I can describe my success in advertising, and even in publishing, in one off-color paragraph.
When I was the young creative director at Thompson New York, a crafty veteran account man by the name of Bob Norsworthy thought that I was arrogant and full of crap. He wasn’t all wrong. But I kept making the right decisions. And so Norsworthy—a very funny raconteur from Kentucky—came up with the following: “If Jim Patterson says a grasshopper can pull a plow, hitch up that little motherfucker.”
What Bob Norsworthy meant, I think, was that I had a good gut, good instincts for what was going to work and what wasn’t. Is it that simple? Sometimes, I think that it is.
Meanwhile, Advertising Satan continued to use his wiles on me. I was in my mid-thirties when I became the youngest creative director ever at J. Walter New York. Or so they told me.
I was always clear about the work—what was good, what wasn’t. I would always say, “This is just my opinion”—but in the end, I was the person in charge. I didn’t often take the praise, but I always took the blame.
Around this time, I teamed up with Steve Bowen, an ex-Marine who used to keep a grenade on his desk. I don’t think it was an armed grenade, but it sure looked like it. And he thought it made his point, whatever in hell his point was.
That was Steve’s style: macho and Marine, provocative, combative, and, occasionally, a little hard to understand.
Steve had a way of speaking that people in the office came to call “Bowenisms.” He did come out with some unforgettable lines. “There’s got to be a golden pony somewhere in all this horse shit” and “You can’t leap tall buildings with a puckered asshole.” Steve Bowen might have been a distant cousin of my old high-school principal, Brother Leonard.
He was a great partner for me. I tended to be more measured. Somehow our partnership worked oddly well. When he and I took the reins at Thompson New York, the flagship office was seen as stodgy, old J. Walter. We pulled off some loony-tunes-crazy stunts to try and counter the image.
J. Walter Thompson had moved its offices a few blocks north. One night, we commandeered the lobby at 466 Lexington and threw a totally ridiculous WrestleMania event. At least we understood how absurd it was. I did, anyway. Steve—not so much. We invited the entire New York advertising community to come to dowdy J. Walter Thompson to watch live wrestling in the enormous atrium at 466, have some laughs, and party like it was 1999, a decade or so in the future. Most of the agencies came, and they partied, and Thompson’s image changed almost overnight.
When Steve and I took over the New York office, our largest account was health-care and consumer-products giant Warner-Lambert. Less than a week into the job, we were summoned to meet with their COO and president, Mel Goodes. We knew it wasn’t going to be a fun visit to Morris Plains, New Jersey.
Mel turned out to be a good guy, but at that first meeting he told us, “Look, fellas, right now we’ve got three ad agencies—Thompson, Y and R, and Ted Bates. I’m sorry to say this, but I have to rank you guys fourth out of three.”
I told Steve I thought I could not only fix the problem but that I could fix it almost overnight. But it would take some courage from the account managers—the Suits. Steve was on my side, and he was never lacking for courage. The few, the proud, the ex-Marines.
In recent years Thompson had been bringing Warner-Lambert as many as a dozen creative approaches for every assignment, then letting them pick. The Suits were responsible for that strategy. In my opinion, it was suicidal. No agency could create a dozen approaches that had any chance of working in the marketplace. From that day on, we presented only two or three campaigns, and only ones we believed in. Steve and I promised each Warner-Lambert brand manager that we knew the difference. They began to trust us.
Within a year, Mel Goodes invited Steve and me to dinner at the Palm and said we were now his number 1. He picked up the check for dinner (a rarity for clients) and also handed us a bundle of new business.
During the next four years, Bowen and I doubled the size of the New York office—twice. I hated to admit it, but advertising hell was almost starting to be fun. I was beginning to enjoy the constant fires and the blistering heat.
The New York office was thriving. But Thompson was having big troubles elsewhere. Industry analyst Alan J. Gottesman quipped that J. Walter Thompson “[has] problems in places where other companies don’t even have places.”