Robinson fired Doheny and hired Smith & Watkins, their greatest
rival. Lita had been totally humiliated, and the boys in the company were letting her know it. She hadn’t fully understood the depth of the resentment until she saw how much they all enjoyed watching her fall. Assistants hummed the Brite-White jingle under their breaths as she passed them in the corridors. The other senior creative execs, all men, used it as an excuse to get assigned all the plum jobs for more than a month. Even after her formal period in the doghouse, Lira was still feeling the effects. Instead of automatically being the first choice of new business, she had to compete with her colleagues to get it. She was no longer the blue-eyed girl. It was more than a bit embarrassing.
Manhattan glittered below her window, the sunlight gleaming on the
I62
windows of the cars crawling through midtown. Lita sighed and turned back to her latest campaign, a perfume for a large French house trying to break into the American market. Her work was good, but not outstanding, and she thought it was because she was feeling exhausted. A gorgeous girl was standing in front of the Eiffel Tower on her mockup, with the slogan, ‘European Elegance. Wear L’Amour.’ It was OK, but it hardly rocked her world. It would do fine, but it wouldn’t break any sales records. Lita wondered if she needed a vacation, a holiday from all the aggravation. Like she’d ever find time. She hadn’t been out of the country since that long-ago trip to.England. The image of R-upert and Rebecca flashed through her mind, with the normal burst of private, white-hot hatred. Flustered, she pushed her hair out of her eyes and pressed her hands over them.
Her phone buzzed. It was Janice, her assistant. Lita had picked Janice herself from the pool and they got on fine. In fact, she sometimes felt like Janice was the closest thing she had to a friend.
‘Lita, Harry Weiss has called a meeting. Can you make it?’
‘For Harry, of course I can.’ Staring out at Manhattan’s needles of glass and stone jabbing into the sky wasn’t going to get her anywhere. ‘Tell him I’ll be right down.’
‘It’s not in his office, it’s in the conference room. All the senior people are gonna be there.’
‘Of course they are.’ Lita sighed. ‘OK, I’ll be there.’
She picked up a pen and a yellow pad and made her way to the elevators. Lita hated being called to meetings with everyone else. She didn’t think she should have to pitch for work against the others. Basically because she knew she’was better than they were.
The conference room was packed. Lita was one of the last to get there. The polished oak table was set with glasses of water and a plate of cookies which nobody was touching. She nodded curtly at the usual suspects. Harry had obviously gotten there earliest, he was seated at the head of the table. All the senior copywriters and art directors and a couple of account managers were in there. She was the only woman in the room.
‘What’s the buzz?’ Lita asked Pete Besse!, the best art director Doheny had. He glanced appreciatively at her short dress, which Lita ignored. She was used to the boys gawking at her. Bessel had once put his hand on her ass, but that was OK. She’d been wearing stilettos at the time and had trodden down on his foot so firmly that she’d cracked a toe. Ever since then, Pete confined himself to leering.
‘Big new account. Harris Pharmaceuticals invited us to pitch. They want to see ideas.’
163
‘Shit, that’s big.’ Pete frowned at the bad language, but Lita didn’t
give a damn. Screw him. She felt a shiver of excitement. Harris were
They had all kinds of household and cosmetic products,
huge.
everything from diapers to shower gel to a range of cheap lipsticks. They had been using a much bigger firm, Young & P,.ubicam, to handle their advertising up to now. They were well known for spending tens of millions on all types of advertising … print, TV commercials, radio, billboards, the works. If the firm could get even a small slice of their work, it meant huge year-end bonuses for somebody. If it’s me, Lita thought, I could double my salary.
She was making great money, but life in the Big Apple was expensive. If she had more of a cushion, maybe she could get into the stock market. Lita needed some assets. Right now she relied on her job
just to keep her head above water.
‘That’s interesting,’ she said.
‘Forget it,’ Pete said nastily. ‘They heard about what happened with
Brite-White. Besides, everybody wants first shot at this thing.’
‘Go fuck yourself, Pete,’ Lita snapped.
‘Oh. Real ladylike. I can’t imagine why a doll like you isn’t hitched
yet,’ Pete said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Do the paisans like that kinda talk?’
‘Number one, there’s more to life than getting married. And number
two, I’m not Italian, I’m Hispanic.’
