I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, still working out of a cubicle in New York. Burt Manning, who had been creative director in the Chicago office, was transferred to New York to fix the place, which was a sinking ship at the time. Or maybe the ship had already sunk and nobody bothered to notice.
Almost immediately, Burt became my mentor. Why? Because I chopped wood—I worked hard—and I could write. I could also write fast.
Of course, Burt was a mentor who could torture you. He browbeat the hell out of me on a daily basis. I really didn’t like writing ads, but he made me aware of the importance of every sentence, the importance of one sentence flowing into the next, and how you had to always remember you were talking to an audience—and that audience had absolutely no interest in what you had to say about beer, beans, or beauty cream.
Advertising is usually created by pairs or teams of art directors and writers. Burt liked to work lean, and that’s what I learned to do too. I was my own staff. I worked alone, didn’t even have an art director. The arrangement has served me well.
Within a few months, Burt put me in charge of the Quaker business, which he’d brought with him to New York. The food conglomerate Quaker was his safety net, his leverage. It was a lot of billing for a soft-spoken, small-town kid like me to be handling.
Three days a week I had to work out of Thompson Chicago in the John Hancock building, where they set me up in a big office with multiple picture windows overlooking Lake Michigan. I also got to stay in a two-bedroom suite in the Hampshire House off Michigan Avenue. Everybody in the Chicago office thought I was Burt’s boy, some big-deal writer coming out there from New York. But I was just this naive kid rescued from a cubicle next to the water fountain.
One of the Thompson account executives on the Quaker business helped me settle into Chicago. The exec lived out in the suburbs, a forty- to forty-five-minute commute. He and I had to be in an early meeting—7:15—at Quaker’s corporate headquarters in the Merchandise Mart. So he asked if he could crash in my suite at the Hampshire House.
The two of us had dinner at Eli’s the Place for Steak, then we headed back to the hotel. Around eleven, I got into bed. Five minutes later the door to my bedroom creaked open.
Without saying a word to me, the account executive jumped into my bed. He wasn’t wearing anything.
Now, understand that I worked for this man. Also, this was 1974. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I tried to handle it as well as I could. “I don’t know where you picked up this idea. This isn’t going to happen. You have to get out of my bed. You have to go. Please leave.”
The account executive finally got out of the bed and he left. He didn’t say a word to me that night. He didn’t talk about it the following morning either. Like it never happened.
The incident shook me up. I was never physically threatened, but I felt betrayed. And hurt. Obviously, I never forgot it. It’s the kind of situation that in this day would have been a big issue inside any company.
Maybe I should have, but I didn’t bring it to Human Resources. I think I didn’t want to talk about it to anybody. It was a different time.