MY OWN OFFICE LIFE began when I was a little tyke of eighteen—flat-chested, pale, acne-skinned, terrified and convinced of one thing only: working in an office was practically the most gruesome thing that could happen to a woman. If there had been anything else I could have done I certainly would have, but there wasn’t anything. I had only a business college education and that not yet completed. The school got me a part-time job for six dollars a week in a radio station so that I could continue to pay my tuition.
Every day after school I would arrive at radio station KHJ in Hollywood, California, to tabulate the mail for a breakfast show called “Rise and Shine.” The emcee, Mr. Wilson, announced birthdays, wedding anniversaries and other sentimental occasions on this show, and it was my business to glean from the mail who wanted what remembered and where the present was hidden, and to pick up any gooey messages listeners wanted delivered on the show. I would type this information on three-by-five cards for Kir. Wilson to read from on the air while pretending to consult the actual letter. “Well, well, well!” Mr. Wilson would exclaim. “Little Deborah Jean Dallyrumple over in Gardena is having a fourth birthday! Let’s see. It says here if Deborah Jean will go look out in the garage in Daddy’s tool chest, she’ll find something her little heart has been beating for.”
Whether I went astray in trying to decode some of the handwriting, or whether I looked up from the typewriter too often, or whether I was trying to destroy Mr. Wilson outright (he had a temper like a rattlesnake), I don’t know, but at least half the time I would get the information from one letter mingled in with that of a different letter. The child Mr. Wilson sent racing out to look in Daddy’s tool chest for her present would unearth nothing more interesting than Daddy’s secret cache of Old Granddad, while her own precious gift lay unclaimed upstairs under sister Evelyn’s bed. Meanwhile, whoever was supposed to be looking in the tool chest Mr. Wilson would have dispatched to a tree house, or to a Shetland pony’s feeding trough, or to sister Evelyn’s bed when she didn’t have a sister Evelyn.
Those first jobs . . . honestly!
Mr. Wilson was never closer to a stroke than when he had innocently announced, reading from one of my cards, “Well, listen here, twin brother and sister Barbara and Barry Biedenfelder of Monrovia, aged nine, are celebrating their fourth wedding anni . . . (gradual slowing of pace) . . . versary and . . . expecting . . . a . . . BABY?!”
Mercifully Mr. Wilson never saw me. He was up rising and shining about four every morning (no wonder he had a temper) and was long gone from the station when I arrived in the afternoon. His engineers reported faithfully, however, how Mr. Wilson had turned white, then scarlet and finally gone into big purple blotches as still another birthday child’s mother called in to say he had bungled everything.
Mr. Wilson’s tantrums and my hating secretarial work notwithstanding, the job had its compensations. The place was loaded with men. I’ve never seen so many men in one company with so few corresponding females to louse things up. There were announcers, engineers, newscasters, musicians, writers, sound men and producers in the back building (where I was); executives, salesmen and program directors in the front building. I was too young to appreciate the older men in their thirties, and I wasn’t quite as comely as Scarlett O’Hara, but nothing could entirely spoil the fun.
When I came in from school every afternoon, some of the men would be playing a dandy game called “Scuttle.” The Scuttle rules were simple to get the hang of. All announcers and engineers who weren’t busy at one particular time would select a secretary or file girl, chase her up and down the halls, through the music library and back to the announcing booths, catch her and take her panties off. Once the panties were off, the girl could put them back on again if she wished. Nothing wicked ever happened. De-pantying was the sole object of the game. While all this was going on, the girl herself usually shrieked, screamed, flailed, blushed, threatened and pretended to faint, but to my knowledge no scuttler was ever reported to the front office. As a matter of fact, the girls wore their prettiest panties to work. There was some retaliatory action about mid-August. Four secretaries ambushed the head scuttler while he was announcing “Captain Midnight” on a forty-two-station hook-up and took his pants off.
Lest it sound as though I was scuttled regularly those summer afternoons, I have to admit, alas, I was never scuttled at all. Sometimes I would look up hopefully from my typewriter to see three or four scuttlers skulking in the doorway mulling it over, but the decision was always the same—too young, too pale, too flat-chested and all those other things I mentioned earlier. Clearly I was un-scuttleable. (Now, really, was your first job anything like that?!)
At the end of six months Mr. Wilson had had about all he could take, so he got me kicked upstairs to the regular secretarial staff of KHJ. Mr. Wilson could sell anybody anything. He told them I could type like a robot, so they let me fill in for girls who were ill or on vacation.
One afternoon I had to send a teletype. I’d never sent a teletype before, and as everybody knows, teletype keys are lightweight and scatterbrained and always clicking off things you never said. This happened to be a serious message giving all stations of the regional network program changes for the day, and for two lines I got along fine: 1:00 TO 2:00 P.M. DAVE ROSE ENSEMBLE, I clickety-clacked impeccably. 2:00 TO 2:15 RICHFIELD NEWS, 2:15 TO 2:30 NORMA YOUNG HOMEMAKERS CLUB. The next instruction read 2:30 TO 3:00 ALL STATIONS FILL. That meant the network had nothing for them and the individual stations could put in whatever they wished. I wrote 2:30 TO 3:00 ALL STATIONS correctly, then took my hands off the keys, presumably to proofread. When I put them back on, I got the right hand one space to the left, so instead of resting on J-K-L-semi-colon, those fingers were on H-J-K-L, and everything else on that side of the board was loused up too. The letter I became U, L became K, and so forth. A perfectly innocent little word like “fill” came out quite shocking. (Try it yourself. You’ll see what I mean.)
For a pale, flat-chested little tyke of eighteen, I certainly stirred up some excitement around there that afternoon with my typo. Bakersfield flashed back immediately, KEEN IDEA. NEED HELP WITH YOUNGER GIRLS. San Francisco called in, AFRA ACTRESSES DEMANDING MORE THAN SCALE. San Diego reported, STATION MANAGER UNABLE PERFORM, HUNG OVER. The regular teletype operator was back at her desk with a temperature of 102 the next morning.
It all seems so gay in retrospect. Actually it’s apt to be the contrary when you’re that young and that innocent. Sometimes your best-meant efforts backfire. One of my assignments was to put an Alka-Seltzer tablet into an envelope twice a day and staple it to the script of the Alka-Seltzer news program. When the announcer did the commercial and said, “Listen to it fizz,” he would drop the real Alka-Seltzer into a Dixie cup of water, and the Alka-Seltzer would fizz raucously—on my good days. (You’d think they would have developed a depth charge or something for these occasions, but radio was quaintly honest in those days.)
I had a lovely inspiration. Why not test the product beforehand and use only a super-fizzy tablet? I tested several, found a real noise-maker, extracted it from the testing water and dried it off for the program. It did start to fizz loud and clear on the air—but only for a second. It was more like a pop, then cathedral-like silence while the newscaster hotfooted it back to the mike.
During my Alka-Seltzer stint I was madly in love with a young pianist named Skitch Henderson who played with the studio orchestra. I would have been happy to be scuttled by him, but no such luck. He never knew I was alive, although I used to pad around after him quite a lot.
Things did get rather sexy for two weeks late in the summer, though. The regular secretary at KHJ’s television transmitter went on vacation and I was sent up to replace her. I even got excused from school to handle the assignment.
The KHJ transmitter looked down on everything in the city, and it was very woodsy up there. The deer and squirrels used to mosey around the swimming pool and come right up to the front door to be led. They were tame, but the engineers were something eke again. They didn’t look wolfy, with their tall white foreheads and luminous white gazes, but aside from the head wizard, who knew about all kinds of inventions except girls, a grabbier bunch I never met.
The trouble may have stemmed from the nature of KHJ’s programming. The only things being telecast in those days were the fights on Friday and wrestling matches on Monday. That left Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with nothing much for the men to do but sit around and practice hammerlocks and right crosses and speculate about their secretary.
