I was there when girls’ skirts disappeared to be replaced by trouser suits subsequently banned by the management of J. Walter Thompson as unsuitable office attire to make way for the much more acceptable hot pants, so short, only a couple of inches of material hung just below female bottoms.
I was there when Biba took the fashion world by storm and the hems of Maxi Coats hit the floor not quite as fast as the World Trade Centre buildings did 35 years later under controlled demolition.
I was there when Richard Nixon lied through his gleaming white teeth and was impeached.
I was there when advertising became intelligent, sophisticated, entertaining and respectable.
I was there when Jimmy Savile became the voice of British Rail and the ‘clunk click’ seat belt campaigns, which turned out not to be quite so intelligent, sophisticated, entertaining and respectable a notion as first believed.
I was there when scores of people rushed from 40 Berkeley Square to the Beatles Apple building in Saville Row to find out what all the din coming from the roof was about and when someone yelled,
“Get Back!”
I was there when 58,000 American troops were slaughtered in Vietnam along with 3.8 million Vietnamese and wished I lived on a different planet.
I was there when Margaret Thatcher came to power and wished I lived in a different universe.
I was there when the Martians pissed themselves laughing because Earthlings were still using ordinary mashed potato and was so glad I was.
FORWARD – OR SHOULD IT BE CHARGE?
Harold George sat with his knees hunched under his chin, the soles of his tan, calf loafers pressed against the edge of the desk, his jacket shoulders forming a pillow as he hunched low in the chair. His smile constant, his voice, laughing as he spoke, he reminded me of Graham Alexander, a boy I’d known at school, who did the same. It didn’t do to upset Graham. He could turn instantly, radiating a deep, red-faced, quiet rage that made you feel he might unscrew your head and drink your blood. I wondered if Mr. George could turn just as quickly. The white-haired Harold, head of art at J. Walter Thompson, London, was slightly freckled; his reddish brown forehead and MCC tie giving away his main preoccupation.
“Do you like cricket?” he said, and without waiting for my answer, “You know, I really do think we stand a good chance of taking the fifth test at the Oval. The West Indies just don’t seem quite up to scratch and Graveney was on for a double century before he was run out.”
I smiled feebly but my lack of interest was obvious and Harold snapped to. He stood up, stuck his specs back on his face and took another look at my work spread out over the desktop. I’d walked into Berkeley Square for the first time in my life in May, 1966, during a freak blizzard, carrying my new 20”x30” portfolio case, just managing to keep the thing from dragging in the snow, my new thin grey Carnaby Street trousers doing nothing to protect my delicate young pins from the icy wind blowing in from the Urals or possibly Soho. As a student, I’d spent hours rummaging through the records in the damp infested Dobells jazz shop at 77 Charing Cross Road, or exploring the Aladdin’s caves of seedy, dust ridden guitar shops in Denmark Street but this was different. Berkeley Square reeked of wealth. Bentleys and Rollers were everywhere, and diamonds hung by their millions from the majestic plane trees in the square garden.
A long way from the Edegbury council estate where I grew up, Berkeley Square was supposed to have been where the ultra sophisticated, cool world of advertising hung out. Was this what I’d worked so hard for since I left school? Was this what I really wanted to do? I wasn’t sure, but a picture on the flyleaf of The New York Art Director’s Club awards annual at art school showing a line of young American creative guys caught my attention. A couple of them wore white sneakers with their suits. How cool was that?
“Yes, it’s all really excellent,” said Harold, perusing my stuff, “When are you going to the Royal College? October, isn’t it?
"Yes. The 10th.”
“And you’re looking for something interesting to do in the meantime? Well, I think we may be able to help. One of our senior Art Directors is off to our New York office for two years in a couple of months and is very busy trying to finish of quite a lot of work before he goes. He really could do with an assistant so your availability could work very well for both of us. Laurence is a very good art director and you’ll learn a lot. I’ll see if he’s around.” He pressed a button on the antiquated intercom box on the desk,
“Rachel, be an angel, and ask Laurence Hutchins to pop round to my office, would you? Thaa-anks,” he sang the last word.
For a head honcho in one of the most famous advertising agencies on the planet, Harold George was a very laid back individual, his cream lightweight suit looking as comfortable and relaxed as he was. The term, English gentleman, fitted him like a well-tailored cricket box and I wondered if, in the advertising business, he was a rare breed.
J. WALTER THOMPSON, 40 BERKELEY SQUARE
Jeremy Bullmore, one time Executive Creative Director and Chairman of J. Walter Thompson, London, recently wrote in his Campaign Magazine column when asked if he was a Mad Men fan, (the American TV series about advertising in the 1960s) that he was totally hooked on the show but that it bore no resemblance to the real advertising world of the early Sixties. That Jeremy’s loyalty to the business and the agency was such an essential part of it for so long is undisputed, but in my memory, JWT was EXACTLY like the place portrayed in the series. Gin and tonic flowed like the Thames beginning at 11.00 every day, the foot deep, fog of cigarette smoke clinging acceptably to ceilings throughout the building where Don Draper would have felt perfectly at home. The classic JWT joke was: if all the secretaries at 40 Berkeley Square (mostly Sloane Rangers) were laid end to end, one wouldn't be a bit surprised.
TWO YEARS LATER
“I’ve gone and blown all my savings,” Roger Nights stood in the office doorway grinning in his ankle length brown leather overcoat, reminiscent of Heinrich Himmler, except Roger’s head was far from shaved at the sides, his hair over-lapping his collar,
“Come on out the back and I’ll show you what I’ve spent the bread on.”
Gleaming like a galaxy of stars against the curb in the Farm Street twilight at the back of the J. Walter Thomson building stood a sleek, metallic blue, wire-wheeled apparition with a soft roof.
“It’s only an Aston Martin fucking DB2,” Roger announced, his excitement not so much contained as oozing,
“I’m taking Jacqui (his new and very pretty girlfriend from the 5th floor secretary’s bay) to see Hair in it tonight. It cost me four fucking grand. (He meant the car, not the tickets) What a way to pull up outside your actual* theatre.”
Four thousand pounds was the equivalent of a year’s salary for Roger, the copywriting half of a specially hired creative team ensconced with half a dozen account men, a couple of secretaries and a production man in their own open-plan unit in a corner of the fifth floor of 40 Berkeley Square a building which occupied the entire top North West quarter of the square. In 1968, four grand a year was top dollar for a member of the agency’s creative department, most other senior creatives earning a maximum of three thousand. My own junior salary was set at the dizzy heights of £1200 pa.
Group 8, as the unit was named, was set up to service accounts who’s clients were unhappy with the agency’s performance on their business, an improve the focus and quality of the work on the accounts and prevent the clients from taking their stuff elsewhere. 24 year old Roger and his 28 year old art director, Max Henry, a tall, thin, black-garbed Rasputin figure with a droopy moustache, kept the wayward accounts in the agency. They were given carte blanche over how they went about their business, answering only to the Group 8 account director in charge and immune to the general day-to-day admin of JWT. This pissed a lot of people off but the pair won countless awards, which pissed people off even more. Roger and Max knew how to create great advertising, unlike 60 percent of all those employed in the business at the time who had absolutely no idea.
(* Johnny Speight’s TV series, ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ was very popular amongst some of JWT’s creative people in the late Sixties and early Seventies and many of Alf Garnet’s expressions had become part of every day lingo, two of the most well used being: ‘What we call..’ and ‘Your actual…’ e.g. Senior Art Director, John St Claire (real name, Sloggett) to his assistant, John Knight, who was sitting on the floor of the room he shared with 4 other slaves:
“If you’d like to get up off of what we call your arse, I’ve got a load of your actual work I need to brief you on.”)
* * * * * * * * * * * *
CHAPTER 1. WEMBLEY, DAMNIT!
So you want to be a rock 'n' roll star?
Then listen now to what I say
Just get an electric guitar
Then take some time
and learn how to play
And with your hair swung right
And your pants too tight
It's gonna be all right
Then it's time to go downtown
Where the agent man won't let you down
Sell your soul to the company
Who are waiting there to sell plastic ware
And in a week or two
If you make the charts
The girls'll tear you apart
The price you paid for your riches and fame
Was it all a strange game?
You're a little insane
The money, the fame, the public acclaim
Don't forget what you are
You're a rock 'n' roll star!
In my brief first spell at J. Walter Thompson in 1966, the guys in slick, 3 buttoned American suits and white sneakers I’d seen in the New York One Show annual were nowhere to be seen, so I figured the more sanitized role of graphic designer might be cooler. Having dropped out of the pressure cooker of the Graphic Design course at the Royal College of Art, and spent a year doing nothing but contemplate the insanity of a career as a jazz guitarist, my old Tutor from Ravensbourne College of Art told me I was involved in the creative arts world whether I liked it or not and I applied for a job in the newly formed Osram GEC design group in the anonymous, grey North London backwater of Wembley.
The two companies, Osram and GEC had been amalgamated and the new venture had to be launched to the general public and possible business investors – an exciting prospect any young graphic or product designer would’ve killed to be involved in. In 1966, Wembley had been the talk of the Nation, the famous twin towered Stadium hosting the World Cup Final between England and West Germany. In the run up to the eagerly anticipated 3rd World War showdown, as many of the JWT personnel as could squeeze themselves into the lounge area beside the agency’s in-house supermarket, sat enthralled in front of the TV set one afternoon watching one of the semi finals. Dr John Treasure, the then agency chairman, and his entourage passed though the lounge coming to sudden stop, the followers running into each other like a string of goods wagons in a shunting yard. The Doc, as he was known, marched over to the TV and switched it off, announcing,
“I think that’s most unfair.” He wasn’t referring to a ref’s decision or how the horrific the sight of Nobby Styles’ missing front choppers and subsequent black, gob chasm might affect the concentration of the opposing team.
In 1967, Wembley was just a bleak, thoroughly depressing jungle of pre war ‘ribbon development’ semi detached houses, for me, a state immeasurably enhanced by a two-hour journey every day from Chislehurst, and pretty soon I moved into digs in Kingsbury four nights a week, with Jack Bessford, a product designer from Keighly, West Yorkshire. The landlady, Mrs. Richardson, a cheerful, middle-aged peroxide blonde, married to ex-lodger, Ron, 10 years her junior, acted like a Mum to both Jack and I and it was under her supervision that I had my first taste of boiled Rabbit, dished up in a steaming pond of dodgy looking semi-transparent liquid on a tray in front of the telly. I’ve never eaten rabbit since. Something about the skinny bones lurking in the depths of the stew reminded me of my old ginger Persian cat, Spike, the notion of chewing away at his meager flesh putting me off bunny chomping for life.
Jack, the son of a fireman, and resplendent in Marks and Sparks gear from the checked shirt collar peeping out from the neck of his sage green jumper to his grey trousers and elastic-sided Hush Puppies, was given to voicing sudden, categorical condemnations, especially on the subject of any kind of fashion.
“Ar hairt images!”
“Ar hairt the Beatles!”
“Ar hairt Coronation Street!”
“Ar hairt Football!”
“Ar hairt Loondon!”
“Ar hairt Paul Williams!”
Paul Williams had been a fellow student of Jack’s at Birmingham College of Art. There was no love lost between the two, Jack complaining that Paul was more interested in the image that went with being an industrial designer than the craft itself. It was ironic that in answering a recruitment ad for young designers to join the new Osram design venture, and pitching up for an interview, Jack was confronted with not only Peter Williams, the smooth talking, smooth suited member of the Council Of Industrial Design, who’d been tasked by Arnold Weinstock, Chairman of GEC, to set the project up, but with his old arch enemy, Paul Williams, (no relation to PM) already hired as the design group leader.
Both the Williams’s interviewed me together - the sun tanned Peter Williams, exuding all the smiley charm of Kaa, the hypnotic python from the Disney version of The Jungle Book. He was stylish for a man in his mid forties, the cloth of his beautifully tailored, dark blue suit radiating quality that was an absolute snip at a hundred quid a square inch. The 23 year-old Paul Williams didn’t cut quite so much of a dash in his cheap, grey, off-the-peg Burton’s number and plastic looking, black Chelsea boots, complimented his pale, sweaty complexion topped off by an untidy mop of unruly, adolescent blonde curls. Williams 2 obviously idolized Williams 1 but was totally overshadowed charisma wise, nervously chain puffing his Senior Service with the uncertainty of an amateur smoker who’d not yet realized that the true magic of smoking is only appreciated when you suck the burning fumes into your lungs. They must have been impressed by the confident way I breathed in the smoke from my own fags because I got the job.
CLIENTS
This was an unusual situation. Rather than working for clients as I would in an agency, the 5 designers in the new group were the clients. We were, after all, an essential part of the mighty Osram GEC machine, creating products and graphics that would shape the future. There would be no one in the way, no one to say no, that something couldn’t be done. It was the situation every eager young design student leaving college dreamed of: a chance to change the world. But there was a nagging doubt in the back of my mind. In becoming a client, I’d become the enemy. In my first brief spell as a junior art director at JWT in’66, I’d met and presented work to these client people, and found them generally to be smart, intelligent, cultured and quite switched on.
One guy, a Tony Bennett lookalike from Lyons Tea, a tight, shiny black suit fitting him like a shark’s skin, was friendly and complimentary about some new tea packaging I’d designed. The meeting was a scene of traditional thick, blue smoke, a gallon or two of obligatory G&T, sumptuous sofas, jokes and laughter. It was Tony Bennett, me, Laurence Hutchins, copywriter, Shirley Gardener, account director Larry Ovens, in his double breasted, blue 1940s style suit, an account planner (to be explained later) and Larry’s PA, taking notes. We all acted like old pals having a jolly time but after the meeting, Tony Bennett was dismissively referred to as that bastard, ‘Scarface’, pointing up the neat 4inch scar on his forehead.
All became clear. Clients were really shadowy aliens who lived somewhere on the far side of the galaxy and whose main mission was to make life awkward for the far superior beings in advertising agencies. These extra terrestrials obviously knew nothing of the creative process and the massive effort, all-consuming passion, desire, self-belief and determination without which great advertising and design ideas weren’t possible. They were just too demanding. They wanted things done on time and to a budget. They even had the brass neck to turn some of those great ideas down, and they expected their products to sell as a result of the advertising that eventually ran. And well they might have in spades, had the aliens not messed around with the original ideas and watered them down till they were no longer great, entertaining pieces of pure art but merely functional bits of communication. They paid the bills and our salaries, but so they should have for the privilege of having such a plethora of talent on their side.
In an advertising agency, a creative person was to some extent protected from aliens by account people, popularly referred to as suits or skirts according to gender, whose job was to keep clients happy at all times, to understand a brand’s position in the market place, suggest how that position might be expanded, agree a brief, and make sure the agency produced something that would make the brand more famous and shift goods off shelves. Things sometimes crossed over into other areas, like babysitting and listening to drunken blubbing about how someone’s wife didn’t understand them and their inclination to cross dress. At McCann Erickson in the 1980s,V.K., a client with a particularly nasty personality, called his agency account director in a meeting with another client, to demand tickets for the forthcoming Wimbledon Men’s Singles Final, and to threaten the withdrawal of the business from the agency if his demand wasn’t met. At Osram-GEC, none of that account person stuff was necessary. We were the clients. What we said went, and bugger the rest, but I hadn’t reckoned on something far worse than whatever galactic force came up with clients: salesmen.
My earliest memory of salesmen was as a four-year-old child living in an asbestos-clad prefab in post war Kent. Blokes with yellow socks, enhancing brown and white spat style shoes, trilby hats covering Brilcream sodden hair, pencil-thin moustaches, overlong colourful ties depicting bikini-clad tarts in grass skirts hanging loosely from elephant-sized jackets, grinned through jagged yellow teeth across an already open suitcase that filled the doorstep blocking any notion of escape. Slamming the door wasn’t an option, the bloke having wedged one of his cheap brown and white brogues into the gap. The suitcase overflowed with yellow dusters, dishcloths, shoe polish, clothes pegs, all sorts of other household crap and nylon stockings. My Mum, her nervousness obvious, always bought something just to get rid of these garishly sinister visitors.
And now they were back with a vengeance. Gone were the suitcases, trilbies, pencil thin moustaches and nylons but the ties and Brilcream remained, irrefutable evidence that the front line soldiers of the Osram Empire were the same breed only worse. These weren’t door-to-door spivs, but fully paid up, bone fide scaremongers who could sell a birth certificate to a corpse. Don Alders was the epitome. Short, round, barrel-chested, fake diamond in the centre of a crude starburst design on his cheap, pretend silk, silver-grey neckwear, his remarkably full rubber-lipped incessant grin and defiant feet astride posture projecting a brutal, callous, self confidence that would have scared the shit out of the average Panzer Division. His mantra still rings in my ears 45 years later:
“Yesterday’s gone. We can’t do anything about that so let’s make a day and a half out of today.”
An admirable outlook, but Alders was a bumptious, load-mouthed, nauseating little bogey of a bore, with small man syndrome made obvious by his insatiable need to be the centre of attention. His conversation was riddled with innuendo considerably less subtle than the average saucy seaside postcard; the jokes he frequently told, a clear indication that he was a staunch believer in a world in which women were only fit to be the butt of gutter level humour. Farting as loudly and often as possible was another of his stocks-in-trade and an ideal compliment to his putrid sense of humour.
Ferocious ambition often goes hand-in-glove with paranoia and, apart from making it to the top of whichever slime-coated tree Don Alders had in mind, using the heads of any available lesser mortals as footholds, his main preoccupation was to belittle anything he didn’t understand in case it posed a threat. The new Osram design group fitted the category sublimely. He named the mustard-coloured, 5ft high metal partitioned design group office ‘the Flower Pot’ and the designers inside, ‘the Flower People’. This wasn’t a tribute to Watch with Mother but a sideswipe at anyone younger than his own 40 odd years age and the new Hippy culture spilling over from California and seeping like a massive rainbow coloured oil slick onto British shores. What really pissed me off was that this moron lumped as all together, and I hated so-called ‘Flower Power’ a bloody sight more than anyone except maybe Jack Bessford. I was with him on this one.
"Ar hairt hippies.”
Make love not war? Just who were these lank-haired Flower Kiddie Winkies kidding? “Just give me some more weed, man, or I’ll slit your fucking throat.” was nearer the truth.
