be designed, along with distinctive bottle shapes, and advertising and marketing plans, and a special media strategy, all had to be devised. Ballachulish water could be advertised in media—television, radio, the women's magazines—that would not accept liquor advertising, and that meant that, with luck, the two prongs of the project would promote each other. It would be at least a year, and millions of dollars would have been spent, before Angus Kelso's whiskey appeared on the shelves of liquor stores, or before his water found its way to supermarkets.

Noah's presentation to the sales force, he decided, would begin almost like a travelogue, with colored slides showing Angus Kelso's farm, his fat cattle and plump hens, then his distillery, then the entrance to the limestone caves, then the pine-clad hills with their blanket of pine needles, then the endearing Mr. Kelso himself, and—for a touch of humor—some of his wilder claims, that it restored fecundity in women and virility in men, and was the cure for everything from the common cold to cancer. He had considered putting all this onto a video, but decided against it. A slide show was more old-fashioned, more intimate, more in keeping with the rustic subject matter. And Noah felt that he could sell his ideas more effectively standing on his feet in front of them than as a disembodied offscreen voice.

Then there would be a question period. During this Noah would explain how the promotions for Mr. Kelso's two products could ride piggyback on each other.

The program would conclude with a blind taste test of the new products in comparison to other labels in a similar class. This, he hoped, would turn into a celebration party designed to send the salesmen home in a happy, enthusiastic selling mood, and pleasantly drunk. Once you had the salesmen on your side, that was half the battle.

Now, in his hotel suite, the telephone rings, and Noah reaches for it. “Mr. Liebling? I have Mrs. Hannah Liebling for you,” her secretary says.

“Thank you, Jonesy.”

“Noah,” his mother's voice says, “what's all this nonsense about a party?”

“The cocktail party doesn't start till six,” he says. “And I've got your President's Message to read. And while I've got you on the phone, do you think we could punch up the opening line a little? ‘In our more than two-hundred-year history' sounds a little flat. What about, ‘As we plunge fearlessly into our third century'? Or ‘As we face the challenges of our third century'? Or something like that?”

“What in blazes are you talking about?”

“Your President's Message, Mom.”

“No, no, no, no. That's fine. I'm not talking about
that
party. I'm talking about
this
party—this party you and Carol are planning to give for Anne.”

“A party for Anne? You mean my daughter, Anne?”

“Of course! Is there any other Anne? It was in this morning's paper. Some sort of coming-out party, in June.”

“I don't know anything about that, Mom.”

“We've never had coming-out parties in this family. And the paper says Carol is giving it with that Van Degan woman, of all people!”

“Georgette Van Degan? What's wrong with her?”

“Wrong?
Don't you
remember?
When your father and I bought One thousand Park, the Van Degans made it a point to move out the same day we moved in. They had their moving vans pull up at the same time ours did. Everybody in New York was talking about it.”

“Mom, I wasn't even born when you bought the apartment. And I think it was the present Truck Van Degan's father who did that. He's been dead for a number of years.”

“It doesn't matter. It's the same family of Jew baiters. People will think I've lost my marbles to have my family involved in anything that has to do with those Van Degans. They're in the glass business. Your father refused to buy bottles from Van Degan Glass as a result of the way they treated us.”

“But, Mom, I really don't know anything about this,” he says. “Why don't you call Carol and ask her?”

“No. I want
you
to ask Carol what's going on. After all, you're her husband.”

“All right. As soon as this thing in Atlantic City is over, I'll—”

“No! I want you to find out now. I've had several calls about it already. Several people think it's pretty funny, us and the Van Degans. They're laughing at us, Noah. I want to know what's going on before I read anything more about this party in the papers.”

“Okay, Mom, okay.”

“And this story also says that we've agreed to supply all the liquor for this—this coming-out party for Anne and the Van Degan girl. Who agreed? Did you agree?”

“No. I told you, Mom, this is the first I've heard about it. Carol hasn't mentioned any party to me.”

“You know we've always had a policy
never
to supply free liquor to parties. Every
week
I get asked to supply free liquor for some benefit or other. The Heart Ball, the Public Library dinners, the—”

“Well, a party for Anne isn't quite the same as a charity benefit, is it? But never mind, I'll—”

“Bathy even called me about it. She thinks it's a perfectly terrible idea in terms of our public relations. Not only will it bring back all that old Van Degan business from years ago. But in today's economy she thinks it'll look terrible for us to be throwing a big, expensive dinner dance for a couple of teenage
girls.”