Since I didn’t have a car, the five of them took turns driving me up the mountain to work in the morning and back down again at night. I hated to do anything to hurt their feelings or impede science—KHJ was the only television station in town—but it really was a scramble. On the way up, I would roll down the window on my side and get as far out as I could. The only thing that saved me coming down was that the wizard always left the station last and stopped to investigate parked cars or anything that looked suspicious on his private road. Since the driver always had to keep the car in motion, and that took one hand, I had at least a fighting chance.
Well, that was my first dear little job. My word, we’re only through one—there are eighteen to go. I’ll rush-rush. I just want you to know I’m qualified to write about offices.
Job No. 2 was in the Beverly Hills headquarters of Music Corporation of America, then a talent agency of great influence. (I had finished school and was now a secretary full-time.) In case you’re not familiar with what talent agencies do, they find jobs in movies, television, night clubs and theaters for actors, singers, writers and comedians, for which the performers pay them 10 per cent of their salaries. Most performers are not very good at ferreting out jobs for themselves, unless the jobs come looking for them. The sought-after people always work anyway. Jack Lemmon can always get a job. Jack Orange (I hope there isn’t really someone with that name) can’t give his services away, and an agency doesn’t help him much either—but he always signs up. It’s part of the game.
At that time MCA represented Betty Grable, Bette Davis, Paulette Goddard, Dick Powell, Errol Flynn, Alfred Hitchcock, Edgar Bergen, Joan Crawford and many other top stars and bands. I was just twenty and filling out—almost 28-18-28 by then. The furniture hooked me as it did every other young innocent who walked through the door. One good sink up to your knees in those carpets, one good blink at the center-hallway chandelier and delicate antique furniture, and you figured this must be the place (the fact that other companies were paying money notwithstanding). The MCA building looked so much like a Georgian mansion that tourists used to pile up at the front door and wait to be shown through.
There was nothing Georgian about the secretarial pool from which all secretaries flowed, however. It had everything but a rock castle and snails to give it verisimilitude. The executives who swam through even had a fishy look about them, what with being pale green. (Too much time in night clubs, maybe.) My boss, who was head of the band department, ran to light mustard and looked sensational in pink shirts.
A really warm-blooded girl wouldn’t hold a man’s skin tone against him, but these men weren’t really interested in girls ... in us girls, anyway. Occasionally, we would all wear red dresses or pink sweaters on the same day to see if anybody out there had a pulse beat, but no one ever reacted. They just rapped on the glass of our pool—like when it’s time to feed the guppies—if they wanted anything.
Sometimes we sneaked down to MCA’s posh little theater in the viscera of the building to eat our lunches and take naps on Mr. Jules Stein’s yellow, skin-like leather couches. Mr. Stein was president of MCA. He would have had the place sealed off like Tutankhamen’s Tomb with us in it if he’d known. It gives me a little thrill of pleasure just to think about it to this day.
Once a year we secretaries were fished out of our pool for an outing at the Shipstad and Johnson Ice Follies in the Pan-Pacific Auditorium. The Follies were a client, so the bigger the audience the better. “Bring a date, girls,” the company spokesman would say. Now that sort of order can cause a girl to have a heart attack, as any working girl knows. We were all eager to show our bosses how attractive we were to other men, but the war was on (yes, I am over twenty-two), and there was nobody to show them with but fathers, baby brothers and people with collapsed lungs. (Don’t ask me how the MCA men stayed out—perhaps it was their sea-green color.) Of course the MCA men never attended the show with us anyway, so I don’t know what we were in such a flap about.
I will say some of MCA’s male clients did their best to make up for the agents. Rudy Vallee asked me to dinner at his house one night. That sounded all right—it was a big house, and I was sure I could fade into the crowd. Then he told me what to wear: Black high-heeled pumps, sheer black stockings, any dress at all so long as it was black and sexy. “Put your hair on top of your head,” he said.
“Who’s going to be there?” I asked. (I thought maybe a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scout or something.)
“Just us, my dear,” he said.
I didn’t go, but now I sort of wish I had.
One day a famous movie star invited me to have breakfast with him the following day, after which he said he would drive me to work in Beverly Hills. (Wake up now . . . another sexy little incident for you.) It seemed an odd time to have a date, but food was food. Besides, he was most attractive. I ordered the sandhog breakfast—large orange juice, waffles, blueberry syrup, bacon and cold milk. I was starting on a Danish (dessert) when my date said we must be going. He’d only had coffee and had had quite a wait already. He then proceeded to drive me to MCA by practically the same route the KHJ engineers used to take to get up that mountain to the transmitter. A very good thing I’d had breakfast. A girl needs strength.
I took being fired from MCA with reasonable grace, and I don’t think the firing had anything to do with my alienating MCA clients. It had something to do with what MCA called “not working out,” a miserable expression you may hear used in connection with your own work some day, heaven forbid. Unfortunately, MCA neglected to tell me I wasn’t working out, and I trained my own replacement for three weeks under the impression I was helping the new girl learn the ropes. Naturally I didn’t weep when Attorney General Robert Kennedy closed the talent division of MCA down many years later.
After a few shabby part-time involvements, I was hired by Eddie Cantor’s gag writers, some of whose best gags were wasted in the elevator of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The shortest, fattest of the four would take out a roll of bills as we rode up to the office, squint at me and say, “How much you say it was, Myrtle, fifteen or twenty?” That broke up everybody in the elevator except me.
If one of the four writers thought of a gag he was insane about but the other three didn’t think was funny, they would yell for me across the room. “Gurley!” (What can you do if that’s your last name?) “Come over here! Is this or isn’t it funny? A guy says to his mother-in-law . . .” If I laughed I was in trouble, and if I didn’t laugh I was in worse trouble.
The publicity office which took me in a little later at least had girls in it, but I didn’t get on well in publicity. (This is job seven—I’m skipping along.) My boss sensibly traded me to a young attorney friend whose secretary hated legal work. I hated legal work too when I found out about it, but a girl has to eat.
You learn a little something from each job. In a law office I learned that if a junior partner is gazing out the window at the girls in their any kind of dresses, you may not ask him to proofread something with you. He is thinking. If you interrupt him he may report you to the office manager. Also, when you’re told to type a conformed copy, that doesn’t mean just type the same words as in the original. It means everything has to come out the same distance from the top and bottom and you must try to duplicate the old erasures and smudge marks too if you can. Nine depositions too late I learned this.
The man I worked for was a darling ... at last. My very first day on the job, at the height of rationing, he gave me ten pounds of bacon. I had one great big bacon orgy for eight days.
Mr. Paul Ziffren was also smart (he later became head of the Democratic Party in California), and he taught me several very smart things. If you want somebody to think you’re lying, for instance, just tell the truth, he said. They’ll say, “Where were you last night?” You answer, “I was so drunk I had to sleep in the back of my car.” They will then say, “Come on now, where were you really?”
Who knows who left whom? I was finding myself.
I learned something from each of the jobs that followed, and they continued to follow in rapid succession. With Abbott and Costello (I was secretary for their radio show) I learned how it felt to be very, very popular! They often did their weekly show at an army camp, and sometimes singer Connie Haines and I would be the only girls on the entire base for the day.
With Jack Carson I learned how to tell a joke to a comedian. Before the warm-up for his radio show, I would tell him a new joke I’d heard. It wouldn’t have sounded funny from me if it had been the season’s laugh riot, but Mr. Carson needed only the bare bones. “Yeh, yeh, yeh . . . radio announcer gets the hiccoughs . . . yeh, yeh,” he would say, then go out and tell the story so that it really was funny. It made me feel funny, too.
I got to see Frank Sinatra about fifteen glorious minutes a week in my next job. I worked for the firm which packaged his radio show and took the payroll checks over for him to sign (during which time I gazed on him like a praying mantis examining her next grasshopper). I learned that if you get hold of an absolutely fabulous eleven-by-fourteen picture of a man and put it under his nose, he will autograph it for you. “To Helen,” Frank wrote. “Thanks for everything.” For years I have let it be understood among friends that everything applied to far more than just handing him payroll checks. But, since I have sworn to tell you only the truth . . .
