Love and Glory

Chapter Fifteen

I arrived in New York wearing jeans, loafers, a blue oxford-weave shirt with a button-down collar, and an army field jacket with the twenty-fourth division taro leaf patch on the shoulder. I had no luggage except a gym bag with the collection of unmailed letters in it that I had come to call my journal and a couple of new notebooks. In my wallet was seventeen hundred dollars in mustering-out pay. I was twenty-two.

The one-room apartment I rented on Thompson Street had been freshly painted. But whoever had done the painting hadn’t scraped the old paint, so the walls were lumpy. Around the old four-footed tub and pull-chain toilet, paint had slopped and dried into thick white scabs. The porcelain surfaces were ineradicably stained, like the soul of man, and no absolution would ever clean them. I didn’t care.

Except for the daily journal entries to Jennifer my writing didn’t happen. I sat every day for a couple of hours at my kitchen table and looked at the cheap white paper in the typewriter. But I didn’t type anything. I was spending a lot of money on beer and by December I was up to 180 pounds, all of it fat, and I was almost out of money.

I went down to Robert Hall and spent forty-five dollars for a blue blazer and some gray flannel pants. I bought a tie in Times Square for a buck, then I got the Times and started reading help wanted ads. Some kind of writing job, advertising maybe.

It was my twenty-third interview. I’d been doing about five a day, every day. I didn’t have a job, but I was getting good at interviewing. No sir, I didn’t finish college. I felt my military responsibility came first. Yes sir, I know that advertising’s a tough business. The war left me needing action. I couldn’t go back to school like a child. Oh absolutely sir, I’ve given it a lot of thought. I assessed what I could do that would help me and help my employer. What did I have to market, I asked myself. Writing skills, I decided, and a desire to be where there was action.

I had the patter down quite well now, when I got a chance to use it. Most of the time the interviewer told me about the company and himself and his philosophy of advertising and employment and things.

“Mr. Adams?”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Locke will see you now.”

I walked behind the secretary’s wiggling buttocks across the big reception area and down the corridor with head-high cubicles on both sides and men in shirt sleeves working at typewriters and into a big private office with a big window that looked out over Madison Avenue and another big window into another big office across the street. There was probably a guy over there having an exit interview. Matter and anti-matter. The secretary smiled and closed the door behind me.

Mr. Locke was sitting with his feet on the window ledge facing out the window, his head tilted back, his eyes closed. He was tall and thin and blond and probably went to Cornell with John Merchent and his ushers. His gray flannel suit jacket hung on a hanger by the door. His blue oxford button-down was open at the neck and his blue and red rep tie was loosened. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and wing-tipped cordovan shoes. The Prince of Madison Avenue. Full uniform.

I stood by his desk. He still sat with his eyes closed. Maybe I was supposed to launch into my spiel unprovoked. No sir, I didn’t finish college. I felt my military... shit. Locke kept staring at the insides of his eyelids. Then he sat up abruptly, swung his feet down, spun his chair around, and wrote for maybe a minute in longhand on a legal-size pad of blue-lined yellow paper. When he finished he read over what he’d written, made a spelling change, and sat back.

“Hi,” he said. “Whitney Locke. I was just writing some poetry.”

I nodded.

“You’re Boone Adams. Personnel sent you up.”

“Yes.”

He waved toward a chair. “Sit down, please.”

I did. My chair wasn’t as nice as his. But I wasn’t the copy chief. He sifted through some folders on his desk until he came up with my application and résumé.

“So you want to get into advertising?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“One of the things I’d suggest right off, and mind you, you want to work in advertising, I can get you in. But first I’d suggest you and the wife get together, maybe go down to the playroom, something like that, get a blackboard and very carefully chart your career plans. Be goal-oriented, think it through, and recognize that no one’s going to be giving you any breaks.”

“I’m not married, sir.”

“That’s too bad. It helps if you are. But whatever. Go to that blackboard and make a chart. Where do I want to be in five years? Ten? How long to be copy chief? Will I be satisfied as copy chief?”

I nodded.

He was still looking at my file. “Didn’t finish college,” he said.

“No, I felt my military responsibility...”

“Doesn’t matter, it’s the wrong college anyway. We only employ men from Princeton or Yale.”

“Oh.”

He smiled, stood up, and put out his hand. “Good to have talked with you, Boone. Let me know how you make out. Be sure to get that chart worked out and get yourself goal-oriented. Advertising is not a job, it’s a career.”

We shook hands. I went out.

At the Discretionary Mutual Insurance Company of America they gave me a writing test. In an interview cubicle in the personnel office they put me at a table, gave me a typewriter and a timer, and asked me to write a story based on the proposition that at noontime tomorrow everyone would lose the power of speech. It was my fifty-second job interview. I had twenty minutes. I wrote a thing called “Winterbaum for President” in which an out-of-work Jewish mime of that name found himself suddenly the great communicator in a speechless world, and became president of the U.S.A. Everyone told me it was a really creative piece and they hired me at three hundred and ninety dollars a month to be the editor of their house organ.

My boss was the Manager comma Advertising and Sales Promotion. The comma and the inversion mattered, I discovered. Advertising and Sales Promotion Manager was a lower rank. Only a Manager comma got a chair with arms and a plastic water carafe and a shoulder-high glass-partitioned office. A Director comma got a partition more than head-high and a rug in addition to all the rest. As sales promotion editor I had a desk and a file cabinet and a chair without arms in the pit with all the other groundlings.

“Remember,” my boss told me on my first full day, “this magazine is a management tool. It is a sales promotion device, a means of communicating management’s point of view to the men in the field.”

I nodded. I was sitting in his office in his conference chair. The conference chair had no arms. Directors got conference chairs with arms.

“The field men, the agents are encouraged to view the magazine as theirs, and that’s good. It builds a sense of community. But it is not, I say again, not, their magazine. It is ours. All copy is approved upstairs by the general sales manager or his designee. Right?”

I said, “Right.”

“You’re in on the ground floor here, Boone,” he said. “You’re getting the chance to start a brand-new company pub. You’re not taking over something someone else devised. This is new.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a real creative opportunity, and the fact that you proved, with that splendid short story, that you’re one hell of a creative guy, you got hired.” He laughed. “Winterbaum for President, goddamn. What was that stain he had on his tie?”

“Beet soup,” I said.

“Yes. Good job.” My boss’s name was Walt Waters. He was a tall, crisp, horsey-looking product of Amherst College and the Discretionary Mutual Executive Training Program.

“Thanks, Mr. Waters,” I said.

“Walt, remember, call me Walt. Everyone’s first-name here, even Lee.”

Lee was the president. When Walt said Lee his voice hushed a bit.

“Okay, Walt.”

“Now, let me give you a couple of tips. Being creative isn’t enough. You’ve got to be savvy as well. About the job. About people. About your appearance. Get a sunlamp, first thing, and keep yourself tanned. Don’t overdo it, but a nice understated tan makes a difference.”

I nodded.

“And,” he said with a swell friendly smile, “get some clothes. Look around. See how some of us are dressed, get the sense of the look, and then go out and open a charge at Brooks Brothers. It’s part of the game. Maybe it seems conformist to you. But it makes sense. A good product sells better in a good package. Right?”

“Right.”