Among the many unsurprising facts of life that, when taken in aggregate, ultimately spell out the doom of our species is this: People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention.
For a time I commanded both. I attracted attention and held it. I wasn’t famous, exactly—Henry Luce never threatened to put me on the cover of Time—but those who knew my work kept tabs on me, watched to see what I’d do next. After R.H. Macy’s sent pregnant me packing, my devotees somehow grew even more passionate, distilling into a cult of hermetists eerily adept at spotting my freelance copy—to which, of course, my name was never attached. With my association with my longtime employer dissolved and my poetry collections on their way out of print, my following became oddly similar to those of the pseudonymous criminals from the outer boroughs who cover subway cars with bright, hyperelaborate, all-but-illegible graffiti: fans keen-eyed enough to recognize not only art but authorship. The Lillian Boxfish Society! Connoisseurs of the cast-aside! Taxonomists of trash! Secret agents of an aimless, harmless, bottomless conspiracy no one can unlock—me least of all. I once received a beautiful handwritten seven-page letter from a twelve-year-old girl on an Indian reservation in Idaho that made the observation—supported by a dozen examples drawn from twenty-odd years of poems and prose, ads and verses—that tropical birds appear with great frequency in my work. They often have funny names, I replied by way of explanation.
But I never garnered enough of either—enough respect, enough attention—to be invited to appear on, say, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Even when it was still based in New York.
And this is a shame, because I can say without undue pride that I would have been so good as a guest on those national programs: What’s My Line?, Hollywood Squares, all the rest. At a certain point in my career, at my quickest and cleverest, I even would have been great—but that point was long past when I appeared on TV for the very last time.
Although I never hit the television jackpot, over the years I did make several well-received appearances on local affiliates of the major networks: news programs, talk shows, the occasional bit of occasional verse during a Yankees or Dodgers broadcast. From the outset, though, that final appearance was different: a one-off for a public television program called Where They’ve Been and Where They’re Going, which took as its underwriter-seducing ambit the discussion of particular industries and the most eminent achievers within them.
When the show’s producer, Mindy, first called me, she pitched the appearance as an opportunity to talk about my storied background, as well as a chance for some of the notable advertising women who’d succeeded me to honor the trail I had blazed.
Her invitation came in the spring of 1980, an anxious season when seemingly every flat surface in Manhattan was adorned with a “New Yorkers for Kennedy” sign. I had, by that time, finally stopped writing copy. For years I’d worked on campaigns for Arrow shirts, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Martex fiber, Clairol, DuPont, Seagram’s, Simmons Beautyrest, and Chef Boyardee—a lot of decent freelance clients in the 1960s and ’70s—but I didn’t need the money anymore: I’d saved a lot, invested wisely. And lately copywriting hadn’t been bringing me joy. So I’d let it go. I didn’t quit, per se; I just started saying no until eventually no one was asking.
Poetry still flowed out of me—an unstoppable effluence—so I continued to write greeting cards, which I’d taken up not long after I got out of Silver Hill, but even that felt more rote than satisfying. The neighborhood of verbal felicity in which I still resided had gone down, down, down. I kept living there—trimming the hedges, freshening up the paint—but everyone else had died or moved away.
So Mindy’s proposition caught me at a moment of uncharacteristic vulnerability. I let my guard down, allowed myself to be swayed. Solicitousness and flattery are, of course, the classic methods for preying on the aged. This, I’m unhappy to report, is because they work.
Though I’d have preferred to walk—it was only two miles—I didn’t want to get windblown on the way, so I took a cab to the studio on the Upper West Side.
When I showed up, Mindy greeted me with compliments. She had a feathered and blow-dried haircut and a propensity to exclaim.
“Miss Boxfish, right on time! Don’t you look sharp in that scarlet suit!” she said. “Thank you for not wearing black, or navy blue, or white. You’d be amazed how many people ignore our directions!”