The Beatles had a lot to answer for by unleashing the so-called psychedelic Magical Mystery Tour and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band albums on the world but that it didn’t give an out-of-date, narrow-minded war baby leftover bigot like Alders the right to take the piss. It was clear that the only way to stop someone like him was to put a bullet through their brain - if they’d had one. I thought his kind were long gone, driven into obscurity by the fashion and culture revolutions of the Sixties but for some inscrutable reason Wembley had been stepped over. In the first mili-second of meeting Alders, I hankered after what I suddenly saw as the more civilized life of advertising, the brief glimpse I’d had a year before suddenly shaping into what looked like paradise by comparison to this Wembley shit hole.
It was clear from the start that Alders despised Peter William’s intelligence and style and went out of his way to blacken the man’s name at every opportunity. He thought the new design group was a complete waste of time. Osram already had a whole bank of designers, some of whom, like George Carter, Head Of Design, had been with the company since just after the war. They’d done all right up to now; they were reliable; they did what they were told; they didn’t complain or question anything; they just got on with the job, whatever Alders and his crew decided their job was. I suppose Alders knew his own job too. He was obviously knowledgeable about lighting paraphernalia, from industrial, high bay reflectors (whatever they were) and fluorescent tubes to what he and his kind referred to as decorative fittings. By the sight of the stuff in the Osram catalogues, the only thing they were fit to decorate were the padded cells of those who deserved to be incarcerated for their total lack of taste.
To me the Osram sales force were like the continual waves of Chinese hoards who backed up the North Korean army in 1950, streaming over the mountains, picking up the weapons of the fallen and tearing headlong into battle, regardless of anything the opposition threw at them. This lot would be chucking light bulbs instead of grenades. Getting rid of Alders wouldn’t have solved anything. There would always be a million more tossers like him just over the nearest hill.
FACTORY FARMING
Today, 1930s style is reproduced and collected as elite ‘retro’ design and Art Deco has been an ‘in thing’ for a couple of decades. But the ugly curves, stark, imposing geometric shapes, foreboding acres of parquet flooring, so-called organic patterns, and worst of all, metal-framed, Crittal windows, fill me with a nightmarish dread. The buildings, especially the industrial ones, were imposing, dreary, depressing and threatening, none more so than the Osram GEC Lampworks built in 1933 for the production of light bulbs.*
he Osram factory building was as long as the Queen Mary. Typically, any regard for elegance or proportion had been discarded in the name of functionality but I’d defy anyone with an ounce of sensitivity in their bones to stand in front of this monstrosity and not feel depressed to the point of suicide and I’d swear the place had a profound affect on the people who slaved under it’s roof. The ‘hangar’, as we called the Osram building, was so huge you had to walk about half a mile through endless corridors between acres of partitioned offices if you went in the front door. Jack and I took the tube from Kingsbury where we lodged, a further stop down the line and went in through the back gate. The office part of the outfit was on the first floor but to get to the staircase we had to walk through the factory, which was an education in itself.
The only previous experience I’d had of factory life was working for a shoe repair company in Sidcup in the summer holidays before I started at Sidcup Art School. It was a small, ground floor place accommodating about 25 workers and the machinery on the shop floor was so loud that everyone communicated through sign language. I worked in the stores at the back with 3 middle-aged ladies and our job was to ticket the shoes with the repair requests and wheel trolley loads of the stuff out to the workers in exchange for finished shoes. The other job was to keep the workers supplied with equipment: glue, nails, stiletto heal studs, sticker soles, and leather. I’d stand in the open doorway and wait for someone to give the appropriate sign before scampering to the store cupboard. It didn’t do to keep them waiting as most of them were on piecework and were paid according to the number of pairs of shoes they repaired during a day. The smell of glue and leather was almost overwhelming but not altogether unpleasant in a nostalgia-forming sort of way. I wasn’t yet Sixteen and though I’d had never bought a drink in a pub, often felt quite pissed due to the fumes.
Alf, a bald-headed chap who specialized in the application of leather soles rather than the more common cheap rubber ones, would look up and from his machine and touch his shoulder, a signal that he needed a sheet of the light coloured leather which I assumed originated from somewhere above the upper leg of some poor deceased animal as it was appropriately named, not leg or foot, or knee, but shoulder. Like a lot of 1960s secondary school lads, I’d started smoking at about 14 and had begun rolling my own on the grounds that it was a bloody site cheaper than packets of fags. I was standing in the storeroom doorway rolling up one day when Alf beckoned me over. He took the uncompleted roll up from me and with deft and delicately skilled movements of his fingers, he lovingly and oh, so gently, rolled the tobacco into the paper a couple of times until the paper magically engulfed the weed into a beautifully perfect cigarette leaving the glued strip neatly visible.
He offered the precious object back for me to complete the operation by applying my tongue to the sticky bit, at the same time, bellowing in my ear above the roar of the machinery, “You have to ROLL it. That’s why they’re called ROLL UPS. You were trying to WRAP the fucking thing,” before turning back to slicing his new bit of shoulder in half with a long, vicious-looking curved dagger that looked like something from the Tales of the Arabian Nights. It seemed such a shame to set fire to this new-found miracle of human dexterity, but the thing didn’t just look good, it smoked like a dream without me having to suck deep furrows into my cheeks for once. By the time I got to art school, where smoking, especially of roll ups, was an accepted method of self-destruction, I was a real pro.
The ladies I shared my storeroom lair with were friendly but formidable. Kitty, a grey haired, plump, Irish woman in her late fifties was the ‘boss’, the other two, so overshadowed by her, I can’t remember what they looked like. Kitty was some kind of union delegate and kept a close watch on the two men who owned and ran the business, Mr. Clark and his son, known as Mr. Ken. Kitty’s philosophy was ‘do as little you can get away with, look busy whenever management’s in view’, but most of all, make sure the management see’s you’re keeping an official, union-backed eye on them, a part Kitty played to perfection. Ken, a well-educated young man in a white doctor’s coat, slick, black Brilcreamed hair covering his brains like a swimming cap, buzzed about the place like an agitated wasp checking this and that, making sure everything always ran at full steam while his tired looking, white-coated father looked on with pride. To this shy, spotty, 15 year-old, Kitty’s comments were often personal and cringe making.
“Have you ever been kissed, Neeel?”
“Do you have a girlfriend, Neeel?”
“Your skinny as a twig, Neeel.”
“That mole on the end of your nose looks like a bogey, Neeel.”
By the time my month at Clark’s Shoe Repairs was up, I wanted to punch her face in, but next to the women on the Osram factory floor, Kitty was an angel. The way through to the Flower Pot was akin to running the gauntlet. The mixture of peroxide blonde and tattooed numb brains didn’t hold back, the jagged clatter of their voices louder than the machinery and sprinkled with the kind of maniacal screaming that would only pass for laughter inside the walls of the same lunatic asylum that housed those that bought Osram’s decorative light fittings.
“’ere, look at ‘is arse, Dolly. I’d love to get me teeth into that. Wouldn’t you like to get your teeth into me, darlin’?”
"They look bloody frozen, dinthey? What they need is somink warm. I’ve got somink really warm you can slip into over ‘ere, darlin’. Aa baat that?”
“I ‘ad it last night, Bren.”
"You didn’t, didja? So did I? Heheheheheheheheheheheheh!”
It was a case of look straight ahead and keep walking. Don’t look right. Don’t look left. Just keep walking. Don’t smile. Don’t go red. Just keep walking. Think of something else – your Mother; your girlfriend; your girlfriend’s mother; your cat; your dog; next door’s dog, if you didn’t have one. Anything. Just keep walking. And don’t look back. It’ll all be over in a minute. Just another 100 yards and you can turn left through the swing doors and be back amongst those lovely salesmen, in which case it may be better to turn round and go through the welcoming routine all over again. Several times.
Tide Clean. Tide Clean. Tide Clean.
Just A FUCKING Minute.
“Hello, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Nicholarse Parsonsnose and it’s my pleasure to welcome you all to another edition of the most infamously boring panel game this side of Alpha Cenruri – yes, yes, wait for it…. It’s Just a Miiiiin…. Hang on. Where is everybody? Where the panel? Where’s Paul Merton? Where’s whatisname and old thingy? Where’s the audience? Hey! Who turned the lights out? Just a minute. What’s this someone's just handed me? It feels like a… pistol. Or maybe it’s a lollypop. Yes, of course it is. We don’t use guns on Just A Minute, though some people think we should. I wonder what flavour it is. Just a minute, I’ll give it a try.”
BANG!
Applause.
* * * * * * * *
CHAPTER 2. THE FLOWER POT.
Love, Love, Love.
Love, Love, Love.
Love, Love, Love.
There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.
It's easy.
Nothing you can make that can't be made.
No one you can save that can't be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time.
It's easy.
All you need is love.
All you need is love.
All you need is love, love.
Love is all you need.
All you need is love.
All you need is love.
All you need is love, love.
Love is all you need.
Nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.
It's easy.
All you need is love.
All you need is love.
All you need is love, love.
Love is all you need.
All you need is love (All together, now!)
All you need is love. (Everybody!)
All you need is love, love.
Love is all you need (love is all you need)
(love is all you need) (love is all you need)
(love is all you need) Yesterday (love is all you need)
(love is all you need) (love is all you need)
Yee-hai!
Oh yeah!
love is all you need,
love is all you need,
love is all you need,
love is all you need,
oh yeah oh hell yea!
love is all you need,
love is all you need,
love is all you need.
Jack was right. Paul Williams was a twat. What time he didn’t spend in Peter Williams’ office he spent walking there and back from the Flower Pot half a dozen times a day, no doubt enjoying the sound of his steel edged heels clacking on the Parquet floor.
He hardly ever did any design work and when he was in the Flower Pot he pontificated about sweet FA…
“When I worked at Raver…(Rover)”
“By the same taken, (token) Jack…”
“When I worked at Raver…”
“By the same taken, Jack…”
“When I worked at Raver…”
“By the same taken, Jack…”
…with monotonous regularity.
P.W. went on a visit to Caithness Glass at the very top of the British Isles where the land suddenly ends with a sheer drop into boiling seas. He was supposed to discuss Caithness Glass’ involvement in the production of a new range of Osram, decorative light fittings. Whether he did or not is anyone’s guess. He was certainly wined and dined by Charles Ore, the company’s owner, and for weeks afterwards would call Ore every day – sometimes a couple of times a day - as if they were old mates until Charles Ore got fed up with being pestered and refused to take the calls.
“Hello, Charles? It’s Paul. Paul Williams. I just thought I’d give you a call. What are you up to, Charles? I have to say, Charles, that restaurant the other day was superb. Oh, did I already mention that? The crab soup was out of this world and as for the Châteauneuf, well, what can one say, Charles? By the way, Charles, I remembered the name of that girl I was telling you about…oh…right. No, that’s fine, Charles. Meetings can be a bit of a bore but we all have to put up with them when duty calls, speaking of which, I’d better get on with something so I’ll call you later in the week, Charles, say Friday? Oh, really? New Zealand? For 6 months? Wow…hello? Hello… Charles?”
Paul just loved the sound of his own voice saying the name Charles. Maybe he’d had a deprived childhood and didn’t know anyone called Charles and if he had, maybe it was a Charlie. Charles Ore was yet another idol for dilettante, Paul Williams, to salivate over while still wearing out shoe leather tripping backwards and forwards to Peter Williams’ office. Peter Williams shot down in my estimation after I saw a very pretty blonde girl in a business suit leaving his office. Inside, the two namesakes were grinning inanely and puffing away amateur style on King-sized fags. Peter Williams had been interviewing the girl for the job of PA with Paul ogling on, but they said nothing about any skills or qualifications she may have had or her suitability for the job, the only comment from PM to Paul being:
“She needs shoving as soon as possible, and if you don’t do it, I will.”
The only time the The Flower Pot got really motivated was when we were tasked to produce a stand for a lighting exhibition at Earl’s Court. Jack designed the stand and I helped out with the graphics on the outer walls using huge backlit black and white photographs of light bulb filaments and historical light fittings. On the opening day, I pitched up in a new 3 piece, brown, windowpane checked, tweed suit I’d had made by Walter Tarry & Sons, a bespoke gentleman’s tailor in Bromley High Street. I must have looked like a pretty smart version Sherlock Holmes but Paul Williams’ jaw hit the deck.
“That’s a superb suit,” was all he could manage. He was right. It was.
A couple of weeks earlier, Peter Williams sent me to see top graphic designer, Lou Klein, in his Goodge Street office to show him some catalogue covers I’d designed and to make sure they were compatible with the corporate ID design Klein had come up with. Paul Williams thought he should go instead on the grounds that being taller he would be a better representative. Being taller just made him a bigger prick than ever in my book.
WALLY
There were a few human beings in the Osram zoo. Glenn Melvyn was a Northern comedy film actor who’d appeared with Arthur Askey in a couple of dodgy British films in the Fifties as a gormless character, Wally Binns, perhaps explaining why he was now an assistant salesman for industrial light fittings. Dougie, as we knew Glenn Melvyn, was a tall skinny, bird of prey like bloke with his long, drainpipe-proportioned legs, scrawny neck and beak-shaped nose, though I couldn’t think of a species that had a badly stuck on moustache or such an ill-fitting mat of greasy hair on its head, similar in shape to that of Mr. Ken Clarke of Sidcup. Being well over 6ft, Dougie would stand outside the Flower Pot, hook his arms over the partition, rest his chin on the top, light a fag and rabbit idly on about nothing in particular. He’d crack a constant stream of bad jokes after glancing left and right like a naughty schoolboy. Some of his jokes were really crude, most were really boring, none were very funny, but at least Dougie was friendly. He was also an incurable gossip and though it was obvious he made most of it up, he was a breath of fresh, if smoky air in an otherwise
active war zone.
Dougie knew everyone who was anybody in the film Business. (Well, of course he did.) Orson Wells was his best friend as were David Niven, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Michael Kane, and Elizabeth Taylor though he said Richard Burton was a prat. He may well have crossed paths with a few movie luminaries in his time but that was probably because of his partner, Gladys, whom he mentioned in every other breath. Gladys, and we’re not talking Gladys Night And The Pips here, was a continuity girl/woman and, according to Dougie, had worked on every film you cared to mention and quite a few you didn’t. His great revelation of the day was that he’d been present on the set of the forthcoming, Carry On Up The Khyber, and was in raptures over some of the dialogue and the names of characters, notably, one he found particularly hysterical, ‘Jimmy Riddle’. All inmates of the Flower Pot were lost for words, not that anyone could get one in edgeways when Dougie was in full flow.
Dougie could be quite funny in his inimitably, cynical way. The pretty girl I’d seen leaving Peter Williams office turned down the job of PA probably on the grounds that she didn’t fancy being ‘shoved’ by either W’s and would rather have been boiled in sulphuric acid. The post was offered instead to the loud, brash, bespectacled Rita Weiseman, a slightly overweight Canadian with short, Mary Quant style hair and even shorter skirts that revealed her dumpy thighs a trifle too suddenly. Dougie nicknamed her ‘The Rissole’. ‘The Rissole’ was quite friendly and pleasant and though she and I shared an interest in Jazz, I was taken aback when she called me one day saying she had tickets to see organist, Jimmy McGriff, at the Marquee Club in Soho and invited me along. Cautiously, I agreed and, donning my Walter Tarry finery, I went for it, whatever IT turned out to be.
I met Rita outside the Marquee in Dean Street and she introduced me to her friend and flatmate, Kay, an over made up New Yorker in her mid forties and a dodgy looking fur coat. Apart from being a surprise guest for the evening, I wasn’t sure if Kay was a chaperone or the proposed other half of a sandwich. Jimmy McGriff’s performance was unsurprisingly average. I’d never thought he could shake a Hammond organ at the great Jimmy Smith (check out his album, ‘The Sermon’, on Blue Note and you’ll see what I mean) but the Rissole’s performance was anything but. The place was packed and sweaty in that order and she kept yelling at people to get out of her space.
“Hey, buddy, you’re crowding me. Get the fuck away from me,” or “Get your hoof off my Godamned foot, you clumsy son-of-a-bitch.”
Her outbursts were nerve-wracking and I half expected someone to deck her where she stood, but her victims either just looked at her like she was crazy or were so zonked out on something or other her existence didn’t even register. It was suddenly clear why Kay was there – to protect members of the public from the Rissole, wedging herself between Rita and her adversaries when necessary, which was quite often. Or maybe this was Rita’s chat up method. The vibe that she was on fairly urgent man lookout, was worn on her sleeve like a Swastika from the start and, though I was intrigued, the thought of being wrestled to the ground by this hungry little bear wasn’t altogether a huge turn on and became more and more of a distinct turn off as the evening wore on. On the tube train back to Wembley, Kay rambled on non-stop about her son, Mikey, a NY subway driver who had a whole list of psychopathic tendencies to overcome but was doing pretty well at the time. The train doors slid open in relief when we got to Kay and the Rissole’s stop but as they stepped out onto the platform, I froze and stayed rooted to the spot, Rita having got quite close up during the journey, telling me how dapper I looked in my English suit, her fingers toying eagerly with the jacket lapels without so much as a by-your-leave.
“Bye. Thanks for the evening. See you again,” I offered.
“I can’t imagine why,” was Kay’s parting shot. Thankfully, my cowardice had saved me from a fate worse than even my own vivid imagination could conjure up.
When I finally left the Hangar to return to JWT, Dougie cornered me.
“If your new place wants a good worker, someone not afraid of the bosses, put in a good word for me, yeah?”
Dougie was hardly what I’d call a hard worker – he spent too much time chatting over the garden wall and whenever senior management made their presence known, he’d vanish before our eyes, skuttle back into his own office like a frightened rabbit, pick up his phone, and pretend to be in urgent conversation with a buyer. I didn’t begrudge him his natural survival instinct but Dougie was just a rotten actor.
In December 1967, my friend from art school, Patrick Uden, reminded me about the end of year party at the Royal College of Art and all 5 Flower Pot Men decided to have a night out in Knightsbridge and go. For the event, the RCA, famous for its parties and as a launching pad for new bands that always became famous, hosted a strange bunch of hairy guys who projected weird, pulsing psychedelic images on the walls in time to the beat of their extremely loud music, all of which just gave me a blinding headache. It was all too un-jazz for my liking and I knew these guys were never going to make it. What were they called? I think it was Plink Boyd, or something. It was a good night though - the theme being Horror and the students who wore costumes did so in typical RCA style. One girl dressed entirely in black with tutu and tights, had a tiny red light over her left nipple and a flashing green over her right; a guy in a black suit with an axe buried in his shoulder stood at the bar chatting nonchalantly; another bloke in black had a totally white face and hands with pale blue lips. This guy really was dead. Even Paul Williams seemed to relax and drop his stupid façade during the evening and I had the illusion that he might be an OK chap underneath all the crap - but only for a mili-second.