‘Whatever.’ Pete shrugged, just to show her that it was all the same to him. Lita thought of something suitably vicious, but was interrupted by
Harry Weiss entering the room. ‘
‘Settle down, boys,’ Harry said, and the murmur of voices subsided.
‘You’ve probably heard that Harris is looking for new representation. They’re considering us, a couple of boutique shops and Smith & Watkins. Needless to say, Bob Dawn, our esteemed MD, is determined that we should get the account. Harris has a soala they want us to pitch for. It comes in new packaging, a kind of bottle that you squeeze, and it comes out of a little spout.’ He tossed a small bottle of liquid soap on to the table. It was white plastic with red and blue flowers on it. ‘This is it. We have one week to put mockups together. They are starting offwith a print campaign. You’ll all come up with something, submit it to Bob Dawn’s office direct. He picks the best three, submits them to Harris. God help you if none of them are good enough for us to pick up the
account.’
‘And what’s the prize?’ Matt Lauder called out across the table. The
other men chuckled. Lita bit her cheeks. She couldn’t stand these guys
and their hearty, boys-club bonhomie.
‘Apart from keeping your job?’ Weiss asked flatly. Lita grinned. Harry
64
Weiss was the only one of these jerks she had any time for. ‘Bob is actually putting up something pretty big. A hundred grand for the guy that gets this account.’
The murmur redoubled.
Or the girl, Lita said to herself. Or the girl.
‘That’s it. Go to it. They sent over twenty bottles of the product. Your assistants can come and get them.’
There was a rush for the door. Everybody wanted to get started right away. On her way out, Lita swiped the sample that Harry had thrown on to the table. She had a feeling that once Janice got down there, there wouldn’t be any bottles left.
‘Lita.’ Harry Weiss stuck out his arm and stopped her as she was leaving. ‘Janice told my assistant you wanted some vacation time. is everything OK?’
Lita tossed the soap bottle in her hand. Look at how concerned he was over the idea she’d take a vacation. She really was a workaholic. ‘It’s fine, Harry, and I don’t want any time off. Everything’s peachy.’
‘Good to hear it. You can come to me if you need to talk. Not about
the soap, though,’ Weiss added hastily. ‘That wouldn’t be fair.’ ‘Thanks.’ She was quite touched. Tll keep that in mind.’
‘I know you can do us proud on this one, Lita,’ Weiss said quietly. ‘If you get this account, Bob would forget all about …’ His voice trailed off.
Lira patted the soap bottle. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’
‘So what are you going to do?”
Janice knocked and simultaneously walked into Lita’s office. She was carrying a cup of hot coffee with cinnamon sprinkled on top of it, and it smelt delicious. Lita smiled gratefully; she needed something this morning. ‘Come up with something perfect,’ Lita said. ‘Any ideas?’
The other woman blinked. Janice Cohen was almost thirty, rather plain and highly efficient. Lita was sure she could have gone to any good college - NYU, Columbia - if her parents had had the money to send her there. Janice was poor, but she never discussed her finances with anybody. Lita could see the signs, though. She herself had come from that world. Some of Janice’s jackets and skirts were neatly darned in places. Lita had seen the same marks before, on her mother’s clothes. The seventies were the The’ generation, everybody was about hot and young, and at thirty maybe life had passed a woman like Janet by. Yet she took immense pride in her work. She didn’t rush out the door on the dot of five, she wasn’t sloppy and she didn’t gossip about Lita or
I65
anyone else. Lita had had a short list when she got to choose her own
assistant. Janice’s had been the only name on it.
‘You’re asking me for ideas?’
‘Why not? You’ve worked here for six years, fight?’
‘Eight, actually.’
Lita motioned for Janice to shut the door behind her and sit down.
‘You must have picked up a lot about the advertising business by now.’
Janice nodded. ‘I would say so. But assistants aren’t usually asked to
give their opinions.’
‘Well, this isn’t a usual office. You heard about Bob Dawn’s contest?’
‘All the secretaries did.’
Of course. The secretaries knew everything before any of the executives did. They were faster than AT&T.
‘Do you have any ideas on this?’ Lita tossed her the liquid soap bottle. ‘Other than to check the Beta testing?’ Lita groaned. ‘Not you, too.’