“They think they know best what will make them look good, I imagine,” I said. “But I assume you know your business, and I’ve done this often enough not to second-guess you. In fact I think I was in this very same studio once before, almost thirty years ago, to be a guest on Betty Furness’s Success Story.”
“Is that so!” said Mindy, who clearly had no idea what I was talking about, no clue as to whether Betty Furness was a person or a manufacturer of home heating units. “I hope we’ll get a chance to talk about some of that fascinating history today! Now the show, as you know, is telecast from seven to eight—which means this morning we’ll be shooting for an hour or so! We’ll probably go a little longer, so if we need to edit or cut anything, we can! We’ll have the material!”
As I wondered what might cause a person to sustain such apparent enthusiasm—an endocrine condition? cocaine?—Mindy waved over an assistant who took my coat and hung it up. The studio was air-conditioned to a meat-locker temperature, the better to prevent us from becoming sweaty and shiny under the lights.
The other guest panelists were Leslie Monroe, an ad exec who’d rocketed from the copywriter ranks in the glossy 1960s and was still in the game, and Geraldine Kidd—she did look young—who’d recently made a stir with a provocative shampoo campaign and was on her way up. We all met in the green room.
The show’s host, Tuck Merkington, came back and greeted us; he was fresh from makeup, salt-and-pepper hair shellacked into an oceanic sweep above his leonine face. Like so many public-television people, he was a former radio guy, with a voice made for broadcasting: even his name sounded like an avuncular chuckle. He thanked us for coming, and Mindy marched us to the set to arrange us in our places, tasteful chairs arrayed in a semicircle that was part home den, part doctor’s waiting room.
The tape rolled. Tuck ran through his introductions of each of us, then kicked off the discussion with a patronizing cliché: “Now, this program will no doubt be watched by a lot of girls who already have a toe on the first rung of the advertising ladder,” he said. “I’d love to ask you on their behalf: What steps are taken by those who scale the heights?”
Geraldine Kidd, unfazed by Tuck’s vapidity, jumped in. “Listen, ladies, here is where you stand,” she said. “Advertising is no longer the dream job of every high-school girl. Radio, television, and public relations have passed it in the popularity race. This is all to the good for those of you who want advertising or nothing, because you really stand a chance to make it.”
“Indeed,” I agreed. “The same skills that I built my career on are as valuable as ever. If you write well, if you have creativity and good instincts about how to communicate with people, then you’ll make progress. Once you get in the door, it won’t take long before your talents are recognized.”
“Well, creativity is always good,” said Leslie Monroe. “But we should be clear that writing is no longer the advertiser’s primary tool. As early as the sixties, when I got my start, whether you were making classy ads for Ogilvy or hilarious ones for Bernbach, the priority was always to deliver a complete visual statement. Graphic artists and copywriters had come to be regarded as equals.”
“Certainly, visual impact has always been important,” I said. “I always worked with talented illustrators, and they deserve more recognition than they get. But words are still key. No matter what first draws our attention, language is where we make our decisions. If you look at the first ad in English—by William Caxton, from the 1400s—it says that a volume of Easter rules is for sale at his print shop and can be had ‘good cheap.’ No matter how you dress them up, the basic principles of advertising are all already there in Caxton’s ad.”
“What a charming fact, Miss Boxfish,” said Tuck. “Very typical of your famous style, as I understand it.”
While I was trying to figure out what Tuck meant by this—typical how?—Geraldine Kidd piped up again.
“We all still get a giggle from the ads of Miss Boxfish’s era,” she said with a youthful toss of her youthful head. “I’m sure most of us remember our grandparents constantly quoting some of the famous Boxfish lines. And they were, to be sure, hugely innovative for their time. But over the years, the way we in the profession think about advertising—how it fits into a larger marketing plan—has changed a lot. For instance, and to respectfully take issue with something Miss Boxfish just said, we now understand that the advertising that we remember from her heyday simply does not take full account of the way people actually make purchases.”
“Really, Miss Kidd?” said Tuck. “How do you mean?”