I bumped into Julian Whittaker in the RCA bar with his brother, Daryl, who was a student in the Silver Smith and Jewellery School. Both greeted me like an old friend, and at one time, I suppose I had been. Whatever differences we’d had over the past two years seemed to be have been buried which was a bit of relief. Julian had emigrated to Australia in 1970 and was very successful as an art director in a couple of advertising agencies before setting up his own design studio. Later on, he became a luthier, producing acoustic and electric guitars of world-class quality - take my word for it. He visited me in 2008 along with Jim Sweetland, from Canada, bringing a couple of his ‘boxes’ (Only fellow guitar
players will understand this deeply esoteric and profoundly groove-ridden word…) with him. We had a great session digging up a load of the old blues songs we’d heard and played back in the men’s locker room d of 1960s Sidcup Art School. When the secondgreat musical revolution of the Twentieth Century really began, the 3 of us were there, and how!
I went on another evening out with Jack and Paul and some of their mates from Birmingham College Of Art. We met up in the place that was become the Harri Krishna temple and centre in Soho Square. In 1967, it was The Beer Keller, a German Run cellar bar dispensing very expensive, very tasty, very toxic German draft Lowenbrau beer.
I’ve never been so drunk, later trying to steady myself with the flat of my hands against the wall and dangerously pawing my way along Tottenham Court Road tube station. Somehow I survived, mind-blankingly making it back to Mrs. Richardson’s.
Back in the hangar Peter Williams was beginning to seem lost and preoccupied. Pressure from Don Alders about various projects that weren’t being fulfilled was mounting but there was no positive direction from either of the Williams’s. Everything was coming unglued.
Meetings were held in Peter W’s office, usually culminating in Alders demanding to know what was going on or criticising what was being laid down and on one occasion, PM lost it banging his fist on the desk and telling DA he didn’t give a monkey’s fuck what he thought. I was to learn that losing your rag in business was the worse political faux pas you can commit and by doing so, PM had shown chinks in his armour and played right into Alder’s grimy little mitts.
In the end, Don Alder and his sales force were too much for Peter Williams to cope with and his short-lived regime collapsed after 9 months. It could be argued that he’d tried his best to do his job and raise the Osram GEC profile even enlisting the services of two of the best Graphic design outfits this side of Jupiter: Klein Peters and Minale Tattersfield, both of whom produced superb logos and house styles for the re-launch of the company. He told me he didn’t care about the politics and disruptive, cancerous games Adams was playing in the background and that he had the trust and backing of chairman, Arnold Weinstock
come what may.
It’s not that Peter Williams didn’t try. He’d put the Osram-GEC account into Davidson Pierce Berry and Tuck, one of the most successful British advertising agencies at the time and they ran a prestigious campaign in the Sunday newspaper colour supplements. It was a series of beautifully written and art directed full colour, double page spreads created by DPBS’s top creative team, Mario Lippa and David Newton. For the first 3 ads, art director, Newton hired top photographers, Julian Cottrell, David Montgomery and Art Kane. The results were stunning but though the campaign won prestigious adverting industry awards, presenting a new public face for a company to the world that was not only convincing but effective, taking care, time, money and patience – none of which the Osram-GEC management seemed to have.
I was invited to attend the shoot for one of the ads, which featured the entire Royal Shakespeare Company, some in costume, headed by Sir Bernard Miles, grouped on Blackfriars Bridge at night, flooded with light from Osram-GEC street lamps. It was a very fast-moving, slick and impressive affair, with Montgomery employing the services of an entire film crew, from makeup to props men who flooded the location with blue smoke to enhance the atmosphere. Being present at such a spectacular event after being entombed in the Wembley hangar for a couple of months, induced a sudden, powerful feeling of homesickness for Berkeley Square and J. Walter Thompson.
But Peter Williams’ belief in Weinstock’s support was misguided and partly the cause of his downfall. Weinstock was only ever interested in productivity and profit at the end of the day and was already notorious for having reduced the GEC staff from 250,000 employees when he took over the company in 1963 to 57,000 by 1974. Peter Williams was too slow in getting things off the ground and Weinstock finally lost patience and reverted to his infamous old adage:
“Either do it my way, or get out.”
Peter Williams got out, ‘shoved’ on his way by a particularly nasty piece of work, Deputy MD, Head of Sales and mentor to Don Alders, Jim Shanks, a redheaded, cigar smoking Glaswegian gangster type with a glass eye, the original one probably being gouged out in some kind of brawl in his hometown or the Osram boardroom. Whatever the other guy got didn’t bare thinking about.
Either way, like Don Alders, Shanks saw everything Peter Williams and his Flower People stood for as a complete waste of time and on the day PW left the building with his cardboard box under his arm, Shanks paid us a visit in the Flower Pot with a smugly grinning Don Alders stuck to his heal like a dog’s turd, to tell uz ‘the wee it was gonna be from noo on, Jimmay.’
Soon after, on the day I left the miserable, turgid Osram GEC hangar forever, I noticed the name Shanks printed inside the urinal in one of the Osram toilets. I’ve never enjoyed a pee so much.
Smarties. Whata lot I've got.
Perry Comatose.
“Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket…”
SFX: sound of breaking glass.
Perry: “Christ! I’ve dropped it!”
* * * * * * * * *
"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief, "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief. Businessmen, they drink my wine, Plowmen dig my earth, None of them along the line know What any of it is worth."
"No reason to get excited," The thief, he kindly spoke, "There are many here among us Who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we've been through that, And this is not our fate, So let us not talk falsely now, The hour is getting late."
All along the watchtower, Princes kept the view While all the women came and went, Barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a Wildcat did growl, Two riders were approaching, The wind began to howl...
On my return to JWT, I worked as Roger Nights’ art director for two weeks while Max Henry was on holiday. Roger was a very good writer and luckily, he and I got on very well. We shared the same sense of humour and it turned out he was also a guitar player, which helped cement a good working relationship. (Only fellow guitar players will understand this deeply esoteric and profoundly groove-ridden statement…) I was put into Group 8 because Harold George considered me a fastidious designer and Max would’ve eaten alive anyone who didn’t take proper care of his domain. I think I did OK, Max only changing a few of the things I’d done when he came back from his hols.
Roger and Max were way ahead of most of the rest of JWT’s creative department – their work was bold, simple, strong, beautifully written and art directed, and, most of all, communicated powerful ideas in the way I’d learned at art school was the way. More importantly, they were a team, which meant they sat at the same table and produced stuff together by actually discussing the brief, a concept as yet resisted by JWT London, still a place where copywriters, ran the roost, each with their own offices while young art directors were crammed into rooms sometimes 5 at a time.
I shared with four others. There was Andy, fashion-wise, the most up-to-the second man I’ve ever come across. His appearance was sate-of the-art and immaculate, though definitely not in any Biblical sense. He’d return from his lunch break having cruised the ultra-trendy shops off Savile Row with horrendously puke-making names like Blades and Mr. Fish, show us all what was what in the advanced world of fashion he was always well ahead of. There’d be a silk shirt or two, still folded in cellophane, the odd kipper tie and maybe a couple of up-to-the-moment paperback books. On my first day back at JWT, he was wearing a beautiful tweed suit from the newly opened Brown’s in South Molten Street. He’d paid 40 guineas for it, the same price as my Walter Tarry number, now hopelessly way behind the times by comparison.
Then there was Roger North, from Norwich. He was rebuilding a Lotus Elite sports car. Very noble, I’m sure, but you’d have thought he was building the bloody thing in the office judging by the amount of time he spent on the phone arguing the toss with parts suppliers, “Oi don’ care wha’ you say, that throttle cable you sold me int’ long enough an’ oi want me money back. Of course I’ve took it out the box. ‘Ow else would oi flippin’ well know it int’ long enough?”
A young girl copywriter, Barbara Lines, who worked with Roger North a couple of times, was moved to pen a little poem in his honour:
‘Roger North wears squeaky shoes,
A sign of real aggression,
So if you hear his shoes, beware,
He suffers from depression.’
The next inmate was Beresford Casey, a Newcastle lad with a moustache too old for his young face, as were most of the sprouting crops of upper lip hair at the time. Berry, an affable Geordie lad, appeared slightly wide-eyed at the thought of working at a top London agency, and had been hired straight out of college as assistant to a senior art director as we all had. Berry worked for Collie Colwell, a pleasant chap and board director of the same vintage and long JWT history as Harold George. There were a handful of similar elder statesmen in JWT, most of whom were friendly, encouraging, and genuinely interested in what these young tear-aways could bring to the party. Maybe they saw the writing on the wall that their way of doing things was coming to an end, not that they would have been particularly fazed, as at JWT, the retirement age was set at 55.
Much of the advertising produced by the big British agencies in the late Sixties belonged in the arc. The work produced by the deeply established JWT was no exception, many of their larger client’s attitudes to their own public image belonging in the same wooden boat - at least, that’s how we young bucks saw it. Of course, we knew all there was to know about everything. Not that there was anything wrong or unprofessional in what JWT generally produced, quite the contrary. No one likes change and there’s always a younger, up-and-coming generation in any field who want to do just that, and as advertising clients also introduce young blood to their staff, things eventually move on and develop naturally.
Kelloggs, JWT’s biggest spending client, was a case in point. The breakfast cereal commercials were full of happy smiling families, typically projecting the great American, Hollywood Dream way of life. At least the images were moving, arguably giving them a bit of interest, but in press and posters, the sickly, phony, contrived pictures lacked any kind of real humanity, projecting instead the notion of some kind of weird, unobtainable fantasy world. It’s all very subjective, it has to be said, and JWT and Kelloggs still managed to sell a billion tons of cornflakes every half hour. The press ads were produced in the fittingly good old-fashioned way. The copywriter delivering words on sheets of yellow paper to the always senior citizen art director who then rendered some kind of visual interpretation into what was described as a layout – a word I abhorred then and still do. The art director would disappear into his lair and produce what was also described as his ‘rendering’, another word I hated. The rendering was more important than the idea and art directors were judged on their ability to render rather than their skill to invent and communicate powerful advertising messages – in blood, if it helped grab attention. The fact that few of us could draw like the older inhabitants probably strengthened our views.
The new technology of the day was the Magic Marker – a little glass bottle containing a dye-soaked wick, sliced to a 45 degree, quarter inch felt nib poking through the neck. MM’s took a lot of skill to use, and I never really mastered the art. The nasty things also stank to high heaven and were pretty toxic, though not nearly as dangerous as the pastel crayons still lurking in some darker corners of the agency. Bob Scanlon, a stout, balding little man in his early Fifties was a pastel user. Also a senior art director citizen, Bob had his own office the same size as the one 5 of us shared. His solitary space wasn’t altogether a mark of respect, but more a precaution against the huge clouds of pastille gas he created. A young copywriter, Ian Mason, whom I later worked with on the Union Castle shipping line, told me he’d go into Bob’s office to deliver some copy and only just be able to find him in the fog. Bob didn’t have a desk, but a small swivel, drawing table in the centre of the room. Ian would hand over the copy with the intention of discussing it but Bob just took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and clapped his hands together.
“Right!” he’d say gleefully, “We’ll soon have this little blighter sorted out,” and wait for Ian to leave. Ian said this was the usual procedure and Bob would later come staggering and sputtering into the corridor covered in coloured dust, a rainbow cloud mixture of pastille and Senior Service fag smoke seeping like an impending Jupiter storm through the doorway after him, “Christ,” he’d cough, leaning against the wall and trying to regain his breath, “These bloody pastilles will be the death of me.” They probably were, eventually.
John Knight was the last to join the club. On the day he arrived, Harold George ushered him into the room and introduced him, before taking him to show him around. Peckham born and bred, a staunch Millwall supporter and lifetime member of the infamous ‘Treatment’ supporter’s club, the tall, skinny, suited and booted, elfin-faced John, his hands behind his back in true, new recruit manner, turned and shot us a wink as he followed Harold to the door,
“See you later, boys,” he said through the cheeky grin that was to become his trade mark along with his extravagant use of the F word.
During the 6 months the five of us shared the room John Night didn’t stop talking. It sounds like a bit of a cliche to say John had an in-built, cheerful, cockney charm, but his was genuine and drove everyone nuts.
GROUPS
JWT London’s staff in 1968 numbered close to 900 people. You could go for a stroll along the endless corridors of 40 Berkeley Square any time of the day and come across someone you’d never seen before and I sometimes wondered if people just wandered in off the street to have a look around. The biggest departments were divided into groups – account management, account planning (to be explained later) and creative. Andy, John Night and I were in Bob Judd’s group. Bob Judd was a mountainous American with a college boy face, the build of a Yankee football player and a chest like the Hoover Dam. He was affable, witty, mad about motor racing and the proud owner of a vintage Allard.
As with most creative groups heads and creative directors, Bob was a writer. Writers are better talkers than art directors. They deal in words rather than pictures but also see what they do as less tangible than what’s produced by art directors and believe they have more to prove. Art directors tend to be moody buggers, dwelling most of the time in an ephemeral world where hand-cut type and beautiful photographs float easily by. There are exceptions to the rule, but the solid, logical, exquisitely woven, persuasive arguments always seem to come from writers, when selling an advertising idea to a skeptical account man or client. The absolute master of the art was the late Roger Beattie, whom I’m worked with in the 1990’s. He had his own way of explaining the difference between writers and art directors:
‘How many art directors does it take to change a light bulb?’
Answer: “Does it have to be a light bulb?”
‘How many Copywriters does it take to change a light bulb?’
Answer: “I’m not fucking changing anything.”
The only time I saw Bob Judd lose it was when he and I were working together on some ads for Roses Lime Juice. We were in his office and he had the radio on waiting for the results of the US Presidential Elections. When the news came through that Richard Nixon had become the xxxth President of the United States, Bob stood up, yelled ‘NOOOOOO!’ at the top his voice, turned round and put his fist through the wall.
THE WRONG TROUSERS
Bob Judd’s secretary, Jane, was a tall leggy, smiley blonde girl with Brigit Bardot hair and a pleasant disposition that exactly complimented Bob’s, making her popular with every member of the Bob Judd group. However, she was to commit a mortal sin. One day she turned up to work wearing the first female trouser suit anyone had ever seen. (At least, those that didn’t experience life during the Second World War.)
Norman Philip, JWT’s pipe smoking office manager, and the most un-advertising person you could ever hope to come across, had a runaround PA named Zoe Hopper, an ex-police woman who did just that. She literally ran around the building, clop-clopping in her blocky, high heels, handbag gripped firmly in the crook of her arm, checking. Checking what? Anything. Everything. Were there enough toilet rolls in the toilets? Were there enough toilets? Were there too many? She came to a screeching halt when confronted with Jane’s lilac trouser number,
“What’s that?” Zoe convulsed.
“What’s what?” said Jane.
“What you’re wearing?
“It’s a trouser suit,” said Jane, looking down to make sure she hadn’t forgotten to put it on that morning.
“It just won’t do.”
“Do what?”<
“You can’t wear it here.”
“Why not?”
“Because it's not appropriate for a woman to wear trousers to work. You’ll have to go home and change.”
Jane went home to change. Zoe had made her point, whatever her point was. A couple of years later, hot pants arrived in the agency and spread through every secretary’s bay like wildfire. Zoe complained to the wearers who looked at her blankly. She couldn’t send them all home, there were too many of them, so she warned them not to wear the revealing little scraps of cloth to work again. She told Norman of the scare. He told the management. The management, mainly men, weren’t keen on trouser suits because they covered female legs. Hot Pants, on the other hand, revealed more female leg during a working day than they could have dreamed possible. The management told Norman to shut up. Norman told Zoe to shut up. Zoe shut up. Hot Pants stayed – till winter, at least.
This is luxury you can’t afford by Cyril Lord.
Patrick Morelock.
“I’vecometotheconclusionthatnotonlydoestheplanetJupiternotexistbutneitherdoesplanetEarthwhichmeansnoneofusarereallyhereandthatwe’reallyapigmantofmyfertileimaginationwhichI’mfamousforandofcourseit’sthemonaclethatmakesmeseethingsinwaysthatlessermortalscan’tbutbeingthealienIamwhogivesabuggerIknow Idon’t?”
* * * * * * * * * * *
CHAPTER 4. FLASH, BANG, WALLOP!
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn't get much higher
Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire
The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire
Try now we can only lose
And our love become a funeral pyre
Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire, yeah
The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire
Try now we can only lose
And our love become a funeral pyre
Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire, yeah
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn't get much higher
Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire
Try to set the night on fire
Try to set the night on fire
Try to set the night on fire
PECKING ORDER
As mentioned in Blind Old Kate Part 2, designer/photographer, Harry Peccinotti, was a hero of mine while I was still at art school. He was blessed with an amazing eyeball and unlike lesser mortals, he designed through camera lens – that’s to say, he didn’t need to wait to for prints or transparencies before cropping the pictures. With his eyeball came an innate ability to think ahead while he was looking through the viewfinder – he saw how an object would look in the magazine before he pressed the shutter, but exactly. Every photograph he took wasn’t merely beautiful, but a brilliantly conceived piece of design art. Determined to be in control of everything, Peccinotti often took his own pictures when he was art director of Nova magazine, rather than commission another photographer. As a result, the editorial images he produced for the magazine were stunning and won every award going.
How do I know about Peccinotti’s technique? Because I worked with him, and by doing so, tried to develop a similar photographic technique, which I still use today, quite successfully, I think, though maybe not in Harry’s league. I’d only been at JWT for a couple of months when Laurence Hutchins, who’d employed me for a second time, gave me the opportunity of seeing through the art direction and photography of an ad on my own. The ad, for a range hair colourants called Melody, and ‘written’ by one of the dying breed of senior, queen bee copywriters, was hardly groundbreaking. It was crap. She’d come up with the line, ‘Melody Brings you Nature’s Browns’, and handed it over to Laurence, offering no thought of how it could be visualized. Laurence suggested that we shot a close up a model’s face and hair against a natural, brown background and, using one of JWTs in-house ‘snappers’, we took a ‘rough’ picture against a stained brown antique door. It worked, and with the idea approved by the client, we were given the go-ahead for the final shoot. Laurence said I could choose the photographer and, without a second’s thought, I fingered Harry Peccinotti.