Janice smiled, which was unusual. ‘Yes, I do. I. think that everyone
else is going to be so desperate to get this business that they are going to
forget to focus on the client.’
Lita leaned forward slightly in her seat. ‘How do you mean?’ ‘They are going to be looking for ways to be new and radical and funky, but Hams likes to sell to wives and mothers. They like
straightforward advertising, nothing conceptual.’
‘Correct,’ Lira agreed.
‘So, look at this bottle. It squeezes. What Hams will want to emphasize is that it isn’t messy. Maybe it gets more soap out, so it’s economical. You always lose so much soap offthe end of a bar, which is wasteful and untidy,’ Janice said, with extreme disapproval. Lita imagined Janice painstakingly scraping soap mess from her sink and tut tutting over it. ‘So I would sell it for what housewives want in a soap. Value, efficiency and no mess. I think if you can do that, you’ll be on to a winner.
Lita grinned. ‘So do I, Janice. Thank you so much.’
‘You’re welcome. And about that perfume.’ Janice pointed to the mock-up of the girl by the Eiffel Tower. ‘If I may speak frankly, that’s rather boring.’
‘Yeah, it wasn’t my best effort.’
‘Instead of deferring to the French as being so much more “hip”,’ and
Lita could hear the inverted commas she put around the word, ‘why don’t you suggest that the American girl is the stylish one? Put a model in the same shot, wearing jeans and holding a large Stars and Stripes.’
‘That’s brilliant.’ Lita was shocked. ‘That’s perfect.’
I66
‘And for the slogan,’ Janice said, gabbling slightly now as though she was afraid of being cut off, ‘How about “Have style. Will travel.”?’
‘I love it.’ Lira leaned right over desk and hugged Janice. ‘I was stuck on that one. I’m going to recommend you for a promotion.’
Janice turned purple.
‘Are you OK?’ Lita asked anxiously.
‘I’m fine. I think I need a glass of water.’
‘Just one thing.’
‘Anything,’ Janice said, with unaccustomed passion.
‘Please don’t leave me before we’ve got this soap thing done.’
Lita had somebody else on her team now, and she enjoyed it. Janice talked to the other assistants and reported back to Lita that her hunch was correct - the men were outdoing each other with outrageous ideas. Lira had Janice find out the results of the Beta testing and sample product names the company was leaning towards. She reported, from one of her opposite numbers, an executive’s assistant at Harris, that the big company was almost settled on ‘SoftClean’ as the brand name.
‘That’s wonderful. You’re a genius,’ Lita almost shouted, when Janice got back to her with this nugget.
‘But you can’t use that name. They could trace the information leak back to Maria.’
Tm not going to. But the name tells us things that Hams wants to point out. Clean is a given, but soft … They want the buyers to think about luxury.’
‘And maybe that the soap doesn’t melt and cake on to the sink.’
‘That, too. Look, this is what r’ve got so far.’ She held it up for Janice to see. ‘What do you think?’
167
‘Oh, my goodness.’ Janice sat down heavily on Lita’s chair. ‘That’s perfect.’
Lita had a large mock-up on cardboard, done in her normal mode of using a collage to get an approximation of what she wanted. Once she was certain of her image, an art director would take it and produce something more refined. But the collages worked pretty well. They got the point across. Clearly Janice had gotten it.
An attractive, middle-aged woman in a neat pair of black pants with a crisp white shirt was fixing the coat on her angelic-looking, soft-skinned daughter. The door was open with a school bus in the background. The mother looked stylish and pulled-together. There was a picture of the Soft-Soap bottle in the foreground. The copy read ‘No time for mess. No time for stress. No time for less than the best.’
‘You think that would sell it?’ Lita asked, rather proudly. ‘Absolutely. She’s a fox, but she’s still a morn. You really hit it.’ Janice peered under the slogan to read the small prifit. Lita had only bothered with a couple of sentences: ‘Economy meets style. When you don’t have time or money to waste, and you won’t take anything less than the softest skin, use WonderSoap. Your family deserves it.’
‘That’s perfect, too. You’re winning this easily.’ Janice looked as smug as a cat with a dead bird. ‘I guess that mears I get my promotion, huh?’
‘Absolutely. Just as soon as this is in the bag.’