I next made a movie with Frank Buck, cast mostly with snakes. It was two months in production, one for each customer who came to see it. I don’t know whether I learned anything on that job, although I felt I was gaining in favor with man and possibly with God. We worked in Mae West’s old bungalow, which was kind of sexy, I guess. I don’t recall learning any valuable lessons, but the production company probably learned that in casting their next picture they should use people.
Next came a brief sojourn with three more talent agencies. Somehow a girl could always get a job there. At the William Morris Agency my typographical errors tended to be more southern than pornographic, and instead of getting me fired, they seemed to solidify my position. When I wrote “chile” for child, or “Satiday” for Saturday, Mr. W., a literary agent, would crumple up at his desk and have trouble getting his breath. An Irish-type booboo—”I forgot me (instead of my) brief case,” tore him apart completely. I would warily wait out these bursts of mirth expecting them to turn to rage, but he was genuinely tickled.
I moved on to the Daily News, Los Angeles’ one Democratic newspaper, and might possibly have made out all right if it hadn’t been for the weather. The first afternoon I was there, my new boss got around to taking a good look at his new No. 2 girl (me) and sent word out by his No. 1 girl that at the Daily News all young women wore stockings. (It was the middle of July, for heaven’s sake, and no time to be putting things on.)
Job fifteen was with producer Howard Hawks’ brother Bill, a nice man who was “writing a book.” Mr. Hawks taught me that when somebody says he’s writing a book, he hasn’t necessarily got around to it and possibly never will. I worked in Mr. Hawks’ home and, although I never took one word of dictation, I think it made him feel closer to his goal to have a secretary around.
He had fascinating friends. Actress Arline Judge was his best girl. Miss Judge had married at different times both the Topping brothers, and she was so rich that I wondered if she had left anything for Sonja Henie and Lana Turner. While rubbing the philodendron leaves with whole milk—my only official duty—I would listen shamelessly as Arline told Mr. Hawks what she had said to the children that morning. “Now Dan Topping,” Arline would have said to her eleven-year-old, “if that woman (his new stepmother) says anything to you, you just hit her over the head with her skates.”
Actor Walter Pidgeon was another visitor, and he was a dear. My roommate Barbara and I both got a virus while I was working for Mr. Hawks, and Mr. Pidgeon telephoned to see if we needed anything to pull through. The only things Barbara and I could handle just then were boiled potatoes and weak tea, but we made a grocery list of several pages, including steak, Scotch, and other staples. Mr. Pidgeon graciously paid for them and sent them over.
Job sixteen was so dismal I won’t even try to recall. I don’t know why I skipped around so much, I really don’t. Still looking for but not finding the real me, I suppose. An employment agency got me my seventeenth assignment—we’re almost through the heap. I was by now their steadiest customer, and this time they placed me as secretary to a wealthy builder. He was so rich that his two young children each had a nurse, and each nurse had a maid. It was absolutely ridiculous.
Mr. Winston (which was almost his name) hated Communists (Commies), Catholics, ostentation (our office furniture was late William McKinley), Roosevelt (even though the man had graciously obliged him by dying), noise of any kind before lunchtime, and Jews. He hated all these things pretty vehemently, but most of all he hated Jews. It was really kind of pathetic, because the poor darling had, incredibly, constructed a motion picture studio with many sound stages right in the heart of Hollywood, not realizing until it was built that the entertainment business was larded with his least favorite people. (Mr. W. had led a sheltered life.)
Maybe Mr. W. had problems, but things were looking rather brighter for me. All I had to do for eighty-five dollars a week (when every other secretary in town was making forty) was keep things quieted down (the rustle of carbon paper was too much before noon) until Mr. W/s hangover began to subside, take scattered dictation and guard the office from undesirables who might try to rent sound stages. (You can imagine who that meant.) The rest of the time I was free to eat and read. I went straight through the Melrose Lending Library and about thirty pounds of peanuts in three weeks.
Mr. W. adored gossip, particularly if the subjects were in trouble. He didn’t have to know the people—he found just any kind of trouble anybody was getting into soothing. I never bothered with the facts but embroidered the simple plights of friends into a rich tapestry of woe. I got to be rather accomplished.
In return for the gossip Mr. W. told me about people he had ruined—and you can imagine who they were—how he drove them right out of New York State and sometimes all the way out of the country with just the clothes on their backs.
Since he was so good at ruining people, I thought there might be something he could do about our landlady. Ever since Barbara and I had put forty-two beer bottles out in back of the apartment one night—one of our beaux was a bit of a drinker—she’d considered us undesirable tenants and was conducting a vendetta against us.
“Do you have rats?” Mr. W. asked.
“Not that I’ve ever seen,” I said.
“Don’t you ever hear anything running around in the walls?” Mr. W. demanded.
“Yes,” I said, “but we always just assumed it was Mrs. Tuttle.”
“Keep an eye out for rats,” Mr. W. advised. “I could sic the health department on Mrs. Tuttle if you have rats and scare hell out of her while I check into who holds the trust deed on the place.”
Clearly the man wasn’t all bad.
Around five o’clock every day Mr. W. would break out the Haig & Haig Pinch Bottle, one or two other quiet employees would be asked to join us, and cocktail hour would begin. We drank the Scotch out of paper cups with a splash of water. (Glasses and ice would have been too noisy.) Around six every night I would go home crocked.
Despite the fact that I was becoming an alcoholic, the money on this job was too good for me not to try to stay employed. I was doing nicely too—mouse-quiet, a dedicated gossip, hadn’t rented a sound stage to anybody—desirable or undesirable. My one big problem in making good was in learning to hate Jews. I couldn’t tell who was Jewish. Mother never told me I was different. In Little Rock where I grew up everybody was too busy with lynchings and all that to get around to Jews. In my whole life I don’t think I’d ever heard of anti-Semitism (obviously I never read a newspaper) and in one or two of my former jobs I had apparently been the only gentile on the place, but had never realized we weren’t all peas in a pod, racially speaking. This lack of perception about my co-workers Mr. W. found not only unbelievable but morally irresponsible.
My roommate Barbara, who was half-Jewish, tried to help. Like me, she was convinced this was too good a job to go the way of all my others.
“See my eyes,” Barbara would say. “Jewish eyes are sort of big and brown and terribly sad.”
“Your eyes are blue and little and mean,” I said, “and you look perfectly happy.”
We decided we needed outsiders to practice on, and wherever we went, Barbara would scout Jews and I would study them. I explained to Mr. W. that Barbara was helping me with my problem and that, although she really could have been more help if she’d been all Jewish she had unselfishly produced some full-blooded friends for observation. His reaction was percussive.
“My God,” he said. “My God! My own secretary in a hotbed of them! This is what comes from not having had you investigated.” (He peered at me to see if by some monstrous error he could have made a mistake about me.) “I just never dreamed the agency would send me a. ..a. ..a... Jew-lovevl”
Because of my first-rate gossip perhaps, or maybe because I was mouse-quiet, Mr. W. decided to save me from the ovens. But despite our reconciliation, Mr. W. was never quite himself again. He sold the studio to a savings and loan company at a personal loss of nearly half a million dollars—only a year before a burgeoning television industry made studio space so rare he could probably have made four million on his property.
Well, let’s see . . . that was job seventeen, and there are only two more.
You would think I’d be blackballed after the number of bosses I had sent either to psychiatrists, bankruptcy or monasteries, but it doesn’t work out that way. You can be a butterfly, a gadabout, a kook, a moth, a migrant or a dilettante; you can be fired, cursed, turned out in wolf-packed black forests or deposited in deepest snow drifts—if you keep working long enough and try enough different jobs, you’ll eventually find one to which you can safely give your heart. My eighteenth was like that.