I put this to Peter Lister-Todd, the only male buyer in the art buyer’s coven on the third floor, and he called in Julian Seddon, an agent who represented a clutch of top photographers, including HP. In Peter’s office later that day, I found him and a troubled-looking Julian deep in conversation. Julian asked me if I was sure about using Harry for a hair shot and suggested, as hair and beauty photography were specialist areas, that I should maybe consider other photographers with more experience in those areas. Being young, naïve, momentarily arrogant, and totally wedded to Peccinotti’s genius, I declined. I left Peter and Julian to sort out the details, dismissing the fleeting thought that Julian’s perplexed expression may have signified a valid concern.
Harry cast a stunning, lanky, New Zealand model with a mane of brown hair the average girl on the street would die for and I pitched up at the studio he’d hired for the shoot just off the Kings Road, Chelsea. This should have been a clue as to why Julian was worried, but I was so excited, nothing negative (if you’ll pardon the pun) crossed my mind. In those days, most photographers had their own studios equipped with whatever specialist gear they needed for their particular photographic area. Maybe Harry’s own studio gaff was being decorated or maybe he was in the process of buying a new one. Whatever, the important thing was, I was there and so was Harry who was leaning into the back of a grimy little once white van with a guy about my own age.
Though we’d never met, I knew who Harry was, someone having once pointed him out standing in a shop doorway trying to keep the pissing rain of his famous privet hedge of a droopy moustache. The moustache had since grown further sideways to form a mariiage with his sideburns, another popular incoming trend of the day, thankfully only amongst men. I introduced myself to the great man and he seemed friendly enough, splitting his face foliage with a wide, toothy grin. I watched in awe as Harry and Len, who looked after the studio and was Harry's assistant for the day, unloaded two silver umbrellas, a square, metal thing, about the size of a small suitcase, and a well-travelled camera bag onto the pavement.
I assumed the gear was a small supplement to the vast array of up-to-the-second technology that was no doubt residing behind the door in the white-painted wall Harry was unlocking, and I had a job hiding my excitement, anticipating the great Tardis experience I was sure was about to follow. There’s scene in Martin Scorsese’s film, ‘Goodfellas’, where the character, Tommy, played by Joe Pesci, is led into a room by two mafia men, on the pretext that he’s about to be taken through the blood and oath ceremony and become a member of the inner sanctum as a ‘made man’. Tommy, dressed in his best, expects a welcoming committee of mafia luminaries, but is instead confronted by an empty room. Too late, he realizes that rather than being signed up, he’s going to be ‘whacked’ and just has time to exclaim, “Oh n….” before a bullet passes through his brain via a spot behind his left ear.
My entry into this apology for a studio, a damp, dark, musty cave, plaster peeling from the walls and containing nothing but a sink, an old kitchen table and a couple of chairs, and a single naked light bulb overhead, wasn’t quite as dramatic. I didn't get shot, but I might as well have been, such would be the ramifications. Harry, chatting away like an agitated chipmunk, set up the two reflector umbrellas and a single light on a stands in one corner of the cave, and took a couple of battered, travel-worn 35mm Nikon cameras from the bag.
“Watcha, Harry,” a cockney flavoured voice from the doorway announced the arrival in the cave of Harry’s brother and partner, “’allo, mate. You must be Nilw,” a neatly dressed young man in an expensive looking, navy blue Cashmere overcoat and sporting a similarly iconic, but neater trimmed, handlebar moustache as Harry’s, strode forward and extended his hand, “Bob Peck. Pleased to meet you.”
Harry clearly hadn’t been satisfied with the Sir name he was born into and had added an Italian flavour to enhance it, a trend I was to come across a few times in my forthcoming career. Bob was followed into the cave by a beautiful young girl in a fir coat, an amazing mane of brown hair wafting across her shoulders, and a much shorter young girl with obviously died blonde hair and jeans, and carrying a vanity case,
“This is Lyn,” the model, a good foot taller than Bob, lightly shook my hand with long, icy-cold, boney fingers,
“And this is Suzie, hair and makeup. Where d’you want these, H?”
Suzie shot me a grin, “Hi, Neal.”
“Just chuck them down there,” said Harry, crouching down and looking through the viewfinder of one of the Nikons.
Bob tossed a canvas sack onto the floor next to where his brother was crouching,
“Anyone for conkers?” he chirped.
The idea was to photograph the girl’s hair against a bed of conkers in an attempt to breathe some life into the Melody copy line. Our model nipped into what looked like a cupboard standing in for a changing room, emerging with her fir coat round her shoulders. She sat on a chair and Suzie busied herself with a couple of hairbrushes and an armoury of make up ammunition. Harry and Bob polished the conkers with a couple of yellow dusters and laid them out in a flat cluster on the floor. Lyn, wearing a low-cut, flesh-coloured swimsuit, slipped off her coat and lay down using the conkers as a pillow and spreading her hair wide of her shoulders.
Harry got to work. Kneeling astride Lyn’s slender torso, his own writhing about like python on heat as he got in close to Lyn’s face and hair, firing off shot after shot, the metal box popping like a damp penny banger every time he pressed the shutter, flooding the cave with searing white light instantly blinding me and fixing strips of phsycodelic colours in front of my eyes. This was my first introduction to the effects of acid without having to swallow the stuff. (Not that I ever had!)
“It’s best to blink over the flashes,” Bob suggested. He must have been taking the piss. Harry was firing the motor driven Nikon, like a bloody machine gun. Len stood to the side, reloaded second camera at the ready. As Harry finished each roll, he stretched out his arm behind him without looking round and Len replaced the camera he held with the newly loaded one. So this was how great advertising art photography was produced. It all seems so simple and uncomplicated.
I remembered my trip to John Green’s Kensington studio with Laurence two years before to photograph the edge of a sheet of aluminum and how long it had taken to set up in John’s clinical, operating theatre style studio, with his 10x8 plate camera hanging from the ceiling supported by an overhead rail. When he pressed a button, the camera slid silently out from the wall to the centre of the studio like something from Kubrik’s 2001, A Space Odyssey. The Melody shoot with Harry seemed bohemian by comparison - anarchic, risqué, exciting. Who needed overhead cameras on rails and an environment where you could eat your lunch off the floor? I did, but in my ignorance, I had no idea that I did.
CLIENT LIAISON? CREATIVE WORK? ACCOUNT PLANINNG? (TO BE EXPLAINED LATER) WHAT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT ADVERTISING ACTIVITY? LUNCH
Until august, 1966, lunch had been something I took every day to my first infant school wrapped in newspaper, to consume half way through the morning along with the ghastly bottle of freezing milk they dished out. (See BOK part 1.) Lunch was something that occurred between breakfast and dinner, which was at midday. Tea followed at about 4pm and supper just before bedtime. Turns out that this was all a bit of a working class concept, and that in the upper crust world, breakfast was breakfast, dinner was actually lunch, tea was something you drank half way through the morning, unless you were really posh, in which case you partook of it at the Ritz in Piccadilly with a couple of scones. Dinner was a sit down meal in the evening, which, if it was served after 8pm, became supper - all very simple, no?
There was always a couple of hours break after a shoot while the exposed film was developed which conveniently always coincided with lunchtime. In those long distant prehistoric days, pre-digital days, stuff called ‘film’ was loaded into a camera. In the 35mm Nikon that Harry was using, there was a maximum of 35 shots on a roll. Post shoot, this film stuff was then taken out of the camera secure inside its little metal cylinder, and sent to a laboratory, where a technician would remove the film from the canister by placing it inside a black bag and fumbling about with his mitts. The exposed film was then dipped in chemicals for couple of hours until the images showed up.
Transparency was the order of the day, which simply meant you could hold a picture up to the light and see a positive image of what you’d photographed rather than the negatives we all used to get from the local chemist along with a set of usually fairly dull-looking prints. Photographers used Kodak film as most labs were geared up to process it – all except Kodachrome 2. Kodak had the only chemical formula to develop and kept it a closely guarded secret, so hardly any professional photographers used it.
The legendary New Yorker, Lester Bookbinder, arguably one of the best, and most experienced still life photographers of the day, with a notorious temper, once had occasion to use Kodachrome 2 as it fitted the colour mood of the subject he’d been commissioned to shoot. The exposed film was delivered to the Kodak offices and lab in High Holborn and two days later, Lester went to collect it. When the shop assistant/Kodak representative laid the plastic envelopes containing the film on the light box, Lester was horrified to see the results were very pale. He asked the rep why this was and with a cynical smile, which he wouldn’t have chanced if he’d known the reputation of the man he was talking to, the guy suggested Lester had used the wrong exposure. Lester punched him in the face.
The Del Arethusa restaurant sat resplendent above marble steps at the end of a crazy-paved, wrought iron gated, pathway in the King’s Road, Chelsea, which, in late 1960s, had replaced Carnaby Street as the trendiest street on the planet. The atmosphere inside was a cool, dark, quiet and somber white linen heaven with cool, dark, quiet and somber waiters to match. We’d taken our lunchtime early having finished shooting as soon as Harry had run out of film, and the place was almost empty. Apart from ours, only one other table, in the far corner of the room, was occupied. Two suited men in deep, and what appeared to be conspiratorial, conversation, huddled together across the starched tablecloth.
Harry’s face cracked into a mischievous grin, “Look Bob, it’s that wanker, John Perry”, and, summoning a waiter,
“Got any raspberries?”
“No, I’m afraid not, sir.”
“Yes, sir. Those we do have.”
“Bring me one on a plate and a piece of paper.” Without hesitation, the waiter disappeared and returned with a single strawberry in the centre of a white side plate, which he placed in front of Harry with a sheet of plain white writing paper. Harry scribbled something on the paper, folded it and placed it on the plate next to the strawberry, “Take it to the man at that table – the one with his back to us.”
The waiter took the plate and made towards the corner table.
“What did you write?” said Bob.
“’The nearest thing we could find to a fucking raspberry,’” Harry said, his grin widening. We watched the waiter deliver Harry’s package and pause, as if waiting for a reply. The man unfolded the piece of paper and said something to the waiter who pointed in our direction. The man turned round.
“Shit!” Bob exclaimed, “It isn’t him.”
“Shit! You’re right,” said Harry, waving at the guy, “Sorry, mate,” he called out, “Mistaken identity. Thought you were someone else.”
The bloke stared, grim-faced, momentarily, then turned back to his companion and carried on conspiring.
This method of advertising restaurant communication became more developed over the years and in 1973, copywriter, Richard Smith was having lunch in a crowded, noisy Chelsea easting house, with his art director, a huge, tanned, Australian, Bob Marchant, when someone decided to get Bob’s attention by chucking a bread roll at him. The roll, one of the hard crusty type, hit Bob on the back of the head as he was delivering a spoonful of consome’ to his gob. Bob, resembling some kind of crazy, deranged Hill Billy with his scruffy beard and dungarees, whirled round and gave a sandy haired, laughing bloke, whom he half recognized, a couple of tables away, a laser-like stare. Bob lifted his spoon again just as the back of his head was bombed with another crusty missile. Again, Bob whirled round a glared at the laughing sand hair,
“Don’t push your luck, mate, alright?” he warned.
The process was repeated – spoon to gob, crusty roll to pate. Bob stood up, pushed his chair sideways with a screech, strode over to the laughing sandy man, pulled him out of his chair, and punched him in the face. The guy went sprawling, his glass of red wine spilling onto his shirt and making him look like he’d been shot full of holes.
“Hey, Bob!” someone yelled from the other side of the room, “Sorry, Bob, mate. Just trying to get your attention.”
It was another art director mate from the same agency. Bob had punched the wrong bloke. I don’t know what happened next. I wasn’t there, but Richard Smith told me about it when describing how dangerous Australian art directors could be if pushed.
PURPLE HAZE
“It’s green. The hair’s green,” said Laurence as he peered at a sheet of Harry Peccinotti’s 35mm transparencies from the Melody hair shoot on Peter Lister-Todd’s lightbox. Julien Seddon, Harry’s agent, had brought them in to the agency probably knowing they weren’t going to be well received. I thought Laurence’s assessment was a trifle exaggerated. The hair was arguably a tad green tinged around the edges, but not that much, after all, the pictures were beautifully cropped and the girl’s face was stunning. “I’m sorry,” he went on, directing his criticism at Peter and studiously ignoring Julian, “We’re advertising a product that majors on shades of brown, not green. They’ll have to be a re-shoot. Come on, matey,” he said, “We’ll leave Peter to sort it out.” Back in his office, Laurence turned to me looking slightly grim, “I have to say, we may have chosen the wrong photographer. I’m not sure that Mr. P. knows enough about photographing hair and beauty. He may be a great designer, but you need to learn that there are photographers who specialize in just about everything from cars to food, and we should’ve gone for someone who’s a hair specialist. It’s my fault,” he said magnanimously, “There are those photographers out there who can shoot anything but they’re few and far between and this chap isn’t one of them. I should have had a closer look at the portfolio. I’m a bit pissed off that the agent or Peter didn’t show a bit more caution. Julian Seddon’s been in the business long enough to know that Peccinotti probably wasn’t the right man for the job.” I decided not to mention that both Peter and Julian had expressed their concerns but that I’d insisted on using Harry. It wouldn’t have done any good at this stage and, anyway, I was a born coward. “We have to allow them to reshoot it,” Laurence continued, “I just hope he gets it right next time around.”
A week later, I was standing outside the same dingy studio off The King’s Road as Harry and Len unloaded the van. Out came the same two silver umbrellas, flash box and bag of cameras. I must say, I was a little surprised, not to mention alarmed. Julian had called Peter Lister-Todd, having talked to Harry. Harry had said he knew what the problem was – the wrong combination of film and lighting and that this time, everything would be tickety boo. I convinced myself that Harry knew what he was doing and had somehow made the necessary adjustments to whatever. It also boded well that a different model had turned up. She was a taller, thinner girl from Argentina with frizzier hair than the New Zealand tart, and to me, went to show that things had been thought about and changes made. It never occurred to me that the original girl might not have been available.
“It’s purple,” said Laurence, “The hair’s bloody purple!”
The same jury that was present at the viewing of the green hair, was again gathered by Peter Lister-Todd’s light box, and my stomach traveled to the soles of my feet. It wasn’t really my fault but as I’d insisted on using Harry in the first place, I felt somehow it was. When I’d first seen the ‘trannies’, as it was trendy to call the transparencies, I’d been so relieved that the edge of the hair wasn’t green, the fact that the green had changed to a slight tinge of purple somehow eluded me. Back in his office, Laurence gave me the news that we’d have to choose another photographer and, as we’d have to pay some the expenses for the original two shoots the because the agency (me) had insisted using Harry against better advice, we couldn’t afford one of the top guys. Laurence also told me he’d need to be involved in the selection.
David Vaughn, an alleged hair and beauty photographer also with a Studio off the King’s Road, was chosen. Laurence had spoken to him and agreed with Vaughn’s idea that the conkers would be placed in a basket in front of the model’s face and hair, which I didn’t like the sound of at all. However, I kept my gob shut and went along to the shoot, which turned out to be another kind of nightmare. Vaughn was extremely effeminate, both in looks and voice, mincing around his studio in a garishly flowered shirt with a chiffon scarf knotted around his neck and trailing to the waist of his brown hipster trouser waist, his thinning, sandy hair a perfect compliment to the apology of a moustache barely concealing the skin above his top lip.
“Isn’t this pretty!” he exclaimed excitedly, delicately holding the thin handle of a small wicker basket between his thumb and fore finger, cocking his pinkie like he was taking tea with the Queen Mother. I nodded hypocritically, really wanting to throw up. The shot was crap. At least, I thought it was, though again, I kept my gob shut. Gone was any feel of graphic impact, the picture resembling the kind of rubbish that had been churned out in the 1950’s.
The job had been taken away from me, though I was still expected to see it through to the end. I was about to learn another great lesson: as a creative person - writer or art director - never, ever, let anyone interfere or get involved too closely with your work. It’s recipe for disaster - a sheer case of too many cooks spoiling an ad. Listen to advice from your superiors, then ignore it. Stick to your guns. Stand by your beliefs and principles and if you’re wrong, you can only get fired, and if you do, you probably shouldn’t be in any kind of creative business in the first place. If you’re right, the rewards are beyond comprehension. I don’t mean dosh or accolades, but there’s nothing compare with the feeling you get seeing something you conceived and created bare fruit and become real. This may sound like a load of pretentious rubbish. If it does, tough.
In the case of the Melody ad, things went from bad to absolute disaster. Laurence, in his wisdom, decided that rather than run the basket case picture as a full page, as was the original intention, the picture should be small and in the centre of the page surrounded by an expanse of brown. We mocked up a layout using a colour print with the small amount of copy run in white type underneath the picture. Apart from being a meaningless load of rubbish as an ad, it looked OK. Enter the print mafia. For generations, the printing business had been run as a family concern - that’s to say, just about everyone employed in the business was related to someone else in that business, either as direct offspring, cousin, niece, nephew or distant second cousin 14 times removed. There was no other way to be employed in ‘the Print’ as it was known.
The industry was also union controlled, the members connected to the same families. Ron Jones, the JWT print director - sorry, dictator - a fully paid up mafia executive, was particularly un-helpful and negative standing there in the fog of his smoke filled office, his ill-fitting double-breasted brown suit, the jacket flapping open like double garage doors, doing little to subdue the violent shock of his round necked, ultramarine tank top, a miserable little tie knot hooked over the jumper top like an upside-down, dead question mark. Ash cascaded down the wide slopes of his lapels like volcanic laver from the perpetual dog-end attached to his bottom lip. Lawrence showed him the Melody layout with it’s brown back ground, curiously matching the suit.
“You’ve got to be fuckin’ jokin’,” was Ron’s opening offer, “We’ll never reproduce such a large area of brown out of four colours, an’ even if it was possible, which it isn’t, that white type will disappear.”
His assistant, Len Brooks, shook his head in agreement as he stubbed out his Players Navy Cut and lit another. Laurence wasn’t about to roll over, “Can’t we run a tint?”
“With a four colour picture in the middle, it’ll look like shit,” said Ron, following up his first offer with more damnation.
