How’s Charlie doing?” my father asked. Seated in his leather armchair watching a Western, he pointed a Colt 45 revolver at the TV screen every time John Wayne pulled his six-shooter from his holster. My mother had once told me of a similar scene when Charlie’s baby nurse came downstairs to the library. “Mr. Stroh,” the poor woman announced, standing at the entrance. “Charles has taken his bottle.” Sitting there in full Western regalia, replete with a cowboy hat, chaps, boots with spurs, leather holsters, and a revolver in each hand, my father kept his eyes on the TV. “Thank you, Ivy,” he said.
I attached my video camera to the tripod, aiming the lens at my father. “Charlie wants to come home for Christmas,” I told him.
My father frowned. “He drinking during the day, or only at night?”
“Both,” I said. I moved the tripod and adjusted the height so that the viewfinder framed the bottom half of his face. “I’m worried about him.”
“Is he working?”
“Not right now.”
My father switched off the movie with a remote and set the gun down on a table. “You’ll have to talk with your mother about Christmas,” he said. “That’s her department.”
I scanned my father’s library for additional lights with which to better illuminate his face, but none were quite the right height. I walked through his entryway and down two steps into the sunken living room. The lushness of the garden flooded in through the picture windows. Out on the terrace, large ceramic ashtrays shaped like fish had been placed on glass-surfaced tables. Remembering these brightly painted ashtrays from the garden parties where, as a child, I often finished the cocktails left behind, I marveled that they had lasted all these years, through so many parties, so many moves.
My father had settled into this six-bedroom house five years before this. Looking around at his immaculately decorated rooms, a visitor could have been forgiven for assuming that our beer brands were thriving. But Uncle Peter’s late entry into the exploding light-beer market in the eighties had kept us from competing effectively. In 1989, after a deal to sell our business to Coors had fallen through, dividends had been withheld, and the family had started attending annual shareholder meetings—something we’d never done—to be told how poorly the company was performing. Angered by our advertising cuts, wholesalers gave up on our brands, switching to rival labels, causing sales to drop precipitously. A sudden, panicked repackaging of the iconic Stroh’s brand—to block letter blue, contributing to a 40 percent sales decline within a single year—was the last nail in that brand’s coffin. The new packaging might have worked, had we not tried to market the very same beer formula as a higher-priced premium beer. As it turned out, my father hadn’t saved a thing, and my mother had to lend him his mortgage money until dividends were resumed a year later.
In 1990, in the aftermath of the failed Coors deal, management rallied to revive Old Milwaukee, our strongest brand, by committing an unprecedented $9 million to a new marketing blitz: the Swedish Bikini Team ad campaign. The celebrated Hal Riney Agency in San Francisco came up with the concept of svelte blond-wigged babes with cases of beer dropping out of the sky in parachutes, or coming downriver in a boat, to update the already popular “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” Old Milwaukee ads. For the sake of variety, viewers saw a different Swedish Bikini Team commercial on TV every night. Many considered it the best beer campaign ever made. Ratings were off the charts.
Then the bomb dropped. A group of female workers in the Stroh’s plant in St. Paul, Minnesota, hired a powerful feminist lawyer, claiming sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace and linking it to the ad campaign. The controversy sparked a national press debate over sexist themes in advertising. The fact that the Swedish Bikini Team had also just posed for the cover of Playboy magazine didn’t help. Feminist groups everywhere used the campaign as a scapegoat. Soon the media controversy landed on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, and the Minnesota lawsuit was headed for the Supreme Court.
Stroh’s finally pulled the campaign in its third month, spending minimally on advertising from that point on. It was impossible to compete with Anheuser-Busch’s deep advertising pockets. And so management switched to a strategy of managing our U.S. business down while making a big overseas push, particularly in India and Russia, where Stroh’s Beer was fast becoming an icon of the American way of life.
Out on the terrace a light rain began to fall, pelting the ceramic fish ashtrays. I pulled a plug out from the wall and carried a lamp from the living room into the library.
“I’m thinking of selling this house,” said my father.