One Saturday morning just after my twenty-fifth birthday I went to an advertising agency, Foote, Cone & Belding, to be interviewed by then-board chairman for a job as his secretary. I wasn’t impressed with the job or his title. Downtown Los Angeles? That was someplace to drive through to get to Palm Springs. Advertising? I was fresh from the exciting world of entertainment, whether I’d rented any sound stages or not.
Mr. Belding’s office was as black as Carlsbad Caverns except for one sliver of lamp light. It was a high-ceilinged old thing with brown suede draperies, now drawn. He was behind his desk, and behind him was a painting of two Neanderthal fellows doing battle in a misty glen. Each held a spiked club in his one hand and, so far as I could see, their other hands weren’t anywhere in the picture, although they must have been lying around on a rock or under a bush. All each man had on one side was a jagged stump which was bleeding wildly. An animal carcass lay between the two fighters, and there was blood all over the place. A plaque under the picture said, “The Ad Game.” (Mr. Cone made Mr. Belding take the picture down when he saw it.)
The other walls of the office were strewn with autographed pictures of Harry Truman, Konrad Adenauer, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower —that crowd—mixed in with pictures of girls rinsing out undies, girls making tuna sandwiches, girls waxing linoleum. (They were using client products, I learned later.) There was also an American flag in one corner, brown overstuffed couches, three mounted Kietsal birds and costumes from Guatemala under glass. It looked like the Field Museum.
Mr. Belding himself looked like Lionel Barrymore sprung from his wheelchair—balding, lean, lion-like and quite handsome, despite having only one good eye. (That’s why the draperies were drawn, he said.) During the interview I never knew whether I was looking into Mr. Belding’s good eye or Mr. Belding’s other eye; it was impossible to look into both of them at the same time.) We sat there in a widening pool of silence. I’d stopped feeling so cavalier about the job already and was numb with fright.
“I’m out of town a good bit,” Mr. Belding said finally, probably to cheer me up.
“I have excellent contacts with all the airlines,” I said, never having booked a ticket in my life.
Mr. Belding said the company didn’t usually have much trouble with reservations. He was a member of United’s Hundred Thousand Mile Club, an American Admiral, a TWA Ambassador and TWA was a client.
About eight minutes later I was out in the sunlight again, blinking like a mole. The following Monday Mr. Belding’s secretary, who was leaving to get married, telephoned to say I had the job.
Now this was a sexy office, and here was a sexy job, although I didn’t know it in the beginning because I was drowning. (You’ll find this is often the way it is in the beginning with a good job.) Miss Cunningham, my teacher, was thirty years old. She was a whirlwind, tweedy, fantastic with figures, lovey-dovey with stock quotations ... a really dreadful girl, you know, and how I was supposed to follow somebody like that I couldn’t imagine! I was dying to get rid of her at the same time I was dying at the thought of getting along without her. Every morning she would take the stopper out of my head and pour in so much information I would bubble up like Drano in a clogged sink. I was supposed to memorize account executives and supervisors and the accounts they worked on, copywriters and art directors, departments and what went on in them, clients’ names and titles, clients of other Foote, Cone --& Belding offices, Foote, Cone --& Belding brass in other cities, Mr. Belding’s partners and their families and Mr. Belding’s two families—one by his first wife, Eunice, and another by his second wife, Alice. They each had children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters, mothers, cats, dogs, birds and servants. It was clearly impossible.
Mr. Belding kept springing new characters on me. He’d have me call his ranch in San Diego, then he’d take the phone and say, “Put Sarge on.” (The foreman? The cook?) Then he would say, “Hello, Sargie? Hi, Sargie! Did you catch any nice gophers today?” It couldn’t have been Eunice or Alice—their names weren’t Sargie, and besides, whoever was on the other end was howling like a wolf.
I soaked up my daily briefings from Miss Cunningham and girded myself for the time when it would be Lionel Barrymore and me alone together. When the day came in two weeks, it wasn’t so much like drowning, after all. It was more like being in a French railway station in a movie when they take the spy off the train—absolute bedlam. Phones rang, callers called, conferences convened, the mail poured in, campaigns coagulated, clients were coddled, civic activities got sandwiched in along with the problems of mothers, wives, children, grandchildren, and pets.
Mr. Belding turned out to be a nut about punctuality. There were just two morning buses I could take to get to work on time—one that got me there thirty minutes early and one that got me there thirty minutes late. That meant there was really only one bus I could take. While the moon was still out, I would whip out of my nightgown and into a dress. While the big red Pacific Palisades monster roared its way downtown I took out my curlers, made up my face, doused on cologne and, when there was any time left, went back to sleep. When Mr. Belding charged into the office around eight-twenty, forty-five minutes before anybody else arrived, he would find his secretary in her posture chair, unconscious but there.
“You here?” he would growl. “This time of morning?”
I refrained from giving him the Shepherd Mead line, “Oh, is it morning, sir?” but I did produce my, “Wouldn’t have it any other way working for you, sir,” smile, which kept me out of trouble until the office opened.
My first week without a keeper Mr. Belding asked me to send a bunch of ballpoint pens to Mr. Albert Lasker in La Quinta, a California desert resort. Mr. Lasker was Mr. Belding’s benefactor and he liked to keep him informed on new products developed by clients. I wrapped up a whole mad assortment of pens, not saving out even one for me because I had decided never to steal from Mr. Belding. Then I sent them off to La Kenta, California. Who knew Indian? I spelled things the way they sounded.
In about three weeks we got the whole mad assortment back, of course. “I can’t understand it,” Mr. Belding said. “We never got anything back from La Quinta before. Let me see the package.” I showed him the wrappings. “My God,” he said, “you’d think Mary Curnningham would know how to spell La Quinta by now.”
“You certainly would,” I said.
Mr. Lasker left La Quinta presently to spend a few days at his ranch in Arizona, from which he planned to take the Super Chief back to Chicago. Before leaving town he asked me to get him a virginal drawing room to step into in Phoenix—he didn’t want anybody to have been in the space when he boarded. He was so awfully pleasant and smiling, how did / know he’d handed me the messiest transportation problem of all time?
“Why cant somebody use the drawing room from Los Angeles to Phoenix?” Santa Fe wanted to know.
“Because Mr. Lasker wants the room to be virginal,” I said.
Sante Fe explained that since several hundred, possibly thousand, people had used the room in the past ten years, what difference would two more make if they’d be gone when Mr. Lasker got on? They wouldn’t hear of letting a drawing room go empty from Los Angeles to Phoenix, and Mr. Lasker, who was perfectly willing to pay for the room all the way from Los Angeles, wouldn’t hear of other people using the room.
I offered Mr. Belding my solution. I would get on the train in Los Angeles and occupy the drawing room, sitting in one corner so as not to disturb anything, then pop off the train in Phoenix and disappear. Mr. Lasker would never even know I’d been aboard. Mr. Belding didn’t think it was a bad idea, but before agreeing called the railroad himself. They relented.
The same week our tallest client and one of the most important, Mr. Philip Liebmann, President of Rheingold Breweries, wanted to go to New York, also by train. Mr. Liebmann didn’t want an empty room. He wanted two rooms—one for him and one for his feet. (Apparently adjoining bedrooms could be opened up and Mr. Liebmann’s feet could be stuck into one of them.) Of course Santa Fe wasn’t any more going to let me have a bedroom for Mr. Liebmann’s feet than they were going to give me an untouched drawing room for Mr. Lasker.
When I broke the news to him, Mr. Liebmann was hurt. “I am a tall man, Miss Gurley,” he said. “Do you honestly want me to sleep with my knees under my chin all the way to Chicago—curled up in the fetal position, Miss Gurley—for two thousand, two hundred and twenty-three miles? Think of it . . . my curvature of the spine on your conscience.”
Mr. Belding made some phone calls and I was saved again.