This was how it was dealing with some agency print people back then. It was like trying to penetrate the walls of a fortress with a penknife, that’s if you managed to get through the thick mesh of barbed wire bullshit first. There always seemed to be a problem with reproduction. (Just printing something on paper) You’d supply, or the agency production department would supply, a mechanical – a flat piece of card with all the type glued to it to the print department – and, in the case of colour, a transparency of the photograph or illustration of any image which was part of the ad.
But it seemed no matter how much care was taken over the photography and retouching, you could almost guarantee that when you saw a proof (A print out of your ad on thin newspaper type paper - newsprint) it bore little resemblance to what you sent out, in terms of colour accuracy, contrast etc. It was always a shock. And it was always your fault with proofs delivered with the obligatory, ‘I told you so attitude’. Whatever you showed an agency print man before going to print, the response was the same – a deep intake of breath followed by a whistling out breath through the teeth, just like the mechanic at your local garage does when you take your car in for a service and he tells you half of it needs rebuilding. Then, as if to prove himself right, the final result backed up the agency print man’s view that art directors don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.
This isn't to say that British print industry was stuck in the dark ages. It wasn’t. The finest printing machines available in the world were standard equipment in most print companies, and I was to learn in later years, that if you could actually get to talk to the man who operated one of them, anything was possible. These guys were highly skilled with a huge sense of pride about their work and could perform miracles from the most meager bits of artwork. But you still had to get past the agency print mafia before you were allowed into the inner sanctum of the shop floor and that was never easy with people like Ron Jones around, because he and his kind would be exposed as the con artists they were.
Before we left the meeting, Laurence insisted that Ron and his crew were to supply us with a colour proof of the ad the way we (Laurence) wanted it.
“I know it’ll be crap, but if we get somewhere near, there’s a chance we can steer them towards what we really want. There’s no reason why it can’t be achieved. That lot are just bone idle and it really pisses me off.”
“What did I tell you?” said Ron aggressively two days later. The brown background looked like someone had pasted mud on the page and the white type had almost vanished in the mire. Laurence tried to argue that perhaps too much ink had been applied but was shouted down, “If you bring us shit, what you gonna get is shit.”
Laurence was furious but, though pretty red in the face, he managed to control his temper. A compromise, of sorts was reached and it was decided to run the picture on a white background, blow up the type, colour it brown and run it around the picture. I didn’t think this would work as there wasn’t enough copy, but Laurence was losing interest and left the problem to me to solve. It didn’t work. The type was a mess and looked like a spider had dipped its 8 legs in some brown ink and wandered nonchalantly across the page. I was embarrassed to say the least. Proofs of ads had to be signed off by the art director and copywriter before being sent to the publication and when the Melody ad landed on the copywriter’s desk, she swept it up and showed it to everyone she could find in the corridor loudly claiming it was the worst piece of art direction she’d ever seen and that whoever was responsible should be fired, a proposition she also put to Harold George.
Veroshka Tufty, the writer, knew exactly who was responsible, but she never came to me with the ad, which was the usual protocol but decided to publicly blacken my name instead. Veroshka never liked me since I’d worked at JWT as a student. I wasn’t keen on her either, with her ever-present black sunglasses, flouncy, flowered dresses, patent, stiletto heals, dyed Elizabeth, Taylor hair style, heavy makeup and gourdy handbag perpetually hooked over the crook of her arm, not to mention her winey, penetrating voice. I wasn’t fired but my reputation had been severely damaged as I was to find out.
I got my own back on the her one Christmas when she invited the whole of Bob Judd’s group to her flat off Berkeley Square for a drink one afternoon and I managed to knock a glass of red wine over her the white carpet in her living room. She would have stabbed me to death there and then had the rest of the group not been present. Someone applied copious amounts of salt to the bloody patch but it didn’t seem to work. Of course, I apologised profusely but Veroosh, as she was called, said nothing. I could clearly feel the rays of hate from behind her black lenses. I’d love to say that I kicked the claret over deliberately, but sadly, that’s not the case. It was a complete accident, albeit a thoroughly enjoyable one.
Smarties. WhatalotIgot!
Wagon Training.
Ward Bond: “McCullough! What in tarnation are we doin’ here an’ who are all those varmits over there? Hey, that looks like Cheyenne Body, an’ there’s Rowdy Yates, an’ ain’t that Matt Dillon talkin’ to Maverick, an’ who’s the rattler in the mask with the injun?”
Robert Horton: “We’re having a meeding, Major.”
WB: “What in tarnation’s a meeding? Donchoo mean a meet’n’?”
RH: “Call it what you want, Major, but it is a get together that we are having.”
WB: “What in tarnation for?”
RH: “Over exposure, Major.”
WB: “Cuss you, McCullough. I told you what I’d do if you started them shenanigans agin…”
RH: “You said you’d blow my fucking dick off, Major, but I’m not talking about that kind of exposure. I’m taking about too many cowboys on TV. Do you realise there’re two, sometimes three cowboy series on TV every goldarn night?”
WB: “Tarnation! Are you pullin’ my goldarn pecker?
RH: “Chance’d be a fine thing, Major. By the way, the guy in the mask is the Lone Ranger.”
WB: “He don’t look too lonesome to me. What in tarnation’s he doin’ cavortin’ with a darned redskin? Anyway, why shouldn’t TV be crammed full o’ cowboys? We need ‘em to keep all them cussed immigrants down.”
RH: “Black folks aren’t immigrants. Most of ‘em were born over here into slavery.”
WB: “I don’t mean niggers, I mean redskins.”
RH: “But Indians aren’t immigrants. They’re the original indigenous population…”
WB: “Indigeons, Indians – same thing.”
RH: “But…oh, whatever. The main thing is, we have to sort this out.”
WB: “Sort what out?”
RH: “I told you. Over exposure.”
WB: “I warned you, McCullough….”
RH: “Put your gun away, Major. What I mean is, people are gonna get bored with cowboys. All cowboys, and that includes us. And then we’ll be out of work. Some of us have got to go.”
WB: “Go where?”
RH: “Use your imagination, Major.”
WB: “You’re pushin’ your goldarn luck, McCullough. You know I ‘ain’t got no dad burned imagination.”
RH: “Just leave it to me, Major. When I say hit the dirt, take a dive. It’s all arranged. I’ve talked to them all, Major. They know what has to be done. Any second now…TAKE COVER, MAJOR…..”
SFX: Gun battle.
WB: “Holy moley! There ain’t one of ‘em left standin’”.
RH: “That was the general idea. Now, we’re the only TV western left.”
WB: “It pains me ta say this, McCullough, but that’s pretty sharp thinkin’.
RH: “They don’t call me Flint for nothin’, Major. I reckon it’s time for a little celebration. I’ll sing my famous hit song, Shenandoah, to mark the occasion.”
WB: “You do that McCullough, an’ I’ll blow your damned dick off.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
CHAPTER 5. COWBOY.
Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turn my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
"Fools," said I, "you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said "The words of the prophets are written
on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence
4 boys and a girl, aged between 9 and twelve, sat, bored looking, on a low wall in front of the house. They were dressed in casual summer clothes – jeans, T shits, basketball boots – as briefed to their parents by the slylist. A black and white Border Collie lay at the feet of a ginger-haired lad, its head resting on its front paws, looking almost as bored as its young master. The house, a grey stone farmhouse built in 1910, was situated on the outskirts of a pretty village, Bibury, famous for its trout farms and idyllic surroundings, deep in the Cotswold Hills of Gloucestershire. The house belonged to the parents of the ginger-headed boy. Renovation work was in progress and a small cement mixer stood idle next to the wall, this being a warm, spring, Saturday afternoon.
This was another photographic shoot in my early days as a junior art director at JWT. It was for a proposed poster campaign for butter and was to illustrate the line, ‘We’re All A Lot Better For Butter’, penned by another of the agency’s lone female copywriters, Sarah Sharpe, and was supposed to show children having the time of their lives and displaying tons of healthy energy. (Bit difficult, I’d have thought if their arteries were bunged up with buttery fat.) In those days, experimental shoots were order of the day, a photographer being paid a vastly reduced fee with the possibility of a final, fully paid up shoot if the campaign did well in research.
Three photographers were involved in the butter project: Peter Webb, a rising star, Stephen Coe, and experienced advertising photographer, and Laurence’s mate, John D. Green. I was sent to the Cotswolds with Peter Webb, Andrew Dickerson was dispatched to the South Coast of Kent with Stephen Coe and another bunch of kids to photograph them having fun on the beach, and Laurence and John disappeared off somewhere else though I can’t remember where. It was a beautiful day - the sunlight streaming between small, lightly scudding, puffy white clouds and the kids on the wall clearly wished they were enjoying the weather somewhere else. The tall, lank-haired Peter Webb, who’d been standing watching the sky, in that inscrutable way photographers have a tendency to do, stepped laconically forward and picked up a long length of rope lying on the ground next to the cement mixer. He turned and walked slowly away from the wall, coiling the rope and tying a loop in one end as he did so.
He stopped about 20 feet from the wall, turned towards the cement mixer and, with feet apart, holding the coil in his left hand, began whirling the loop above his head with obvious skill. The kids lifted their chins and watched, as did the dog, a gentle swishing sound coming from the rope. Peter hurled the loop towards the mixer, the kid’s and the dog’s heads moved as one as their eyes followed the trajectory. The loop fell comfortably around the mixer. Peter pulled the slipknot tight and, with a teeth grindingly scraping noise, hauled the machine across the yard to where he stood. The kids’ faces lit up like Roman candles. Even the dog looked impressed. Peter had the kids in the palm of his hand becoming their hero on the spot, with them suddenly entering into the spirit of the shoot as if fulfilling a lifetime’s ambition and doing everything he asked with enthusiasm.
“Where the hell did you learn to do that?” I asked as Peter coiled up his lasso.
“In Colorado,” he said, a satisfactory grin on his chops, “I was a cowboy there for two years before I became a photographer.”
Actually, Peter Webb looked more like an American Indian than a cowboy, with his high cheeks bones, dark skin and jet-black hair. Someone actually told me that he was part Cherokee but I never plucked up the courage to ask him if this was true. Men don’t usually know what constitutes good looks in the minds of women and are often surprised when a female friend lets on who they find attractive or sexy, but in Peter’s case, we blokes understood the attraction straight away. He seemed totally swoon inducing, not only amongst girls, but, worryingly, boys too. Andrew Dickerson once confided in me, that though he himself was in no way Gay and freshly married, felt he’d fallen in love with the enigmatic young photographer.
Peter Webb’s talent was obvious to anyone with half an eye right from the off and over the years became one of the most sort after photographers on the advertising scene, working for and winning awards with some of the best agencies in Britain. His approach to a shoot was slow, quiet, pondering, thoughtful and straw chewing, I always thought. Somehow all of this came through in his pictures in a subtle, almost laid back, magical way that’s difficult to describe. But then you’d only have to look at the pictures to understand. Can a picture speak a thousand words? Peter Webb’s pictures spoke millions.
I did several other shoots with Peter Webb – we seemed to get on and I was in awe of his talent. He was also a guitar player and a fan of Bert Jansch, the Scottish guitarist and folk singer, and showed me how to play Bert’s big guitar solo hit, Angie, written by Davy Graham. (Actually, I’d never heard the song before I heard Peter play it.) We were sitting jamming in his basement studio in Fulham Road one evening just after I’d bought my first top flight guitar, a 1967 Martin D18, and he told me an American girl photographer would be calling round to look at some pictures of her new boyfriend she’d taken and which he had developed. About half an hour later, the doorbell rang and Peter went to answer it. A couple followed him to the opposite corner of the studio where the contact prints hung above the sink. The three chatted over the pictures for a few minutes and the girl seemed very pleased with the results. I could see the side of her face and she was smiling but the man had his back to me. As they turned to leave, Peter said, “This is Neal.”
The pretty, smiling, girl said, “Hi,” and the chap said, “Whatcha, mate,” in a very broad Liverpudlian accent. Well, he was Paul McCartney. He didn’t offer to sit and jam with us, maybe because he knew we didn’t have a lefty for him to strum.
Peter and I travelled to Southampton to photograph the funnel of a Union Castle liner. Union Castle only sailed to South Africa and more or less had monopoly over the route from Southampton. Ian Mason and I had had written a full-page national press ad with the line: ‘On the sea route to South Africa, certain land marks stand out.’ The visual was to be a close up of a Union Castle liner funnel shot sideways on.
This would have been a piece of cake, but when we arrived at the dock, the tide was in and the funnel on our designated ship was what looked like the height of the Empire State Building.
Most of the dockside was occupied by a line a cranes so we couldn’t get far enough away to use a long lens. Step forward, our intrepid cowboy. He didn’t use a lasso this time but talked one of the crane drivers into hauling him and his Hasselblad the 200 odd feet up to the funnel in a huge steel bucket. I’d never been fond of heights and immediately declined Peter’s invitation to join him in the bucket, and I have to say, the sight of him spinning slowly around way up against the grey sky made me feel sick and turned my knees to jelly. The bucket kept slowly spinning so Peter had to keep waiting till he was facing the funnel before he could press the shutter. Needless-to-say, we got the shot.
OTHER SNAPPERS
Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the finest photographers in the world. They were all talented, each in his or her individual way; not all were easy to work with. Some were almost impossible. I learned a great deal from all of them.
LORDY, LORDY
I met Royal photographer, Lord Patrick Litchfield and his assistant, Chalkie White, on Paddington Station in the Spring of 1975. We were travelling to Newcastle to Photograph Rod Allen, the then Executive Creative Director and partner in the advertising agency, Allen Brady and Marsh for a new ABM publicity brochure. Rod, a piano playing Geordie, was famous for his mysterious ability to swing sideways to the electric keyboard he kept next to his desk and pump out the chords from a new song that had arrived in his brain a split second earlier.
The manoeuvre would usually happen in the middle of a meeting about an upcoming new business pitch where various options for possible creative routes were being tabled. I found myself in that scenario several times as part of a creative team, and we were always anxious to sell the meeting a thought or direction we may have come up with before Rod went into his usual music making trance, because if Rod made it to the keyboard first, whatever ditty it was that split the air would be the basis around which the creative work/campaign would be based, like it or lump it. Many of the agency’s most successful campaigns were based around Rod’s advertising jingles, and though frowned upon by the glitterati in agencies at the arguably more creative, award winning end of the advertising business, where the ABM way was considered excruciatingly out of date, ABM never-the-less had a list of clients they’d turned into household names with their almost music hall type approach to advertising.
Try getting any of these jingles/catchphrases out of your mind if you recall them:
‘This is luxury you can afford, by Cyril Lord.’
‘One Thousand and One cleans a big, big carpet,
For less that half a crown.’
‘This is The Age Of The Train.’
‘That’s the magic of Woolworth,
That’s the magic of good old Woolies…’
‘I’m a secret lemonade drinker…
R. Whites Lemon-a-a-a-ade.’
‘Milk has gotta a lotta bottle.’
‘Whitbread, Big Head, Trophy Bitter.
The pint that thinks it’s a quart!’
‘Toblerone. Triangular honey from triangular bees.’
Though born in Consett, County Durham, Rod always felt his true home was Newcastle where he started his advertising career at the age of 17, and the idea for the brochure was to photograph him sitting at a grand piano on the city River Tyne key-side with the famous five bridges in the background. So the piano was on it’s way to the 5 bridges in a removal lorry from somewhere in Gateshead, pet, Rod was whistling up the M1 in his Maroon Volvo, and the then 36 year old Patrick Litchfield, with his family crested belt buckle, family crested briefcase and non family crested Burberry trench coat, Chalkie and I were relaxing in a high speed first class BR compartment. Cousin to the Queen, Patrick, was friendly, smiling, and with the customary Royal plum stuck firmly in his gob, was at full chat straight off. He was charm itself with an infectious laugh, launching in immediately on Royal Family gen I wouldn’t have thought should’ve been to fed to common lugholes such as mine.
Amongst other things he told me that the Queen Mother did indeed like the odd G&T and was usually the life and soul of any party, having a natural knack of making the rest of the Royal crew relax during the numerous formal family photographic sessions he’d participated in.
“She is always cracking jokes, sometimes personal ones at the expense of some family member or other, and usually the smiles one see’s in the pictures I’ve taken are genuine and not staged. Someone in the group I was photographing once actually farted quite loudly and rather than ignore it, she was straight in with a comment about the potent strength of Buck House Brussels sprouts. No one owned up, of course, even though she invited them to. It was all very funny.”
The journey to Newcastle Central Station was relaxed and entertaining and on arrival, the ‘Royal Party’ took a taxi to the docks to meet Rod. Rod was his usual jovial self, and having vigorously shaken Partick’s arm almost out of its socket, he lit one of his customary, massive Cuban cigars, his eyes sparkling with delight as the piano was lowered onto the keyside. He was obviously determined to enjoy the whole event, and, piano in position with the bridges in the background, he donned his straw hat, sat down on the stool and started playing.
Rod was in heaven. Here he was in his favourite city in the world, sitting in front of his favourite instrument beside his favourite river on a beautiful summer’s day with no intervention from the infamous Northumberland rain. Rod let rip, playing and singing at the top of his voice songs from all genres, from jazz to music hall, pop to operetta, with a few somewhat risqué naughty ditties thrown in. The shot looked perfect – Rod and the piano in the foreground, the river winding away past the 5 bridges visible over his shoulder. This was going to be a piece of cake. I turned to Partick who had his Hasselblad at the ready…at least, that’s what I expected. He was holding the thing, but looked lost.
“What do you want me to do?” he said.
I would have thought that was bloody obvious. Take the fucking picture! We had discussed the shot on the train but maybe his Lordship hadn’t been listening. This was a gift of a shot. All he had to do was press the shutter. I stepped forward and crouched down looking across the top of the piano.
“Try it from here, Patrick. This looks great.”
He did exactly as I’d suggested…then waited for another suggestion. He did everything I asked, shot after shot, and the pictures turned out very well…but surprisingly, Partick used none of his own initiative. Had I been the photographer, I would have been over this particular set up like a tomcat on a fish stall. A large part of my job was directing photographers and I loved it, but sometimes it helps if the snapper himself has more of an input. Two heads are always better than one. Often you choose a photographer for a particular skill he or she might have and in those circumstances. It’s great if the art director and photographer have a report – a mutual understanding of what you’re trying to achieve – the whole thing is much more fun and productive that way.
Anyway, I reckoned we’d got the shot, Rod seemed happy and went back to his hotel, and the 3 of us headed off to the station. The next stop was Hull, Peter Marsh’s hometown, to take pictures of him on his home turf. Peter Marsh was already at the hotel with his daughter when we arrived and I called him in his room.
