Summer 1985
I went out to New York around July of 1985 and stayed for weeks at Donald Trump’s Grand Hyatt, which was near the new Sunbow office. It was a fun time. I actually felt a little bit like a New Yorker. To get a sense of context, Sunbow was a subsidiary of Griffin-Bacal, which in the summer of 1985 was listed as the fastest-growing ad agency in Manhattan. It was Hasbro’s ad agency, and Hasbro was in the middle of the opposite of a perfect storm. They had three phenomena going at the same time: G.I. Joe, Transformers, and My Little Pony. Along with the new status came a new Manhattan office.
If I ever saw the old office, I don’t remember it, but I did spend a lot of time in the new one. It was a very cool warren of staircases and offices and open conference rooms and activity. That’s what I remember most: the activity. People going in every direction, working on the TV shows, on ads, and so on. I’d get roped into meetings regarding copy and campaigns, and my memory of that time is of being a dazed guy from LA caught in a Madison Avenue whirlwind and being blown wherever it took me. I love those memories. There was something different every day. There was excitement, but very little stress—mostly because I didn’t know enough to be stressed.
The real “Belly of the Beast,” however, was when I’d go out for lunch with Tom Griffin or Joe Bacal—my only true firsthand experiences with Madison Avenue. Tom and Joe were in their mid-to-late forties and had lived through the golden age of advertising. They would have been the young guys in Don Draper’s office in a Mad Men episode, back when Madison Avenue was the cultural engine of America.
TV might have been the medium of the day, but commercials ran TV.
There was always a fascinating and exotic collection of old guys who talked to me like I understood what they were talking about, and I raced to keep up. They were a type of person that I knew existed—I’d seen a lot of them on TV—but that’s different than when a guy who seems more fictional than real is talking to you across the table. Joe and Tom were so normal that it only drew these characters further into relief. I mean, not that they’re not characters in and of themselves, but they were incredibly solid, stable ambassadors to a crazy world.
Living on this edge of advertising and TV was a fascinating place to be. Madison Avenue meets Hollywood Boulevard. And the cultures met in an interesting way, too. Today, you look like an alcoholic if you drink at lunch, but back in 1985, it was standard op. In Los Angeles, people went to what I called “white places,” restaurants where the walls were painted white and the menu was something called California cuisine, which seemed to boil down to “lite” Italian food with chicken and vegetables. And there was always the glass or two of white wine (or rosé) at lunch.
When I went to New York, though, it was completely different.
In New York, restaurants really matter, and Carole Weitzman always knew the best and the latest. We went to Tavern on the Green, Smith & Wollensky, the Russian Tea Room, and a million other places I don’t remember. Lunch would usually be at places that seemed to have been around since the fifties, and you didn’t drink some wiener glass of White Zinfandel or Chardonnay—you’d drink real man cocktails. Those places came from a time when people actually had their drink. My dad had the old fashioned without sugar (he was diabetic), my grandmother had a John Collins, my grandfather drank martinis with extra olives. It was a form of branding. It defined them. It wasn’t about who the maker of the alcohol was—that was a product of advertising—it was about whether you were bourbon, scotch, gin, vodka, or rum.
I never had a specific drink, but I usually defaulted to bourbon as I didn’t like it much, so I didn’t end up getting wasted. At the time, the three-martini lunch was a political issue. It was about corporate taxes. The funny thing is that I never saw anybody get drunk at lunch, and they all went back to the office and got work done.
From 1984 for about a decade, I’d spend every Valentine’s Day at Toy Fair. Toy Fair defined the winter for me in much the same way that Comic-Con defined the summer. It was a magical view of Manhattan. We’d stay in swank hotels like the Plaza, the Ritz Carlton, Le Parker Meridien, and make the trek to the Toy Center at 200 Fifth Avenue, which, in fact, was its own little urban network of buildings connected by bridges. Hasbro had their own building not far away, which was a hyper-real version of an old-time toystore. It was filled with dioramas displaying action figures, dolls, plushies, toy guns, arts and crafts, games—you name it.
In the main building, you’d see toys you’d never see again. It was marvelous and wondrous. It was every fantasy Christmas in America spilled out into one building. It was Santa’s workshop in full swing, but it only existed for one week a year. I would often wonder what it was like in the Toy Center the rest of the year, and I never figured out why they didn’t keep it open all year long.
I rarely had much actual business at Toy Fair, but both TSR and Sunbow thought it was worth flying me out and putting me up. Basically, it was about getting the gestalt of the toy and game worlds. Every year, there’d be the big things people were talking about. Sometimes it would pan out, sometimes it wouldn’t. It was the eighties, and people used the phrase “buzz” the way people in the 2010s used “trending.” Some things got the buzz, others didn’t. Everybody wanted it.
For me, it was mostly about seeing people. I’d always get together with Bob Prupis, head of boys’ toys at Hasbro, and of course Joe and Tom. Sometimes I’d hang out at the Griffin-Bacal office pretending to be an ad executive (which is what I technically was), and sometimes I’d be at TSR.
In any case, at twenty-nine, I had a whole alternate life in New York. John Phillips, Patty, and Wendy were there, along with a smattering of other folks. A lot of LA people were there. Dini and I never let a trip pass without a visit to Trader Vic’s in the basement of the Plaza. I never didn’t have something to do.
I learned to function in an alien city. As the song of the day said, “Nobody walks in LA,” but you walk a lot in New York. I’d take cabs when I was lazy or it was a long way, and I’d take the subway when I had a native with me. The background sound bed was honking horns and guys yelling. In the winter there’d be steam rising from the grates, and in the summer there’d be a million different smells from street-cooked food mixed with exhaust.
From the moment I arrived at the airport (usually LaGuardia), I’d get chop blocked by some gypsy cabbie who’d try to lead me to his car three parking garages away. I fell for it once. Then it would be bump and grind as I stared in amazement at the skyline. I’d grown up in Chicago, so I appreciated skyscrapers. My favorite thing was the lonely globe in the park where the 1964 World’s Fair had been held and which had been immortalized in DC Comics.
The other great thing about New York is that everything is right there. You’re walking down the street and oh, there’s the Empire State Building, or the New York Public Library or the Met. So much history, iconography, excitement, and energy all compressed into such a small place.
At one point, Sunbow was trying to do something with Radio City and the Rockettes. It was called “Rookie Rockette.” I had never heard of a Rockette and only vaguely knew about Radio City Music Hall, but the name had a great whiff of the thirties. Maybe it was then that I started incubating Agent 13. We did a tour of Radio City trying to think of a story. We went backstage, onto catwalks, into boxes, into a vast labyrinthine warren of props and costumes and dressing rooms. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of anything other than murders and weird conspiracies. None of my ideas were very helpful, but being there was like a vacation to a different life in a different time. The interesting thing was that it was the first sign that Sunbow was thinking beyond kids’ entertainment.