II8
‘Is this some feminist shit? I expect you to turn up before me, toots. I need my letters typed. I had to borrow Barry’s girl this morning. I had to get my own coffee. Why the fuck did Maria have to get herself knocked up anyway? She was never late. And look what they give me,
some popsy who can’t even get here on time on her first morning.’ ‘I’m sorry, Mark. It won’t happen again.’
They looked at each other. ‘Ooh,’ the skinny guy said, meanly. ‘Listen to her.’
‘Who the luck told you to call me Mark? Did I tell you to call me Mark?’
‘No.’ Lita paled. She really didn’t want to get fired, not before she’d had a chance to talk to Harry and get this whole mess sorted out. She noticed that some of the other offices behind her were starting to quieten down and listen to the bawling Smith. With a flush of embarrassed anger, Lita realized that they were enjoying it. ‘No, you didn’t - sir. I’m sorry, sir.’
She lowered her eyes deferentially. The thin man chuckled. Lita thought she hated him. Smith relaxed a little.
‘That’s more like it. Here one day and think you own the goddamn
place. Go get me and Bud a coffee before we die of thirst.’
‘That’s Mr Roberts,’ the thin man added.
‘Yes, sir.’ Lira turned to Roberts. ‘How do you take your coffee, Mr Roberts?’
‘Milk, two sugars.’
‘Same for me,’ Smith barked. ‘And get it back here in under five
minutes or you’re out of the door, baby. Got it?’
‘Yes, sir. I got it,’ Lita said qnietly.
She hoped there was no rat poison in the kitchenette. Because she might just be tempted to put some in the coffee.
That had been yesterday. Lita had ignored the sly grins of the other secretaries, typed letters barely adequately and kept her head down. She gathered that Mark Smith wrote the copy, and Bud Roberts was the art director, one of several Smith was assigned to. Both of them called her ‘baby’, ‘doll’ and ‘toots’, and Lita didn’t dare to object. She had swallowed her pride and counted the minutes.
This morning she hadn’t made the same migtake twice. A conservative, sexless suit, arriving at work on time and excusing herself for her meeting with Harry Weiss.
That bitch Susie had shown her in with a sly grin.
And then, after he’d listen to her outpourings for five minutes, Harry had cut her off and told her that, yes, she was going to start as a secretary.
II9
‘But, Harry—’
‘Mr Weiss.’
‘Mr Weiss. You offered me the job because I came into your office and pitched you my ideas for the Country Fresh campaign.’
‘That’s correct. “Fresh from the heart of Italia” was your slogan, wasn’t it?’
Lita beamed. ‘Yes.’
Harry leaned on his desk, his wedding ring catching the sunlight that slanted on to his mahogany desk. ‘And did you see us using that slogan in the TV ads?’
Lira paused. ‘I guess not.’
‘We went with “Mamma Mia, that’s good!”. A slogan that Lionel Forth came up with, one of our senior copywriters. I hired you because you talked intelligently about advertising, you have experience of visuals and you sounded like you wanted to take this job seriously. Now I’m doubting my judgement.’
‘How can yon be? I haven’t had a chance to do any work.’
‘On the contrary, you’ve had plenty of chances to do some work-to find out your position, to turn up on time, to strike a good relationship up with your boss and to do his paperwork and learn from him how the job runs.’
‘I bet he was never a secretary.’
‘He started as a mail clerk, actually.’
Lira tried another tack. ‘But not many women make it out of the secretarial pool, do they? There are only 6˘˘o on my floor.’
‘Winners make money, Rosalita. Losers make excuses.’ Harry sighed. ‘Look, you were a model making some dough, having people jump when you snapped your fingers. You can’t jump in at the top here because you have a pretty face. Maybe this was a big mistake for both of
US.’
‘It wasn’t.’ Lita was seized with a sudden desire not to leave here like this. Weiss was an arrogant, sexist, selfish son of a bitch, but she wanted to prove herself to him. ‘I guess it was just culture shock, but I’m over that now.’
‘Then get back to your office. And no more histrionics. I’m too busy for that shit.’
‘Yes, Mr Weiss,’ Lita said, standing up.
As she was walking out the door, he said, without looking up from his papers, ‘Call me Harry.’