“I’ll be down fully wardrobed in 5 minutes,” he announced loftily.
I should point out that Peter Marsh, Chairman and Chief Executive of Allan Brady and Marsh had once been an actor, albeit a not very good one, and he was nevertheless quite a performer. Once also married to Pat Pheonix of Coronation Street fame, he loved the sound of his own voice and being center stage.
In fact, when it came to presentations, especially to new business prospects, Peter Marsh and Rod Allen were a formidable double act – literally. They hired a West End theatre when they did their original presentation to F.W. Woolworth and Co. When the lights came on, the two performers shambled onto the stage dressed in scruffy looking baggy grey suits and took the audience through a brief summation of Woolworth’s recent history. This done, they proceeded to describe how the agency was going to take the Woolworth business forward into a new, brighter future. At this point, they both ripped off the loosely sewn grey suits to reveal white tuxedos beneath. Two stage hands rushed to hand the duo a cane and straw hat each, the music struck up, and Peter and Rod went into a song and dance routine….
“That’s the wonder of Woolworth,
That’s the wonder of good old Woolies…etc.”
Their act was usually pretty cringe-making for anyone with a modicum of good taste, but it was so spectacular, it impressed the hell out of many would be clients and the agency became one of the fastest growing agency success stories of the 1970s. One of the neatest tricks the agency pulled was when they were pitching for British Rail. On the morning of the presentation they kept their prospective client waiting in reception area for 45 minutes beyond the appointed time. Ashtrays were un-emptied, plastic beakers were on the floor and casually discarded newspapers on the sofa, and the receptionist was nowhere to be seen. When they clients were finally ushered into the conference room Peter Marsh addressed them:
“Now you know, gentlemen, how the average British Rail passenger feels. Not only is his train late, but when it arrives, it’s filthy, there is no one he can address his frustrations to and quite frankly, he’s fed up with British Rail’s perceived attitude. All that has to change, along with the image of British Rail in the mind of the public. We can change peoples’ attitude to British Rail, but that’s all we can do. You’ll have to do the rest and change things for real. Because if you don’t, we cannot be held responsible for the public’s continued slide away from the very notion of train travel altogether.
“Gentlemen, we can get people to believe that this really is the age of the train, but you’ll have to have to back us up, make the notion of train travel, as exciting and desirable as air travel, and there’s no reason on earth why it shouldn’t be…” and so on. Well, summat like that. Patrick was in full Royal Flight as we awaited Peter’s arrival in the hotel bar. When Marsh strode confidently onto said center stage in a pinstriped suit, bright silver silk tie, loudly striped red and white shirt and monocle on a gold chain, Lord Litchfield was visibly stunned and seemed to shrink into the shadows, allowing Marsh to take over the conversation, which he would have done anyway.
The following day's shoot went reasonably well, even though I had to keep up directing the photography, trying to stay one jump ahead, and figuring out the next set up while Patrick photographed the current one. Marsh was dressed in his white suit and had his white Jaguar at hand along with his chauffeur. We tried various locations but finally found an empty, derelict street near where Marsh was born, and the best shot of all, and the one we used in the brochure was of Marsh, complete in white suit and straw hat, standing, smiling though a large gaping hole in the wall of an upstairs room where a window had once been. We’d finished by lunchtime and went back to the hotel. Marsh shook hands with Litchfield, said goodbye and proceeded into the restaurant with his daughter, whilst Patrick, Chalkie and I went into the hotel’s cheap burger bar. I thought we’d all eat together and was a bit embarrassed, realizing that Peter Marsh considered Lord Litchfield to be far too common to have lunch with. Patrick was remarkably quiet during our meal, if you could call it that. Confidence, now matter how well rooted, seemed a remarkably brittle thing.
OOOER!
There are some photographers who don’t take direction from anyone. Lester Bookbinder was THE classic case. Represented again by Julian Seddon, Lester had a formidable reputation – rumour had it that he’d been known to throw art directors out of his studio if they stepped out of line. But no one could make a glass of beer look like he did, or anything else, come to that. And a Lester Bookbinder glass of beer was what I wanted. Once again, Julian was cautious asking if I was sure I wanted use Lester, suggesting one or two other photographers he had on his books. Once again, I dug my heals in. I wanted Lester and that was that. I‘d come a long way since the Pecconotti debacle of 5 years previously and was much more confident as an art director.
“You won’t need to go on the shoot,” Julian said, having given in.
I told him wild hairy mammoths wouldn’t keep me away. I wanted to see how the great man worked – learn what his secret was, “I know all about his reputation, I said defiantly, then lying, “He doesn’t scare me.”
You’d have thought I’d elected to go before a firing squad judging by the look Julian shot me. It turned out not to be too far from the truth.
‘Ah. Bisto!’
Perry Mason Dickson Line.
P.M. “So, finally, we have conclusive proof of your innocence, Mrs. Peabody.”
M.P. “But you can’t have! I did it. I confessed as soon as I was arrested.”
P.M. “That’s as maybe, but it’s my job to defend you against that blaggard who has the effrontery to call himself the District Attorney – I mean, the man can’t even act.”
M.P. “Neither can you.”
P.M. “That’s beside the point. My character is almost as famous as me and loved all over the country by millions of admirers. My ability to act is irrelevant.”
M.P. “Whatever. I killed the bastard, and I’d do it again given half the chance.”
P.M. “I think we can prove that this was an affair of the heart and that if you killed your husband, as you claim you did, it was as a result of his affair with 14 other women and that nobody in their right mind would blame you, especially as the jury is made up entirely of women who have done the same as you claim to have done – they all killed their husbands.”
M.P. “You can’t have a jury made up entirely of women – at least, not here in Louisiana.”
P.M. “That’s why half of them are dressed as men. Cunning, don’t you think?”
M.P. “Whatever. You still don’t stand a chance of getting me off.”
P.M. “Why do you think that?”
M.P. “The wheels.”
P.M. “Wheels? What wheels?”
M.P. “The ones under your arse.”
P.M “Ah, those wheels.”
M.P. “That’s right, dick head. It means, not only are you on the wrong case, but on the wrong programme. How do you like them apples, Chief Ironhorse, or whatever your fucking name is.”
P.M. “Crap!”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
CHAPTER 6. LESTER LEAPS IN.
I was born in a cross-fire hurricane
And I howled at my ma in the driving rain
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas
But it's all right. I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash
It's a gas! Gas! Gas
I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag
I was schooled with a strap right across my back
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas
But it's all right, I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash
It's a gas! Gas! Gas
I was drowned, I was washed up and left for dead
I fell down to my feet and I saw they bled
I frowned at the crumbs of a crust of bread
Yeah, yeah, yeah
I was crowned with a spike right thru my head
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas
But it's all right, I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash
It's a gas! Gas! Gas
Jumping Jack Flash, its a gas
Jumping Jack Flash, its a gas
Jumping Jack Flash, its a gas
Jumping Jack Flash, its a gas
Jumping Jack Flash,
The door was yanked open so hard I was nearly sucked into the room by the sudden inrush of air. A huge, grey haired man in his fifties, wearing transparently framed glasses, stood in the doorway, feet astride, arms extended, one hand on the door frame, the other still gripping the door handle. This was Lester Bookbinder’s studio in a huge Victorian apartment off the King Road, Chelsea.
“Yeah?” said a cold, deep voice from somewhere up in the sky.
“I’m Neal,” I almost stuttered, “I’m the art director for the Whitbread shoot.”
“What d’you want?”
“Er…I’m the art director,” I repeated, not sure why he was asking the question.
You already said that. What’re you doing here?”
The face was cold and hard like the voice, the jaw set square like Superman’s, but without the sympathy.
“I always attend shoots,” I said, not understanding why I should have to explain to someone who must have known what art directors did.
“Not with me you don’t. It isn’t necessary.”
He started to close the door, “Er, I’d like to stay, if that’s OK.”
“Just who does this guy think he is?” I thought, remembering Julian’s worried look. Lester Bookbinder. That’s who.
He stood there like something from Monument Valley for a moment – visions of me flying down the stairs springing to my mind. Then he stood aside, “Suit yourself. You can sit over there, but keep quiet.” I crossed the highly polished wood floor to the armchair Lester had pointed to as he left the room.
“Hi, Neal. How’re you doing?” A familiar, friendly voice filled me with a sense of relief, though just a small amount. John Taylor, whom I’d worked with at JWT when he was one of the assistant’s in the in-house studio, appeared from a small side room holding a huge stack of 10x8 film in his arms. John had once asked me what he should do to better himself, as he couldn’t really see his future going anywhere at JWT. I told him that he should try and get a job assisting one of the really top photographers. He asked me who and I told him Lester was the best and that quite a few top photographers had started out assisting him. I didn’t tell John that I thought his chances of getting such a position were as remote as the Outer Hebrides but he called me two days later to tell me he’d been in touch with Lester, been for an interview and was starting at the Chelsea studio the following week. By now, he’d been with Lester for a couple of years and said he’d learned a lot and that Lester had been really good to him.
“His bark’s a lot worse than his bite,” John said, “He’s just a bit scary at first. The thing with Lester is everything has to be exact. Before he takes the final shot, we have to go through what he calls leveling up procedures with spirit levels and stuff. Most guys do this by eye. Not Lester.”
Lester strode back into the room started barking at me straight away.
“You guys are all the same. You think all this is easy. You think that because I’ve been doing this for eighteen years, I find it easier than when I started out. Let me tell you it isn’t. It’s still as hard as ever it was.”
With that he turned away to the big plate camera on a tripod set up before a small table covered in a sheet of white Perspex. Two small lights on stands were positioned next to the table and a screen of tracing paper hung down behind as a background. Lester spent what seemed like the next two hours moving either of the lights slightly this way or that, their beams pointing at the tracing paper. John stood to the side moving only when he was told. The studio was in absolute silence. The only sound was the ticking of the huge ship’s clock on the wall behind where I was sitting, or the occasional creak from the wooden floor.
The shot I wanted was simple: a pint of ale in a tall glass, but with an extra high head almost overflowing – the way all beer is poured in the North of England. The head had to look as if it was about to topple over and because of the simplicity of the picture it really needed Lester’s magic to bring it to life. I had no idea how he did it, but he could make something ordinary look dramatic with his lighting technique – the object’s form and 3 dimensional shape was highlighted by use of a measured lighting contrast that gave an extra kind of richness to whatever was being photographed.
DAY TWO
Lester had shot a test of a small amount of beer in the glass and sent it to the lab. I’d been as quiet as the proverbial mouse during the proceeding day and Lester had allowed me back for the final shoot. Julian had warned the agency that Lester would use at least a hundred sheets of 10x8 film to get the shot he wanted. At roughly 10 quid a sheet, this was expensive with the cost of developing on top. Lester and John had rigged the glass to be filled via a pipe invisibly connected to the bottom of the glass and leading from a barrel of beer under the table, operated from a foot pump invisibly activated by Lester himself. By pumping the beer into the glass at the bottom, the head was created immediately and pushed to the top of the glass by the liquid. This way, Lester could take his foot off the throttle when the head was at the right height, let the bubbles settle, then shoot.
After about an hour of practice, we were ready to roll. John went through his leveling up procedure while Lester paced slowly up and down. I sat silently in my armchair, almost tasting the tension in the room. Julian arrived and asked Lester if everything was going OK, as any good agent might do. The way Lester spoke to him, you’d have thought we’d all been transported to Mississippi in the worst days of racial abuse, that Lester was a red-necked cotton plantation owner and Julian was a slave.
“Don’t give me all that crap, Jules. What he hell d’you care, so long as you get your cut? You should be out there plying your trade, whatever the fuck that is. Just get up off your arse for once and do something.”
Julian paled visibly. As far as I knew, he’d represented Lester for number of years and one would have thought he’d got used to this kind of abuse but he looked genuinely scared. He put up with it for about ten minutes the left to ply his trade, whatever the fuck that was, managing to slip me a nervous wink as he made for the door. Normally, Julian was a cool, slick, stylish, very together customer, so what I’d just witnessed took me aback somewhat. Speaking of which, when the 2day shoot was finally over, Julian gave me a lift back to agency which was in Norwich Street, just off Longacre, close to Covent Garden. Outside the studio was a once white, very tatty looking 3 litre Ford Capri with on grey door on the passenger side. I asked Julian about what had happened with him and Lester and how he put up with it.
“That’s just Lester. He’s never been any different. You’d think you’d get used to it, but you never do. He’s a pussycat, really. Albeit, a Bengal fucking Tiger type of pussy cat!”
We both laughed as we pulled up alongside a Silver Ferrari at a set of traffic lights.
“Wanker!” said Julian glancing sideways, “I bet he can’t really drive the fucking thing.”
We’d been travelling very slowly through heavy traffic but now we were stationary, Julian blipped the Capri’s throttle and my ears were met with a deep throaty roar and the whole car shook, “I’ve got a Shelby Mustang V8 under the bonnet. This is no ordinary Capri. Watch this.”
The lights changed and the Ferrari took of. So did we – literally. With a deafening squeal of rubber on tarmac, the rear wheels tried frantically to grab the surface of the road with enough blue smoke to excite a fire brigade. The whole front of the car lifted off the ground and we blasted after the Ferrari overtaking it easily on the inside and leaving it in our dust, the front of the car gliding down to meet the road like a jet plane landing at Heathrow. It occurred to me that Julian needed distractions like this as compensation for having to work with Lester. This one seemed to work. He was grinning like a Cheshire cat into the rear view mirror, “How do like those apples, Mr. bloody boring Ferrari?”
The first couple of times Lester pumped in the beer, it rose to the right height, but as soon as the bubbles settled, the head collapsed just as he pressed the shutter. I stood behind him so that I could see what he was seeing and the adrenalin started to pump. Lester was silent and seemed calm, relentlessly pursuing his task. He’d been slightly less scary when I’d arrived at the studio that morning, and had even discussed creating a tiny, subtle horizon line just above the bottom of the glass, which he said would suggest a sense of weight for the glass of beer, as it would appear to be standing on something rather than floating in space.
Lester shot 75 sheets of film, John taking each box of exposed film and marking it with the exposure reading that Lester had called out. It looked like it was going well. There were as many reasonable pints of beer coming up as there were disasters and then, suddenly, there it was, the prefect pint. Lester hit the shutter, the lighting pack flashed, and for a split second, the pint stood still. All 3 of us knew instinctively that this was the shot and all 3 of us cheered. Lester looked over his shoulder, his face split into a wide smile. John managed to pull the flat pack out of the camera, turn it over and pull out the metal protector, and Lester got another shot before the head fell. Lester continued to shoot for a while, but we all knew we had it in the bag, in the can, in the trap, nailed down and tied up. If you’re an art director or a photographer, you’ll know what that moment feels like. If you’re not, you don’t know what you’ve missed.
Lester and John went into conversation about developing the film, and giving instructions to the lab. John collected up the boxes of exposed film and took them off to wherever they were to be cooked. Lester told me he’d send the film to the agency the next day but I said I’d like to hang around if that was OK. He didn’t say it was, he didn’t say it wasn’t. He just went and sat down in the other armchair, swung one leg over the arm, stuck his elbow on his knee, cupped his chin in his hand and disappeared into some kind of deep mood. To this day, I can still hear that bloody clock ticking. Again, that was all the sound there was in the room, but now it was somehow louder. And there we sat, the great Lester Bookbinder and me, neither of us saying a word, for two hours.
The exposed film arrived. John took the plastic envelope over to the light box and began laying out the transparencies and Lester and I joined him. The shots were beautiful – even the ones that didn’t quite work in terms of the head height – and then, there it was, THE shot – the one we’d all seen happen. It was perfect. The best beer shot I’d ever seen and I’d shot quite a few with various photographers. Lester changed before my eyes. The aggressive, stone-faced giant became a friendly, favourite uncle and asked me if I’d like a beer and as we sat sipping in our respective armchairs, we were joined by a tall, slim, very attractive middle aged woman with a small, longhaired dog under her arm and a broad New York accent. This was Mrs. Bookbinder, and though I can’t remember her name, she was friendly, talkative and quite funny, as indeed was Lester suddenly. He just seemed to relax and began telling me stories and anecdotes about his early career in New York and some of the people he’d worked with over the years. It was as if he and I were old friends and I really liked him.
“There was this one crazy banana (pronounced banaana) who insisted on bringing his wife on the shoots. I mean, she wasn’t an art director and wasn’t even in the business as far as I knew, but he kept asking her what she thought, and boy, did she tell him. What sort of nut is that?”
Lester had meant what he’d said about the high standards he demanded of himself and his art never getting easier to obtain and until he got the result he was after, he worried. It was as if he considered anything that came easy not to be worth doing in the first place. Apart from having the privilege of watching the great man at work, I’d discovered something beyond all the mythology about the scary Lester Bookbinder. He was human.
OTHERS
In 1976, I worked with the other Lord photographer, as in Snowdon. It was a very unglamorous shoot requiring a picture of a group of board directors standing on a factory floor for an ad for Hanson Trust, the British Conglomerate. We chose Snowdon because we thought he might bring some of his special magic to a quite boring subject. He didn’t. Don’t get me wrong. I think Tony Armstrong Jones, as he was once known, is a great photographer, particularly when producing documentary pictures, but I found LS to be quiet, aloof, non-communicative, and quite obviously bored with the subject. The picture was OK it just wasn’t anything special. Almost any photographer worth his salt could have taken it. I enjoyed the shoot with Litchfield far more. At least he was good company. And the results were pretty good despite my having had to push him. There’s nothing worse than tension on a shoot. You need to have a relaxed atmosphere and, like I said, a good rapport with the photographer is essential. It just wasn’t there with Snowdon.
Perhaps because they occupied his mind, not to mention loins, more than what was probably normal, Litchfield was best at photographing women. We’re talking nude and half naked women here, arguably at the trashier end of the spectrum, but his Lordship did bring a bit of class and coolness to the subject and for 17 years he produced a ‘girly’ calendar for Unipart, the automotive company. He and art director, the late Noel Myers, the man originally tasked with the job, travelled all over the world shooting beautiful women in the most exoctic locations, from Nairobi to Moscow, Cuba to Musique.