The next six months were filled with adventures. I mention them only to show how anybody can change from a dumb broad into a career girl if she stays with it. For instance:
1. I gave a funeral for about six hundred people.
2. I arranged a dinner party for the Rheingold group at the Hollywood Brown Derby. Thirteen guests were invited (which was my fault?), but Mr. Liebmann was superstitious and refused to sit down to dinner, so they had to get the Brown Derby cashier to come over and eat with them.
3. I answered Mr. Belding’s private phone maybe two dozen times until Mr. Cone or Mr. Foote—I don’t know which one—finally got tired of asking how the weather was out there and asked Mr. Belding to restrain me from lifting the receiver. He’d already explained this was his private phone, but it always sounded so lonesome ringing there all by itself.
4. I locked myself out in the hall in a swimsuit. Several garments had been left in Mr. Belding’s office after a Cole of California creative meeting, and I just slipped into one after everybody had gone home. There was no full-length mirror in Mr. Belding’s office so I flitted down the hall to the ladies’ room to see how ravishing I looked, shutting his office door behind me because my clothes and purse were in there. It locked tight and I had to ring for the elevator man, who stopped off with a load of people from the eighth floor. (I think they kind of liked having an ad agency in the building; you never knew what you were going to find out in the hall at six-thirty waiting for the elevator.)
5. I lost a letter from Charles Luckman, President of Lever Brothers, another client, before Mr. Belding ever saw it. I never saw him unhappier.
6. I picked Mr. Belding up at the Lockheed Air Terminal one day in my thirteen-year-old Buick station wagon because we couldn’t get word of his arrival to Mrs. Belding, who had his car and driver. (Mr. Cone and Mr. Foote insisted that Mr. Belding have a driver because of his eye. Since he could only see out of one he figured only one side of the road needed to be considered in making motoring decisions.)
We got a ticket first thing going through an I-said-yellow-they-said-red signal light. When the policeman asked for my car registration and I said I didn’t have it with me, Mr. Belding said nonsense, everybody keeps his car registration in the car, and it was probably in the glove compartment. He started hauling out silk stockings, one-of-a-kind gloves, a half pint of brandy I was literally taking to a sick friend and a bra of ancient vintage I was going to buy elastic for. Then he gave up and let me get the ticket.
7. I tried to locate Mr. Belding’s old Lord & Thomas proof file of favorite ads. The first time he requested it I took the place apart. After I’d done everything but dismantle the air conditioning without success, Mr. Belding said, “It’s in the building somewhere,” gazing down the hall with his Treasure of the Sierra Madre look. “I saw it about four years ago.”
When the request came up again, which it did regularly, I always dropped everything, went to “look” and came back to my desk forty minutes later carefully smudged, dishevelled and hungry. “The file was last seen in the vicinity of the Union Oil account group s office,” I said. “And I’m concentrating my next efforts there.”
“Splendid,” Mr. Belding said. “Splendid.”
8. I walked my paddies off looking for a piece of genuine cuneiform writing with an advertising message on it which Mr. Belding could use in making speeches to advertising groups. On checking with the County Museum I found that most cuneiform writing was located on slabs weighing roughly seven hundred pounds, priceless, and not available for purchase by civilians even if they could get it carted away. Dawson’s Book Store finally located a small rock with hieroglyphics on it they swore were in the cuneiform period, give or take a few thousand years, and it only cost fourteen dollars. The message was something about fat cows being for sale and Mr. Belding accepted that as an advertising pitch.
9. I let somebody in Mr. Belding’s office who sold him two dozen terrible ties. Since he had no sales resistance whatever, the purchase was my fault.
10. I turned away a man looking for a job—a far more serious offense. Mr. Belding felt that anyone out of work is usually in shock and must always be seen.
11. Swept out six or seven nuts who refused to leave the waiting room until the company hired them. It was a well-known fact that Mr. B. got taken on as a mailroom boy at Lord & Thomas (later Foote, Cone & Belding) by using these same high-handed tactics, and it handicapped us severely in unloading people who were trying to do the same thing.
12. I tracked down Toni Twins for “Which Twin Has” ads. This was my one non-secretarial assignment and I took it very big.
13. I arranged a cocktail party for visiting members of the Swiss Watch Federation, a client, while Mr. Belding was out of town. None of them spoke English and none of us spoke French or German. I dragged in a Berlitz instructor who held the account while the staff drank up the booze.
14. I signed for documents from Mr. Howard Hughes (Hughes Tool, Hughes Aircraft, RKO Pictures and TWA were clients) when my boss was out of town. The courier would ask that we go into an office, shut the door and affix a wax seal to the envelope to be broken only by Mr. Belding. Naturally I volunteered to be put to death for watching.
Mr. Hughes sometimes visited the office late at night, but I never saw him. He and the head of the motion picture department would study Jane Russell’s cleavage hours on end to determine just how many inches more a blouse could slip off and still be considered on. (The Outlaw was being re-released and the agency was doing ads.) Depending on the outcome of the nightly conferences, the artist would move the blouse up or down a quarter of an inch the next day.
This happened too:
1. The agency resigned the fourteen-million-dollar Lucky Strike account because it was giving Mr. Foote a nervous breakdown. After the account was resigned, Mr. Foote had a nervous breakdown anyway.
2. Some of the staff were brainwave-tested by a group of brainwave specialists to determine their worth to the company. (You never know what a company is going to come up with to prove they made a mistake about hiring you.) These people ran an electrical current through your head, and it was very impressive. First they brainwaved the mailroom boy, who was a protege of the office manager, and he came out somewhat smarter than Bertrand Russell. Then Mr. Belding and the office manager volunteered, and they came out only a notch below the mailroom boy. Then somebody suggested the brainwavers give the test to two unidentified employees. The most quiveringly sensitive art director in the place was diagnosed as unperceptive and qualified to do only simple manual labor. The account supervisor who held four million dollars worth of oil-company billing came out slightly better than a Jukes. The “geniuses” adored their scores, but consented to have the brainwavers packed off for the general good.
3. Mr. Ade Pelletier, president of the Purex Corporation, a client, drank a glass of Purex at a banquet to show stockholders how mild the product was, then he had his stomach pumped backstage after dinner. I know I would have fallen in love with Mr. Pelletier if we’d ever met.
4. A husky young mailroom boy (not the genius) went off his rocker, swooped up a frail, elderly employee and carried her around the office until they made him put her down.
5. An agency executive handed down Smock’s Law on the Strangely Sexual Yearnings Advertising Men Experience During a Severe Hangover. “Your body feels so terrible it knows it’s going to die,” Mr. Smock said, “and wants to procreate before passing on.”
6. The head switchboard operator had a dinner date with a publisher’s representative, and while in the ladies’ room of the restaurant, her upper plate fell out. She accidentally flushed it down the toilet and didn’t have nerve enough to go back to the table. Her companion may still be waiting.
7. Mr. Belding spent most of the night in a TWA hangar under the impression he was on his way to Chicago. He had crawled into his berth and gone to sleep when the crew discovered engine trouble. They finally grounded the plane, thought they got everybody off, taxied into the hanger and discovered Mr. Belding, a sound sleeper, four hours later. “Here already?” he wanted to know. He wasn’t happy to find he was just where he’d started.
It was exciting to work for an important man. (And that’s the kind every girl should have after being a competent secretary for a while.) I took dictation in the back of a limousine to and from airports. Sometimes I would be sent for by Mr. Belding’s driver and limousine to bring myself and the mail to Santa Barbara or San Diego where Mr. Belding was just coming in from the boat races. I found it very romantic slipping along in the night under a fur lap robe like Marie Walewska being spirited out of Poland to Napoleon.