There were days when Lita thought she couldn’t take the humiliation. Smith was a boor who liked to swat her on the ass and talk dirty in front
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of her, but Lita soon had him pegged - he was a junior copywriter who hadn’t had a promotion in two years, and she thought Doheny might soon let him go. He was a typical bully. He took it out on the people underneath him, and he was so low on the totem pole that that basically meant Lita.
He made her pick up his dry-cleaning and send tulips to his wife and roses to his mistress. He criticized her long skirts and lack of make-up - Lita went down to the opticians and bought a pair of Coke-bottle glasses with clear lenses. That worked. He stayed away from her ass and treated her like the older secretaries in the office - as, basically, invisible.
As best she could, Lira learned the business. Doheny covered print, radio and TV ads, with different writers specializing in each field. They hired directors, graphic designers and account executives, as well as a whole department that decided where to place the ads. Depending on the product, the commercials could be homely, aimed at housewives, featuring the typical white-bread, blonde-haired family with a sprinkling of freckled kids, or hard-hitting political slogans. For drinks and cars it was all about models - women in bikinis draped over bumpers, women in tight Tshirts with ‘Budweiser’ emblazoned across them. Lita listened to assholes like Bud Roberts discussing the ‘look’ they wanted for one particular type of motorbike and thanked God she’d gotten out of the game when she had.
‘Big tits,’ Bud said loudly, not bothering to look at Lita or lower his voice. ‘Blonde hair … I like that new “flip” style. Who’s that chick? Farrah Fawcett? Like her, but bigger tits. Not fat, though.’
‘Hey, dude, I dig those clam-digger pants,’ Mark suggested.
‘Yeah. Tight white leather, nb panties, shows everything without getting the censors on your ass. Hey, toots,’ Roberts barked at Lita. ‘Call the agencies and tell them we want a blonde about five-eight through five-ten …’
‘OK, Mr 1Loberts,’ Lira muttered. ‘With What colour eyes?’
‘Who gives a shit about her eyes? Just make sure she’s at least a D cup.’
Both men burst out laughing.
‘And no more than one-thirty. We don’t want no fat bitches. Got it?’
Lita bit down on her lip so hard she drew blood. She made the call, and then stayed late that night.
‘What got into you, Lita? You’re normally out the door at five.’
‘I wanted to get a jump on my typing for tomorrow, si,’ Lita said meekly. ‘No need to lock up. I’ll do it.’
‘Good. And make sure the place is tidy, willya?’ He gestured expansively at the papers and empty coffee-cups strewn across his office,
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which resembled the Canyon of Heroes after the Mets World Series parade a few months ago. Lita thought it looked like a fire hazard. ‘Those lazy cleaners never get it right.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Lita smiled warmly at him from under the camouflaged safety of her thick, ugly glasses. ‘You have a good night, now.’
‘Sure,’ he said, walking out without shutting the door behind him. Lita did, in fact, work on her letters for twenty minutes -just long enough to be sure that the chump wasn’t coming back. Then she filed her work away, took off her glasses and slipped into Smith’s office.
There was no way she was going to turn into a borderline pimp for these sleazebags. Lita saw how Ellen Kovacs and Lucy Weldon, the two women copywriters, had gotten promoted - five years slaving for the chauvinist pigs from hell, then finally permitted to submit some suggestions, and getting their own offices eighteen months after that. And now they were here, nobody took any notice of them.
There were exactly three women in senior positions in the whole of Doheny - one senior art director, one senior copywriter and one
account director. Window-dressing for the company report.
Lita was going to be the fourth.
She wasn’t interested in staying in this office, but neither was she interested in quitting. What had Harry Weiss said? ‘Winners make money, losers make excuses.’ So Doheny didn’t promote women. It was 197o. New year, new decade, and women were taking the same old crap, despite all the bra-burning and student protests. In the real world, they made forty cents on the man’s dollar.’ They got their butts patted, and they mostly got given letters to type.
Determinedly, Lita opened up Harry’s filing cabinet. There were notes for each client meticulously organized in colour-coded folders. Lita knew exactly where everything was - she’d had to file it herself. She cleared a space on Harry’s filthy desk. 0
First things first. She extracted the Skin-Soft line for Kitten Cosmetics. One of Mark’s campaigns that hadn’t done well.
‘Defy your age with a Dab!’ said the slogan. Lita examined the image - an anti-ageing cream in a gold-coloured pot. The product looked nice and rich, but she saw the problem instantly. Not only did the slogan suck, the model must have been all of twenty-one. Of course it wasn’t going to sell to older women. They weren’t stupid. Something Bud and Mark didn’t realize.