Noel was a long time mate and told me some of the stuff that went on behind the scenes in the lead up to, and during the Unipart shoots. Both he and Patrick exercised their masculinity in no uncertain terms with many of the models they cast as a matter of course, but Noel and Patrick were chalk and cheese when it came to their origins and backgrounds, which could explain their lively and fairly tempestuous working relationship. They would often argue about the set up for a particular shot and on one occasion, during the African expedition, Noel pushed Patrick away from the camera to look through the viewfinder because his Lordship had refused the irate East Ender the privilege of doing so. The exasperated Patrick then made the mistake of grabbing Noel from behind, wrapping his arms around his fairly thick trunk in an attempt to reverse the situation. His Lordship was immediately awarded a quick Henry Cooper to his right eye. Noel told me that at dinner with the rest of the crew and models in the hotel that evening, Litchfield was nowhere to be seen, the empty chair next to Noel’s a screaming reminder of what had gone on earlier in the day. Noel said he was mortified, even wondering if he would end up in the Tower of London for clouting a Royal.
“You could’ve heard a pin drop. No one was saying anything, I suppose because they were all embarrassed. The all just looked down at their plates. The only sound you could hear was knives and forks against china and it seemed so loud. It was a very posh room, sort of Victorian and dark with a polished wooden floor. I was shitting myself. They’d called an ambulance and whisked Partick off to the local hospital. I wanted to go too, but they wouldn’t let me. No one had heard anything and if they had, they weren’t saying. He could have been dead for all I knew.
“Then the door on the other side of the room opened. I was so relieved it was Partick. He walked slowly over to the table and sat down next to me. Still no one said a word and you could’ve cut the atmosphere with a ruddy bread knife. Anyway, Patrick poured himself some wine and placed a napkin on his lap. After what seemed an eternity he turned to me and leaned his face close to mine. He was wearing a purple, velvet eye patch. He just said, in a very quiet voice, ‘Please don’t ever do that again, old boy, there’s a good chap.’
"Half an hour later things were back to normal and were laughing and joking again as if nothing had happened. I’ve never been so relieved in all my life.”
Noel himself was no angel when it came to members of the opposite sex and it seemed as though both he and Litchfield were both cursed the same obsession - that all women were theirs for the taking and had to be taken ASAP. I once heard Noel reply to a girl he just been introduced to and who’d asked his name in what could only be described as a totally unsubtle, leering fashion - though it was quite funny.
“It’s Noel, as in Christmas, my dear, and Myers, as in beds.”
Sometimes when they were alone, Noel told me, he and Litchfield would discuss their many conquests over a glass or two.
“We were sitting there late one night in some hotel room or other and Patrick asked me if I’d done everything it was possible to do with a woman. I told him I didn’t know. I’ll never forget what he said next…but there’s no way I can tell you.”
Noel was always excited with the annual approach of the Unipart calendar shoot, which he did as a freelancer. Keeping the new location secret was part of the game for him too. In 1994, at the last minute, he told me that he was off to Cuba the following weekend to check out the Island as the next location. Cuba was settled as the location and while he was there Noel and members of the party went to an open-air concert by Tina Turner, to celebrate. The day was very hot and the party apparently had quite a lot to drink. On the way back to the hotel in a cab, Noel was singing at the top of his voice the Tina Turner hit, 'Simply The Best' and waving his arms about. He suddenly felt very unwell and the taxi drove him to a hospital A&E department. A few minutes later, as he lay on a trolley in the hospital, Noel suffered a massive heart attack and died. He was 61.
I went to Noel's funeral with a crowd of people in the business who knew him. Patrick Litchfield didn’t turn up but sent a representative, which was probably the right royal thing to do. A bit naff, I thought.
Vorsprung Durch Technik.
Ena Sharples: “And joost where d’you think you’re gooin’, Elsie Tunner?”
Elsie Tanner: “What business are thut ‘o yourn? Get out ‘o me way. I’m in an oory.”
ES: “Everything’s my business, Elsie Tunner, even you, thick as you are ‘n all, should know that be now.”
ET: “You’re flippin’ nosey. Thut I do know.”
ES: “Someone’s got to be round ‘ere. Someone’s got to keep an eye on the likes ‘o you and your kind.”
ET: “What do you mean, me and my kind? Joost ‘oo do you think you are when you’re at ‘ome?”
ES: “I think I’m a spy, as you usk. I work for Mi5.”
ET: “ ‘An oo the bloody ‘ell’s ‘e, when e’s at ‘ome?”
ES: “You really are as ignorant as you look, aren’t you, Elsie Tunner? Everywoon knows about Mi5, cept you, thurriz.”
ET: “Why, if you wasn’t so old and croombly, I’d give you the back of me ‘und…”
ES: “Raise your ’und to me, Ellsie Tunner, and I’ll ‘ave you carted away and locked oop for life. Don’t think are doon’t know what’s gooin’ on.”
ET: “What are you on about, ye duft old but?”
ES: “Do are need to spell it out?”
ET: “Spell? Why you couldn’t write your own name if ye trard.”
ES: “I know your little secret, Elsie Tunner. You can’t fool me. I know you’re Roosshin.”
ET: “Yewha’? Ave you finally lost ALL your marbles, Ena Sharples?”
ES: Ye cun squirm all ye like, but I’ve got proof. Areve teken pictures o you at work.”
ET: “Wha’, in the ice cream fuctory?”
ES: “Lark I said, you can’t fool me. The fuctory’s just a coover oop. I’ve seen what you’re really oop to. They, them at Mi5, told us what to look out for, thut Roosians were our deadly enemy in this country, an’ ‘ere you are, at it again, bold as bruss.”
ES: “A’ wha?”
ET: “Rooshin’. Yer allus at it. Rooshin’ ‘ere, rooshin’ ther. Rooshin’ flippin’ everywhur. Areve gor you bunged to raghts this time, Elsie Tunner.”
ET: “I’ve ‘eard it all now. Ooh wrote this fookin’ shite? I’m off to join Brookside.”
* * * * * * * * *
CHAPTER 7. HEROES AND VILLAINS.
I've been walkin' these streets so long Singin' the same old song I know every crack in these dirty sidewalks of Broadway
Where hustle's the name of the game And nice guys get washed away Like the snow and the rain
There's been a load of compromisin' On the road to my horizon But I'm gonna be where the lights are shinin' on me
Like a rhinestone cowboy Riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo
Like a rhinestone cowboy Getting cards and letters from people I don't even know And offers comin' over the phone
Well, I really don't mind the rain And a smile can hide all the pain But you're down when you're ridin' the train that's takin' the long way
And I dream of the things I'll do With a subway token And a dollar tucked inside my shoe
There'll be a load of compromisin' On the road to my horizon But I'm gonna be where the lights are shinin' on me
Like a rhinestone cowboy Riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo
Rhinestone cowboy Gettin' cards and letters from people I don't even know And offers comin' over the phone
Like a rhinestone cowboy Riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo
Like a rhinestone cowboy Gettin' card and letters from people I don't even know
Most art directors have a favourite photographer, someone they feel comfortable with, with whom they have a report, who instinctively knows where they are coming from – someone who is bloody good and whom they feel can shoot anything, from fashion to food with the same skill and enthusiasm. Mine was Brian Jaquest. I met him in 1974 when I worked at Benton and Bowles in Knightsbridge. Brian was recommended by the creative director, Richard Smith, whose advice I listened to because he’d worked with some of the best art directors in the business and had a string of top awards to his name. He was also a really tough bastard who would have been pissed off if I’d decided on someone else.
Brian and I hit it off straight away. He wasn’t on the Lester Bookbinder scale of fame or expense, but he had a very good reputation and I really admired his work. Most photographers specialize either by choice or simply because they become associated with a particular area. Like Lester’, Brian was a still life man, though over the years, he and I photographed everything from food, to fashion, to jet planes, to motor cycles, to beer, to room sets. A really good photographer can photograph anything. Brian was a hard worker and problem solver apart from being technically as good as anyone I’d worked with, including Lester. He was also down-to-earth, not a prima donna despite his talent and we shared a mutual respect for each other. There was never any tension and he was always cool as a cucumber, whatever the pressure and was always ready to smile.
I shot a lot of food with Bernard Philips in his studio off Oxford Street. Bernard was a very quiet man but extremely meticulous and hard working. The only complaint I could level was that he was quite slow, and if I had a pound for every mile I’d paced waiting for him the press the shutter I’d have been a trillionaire. However, Bernard’s work was superb.
Bernard, recommended by Max Henry, (if he was good enough for Rasputin, he was good enough for me!) was a really nice, softly spoken, gentle man, and, as with Brian, he and I were friends for many years. Bernard often photographed cigarettes, a very specialized area with many restrictions and demands due to research-backed information from clients – like the exact amount of a cigarette to be visible poking out of a pack, how many cigarettes should be poking out of a pack, the exact angle a pack of 20 should be, which pack should be in the foreground if both a ten pack and a twenty pack were in the same shot etc. etc. bloody etc. For an art director, it was a very boring subject and something I steered clear of. A new pack could take weeks to photograph, literally. All tobacco clients had a list of their own criteria a mile long – the way they wanted the pack lit, which elements they wanted to highlight, etc. etc. bloody etc.
Once, when I was shooting some foodstuff with Bernard, I noticed a wide trestle table on the other side of his quite large studio. It was in shadow and laid out on the surface was a very complicated cigarette pack set up. The pack was balanced on one corner and there were tiny mirrors everywhere, held in place with plasticiene. I asked Bernard about it.
“It’s been an absolute nightmare. They want to highlight all the gold bits on the pack – make them sparkle. I think it’ll look really terrible, but it’s their decision. It’s taken a week to get this far. I think we’re almost there – just a few tweaks and we’ll be ready to shoot - probably on Friday.”
Half way through the afternoon, the flash pack we were using decided to quit. John, one of Bernard’s two assistants, examined it and told Bernard it would have to be sent away for repairs. The only other available pack in the studio was underneath the trestle table on which the cigarette set up was. John immediately got down on his hands and knees and crawled under the table. The pack was at the far end of the tunnel and was plugged into the wall against which one end of the table was pushed.
“Be careful, John,” Bernard said quietly, obviously worried about the fag setup. <
“It’s OK, Bernard,” John replied, “It’ll be fine.”
But it wasn’t OK. With the utmost care, John, who was quite a big bloke, gently pushed the flash back to one side and reached for the plug. He tried to pull it from the socket but it wouldn’t budge. He pulled again but it was stuck fast.
“John, be careful,” Bernard said again, a slight anxiety apparent in his voice.
John tensed and gave another long tug. The plug suddenly came away from the socket and John’s arm sprang back so that his elbow caught the table leg. His body arched simultaneously, the curve of his back catching the underneath of the tabletop. The table hopped sideways, causing some of the set up to fall over, one of the mirrors falling on the floor and smashing. John tried to move his body which was now somehow wedged, and the whole table and it’s contents collapsed, the legs at one end folding in on themselves, the cigarettes, mirrors, packs skidding down the slide John had created onto the concrete floor. Time seemed to freeze momentarily; John froze beneath what had been the table, Bernard just froze. Without another word, Bernard walked quietly to the front door and left the studio.
Another great favourite photographer and friend was Brain Duffy, always known as plain Duffy, though there was nothing plain about him whatsoever. The Marksist Catholic Duffy, as he described himself, was one of the ‘terrible trio’ of tough young photographers from London’s East End, Duffy, Donavan and Bailey whom, along with Lester Bookbinder ruled the roost back in the late 60s, 70s and 80s. Arguably, Bailey still rules it now. I think he’s untouchable. He’s done it all, said it all and is still doing it and saying it all today. I only worked with Duffy though I did meet Bailey but not Donavan. By reputation, none of the 3 were to be messed with.
I actually met and worked with Duffy before I worked with Lester Bookbinder and it was with slight trepidation that I rang the doorbell of his Hampstead studio but I was greeted by a smallish, tightly muscled man, with very short, almost cropped hair and beard and an unmistakably impish twinkle in his eyes. From that moment, Duffy didn’t stop talking and he talked about anything and everything, his mind dancing from one subject to another like Fred Astaire on speed.
“So how long have you been with the agency? Oh, right. I like that smock you’re wearing. It’s a fisherman’s smock, isn’t it? I have a couple of those somewhere. That’s an interesting ring you’re wearing. The stone looks like amber. A lot of Ancient Egyptians kept a lot of that stuff around. Interesting finger you’re wearing it on, too. That’s the finger of Jupiter, isn’t it? I notice you’re tapping your feet.
“Are you a jazzer too? Who do you favour. Miles? Coltrane? Old Getzy? Evans? Monk? Oh, Wes Montgomery? Yeah, great. Did you get to see him at Ronnie’s when he came over in’65? No? Bad luck. He was amazing and such a nice man. He and I talked about all kinds of stuff - his hometown; Indianapolis; his life on the road; his 9 children; 14 grandchildren. Mind, he smoked like you wouldn’t believe. I reckon that’s what killed him in the end. He was only 43, the same age as Django, when he pegged it. Weird that, don’t you think? Do you smoke? I did at one time. We all did. Bit like sucking in poison, don’t you think?”
From that moment on I was a member of Duffy’s club. He seemed to like me, which was a relief because I’d heard that if he didn’t, I was in for a rough ride. Duffy wasn’t just chatting idly. He was busy all the time positioning the camera, checking out the lighting against the white background the background, his two assistants doing what assistant’s do – making sure the 3 Hasselblad backgrounds were loaded, taking readings with a light meter etc. The two models arrived and Duffy greeted them as if they were his own daughters. I wasn’t sure if he knew them but got the impression that he treated all models like human beings and not like dummies as some photographers did. He chatted with them about this and that as the makeup girl sat them down and went to work. The models were soon laughing and totally relaxed – all part of Duffy’s technique.
When either of the models was dressed and in front of the camera, Duffy only looked into the viewfinder once to check the focus and for the rest of the time, stood upright with the shutter syringe in his hand. He gave the models hardly any directions, except maybe,
“Could you turn just a little to your right, darling,” then carried on chatting to the girl in front of the camera, “So where do you keep these horses of yours? Oh, right. I have to say, you don’t really look the cowboy type to me – or should that be Cowgirl? I love horses, but they scare the shit out of me. They’re so bloody big and powerful. I tried riding once, but was so scared it was embarrassing. I felt like I was miles up in the air and I really didn’t fancy breaking my neck if I fell off. Pathetic, don’t you think? Have you ever had a really dodgy fall…?”
Every now and then, he’d press the shutter, but not that anyone really noticed, such was his skill in engendering such a relaxed, jolly atmosphere. An assistant would step forward and change the film magazine without being asked, and Duffy just carried on. After about an hour, Duffy turned to me, “What do you reckon, Neal? D’you think we’ve got it? Is there anything else you’d like us to try?” I made a suggestion, more for want of something to say, and he shot another reel of film but I knew he’d got the shot and I knew he knew. The pictures were beautiful. The clothes looked great, the girls looked fantastic, and while everything appeared natural and particularly un-stiff and over formal as some fashion pictures tended to, they had an indefinable quality and richness about them. It was as if Duffy had seen things and moments the rest of us hadn’t. He had, of course. All great photographers do.
As I’ve said before, in the days before digital photography, you had to wait for the film to be processed and this was usually the time to relax and have lunch. Duffy erected a couple of trestel tables in the studio every day and there were always half a dozen guests who weren’t part of the shoot. Sometimes, he’d mischievously invite people from rival agencies probably in the hope that there would be an argument and punchup or even a shooting, but it never happened. Whatever, lunch at Duffy’s was always fun and I was invited a couple of times when I wasn’t actually shooting there, which to me, was a real privilege.
One day – no one really knows why, Duffy went into his garden with his entire stockpile of negatives and burned them all on a bonfire in the middle of the lawn. He quit the photography business and became an antique furniture restorer. He returned briefly some 25 years later for a reunion photographic session with actress Joanna Lumley and her son, whom he’d photographed when the young man was still a baby, using the same London location as before. Duffy died a few weeks after of lung disease.
TELLING TALES
Jack Bankhead became the next Lester Bookbinder when Lester concentrated on directing commercials, but only as far as popularity as one of the best still life photographers around – his style was as strong, but quite individual. I worked with Jack a number of times and despite his very pushy, arrogant agent, Bob Sprosden, I found Jack to be a very personable, friendly guy. He was an accomplished Classical guitar player and the owner of a Ramirez, one of the most sought after Spanish made guitars on the market. He also owned a vintage Gibson 335 double cutaway electric guitar, and when he found out I was a player, he bought the bright red little demon into the studio and I played itseveral times during shoots.
Jack, apart from having a great eye and being at the top of the tree, he was a technical master, I’d shot some experimental Birds Eye Arctic Roll pictures for a new product range with Bernard Philips. Bernard wasn’t available to do the final shots so the agency hired Jack. I took one of Bernard’s pictures of a slice of Arctic Roll along to Jack’s as a reference. Imagine a Swiss roll with a 3’’ thick core of vanilla ice cream running through the centre which had been cut into slices, you’ll have an idea what we were looking at.
Jack shot a couple of 5x4 trannies of a slice looking flat on and sent the film to the lab for a test. When it came back, the ice cream looked a bit whiter than I thought it should according to Bernard’s tranny, in which the ice cream was a bit yellower. I pointed this out to jack and asked if he could maybe change the exposure and ‘warm up’ the ice cream a bit to get the right colour. Jack looked at Bernard’s picture, then, with out a word, he placed his own transparency on the light box, cut a slice off a fresh arctic roll and placed it next to it. The colours of the ice cream on the slice and on Jack’s transparency were identical. Duh! I apologized, but again Jack didn’t say a word. He just went back to work.
But jack is a lovely bloke and one evening I met him at an exhibition by Jon Stigner, who did his training as jack’s assistant before making it on his own. Jack seemed extra smiley as I whittered on about this and that and he gradually leaned back against the wall and slid down it till he sat on the floor, still holding his glass. Maybe he’d had a long day and was feeling a bit tired. Bless him.
CLIVE
Clive Arrowsmith’s brilliance as a photographer is irrefutable. He’s also completely crazy. The craziness is an essential ingredient in his pictures. No one uses make-up or shapes hair the way Clive Arrowsmith does. His pictures, usually fashion-based, are overwhelmingly beautiful, but have an edge that pushes them beyond mere beauty. Even the way he uses lighting somehow enhances that edginess. Only someone as crazy as Clive could possess the innate ability to create what he does by pushing things further – quite a bit further, and then some.