One Saturday my boss gave me to General Omar Bradley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a burnt secretarial offering when the General came to California to make a speech. Mr. Belding also gave the General his car and driver (William and I were kind of a package). The General, a quiet charmer, really didn’t need any secretarial help, so I had lunch with his two aides, later to become generals too, at the hotel pool. A third aide, a Naval lieutenant, holed up to work on the General’s speech, Around three-thirty he came down to the pool waving the speech and asked if I would make a clean copy for the General. “Are you mad,” his friends asked him. “This lovely creature type a speech? She wouldn’t know where to find the space bar.” The writer sensibly turned the manuscript over to the public stenographer.
Ye gods, you’ve probably deserted me—not one out-and-out really £\A\-fledged sexy incident in a dozen paragraphs!
On to sexy incidents . . .
The office Don Juan at Foote, Cone & Belding had his hooks into me practically before I had my hat and coat off.
D.J/s have to work fast, because they’ve usually already gobbled up everything in the office and are starving for a new arrival, while the earlier victims are poised to warn the new arrival about the D.J. If the new girls gets the idea that he’s a cross between Bluebeard and the Boston strangler, he’s through before he starts.
There wasn’t any excuse in the world for me, however. I had been warned by no less an authority than old Pete’s wife. She and I had worked together in another office, and when she heard I was going down there with him, she said, “Watch out for old Pete. He has the appetite of a tapeworm.” (They were working out the terms of a divorce.) I had a drink with old Pete one day after work. Several other people were with us, and he was catching a plane to San Francisco—what could be safer? The next night I found Pete on my doorstep. “I came home a day early,” he said. “I had to see you. I think I’m falling in love with you.”
A Don Juan, no matter what else you say about him, is no time-waster. Pete suggested we drive to Santa Barbara for dinner. It was just dusk, and I shifted into something shifty for the journey. During cocktails he declared finally, firmly and positively he was in love with me. (I already mentioned a D.J. is decisive.) We chatted about our office friends during dinner but not much. Two miles out of Santa Barbara on the drive home old Pete made another decision and turned the car into a motel. Under the burning neon he said, “I wish I could stop this, but it’s too late.”
For him maybe. He got out of the car and stalked off to the innkeeper. I slid over to the driver’s seat, put the car in “drive” and drove off to Los Angeles.
This quick-thinking saved me from the demolition corps all of four hours. Around dawn old Pete was on my doorstep again, this time with a taxi driver to negotiate a loan of thirty-four dollars. (If you’re going to delay a Don Juan in the pursuit of happiness, all I can say is you’d better be rich.)
From that day on I was done for—in love ... in pain ... in ecstasy . . . and in for the inevitable. Our l’samour had been toujours for only three weeks when one of the girls in the office and I stayed late to address Mr. Belding’s Christmas cards. She was an even newer arrival than I. Old Pete took us both to dinner several nights in a row and in the dimly lit restaurant it was hard to tell which girl friend had the boy friend.
In time-honored Don Juan tradition we broke up just before Christmas.
I bound up my wounds with a young Swiss chap (good heavens, I hope this isn’t boring you) who was studying advertising at our office. Freddy was about as tall as I, darkly, devilishly foreign-looking, bushy-eyebrowed, gutteral-sounding and not without charm. Freddy handed out Swiss watches for tips (I never got one, since I wasn’t a waitress) and on his way West had bought a cow at auction in New Orleans because nobody wanted her. He brought her to Los Angeles and found her a good home.
Mr. Belding took quite a fancy to Freddy, so I decided that our friendship should be kept secret, lest Mr. Belding think I was making off with his staff one by one. There was another reason. Freddy looked like an anarchist. His suits were not only belted in the back and double-breasted, his trouser legs were square. His beard came out so furiously about noon he just looked like the one whose hotel room you should search first in case of a bomb scare. He was very cooperative about the secrecy thing and we did everything but meet like trolls under bridges for dates.
Sometime later Freddy was the embarrassed one. He had become madly successful in his own agency in Zurich and had returned to Los Angeles on SAS’ historic first flight over the Pole. I picked him up at the airport, and I couldn’t believe it was Freddy in his homburg and navy pinstripe. We got into Appletrees, my antique station wagon with the natural wood sides and composition roof. The roof was so thin by then that when the sun shone brightly, the back end of the car looked like a greenhouse inside. After a good hard rain all Appletrees’ doors would fly open and flap about during the drive. I finally had taken to tying all of them to the car with pieces of rope, except for the one on the driver’s side. That door I just held shut under my left arm as I drove. Freddy didn’t balk at crawling under the driver’s seat so as not to disturb his own roped-up door, but he winced when they had to haul his luggage out through the window at the Sheraton Town House.
One of my office romances was with Jack Dempsey, who was then endorsing a client’s product, Bulldog Beer. Mr. Dempsey couldn’t pronounce beer. When he said it it came out burrrrrrr, and it was the happiest mispronunciation that ever happened to a client. After hearing his radio commercials, people would come into a bar and say, “Gimme a bottle of Bulldog Buuurrrrrrrr.” By the time they got through laughing and decided what they really wanted, the Bulldog was there.
Some people thought Mr. Dempsey and me such an unlikely couple that we probably used an interpreter to talk to each other. It’s true Mr. Dempsey did bring a friend along on a good many of our dates—an ingratiating chap named Willie. This gave him somebody to talk to. I didn’t have a lot to say anyway. We usually went to a night club or the fights where nobody needed to talk.
At the height of our friendship Mr. Dempsey flew to New York to see about a labor dispute in his restaurant, and while there he got engaged to a rich widow. The engagement lasted only two weeks, but I was dreadfully upset. I did think he might have mentioned the widow before. Mr. Dempsey sent me a cheesecake in an effort to make up—I’m pathological about cheesecake—but our friendship was never the same again to me.
The longest-in-my-life beau at Foote, Cone & Belding was a Don Juan supéieur who worked for another agency. (How any one girl can become involved with two Don Juans so close together I don’t know, but it does get them over with, like childhood diseases.) Allen liked to play a little game called “Who Do You Love?” An answer like “You, darling,” branded you a total idiot. You were supposed to say “John Foster Dulles,” so Allen could say “He’s too reactionary,” or “Leonard Bernstein,” “His hair is too bushy,” or “Krishna Menon,” “He’s too occult,” or “Mike di Salle,” “He’s too roly-poly.” The more obscure the personality, the more points you got. Judge Crater was my biggest hit. He was “too disappearing!” The trouble was that in order to give Allen this chance to show off his knowledge of who was who by making his snappy comeback, I had to know the characters too. Getting ready for a date meant cramming with U.S. News and World Report, Time, Life and maybe The Saturday Review.
I suffered during this romance like a purebred little masochist. If things were going reasonably well, I couldn’t stand it and would sneak a look at Allen’s address book ... a big fat looseleaf thing whole sections could be added to. I could check who was new by the color of ink and have a nice quiet nervous breakdown. The girls of my general tenure were in purple. Blue and green were a newer vintage.
When this romance was at its unhappiest, I asked Mr. Belding for a week off to go to Mexico to recover. He said it was a very good idea and that while I was away perhaps this fellow would miss me and come to his senses. Darling Mr. Belding.
It might have happened that way, only Allen went with me. I felt terribly guilty the whole time, because I was supposed to be in Mexico with a girl friend and we kept running into Mr. Belding’s friends. First I spotted two clients at the airport at the same time they spotted me. Introductions all around. At the Del Prado Hotel in Mexico City I crashed head-on into the head fund-raiser for Mr. Belding’s most cherished philanthropy. More introductions. It was nerve-wracking.
Having used up my week’s vacation to get away from Allen without getting away from him, I now had to take the cure at the office. This, however, is as good a place as IVe ever found to forget a man.
Would you believe it—we’re almost up to my eighteenth job, and there’s only one more to go.