And then Geraldine Kidd sat up in her seat, expertly angled her shoulders toward the “A” camera, and proceeded to demolish everything I had achieved in my career.
“First of all” she said, “the old ads spoke to people. They charmed them, won them over, laid out the case for the product. This kind of friendly persuasion can be delightful, but it also assumes that the audience has the linguistic aptitude to follow the argument, the sophistication to appreciate the wit. This style of advertising can’t sell anything to people who don’t have those capacities. Next, the old ads assume that it’s the heads of households—educated and informed—who make purchase decisions. That isn’t necessarily so. As often as not, the real decision maker is a child. I could cite other examples, but my point is that it is ultimately just not that important how much we enjoy a particular ad, or how much we’re entertained by it. Do we remember the name of the product? Will we act on what we’ve been told? That’s what matters. We can’t value our own cleverness more than our results.”
“I think we all know it was established early on,” said Tuck with a wink, “that pictures of little children can sell just about anything.”
Then Leslie Monroe spoke up—smiling, wresting the wheel of the discussion away from addled Tuck, reasserting her authority over the upstart Kidd—to administer the coup de grâce.
“That’s exactly right, Tuck,” she said. “And not only children. Animals. Music. Fire. Sex. Darkness. Loud noises. The odors of the body. We’ve known for fifty thousand years that these things carry a powerful emotional charge. I came on the advertising scene just as we were finally learning how to use them in a systematic way to reach and motivate our customers.”
She pivoted in her seat—Lurex halter glinting beneath her cropped batwing jacket—and laid a small, lushly moisturized hand on my elbow.
“Lillian’s writing from those early years,” she said, “the late 1920s to the early ’40s, is just so clever. So glamorous, in its zany way. So fun! And innovative! And that, I’m sad to say, is really the problem. There’s only one Lillian Boxfish. Ads that tried to imitate what she did—that used humor to appeal to people’s sentiments and their reason—weren’t as successful. Worse, they made it easier for the audience to spot the tricks, to learn the methods. Lillian’s ads were stylish, but styles change for exactly this reason. My peers and I knew we’d never beat Lillian at her own game. So we cut in line. We got to the audience before they listened to her pitch, before they thought anything at all. We figured out that it’s far more effective to appeal to fundamental emotions: envy, fear, lust. Animal instincts.”
“Miss Boxfish?” said Tuck, theatrically inquisitive. “Your thoughts?”
Meeting Tuck’s phony gaze felt unwholesome, like talking to a wax dummy, so I looked past him to Mindy, who was watching through the windows of the control room. Nothing in her unflaggingly upbeat mien suggested that this was going any way other than as planned; she displayed no concern that rather than honoring my legacy, Tuck and my fellow guests were painting me as the Neanderthal in their History of Man diorama. Instead of Let’s thank the pioneering women who came before us!, their tone was more along the lines of Remember how we used to wear hoop skirts?
“My thoughts?” I said. “My thoughts are that I am on this program by some mistake.”
In the glowing window, beyond the cameramen, Mindy was shaking her head.
“I’m afraid I’ve arrived unprepared to defend my approach to writing ads,” I said, “never mind the very concept of professional responsibility, or the practice of simply treating people with respect. Therefore I’m compelled to defer to the au courant expertise of my two successors. Please, ladies, resume the accounts of your efforts to unwind the supposed advances of civilization and return us consumers to a state of pliable savagery. Who knows, perhaps some young lady who watches this program will take up where you leave off and find a way to ease us all back into the trees with the orangutans, who I gather are deft hands at the fruit market. With luck and hard work, perhaps we’ll even recover our old gills and quit terrestrial life entirely. Back to the sea! That Florida swampland Mother bought may prove to be a good investment after all. In any event, I wish you both luck in your quest. I will not be keeping track of your progress, however. My interests, such as they are, lie elsewhere. To be clear, it’s not that I no longer want to work in the world that you’re describing. It’s that I no longer want to live in the world that you’re describing.”