OK, what was next? Another motorcycle ad. A girl in a cheesecloth shirt draping her large breasts over a biker. ‘Freedom’ was the slogan. That worked. Lita could see that. Unfortunately, most of Doheny’s product campaigns weren’t aimed at bearded, unwashed slobs. The
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lock ticked quietly through the night, and Lita got to work. She took notes on her little typist’s pad, analysing everything from ad copy to the client liaison … who ordered what, Mark’s directives from Randy Strauss, his account executive, who ventured into the lions’ den as little as he could possibly manage. Lita noted that P,.andy wasn’t happy with a lot of it. tie was the one who had to take the creative work to the clients.
No wonder this asshole never got promoted, Lita thought.
She glanced up at the wall. It was already nine-thirty. She wanted to get home, take a bath, review her notes. But first there was the ‘Lucy’ campaign.
Lucy was Mark and Bud’s big shot. It was a new fragrance, launched by Kitten, who hadn’t liked the way Skin-Soft had sold, but Mark’s success with the Hard P,.ider bike company had prompted them to offer Doheny a second - and final - chance. Kitten was a serious client, a medium-sized cosmetics firm that sold its products in the NorthEast alone. They didn’t have the distribution to ompete with Elizabeth Arden and the other big boys, but they had plenty of dollars to spend for local advertising. And if Doheny didn’t get them results, they’d go elsewhere.
Lita had heard enough office gossip to know Harry Weiss’s reputation. He kated to lose a client. It made Doheny look bad. As if maybe they weren’t the hippest, hardest, most in-demand firm on Madison Avenue. That got the other firms scenting blood, calling up their clients, looking to poach.
She checked out Mark’s proposed ‘Lucy’ ad.
It was of a young woman starding on a restaurant terrace, looking moonily out at the stars. A handsome young man had his arms around
her. Mark’s slogan read, ‘Get Him Interested - with Lucy.’ Lita filed the mock-up away, a huge grin on her face. I’ve got you now, she thought.
c
Lita didn’t make it home until almost midnight. It took her two hours to get Mark’s filthy office into some semblance of order. As used as she was to tidying up after Chico and Papa, and keeping a small space spotless, Mark Smith was a real challenge. Almost two years of the high life hadn’t made her forget how to clean; she wanted to make Mark’s space gleam and shine as though he had just moved in. When the cleaners arrived at five a.m. tomorrow, she thought they might die of shock.
She worked tirelessly, and now, if Mark wanted to, he could eat the jelly dougnuts he liked to scoff down for breakfast off his office floor. That would please him, she knew. In Mark Smith’s world, most women existed for cooking and cleaning, and Barbie-doll types for sex, too. He’d be so surprised that he’d give her a break for a few days.
She jumped out of her cab - it wasn’t safe to walk in Manhattan at night, so she was forced into the expenditure - and let herself into the building. Lita half ran up the stairs. Her metabolism was charged with adrenaline, despite the late hour and her exhaustion. Her knees and back and arms ached from crouching, bending over and scrubbing. Her eyes were tired and bloodshot. But she had her notes.
Inside her apartment, Lita went straight to the kitchen to fix herself a pot of coffee. It was going to be a long night.
Kitten Cosmetics. She understood them, and not just because she had been a model. Part of the reason she’d wanted to go into advertising was the stuffshe’d picked up at shoots. Every product had an image, a target, a way it wanted to be sold. If the image in the ad designers heads matched the target audience, the product sold - and if not, it didn’t.
Mark Smith and Bud Roberts understood pigs like themselves. They’d had success, Lita thought contemptuously, with pig things. Like motorbikes and speedboats and pool tables. Everything else they’d tried had mediocre results at best. And the way the advertising industry worked almost guaranteed you that - any advertising was better than no advertising, and Doheny’s excellent team of buyers placed the print ads in just the right magazines next to just the right articles. To really fail at this company you’d have to suck even worse than they did.
I24
But the Skin-Soft campaign hadn’t exactly been luminous. Kitten was looking for better, but they weren’t going to get it from Lucy. Not the way these boys were selling it. Mark did sort of OK at food items, because even though he didn’t understand housewives he did understand food. But what women wanted, he had no idea.