When Mr. Belding was out of town—which was often—I spent most of each day compiling a long, gossipy letter to him. Mrs. Belding read them and thought I had such a breezy style she prodded her husband into letting me try writing copy on one of the accounts. No man in his right mind wants to give up a good secretary, but Mr. Belding was a sweetheart. He made the Sunkist Orange account supervisor give me an assignment. “Lady, a big shipment of juicy navels has just arrived in your city,” ten out of my fourteen commercials began, and it only took me fourteen days to write them. You couldn’t say only Sunkist navel oranges had navels, because God had given all navel oranges navels. You could say that if they bore the Sunkist trademark it was a very lucky thing for you, and I said that lots. Some of the commercials were actually used in Albany and Schenectady, where they were up to their navels in Sunkist oranges.
I remained Mr. Belding’s secretary three more years, writing copy only when Albany and Schenectady were under orange juice again. The association might have gone on like that forever if I hadn’t entered a contest in Glamour Magazine called “Ten Girls With Taste.” (It was one of the things I did to get over Allen.) One of the questions was, “What is your ambition?” I didn’t really have any except to continue to be Mr. Belding’s secretary. Knowing Glamour wouldn’t want to have anything to do with a slug, I said I’d like to be a copywriter. It was hideously embarrassing when the magazine printed some of the winners’ ambitions. There I was, sounding like the ambition-ridden girl I wasn’t. But Mr. Belding took me at my printed word—I wasn’t really consulted—and gave me a little office with my name on the door. I became a copywriter.
Writing copy in an advertising agency is quite sexy because you get to fraternize with a lot of men. (I was the only girl among eight writers and six art directors.) You can yappety-yap away at them all during business hours, and nobody thinks you aren’t attending to business. You can also flirt lethally while pretending to be arguing about a headline. Deciding between “Our batteries stay fresh” and “Our batteries charge longer” can have you leaning over a man’s desk all morning.
My client was the Catalina Swimsuit account, and when ads were photographed I usually went along. (Copywriters were encouraged to know all phases of ad preparation.) One of the choice locations for photographing swimsuits was a lonely cove at Malibu that you couldn’t even get close to by car. We would park a mile away and pack in with cameras, reflectors, girls, fins, film, picnic baskets and bourbon in the misty dawn to catch the sun’s first rays. Why it always had to be a misty dawn and the sun’s first rays I never understood, but no photographer or art director I ever met cared a hoot about moonlight or bright sun.
One day we shot three mermaids on a rock several yards out in the Pacific in a foggy dawn. The sun never showed at all, and the surf was very frisky. I can see the mermaids now in their long flaxen wigs, clasping lyres and lutes to their mermaid bosoms, trying not to fall off the rock on their mermaid fannies and have their mermaid tails pounded off in the surf. They looked very sweet and mermaidenly, except that they were turning blue. The photographer would haul them back in every so often, hand them a Dixie cup of bourbon and send them back to the rock, hoping for an improvement in skin tone. I can still hear him bellowing across the surf to the mermaid who couldn’t swim and kept inching toward center rock: “You’re spoiling this setup, baby, now move over! God dammit, baby, move OVER!”
The spring William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon ranch was opened to the public we decided it was just the place to photograph the Catalina collection. However, just because San Simeon welcomed the public on carefully-supervised tours didn’t necessarily mean that an enterprising swimsuit company could immortalize its wares beside the Neptune Pool or on the stairs of La Casa Grande. Our art director finally got permission by giving Mr. William Randolph Hearst Jr.’s office the impression our little group would be photographing a story for one of his magazines—Harpers Bazaar. It’s true our swimsuits would be in the pages of the Bazaar, but we just omitted to say they would be in the advertising pages.
San Simeon, as any vistor knows, is not really possible. Castles there are with turrets and towers and drawbridges—but with lapis-lazuli-lined swimming pools and subterranean Egyptian baths? Mr. Hearst is said to have spent a million dollars a year on treasures for San Simeon from 1919 to near the time he died in 1951, but almost any woman looking at the place would say he got a bargain. I thought it made Versailles look a little tacky.
Visitors were allowed through the castle from 8:42 A.M. to 5:12 P.M., and even with our Harpers Bazaar credentials we were only permitted to photograph before the crowds arrived and after they went home. We had to hustle. The models arose at 4:00 A.M. to put on their make-up. The rest of us staggered out at 5:00 and drove to the bottom of the castle, where San Simeon guards met us and led us up the mountain once guarded by Mr. Hearst’s cougars, lions and tigers. If we were on time, it was pitch dark.
Equipping for Malibu was like packing lunch compared to the junk we moved in around the Neptune Pool. It was huff, puff, puff, huff, and it all had to be set up before the sun came up if we were to catch the ever-loving misty dawn. At sunrise the models flitted from pillar to pillar, embraced stone gargoyles and climbed in and out of sarcophagi while the cameras click-clicked, then shimmied into new swimsuits and started over again. When the sun was high and visitors’ hour upon us, we halted dead, the models turned off their smiles and collapsed, we repacked everything and guards led us down the mountain again. Then we drove back to the hotel to sleep like vampires until afternoon, hopped once more out of the sack and raced back to the castle for twilight. How can anybody say working is always the same old thing?
During our third afternoon of shooting, the Hearst family checked into the bungalow reserved for their special use next to the castle. The bungalow couldn’t compare to the castle—just a little feudal hideaway that slept about seventy-five. Mr. Hearst, his wife and two young sons came down to swim in the Neptune Pool and to ask how the photography was going. Fine, we said, just fine. Then Mr. Hearst wanted to know whether Nancy White was back from Europe. I was the only one who had ever heard of his editor-in-chief at the Bazaar, but I hadn’t even known she was gone. “She isn’t home yet,” I said. (I didn’t want Mr. Hearst chasing off to his bungalow to call her up), “but she’s having a marvelous time and adores the Fabianis.”
This seemed to satisfy him. “Use the pool,” Mr. Hearst said. He really was affable and sweet. The models had to be restrained from jumping in in their new Catalina Masterpieces, but we happened to have other suits along.
The late Humphrey Bogart also let us photograph aboard his yacht, the Santana. We know who put him up to it. In return for her husband’s wearing a Catalina sport shirt in the picture (he refused to part with his own pants), Mrs. Bogart (Lauren Bacall) was invited to select all the Catalina merchandise she wanted for herself and her children. The agency doesn’t know how many carloads of sweaters and swimsuits she took out of there, but the Catalina shipping clerks reported she was there most of the day and they were there most of the night. Getting Mr. Bogart was a coup, however. He was the perfect male image for the men’s stuff, and Mrs. Bogart in anybody’s merchandise was a dream ad walking.
Foote, Cone & Belding presentiy gave me to Catalina Swimsuits in a gift-wrapped package so that I could tour the country for the company. (I don’t know why bosses were always giving me to somebody else—they said I could learn more about the client’s product that way.) I accompanied minor celebrities on a Catalina promotion tour of major department stores.
Florence Chadwick was my first charge—a very nice lady, indeed. Olympic diving star Pat McCormick was the second. The next year Catalina sent me out with the reigning Miss Universe, Hillevi Rombin of Upsala, Sweden. You have your definition of a pill, I have mine. Hillevi was not only sweet, funny, gorgeous and poised as a swan, she also spoke five languages. How could you love a girl like that (if you were another girl) ? When there were men in the same room, I felt as though I’d become part of the furniture. The only time I was noticed was when some man wanted to take Hillevi to show her Milwaukee or Duluth—then I’d be asked if she could go. I was always inclined to let the child see Milwaukee and Duluth—goodness knows when she’d be back again, and a chaperone left in the hotel might become more visible without her little charge underfoot. Hillevi never wanted to go, however.
Hillevi was vain but forthright. If she wanted to look at herself she never stole a glance in the elevator door or sneaked peeks at store-window reflections. She would pause at the mirror, take a good, long, slow, languorous, all-encompassing look and announce, “Ah looooooooooook lak a spoke.”
“What, Hillevi dear?” Her vocabulary was good, but it didn’t always jibe with her train of thought.
“A Halllloweeeeeeeen spoke!” Hillevi said triumphantly. This was a hint that we should cut out all this fashion-show nonsense and get out in the sun where a bathing beauty belonged.