Tuck Merkington looked at me, then at Leslie Monroe and Geraldine Kidd, neither of whom seemed to have anything to say to that.
My intention wasn’t to be rude, but I couldn’t remain.
I got to my feet from the sleek stuffed chair.
“Thank you so much for having me,” I said, clearly and with courtesy, “but I simply can’t stay. I have to be going. Thank you, Tuck. Thank you, Leslie, Geraldine. Good-bye.”
Mindy intercepted me the instant I stepped off camera. She tried to convince me to continue the panel, but I declined every one of her exclamatory entreaties.
It’s probably not accurate to say that I realized, as I unclipped my lavalier mic, wound its lead around the transmitter, and deposited both in Mindy’s beseeching hand, that this would be the last act of my career in advertising. I had known already that it was over; I had allowed Mindy to leverage my vanity to convince me otherwise, to lure me—like a safecracker or an assassin from some silly film—into taking one last job. Never again: Henceforth I would say no to all similar invitations, though these were not exactly flying thick as locusts anyway. My public appearances since then have been limited to a few speeches at girls’ schools for commencements or career days, occasions at which I was introduced only as a vague eminence, an old lady who used to be funny. All these events I have enjoyed tremendously.
Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs.
I asked for and received my coat from Mindy’s cringing assistant, buttoned it over my absurd, optimistic, embarrassing scarlet suit, and headed outside into the late-March sunlight to set about walking home, knowing that only a walk—zigzagging among strangers on their own peculiar errands, setting my pace in counterpoint to my pulse, dissolving myself in the street—would help me feel better.
A motto favored by the ancients was solvitur ambulando: It is solved by walking. Sometimes, I might add, by walking out. I like to imagine that that irascible tub dweller Diogenes would have approved of my big exit, my stroll away from the rolling cameras, even if he spared no contempt for the career that brought me before them in the first place. Well, too bad, Diogenes: I make no apologies for a life that privileged pleasure, poise, and politesse. Had your lantern light fallen on my face that bright March morning I could have told you, honestly, that I have never been dishonest. In any event, I daresay the brand of cynicism displayed in that television studio was not one you would have recognized.
The spring air—clean, substantial—refreshed me as I headed down Broadway and skirted Columbus Circle. The leaves were just beginning to stipple themselves greenly on the trees, and I thought for a moment of going into Central Park. At this time of day the Literary Walk, with its statues and elm trees, would be as safe as it ever got.
And the elms reminded me of Max, and of Johnny. The elm that we three planted as a family the summer Max got back from the war still grew, up at Pin Point in Maine. Max, stripped to his undershirt and suspenders, had dug its wide hole, then balanced the burlapped ball of roots in the middle; Johnny danced around the edge, waving his little wooden trowel, singing an elaborate tune he’d made up, the only lyric of which was tree. The elm was quite tall now, thirty-five years old to Johnny’s thirty-eight. Our musical son, now a professor of music himself, lived only a few miles from it, more at home there than he’d ever been in the city.
I decided against the detour, though—mostly because I was hungry, but also because it would deject me to see the bronze likenesses of William Shakespeare and Robert Burns and all their illustrious and manly compatriots. In my moment of professional humiliation it might have been nice to take solace in the eternal realm of art—to burn with a hard gemlike flame, et cetera—but there, too, of late I had met only with frustration and defeat.
My final book of verse—a collected, not an original—called Free with Purchase, came out in 1968, by which time my light, dry style was well out of fashion, although the few reviews it received were favorable. R.H. Macy’s even bought an ad in The New York Review of Books to help promote their sale of it, someone having decided that the accompanying illustration should be a chef with a tagline reading: “A book to give your hero or heroine—appetizing, easily digested, and nonfattening, it makes a savory entrée or dessert.”
With my various disappointments displaced for the moment by the notion of savory entrées, I headed lunchward, toward the Horn & Hardart at Forty-Second Street and Third Avenue, the city’s last remaining automat, where I stopped in for a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.
