When the show’s producer, Mindy, first called me, she pitched the appearance as an opportunity to talk about my storied background, as well as a chance for some of the notable advertising women who’d succeeded me to honor the trail I had blazed.
Her invitation came in the spring of 1980, an anxious season when seemingly every flat surface in Manhattan was adorned with a “New Yorkers for Kennedy” sign. I had, by that time, finally stopped writing copy. For years I’d worked on campaigns for Arrow shirts, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Martex fiber, Clairol, DuPont, Seagram’s, Simmons Beautyrest, and Chef Boyardee—a lot of decent freelance clients in the 1960s and ’70s—but I didn’t need the money anymore: I’d saved a lot, invested wisely. And lately copywriting hadn’t been bringing me joy. So I’d let it go. I didn’t quit, per se; I just started saying no until eventually no one was asking.
Poetry still flowed out of me—an unstoppable effluence—so I continued to write greeting cards, which I’d taken up not long after I got out of Silver Hill, but even that felt more rote than satisfying. The neighborhood of verbal felicity in which I still resided had gone down, down, down. I kept living there—trimming the hedges, freshening up the paint—but everyone else had died or moved away.
So Mindy’s proposition caught me at a moment of uncharacteristic vulnerability. I let my guard down, allowed myself to be swayed. Solicitousness and flattery are, of course, the classic methods for preying on the aged. This, I’m unhappy to report, is because they work.
Though I’d have preferred to walk—it was only two miles—I didn’t want to get windblown on the way, so I took a cab to the studio on the Upper West Side.
When I showed up, Mindy greeted me with compliments. She had a feathered and blow-dried haircut and a propensity to exclaim.
“Miss Boxfish, right on time! Don’t you look sharp in that scarlet suit!” she said. “Thank you for not wearing black, or navy blue, or white. You’d be amazed how many people ignore our directions!”
“They think they know best what will make them look good, I imagine,” I said. “But I assume you know your business, and I’ve done this often enough not to second-guess you. In fact I think I was in this very same studio once before, almost thirty years ago, to be a guest on Betty Furness’s Success Story.”
“Is that so!” said Mindy, who clearly had no idea what I was talking about, no clue as to whether Betty Furness was a person or a manufacturer of home heating units. “I hope we’ll get a chance to talk about some of that fascinating history today! Now the show, as you know, is telecast from seven to eight—which means this morning we’ll be shooting for an hour or so! We’ll probably go a little longer, so if we need to edit or cut anything, we can! We’ll have the material!”
As I wondered what might cause a person to sustain such apparent enthusiasm—an endocrine condition? cocaine?—Mindy waved over an assistant who took my coat and hung it up. The studio was air-conditioned to a meat-locker temperature, the better to prevent us from becoming sweaty and shiny under the lights.
The other guest panelists were Leslie Monroe, an ad exec who’d rocketed from the copywriter ranks in the glossy 1960s and was still in the game, and Geraldine Kidd—she did look young—who’d recently made a stir with a provocative shampoo campaign and was on her way up. We all met in the green room.
The show’s host, Tuck Merkington, came back and greeted us; he was fresh from makeup, salt-and-pepper hair shellacked into an oceanic sweep above his leonine face. Like so many public-television people, he was a former radio guy, with a voice made for broadcasting: even his name sounded like an avuncular chuckle. He thanked us for coming, and Mindy marched us to the set to arrange us in our places, tasteful chairs arrayed in a semicircle that was part home den, part doctor’s waiting room.
The tape rolled. Tuck ran through his introductions of each of us, then kicked off the discussion with a patronizing cliché: “Now, this program will no doubt be watched by a lot of girls who already have a toe on the first rung of the advertising ladder,” he said. “I’d love to ask you on their behalf: What steps are taken by those who scale the heights?”
Geraldine Kidd, unfazed by Tuck’s vapidity, jumped in. “Listen, ladies, here is where you stand,” she said. “Advertising is no longer the dream job of every high-school girl. Radio, television, and public relations have passed it in the popularity race. This is all to the good for those of you who want advertising or nothing, because you really stand a chance to make it.”