Hillevi had one tiny flaw which nearly endeared her to me. She was a candy sneak of almost criminal proportions. If I let her out of my sight in the May Company or Whelan’s drugstore, she came back with enough chocolate-covered marshmallows to short the Easter bunny that year. Hillevi was supposed to stay wand-slender as the star of our swim-suit fashion shows, but I never scolded. Let the child have her fun! A fat Miss Universe—how marvelous! But no matter how many marsh-mallows she packed away, nothing seemed to happen to her startling proportions.
Travel is fun and profitable, but I returned to my desk in Los Angeles and eventually began to write very good copy. I was written about in trade magazines and started to win little awards. Then, during my tenth summer with Foote, Cone & Belding (you can be so faithful when you’re happy), another Los Angeles agency named Kenyon & Eckhardt acquired the four-million-dollar Max Factor account and needed to staff up with girl writers in a hurry. I was a logical acquisition.
Of course, there is nothing in the world so attractive to a company as someone who doesn’t need them. (This works in love too.) All summer long Kenyon & Eckhardt kept upping their job offer until it was getting ridiculous. What kind of coward am I, I began to wonder. In taking this new job I would hardly be putting in with a band of gypsies. One thing that disturbed me was the reputation of Max Factor’s ad manager. He was said to put agency people in jars like lightning bugs and squeeze out their lights. I decided to go check out the squeezer myself.
Mr. Gross received me cordially. He was dapper, crew-cut, shortish, rounded, neat, wore hornrimmed glasses and couldn’t possibly be a monster, I decided. When I asked him about the monster rumors he said, oh yes, those—possibly they got started because he was firm with people, but he was also very loyal. His key people stayed with him forever. (I never found this to be untrue as long as I knew him, but the people who qualified as “key” got down to a precious few.) Mr. Gross and I chatted for about an hour, and he seemed eager to have me go to work for his advertising agency. When they got the salary up to double the one I was making, I took the job.
Mr. Gross, as it turned out, didn’t put people in jars and snuff out their lights. He shell-shocked them. Though I hadn’t noticed a single gun around the place during my interview, whenever a group of us went to call on Mr. Gross we never knew whether we would be fired on by a short-barrel Luger or a Smith & Wesson revolver. “Got a new gun,” Mr. Gross would announce in the middle of a spring shade presentation. Then he would point it straight at the account executive’s head and fire. We just had to trust that he would continue to use blanks.
On special days we would be bombarded with “it”—a shotgun that fired three woolly purple and yellow snakes with springs inside to make them expand the moment they were free of the gun barrel. With a big, woolly, yellow and purple snake flying at you, it is hard to remember your name, rank or the color of the shade promotion.
Two other female writers also worked on the account. I adored them personally, but sibling rivalry ran high. One played it child-like and bubbly. She would get so excited about every new product you thought she was going to eat the Green Jade eye shadow instead of write about it. They adored her. The second girl was a pretty, sunny, ex-farm girl who could make roses bloom in the snow. Between them those bitches had grabbed of all the great client-pleasing qualities and left me with nothing to wear but femme fatale or lady tycoon. I was too blabber-mouthy for one and too short on leadership for the second. My big moments came at rifle practice, however.
The more scared you were when Mr. Gross fired off a gun, the better he liked it. Well, the girls just weren’t in my league hysterics-wise. They were normal, run-of-the-mill girl-screamers—but I was superb. Loud noises unhinged me anyway, and snakes! Whatever came at me out of Mr. Gross’s gun barrel—snakes, noise or butterflies—I would go entirely to pieces and wander about looking glassy-eyed for minutes. Mr. Gross grew pleased and expansive.
We worked awfully hard on this account. During rush season, which was all four seasons, anybody who left before midnight was chicken. Thanksgiving Day, Memorial Day and always on Sunday a girl found herself on the floor of an art director’s office trying to figure out a new way to show a girl looking radiant. (Surrounding her with flames was too hot. Having her emerge from a flower was too floral. Showing “before-and-after” pictures was too real. Max Factor never admitted girls who used their products were ever birds to begin with.) One Sunday we had a three-hour meeting to decide whether the headline should be “Eight Obstacles to Beauty” or “The Eight Obstacles to Beauty.”
There were many things we couldn’t say for Max Factor, such as suggesting that a product did what it was supposed to do. For instance, we couldn’t say that a matte-finish make-up gave a matte finish, because that might frighten girls who liked a glowing schoolgirl look. We couldn’t say Max Factor’s glowing schoolgirl make-up produced a glowing schoolgirl look, either, because this might frighten away girls who wanted a matte finish. If Max Factor had a glorious new product—say an iridescent lipstick—it was Pussyfoot Time. We couldn’t say it was phosphorescent in case somebody preferred a regular lipstick, but if we didn’t say it, millions in research money would have been wasted. If things got too frustrating, we could always drop empty beer cans out the window and try to hit somebody waiting for the bus at Hollywood and Vine.
I calculate that during my years on the Max Factor account I personally thought up nine thousand, two hundred and seventy-four names for make-up, eye shadow, nail enamel, skin cleansers, hair-spray and perfume. Everyone else in the agency thought up at least as many. We had enough names to start our own language. The exercise was academic, really. Max Factor usually had a name all picked out before they gave us these assignments, and the idea was to see how close the agency could come to guessing their name.
Would you like to play the name game as it’s played for money in an ad agency? Okay, let’s name a lipstick.
Write down every pink, red or orange color you can think of. Never mind what color the lipstick is actually going to be, that has nothing to do with it. Ready? Carmine, scarlet, flame, cherry, blush, shocking, camellia, peppermint, ruby, garnet, damask, vermillion, mauve, coral, tangerine and magenta will do to start. Now write down all the fruits, flowers, jewels, vegetables, birds, zodiac signs, cities, dances, gods, goddesses, fabrics, spices, seasons, weather conditions, emotions, wild animals and terms of endearment you can think of. Skip wines and spirits. No cosmetics manufacturer will ever admit that anybody who uses his products tipples. Avoid colonial uprisings, too. Swahili Red and Viet-nasturtium will go over like wrought-iron kites. Now if you have really gone about this conscientiously, you will have exhausted the dictionary, the encyclopedia, the thesaurus and seven or eight friends, and it will be five days later. (The friends usually have terrible ideas, but they can make coffee for you.)
Now for the fun—you simply mix and match! Watermelon Madness, Count-Down Red, Ginger-Peachy Grapefruit, Blueberry Kisses, Tiger Sapphire, Venus de Pink, Kabuki Peach, Orange Ole, Heart of a Stranger, and on and on.
What am I doing! First thing I know youll be writing copy. Don’t look to me for instruction about writing television commercials, though. I wasn’t too great at it. I had one with a girl taking her hair to the psychiatrist to find out why it hated her, and another with Mr. Acne tracking down kids at high school to break out on. I was told that you’re supposed to try to sell the client’s product, not take it off the market.
That was my last office job—so far. Staying in that particular office meant outlasting nine creative directors and four office managers, and when you have a thirteen of anything, naturally some of them don’t like you. Being out of favor occasionally is nothing to pound your temples about, however. Any working girl comes up against squirrels as well as divine lions and tigers and deer in her jobs. My four years at Kenyon& Eckhardt were most rewarding in many ways, and during some of that time I was Los Angeles’ highest-paid advertising woman. I’d doubtless still be in an advertising agency or an office somewhere, but while I was at K & E I fell really out of favor with one of the nine creative directors, and, having nothing to do, I wrote a book. It turned out to be so successful that it called for another book, and I’m just now finishing that one, which you are just now finishing reading (if you can follow that bit of time juggling you’re probably ready for Einstein). It’s hard to write books and carry on in an office too. I carry on in my office at home of course, but believe me, that isn’t the same kind of carrying-on at all.
But you—you can still carry on in your office-office, you lucky girl!