When walking, I generally welcome courteous contact with strangers—the surprising confidences of letter carriers and construction workers, waitresses and beat cops being just the thing to jolt my busy brain from its unproductive churn—but my mood just then was too tenuous to recommend such encounters. Besides, the automat’s coin-fed mediocrity seemed more in keeping with the spirit of the day, and there I could be confident of uninterrupted solitude as I sipped my tomato juice and looked out the window at the jittery parade of truants and delinquents, the lonely and the bored, all headed west toward Times Square. About ninety percent of the passersby, I estimated, were younger than I, most of them considerably.
Old, old, old—I had grown old. No longer did any even faint acquaintance rush toward me as I was grappling alone with a sandwich and a magazine. I’d bolt my food if my aging throat weren’t so loath to open and close as quickly as it used to.
For the longest time, I knew so many people in the city that I couldn’t sit down in Midtown without at least one of them coming up to say hello, maybe even joining me. But little by little they had moved away, or died, or were being held prisoner—by caretakers, by their own bodies—someplace far from the street.
Helen, heartbreakingly, was among those I’d never see again. Like me, she’d been a Manhattan holdout, insisting, over her son’s and stepdaughters’ requests, on staying in the Greenwich Village brownstone where she and Dwight had lived for the duration of their marriage. Dwight, so much older, had died in 1965, but Helen had hung on until just last year. Her son, Merritt, had her shipped back to Birmingham, the old family plot, so there wasn’t even a physical spot in the city where I could visit her memory.
I might have liked to get married again, too—to remarry as Dwight Zweigert had done. But after Max and I split up I was not exactly residing in the Era of the Extra Man, and between mothering Gian and keeping myself together and afloat, I had had little time for the exhausting business of being courted. To be sure, I was also not at the peak of my appeal to most men at that point.
I went back to the vending window, fed it cash, and got a slice of pie—warm apple with vanilla sauce—plus a cup of coffee: black, no sugar or cream.
When I got home to Murray Hill, I would write Johnny—Gian—a letter. I’d type it on my Remington, probably, or on my Hermes if the ribbon got to snarling. I was already composing it in my mind, taking it—as I often did—as an occasion for arranging my own thoughts.
Since 1960, when Gian left for college, I had written him a minimum of three times a week. A lot, I knew, but not as bad as I used to be. When he first left home I wrote melodramatic poems with titles like “To a Distant College Freshman,” and I longed for the days when measles were the concern, not bouts of going steady.
From the morning that Max and I brought him home from the hospital, Gian had delivered the gratitude and terror that accompany the gift of a beautiful thing: the implicit charge that you, thenceforth, will be responsible for its care and upkeep.
I was not sentimental over him, though I was devoted, as he was to me. He understood my sense of humor. He got me.
For my latest birthday he’d sent me a dopey card with a half a dozen tiny cats on it that looked just like Phoebe; inside he’d written You’re more adorable than a basket full of kittens!!! He’d led all three grandkids in drawing their own cat cards, too, and had mailed them all separately, thus ensuring that the postman was credited with a tour de force on the day they arrived.
I finished the coffee and rose to take my dishes to the dish drop, wondering which of us would vanish first: me or this automat.
When I typed up the letter to Gian, I decided, I wouldn’t tell him about the television studio. Only about the Horn & Hardart, and about the walk, most likely.
I had leaned on him so hard for such a long time—in person, after his father left me for Julia, then in writing, after he himself left home for Bowdoin—that I strove not to do so anymore. We had held each other upright for years; now there had to be distance between us, only a little, if we were ever to learn to travel under our own power.
Even when he was a kid, Gian seemed to understand the absurdity of what his mother did for a living—how my angle was to take common things and reveal them to be strange and attractive, and to thereby relieve the monotony of advertising. The monotony of living, really.
I drew my coat around me and reemerged into the strangeness of Forty-Second Street.
The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.