“Please don't quote Bathy's opinions to me, Mother,” he says.

“Well, Bathy happens to be smart, and if that's what Bathy thinks, other people will think the same.”

“Okay, okay,” he says. “I'll see what I can find out from Carol.”

“Good. Call me back as soon as you've found out. I want to see this thing nipped in the bud, whatever it is.”

“Meanwhile, you might wish me luck with Friday's presentation.”

“Friday? What's that?”

“Friday is B-Day—remember?”

“Oh, that. Well, it's a little too late for luck on that one, isn't it? You're already in so deep. It's too late to turn back on that one. You're either going to sink or swim on that one. Fish or cut bait.”

“Thanks, Mom,” he says. “Thanks for those fine, stirring words of encouragement.”

“Now, don't be sarcastic. But this
is
your baby, after all,” she says.

He replaces the phone in its cradle. Now it is time to change for the kickoff cocktail party, and go downstairs to the ballroom, and smile, and shake hands, and hug, and slap backs, and make nice to all the hundreds of people he is supposed to know on a first-name basis. Oh, thank God, thank God for name tags, he thinks. He would like to leave the guy who invented name tags something in his will. Noah has long ago mastered the art of looking straight into a man's eyes and at his name tag at the same time.

“Good speech,” Frank Stokes is saying to him now as they leave the ballroom and the cocktail party, and walk across the lobby toward the elevators. Frank is a little tight, but that, after all, is the point of a kickoff cocktail party, before everyone settles down to the more serious business of the rest of the week. “I really liked that part about facing the challenges of our third century … and the country approaching its third millennium. That was really neat. I didn't know your mother was—you know, that articulate.”

Noah gives him a wink. “Sometimes I give her a bit of editing,” he says.

“And at the end, when you said something like, ‘We need every one of you who work here at the mill.' That was really neat. Calling it the mill. That's what got the big hand. I mean, you know, like everybody calls it the mill. But some people—I mean a lot of people—would be a little nervous about calling it the mill in front of your face, and nobody would dare call it the mill in front of
her.
But to hear you call it that—or I mean to hear
her
call it that—that was a really neat touch, Noah. They loved that!”

“Editing again,” he says.

“The mill. As in treadmill. Or gin mill. Is it tough working for your mother, Noah? No, I shouldn't have asked that. That's none of my business. Forget I asked that.”

“It has its ups and downs,” he said. “I'm used to it. I know how to handle her.”

“Shouldn't have asked that. None of my business.”

“It's a question a lot of people ask.”

“So. Why don't we change into some more comfortable clothes, meet for a drink at the bar, and then try our luck at the tables?”

“Sounds good to me,” Noah says.

They step into the elevator, and Frank punches the buttons for their respective floors.

“Hey!” Frank says suddenly as the elevator door begins to close. “Isn't that—?”

“Isn't that
what?”
Noah asks sharply. For he, too, has seen the girl.

“That girl sitting in the lobby. With a suitcase. Isn't she that friend of Anne's from school? That Melody?”

“Nonsense
! Don't be ridiculous. What would she be doing here?”

“But, golly, I could have sworn—”

“Well, it wasn't her. Looked a little like her maybe. But it wasn't her.”

There is a little silence as the elevator rises.

At the sixth floor the elevator stops, the door opens, and a whole flock of giggling young women push into the elevator, perhaps a dozen of them, most of them in fanny-hugging mini-skirts, lacy semi-see-through tops, and high-heeled platform shoes. They are clearly party girls, lured here by the word of Ingraham's sales conference. They push the button for the twenty-first floor, where the company's hospitality suite is located. They press their backsides a little too closely against the two men; Noah and Frank are pressed against the rear of the car, and the elevator is overwhelmed by the complicated commingling of musky perfumes and chewing gum.

“So,” Frank says to Noah. “Meet you in the bar in half an hour?”

“Who—
me
?” squeals one of the girls.

“No, I don't think so, Frank,” Noah says. “I've got to work on Friday's presentation.”

“All work and no play—”

“All work and no play!
” squeals the same girl, and the others all laugh noisily.