Clive’s incessant verbal diarrhea is the first sign that he’s not entirely normal and his almost skittish display of unbounded energy is a sure sign that here is one hell of an active mind that’s almost impossible to satify. Even at lunch, a time most people use to unwind and relax, Clive couldn’t sit still, and during the two-day shoot I did with him in 1983, when he and I were in a restaurant after the first morning’s photography, with Leonard, the extremely well-preserved, evenly suntanned hairdresser, Clive was loud, joking with the waiters, telling funny stories, taking the piss out of Leonard, and suggesting, I should have my hair permed (a trend of the day) in Leonard’s famous Grosvenor Square salon.
When the shoot was over, my creative director insisted, despite my protestations, that I went along to the famous Leonard studio and gave the curly hair thing a go. I spent 3 hours in a chair, an extremely effeminate and disgruntled blonde male stylist twisting tiny bits of silver paper into tufts of my hair, coming back to check on it like he was a chef having to cook a dish he hated, such were his snorts of disapproval each time. Finally, he gave an extra penetrating snort after ripping one silver twist from my head and declaring in no uncertain terms that the whole exercise had been a complete waste of time.
“I told them it was useless, but no-one listens around here,” he said sounding like a spoilt 5 year old, “The hair on your head is like you’d find on a baby’s arse. If I had hair like that, I’d shave the fucking lot off.”
With that, he swept off to God knew or cared where leaving me alone in the dark side room where’d I’d had to put up with his winjing and moaning for so long. There was no one else around, so I just got up and left, thankful that I didn’t look a prick covered in pubic hair, which I would have, had the perm worked. About 30 models were needed for the shoot, which was for Aberto Culver, the beauty and hair care manufacturer, and Clive did the casting, something he was obviously pretty good at. When they all trouped into the studio on the first day, one of them seemed ultra friendly with Clive and he with her. I didn’t think this unusual, Clive’s reputation with the opposite sex being a blend of Cassanova, Sacha Distel, Roger Vadim and the Marquis De Sard.
I also worked with Vick Parish, on another shoot for Alberto Culver. Vick was a good photographer though not in Clive’s league. At the start of the shoot, he grabbed one of the models and brought her over to me. The girl was tall, dark and very beautiful, aged about 20, I’d have guessed, and Clive was all over her like a rash, despite looking old enough to be her father. Suddenly Clive pulled her across the studio to where I was standing.
“Neal, I’d like to introduce you to Penny, my wife.”
I have to admit that what flashed through my mind was a combination of ‘dirty bugger’ and ‘lucky bastard’. Half way through the day, Vick went AWOL and things slowed to a halt. 20 minutes later and our photographer was still missing. We had a lot to get through and I asked one of the assistants where he’d gone, but he just shrugged and said he didn’t know. I decided to go and have a look myself. This wasn’t Vick’s’s own studio but one hired specially to accommodate so many models at one time. Holborn Studios is a huge complex boasting 18 studios used for stills photography and film work. Located on two floors, there are also make up rooms, dressing rooms, a kitchen, sauna, and shower rooms, and it’s a maze if you’re not used to it. I couldn’t find Vick anywhere.
Having tried everywhere else, I found myself outside the sauna. The door was locked, though I could’ve sworn I could hear someone was inside. I went back to the studio where people were occupying themselves re-doing hair, touching up make up, checking exposure and generally trying to look busy. 5 minutes later, Penny came tripping into the room and made straight for hair and makeup. I hadn’t noticed that she’d also gone missing. 5 minutes after that, a disheveled, red faced, sweaty Vick appeared, tucking in his shirt and pushing his hair back across his scalp. <
“I’m sorry about that, man,” he said to me, “I just had to – you know what I mean?”
Richard Lynham, a copywriter I worked with at ABM told me of he’d also worked with Vick Parish.The shoot was in Poland in the middle of winter and he said the hotel where they stayed in Krakow, was like something out of Dr Zhivago. It was freezing cold in the bedrooms and the walls were damp. Richard said he was sitting huddled in a blanket by the log fire he’d managed to light in his room, when the building seemed to begin shaking.
“It sounded like an express steam train passing underneath the building. There was this loud, rhythmic knocking sound accompanied by a sort of wheezing like steam from an engine. It got louder and louder and was really scary and I was fairly sure we weren’t anywhere near railway line. Then the wall caved in. It was the wall adjoining my room to John’s. A huge flap of plaster board fell flat into the room with Vick lying face down on it, stark naked. Underneath him, was one of the models we were using on the shoot.”
Tide Clean. Tide Clean. Tide Clean.
Charles: “Hello Rodney.”
Rodney: “Hello, Charles.”
C: “Why do we have to do this every week? It makes us sound like a right couple of poofs.”
R: “Well, we are. That’s what they pay us for.”
C: “Speak for yourself, duckie.”
R: “Ooooh, listen to macho man. What’s made you so manly all of a sudden?”
C: “I’m fed up to the gills with being stereotyped. Anyway, you can talk. I saw you chatting up that girl in the club the other night. Just whom are you trying to kid? You’re as much a blokey bloke as I am.”
R: “That was no tart, that was my Dad.”
C: “Looked like a woman to me.”
R: “It’s just the way he dresses.”
C: “Which way does he dress, then. To the right or the left?”
R: “Fuck off!”
* * * * * * * * *
CHAPTER 8. BOTTLING IT.
Busted flat in Baton Rouge, headin' for the train,
Feelin' nearly faded as my jeans.
Bobby thumbed a diesel down, just before it rained;
Took us all the way to New Orleans.
I took my harpoon out of my dirty red bandanna,
And was blowing sad while Bobby sang the blues.
With them windshield wipers slappin' time,
And Bobby clappin' hands,
We finally sang up every song that driver knew.
Freedom's just another word for nothing' left to lose:
Nothin' ain't worth nothin' but it's free.
Feeling good was easy, Lord, when Bobby sang the blues.
Feeling good was good enough for me;
Good enough for me and Bobby McGee.
From the coal mines of Kentucky to the California sun,
Bobby shared the secrets of my soul.
Standin' right beside me, Lord, through everything I've done,
Every night she kept me from the cold.
Then somewhere near Salinas, Lord, I let her slip away,
Lookin' for the home I hope she'll find.
And I'd trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday,
Holdin' Bobby's body next to mine.
Freedom's just another word for nothing' left to lose:
Nothin' left is all she left for me.
Feeling good was easy, Lord, when Bobby sang the blues.
Buddy, that was good enough for me;
Good enough for me and Bobby McGee.
La da da la la na na na La da da na na. La la la da, Me and Bobby McGee. La la la la la da da da La la la da da. La la la da, Me and Bobby McGee.
La la la la la na na na La la la da da. La da da da, Me and Bobby McGee. La la la la la da da da...............
David Montgomery and Julian Cottrell were both Lester Bookbinder’s assistants before cutting loose on their own and his influence over their work wasn’t the only Lester trait they both picked up. The first time I worked with David, I went to his studio near The King’s Road to check out some costumes for a girdle shoot. The copyline, written by Barabara Lines, ironically, was: ‘Whatever goes on underneath, is nobody’s business but yours.’ The picture was of a young woman in a black ‘maxi coat’, the long, down-to-the-ground trendy coat at the time. On the following page was proposed to be the same girl with the coat pulled wide open revealing the girdle she wore underneath. Mr. Montgomery was sitting at the back of the studio playing a kit of drums. He was shouting, probably largely due to the racket from the drums. I did think he could have had the courtesy to leave his hobby aside for a moment or two to discuss his concerns properly, but he continued bashing away.
“Bash, bash, these coats are crap, bash, bash, ting, ting. They’re so badly sewn, bash, bash, thump, thump, ting, ting, thump, thump, bash, the material is tight and will never hang right. They look like they’re made of cardboard. What we need is real couturier, not shit like this.”
And that was that. I was sent away with a flea or two wrestling each other deep inside my lughole. It wasn’t even my shoot or campaign. I was just filling in for Derek Norman, a senior Art director at JWT. He was quite good as art directors go, but he and I didn’t get on for some reason. He’d spent 2 years in the New York office where art directors were also TV producers, an experience Lawrence had also had when he was over in the Big Apple.
When he and Lawrence came back, they both demanded to combine their duties as art directors with responsibilities as producers. This meant they had to divide their attention between film and print, but the load from either department wasn’t lightened so they were both overworked and needed two assistants each. The trouble was, they both unloaded the stress and worry of rarely being in the right place at the right time onto those assistants. Basically, the two seniors were buzzing around like blue-arsed flies and no one got a fair crack of the whip, not even them. I was now the assistant to two senior art directors at once. It didn’t help that Lawrence and Derek openly disliked each other intensely. I managed to escape the final girdle shoot with DM by insisting I had prior commitments. I knew that if anything went wrong on the coat shoot, I would get the blame. I was beginning to learn early on the importance politics had to survival.
I worked with David Montgomery again 14 years later on a shoot for American Airlines. He’d mellowed and was now quietly spoken and affable. The shot was a family portrait with a caste of about 20 and was to be photographed outside a stately home with the mansion in the background. This time, David and I got on really well. We worked together arranging the cast in the picture, choosing the best angle etc, and the shot was great. I ended up really liking and respecting him.
James Badel had become Lester Bookbinder’s young successor in the early seventies and was winning awards all over the place. I picked him to shoot a still life of 9 spice jars to be laid out in a Chicken Oxo ad in 3 rows of 3 one above the other. It would have been fairly simple to photograph the jars separately and strip them into the required rows, but James, being the ultimate professional he was, and a perfectionist to match, decided to do the composition in one shot. He said the perspective on each jar would be true in relation to the next if we put each one in front of the camera individually. He was right, but there’s an argument that no one would have noticed. I decided it was a matter of art so there was no question that one shot was the way to go.
The jars couldn’t be laid down on a background as this would produce a shadow from each jar and it would be obvious the jars were laid down. The answer was to attach them to a sheet of glass, slope the glass at 45 degrees, and shine light through the glass lighting the jars and giving the illusion they were floating in space. This was trickier than it sounded. To get each jar lined up and each perfectly square to the camera to the camera was a nightmare, each one stuck to the glass with a tiny piece of double sided tape, hidden by the contents of the jars. It took the rest of the day. Sometimes the jars looked straight, but a test shot showed they were anything but. The bottom edge of the glass was placed on the floor and the top supported invisibly by this wire. The lights were rigged close to the set up and the glass was difficult to get at, and fine adjustment of the jars almost impossible. Ian Giles, one of Julian’s two assistants, spent most of the day lying awkwardly on the floor and swearing under his breath. James kept himself entertained while this was going on, by screaming down the phone, a la Lester Bookbinder, but in a broad, Birmingham, at some poor sap on the switchboard of a car hire company. “Ah doon fookin’ care. I want all three ‘o them vuns outside my studio at six o’clock Friday mornin’. I said, I’ll pay for the fookin’ Jag from last moonth when you deliver the vuns. If them vuns aren’t there, you worn’t ger any fookin’ mooney. D’ye oonderstund?”
Apart from that, he was charm itself – calm, relaxed, affable, helpfully making suggestions to Ian. We seemed to be getting there by about five ‘o clock. At least, I thought we were.
ENTER THE DRAGON
Over the years, I’ve met one or two people who have the ability to suck an atmosphere dry on entering a room, and kill it stone dead. This is not always creeping paranoia on sight of such a common enemy. There was one man who could create such a phenomenon before anyone was actually aware of his presence. The temperature would noticeably drop, and the hair on the back of the neck stiffen dramatically. You just knew he was there. The effect was most common in the studio of that particular agency.
“Why is that chair empty?” came the cold, spine chilling voice of Dallas from the middle of the room.
“That’s Bob’s chair,” studio manager, the late George Carey, replied,
“He’s off sick.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s diabetic and had a bit of a bad time yesterday, so I told him to take the day off.”
“Fire him. Replace him with someone who can take the pace. We’re not running a charity.”
George didn’t reply. He’d become used to Dallas, who’d bought the company, and could handle him better than most. He didn’t fire Bob.
The studio was an independent company owned by Ron but most of the work the studio did was supplied by the agency. Later, when Dallas sold the company on, the buyers technically owned the studio which owed George something in the region £75,000 and George knew he had little chance, if any, of being paid, which meant the freelance staff of art workers and Mac operators wouldn’t get paid either. George was fiercely loyal to his staff and one evening, he stayed on late and removed the hundreds of artwork files, kept in racks on CDs in the studio, loaded them into his car, and took them home. These files were essential to the continuation of clients’ work by the company who was taking over. Without them, further work for those clients was impossible.
George went to see Dallas the next day and demanded payment. Dallas hardly ever smiled, but did so this time, smugly telling George that the outstanding debt was now the responsibility of the new owners and that George would have to approach them for payment. But George told Dallas how he’d taken all the valuable files somewhere for safe keeping, while the deal was being orchestrated but that, as they were as essential part of Osprey’s negotiated value to the new purchaser, they’d obviously need to be returned to the studio. Ron also pointed out that to do so would be costly in terms of the transportation, which would need to be paid in advance. According to George, Dallas’s smile faded like the sun disappearing behind a dark cloud, becoming blacker than night when the fee for delivery of said files was tabled: £75.000. George left the meeting with a cheque in his pocket.
The entrance of James Badel’s wife to his studio the afternoon of the spice jars shoot was less subtle than any entrance Dallas ever made. The door burst open and there she stood, a cross between Cruella Deville and the bride of Frankenstein and screaming like a banshee.
“What are you still doing here?” it yelled at the top of its lungs or gills,
“You know we have an appointment to pay tennis at 6.30.”
“I won’t be too long, sweetie,” (Sweetie? Was he sure?) “By the way, this is Neal.”
The hag looked at me like I was a freshly born maggot, then shot her glare back at James. She wore a long, fir coat, chicken leg like arms protruding, uncomfortably reminiscent of those of an Auschwitz inmate. She held a tennis racquet in one hand and a set of car keys in the other. Her witches hair was a bush of stiff, straggly, ft long, curly strings sticking straight out from her skull-like head as if rigid from a powerful electric shock and seeming to be trying to escape.
“COME NOW!” she screamed, not moving.
I couldn’t believe what happened next. James grabbed his jacket from the back of a chair and made towards the door and the monster.
“Er, I’m sorry about this. Looks like I have to go. I think we’re about there. You can manage, can’t you Ian?”
“Sure.” Ian grunted from somewhere under the table.
Good-o. Nice to meet you, Neal.”
And with that, James left. The jars kept slipping down the glass but we carried on.
“Who the hell was that?” I asked.
“His fucking wife,” was the reply, she’s always the same - right off her trolley.
“Why does he put up with it?
“I don’t think he will for much longer.”
Nothing more was said about the witch, but the damage was already done. Maybe we were just tired, but all 3 of us were unsettled by the mad woman’s entrance but carried on regardless. Ian took the shot and did the best he could under the circumstances. The shot looked fine when the trannies were delivered to the agency, except… the jars weren’t straight. A reshoot was ordered at the photographer’s expense and James’s agent informed that or him to have left the set before the shoot was completed, was unacceptable and that a discount was demanded. The agent agreed. I didn’t go to the reshoot, which was successful. Ian went on to become a very successful photographer and film director in his own right. Someone told me a couple of years later that James had divorced the hag. I was surprised he hadn’t killed her. The woman was without doubt one of the nastiest apologies for a human being I met in over 45 years in the advertising business. There were others who came close shearing the same crap pedestal.
MISTAKEN IDENTITY.
I saw photographers’ agent, Derek Harman, in 1985 sitting with whom I thought was Robert Brody in Kettner’s one day. I asked Derek the next time I saw him why he was having lunch with such a creep. He told me his companion wasn’t Robert but his brother, photographer, Mick Brody.
“Not much difference between them,” Derek said, “It’s a toss up as to which is the nastier.”
Robert Brody joined the agency I was working for in 1985 when the consultancy he worked for, was bought by the same agency. He called himself an art director, a title I’d dispute, in his case. His writer was Saul Peters, an ex JWT creative who’d allegedly been fired from that agency after making strongly derogative comments to someone about the then executive creative director, Allan Thomas, while having a slash in the 3rd floor toilet of 40 Berkeley Square. How was Saul to know Allan was in the same toilet at the same time, albeit behind the door of the 3rd trap along?
Saul, a biggish chap, with long, blonde hair worn General Custer style, was an affable, intelligent, pleasant enough chap unlike his partner whose character was totally bereft of any such qualities. Saul did get pretty pissed at an agency/client Christmas party in a Soho restaurant in 1985, so much so that he ended up punching the then agency creative director sitting opposite him, on the chin so that the guy fell backwards along with his chair. Not really the sort of action that impresses clients, even if they’re as pissed. Robert Brody was tall and thin in a boney sort of way, with jet black, lank, greasy hair, sharp features and a protruding Adam’s Apple made more notable by the forward thrust of his neck engendered by his fairly pronounced shoulder stoop. With the heavy, dark bags under his bloodshot eyes completing the creepily fearsome picture, he would have been a better Rasputin than even the great Alan Rickman was, though Rasputin would have outrun Robert Brody in the charm stakes. Fittingly, Robert Brody carried with him a perpetual Hammer Horror type fog being a perpetual chain smoker, which also explained his sunken cheeks and sallow skin, enhanced magnificently by the filthy, drab, puke green, oily Burberry coat he always wore.
Brody claimed to be an expert horseman, which only made sense if he’d been a member of the famous apocalyptic brigade. But, being the natural born bully he was, I just felt sorry for any unfortunate nag who found itself straddled by him. And R.B. bullied everyone, from typographers to art buyers, traffic people to account people. Creative people were different. If any good at their jobs, they’re tough fighters and don’t take shit from anyone. I’ve mentioned earlier the atmosphere-freezing ambience one Mr. Dallas carried with him. With R.B. it was like slow, seeping poison, where even potted plants shriveled and died in his presence, not to mention items of furniture. The fact that he used the agency carpets as an open ashtray showed his complete disregard of and any sense of respect for anyone and anything. I was working late one evening and R.B.came and sat in front of my desk adopting his usual carpet ash bombing routine and asked me which photographers I would recommend for a beauty shot he was preparing. One suggestion I made was Rolph Gobits, a high profile snapper of the time. R.B. came back the next day and gave me his critical analysis of the proposal.
“He’s just not enough of a woman fucker,” was the considered depth of his summation.
When the agency creative director suddenly resigned to form a new agency, he advised the M.D. as a joke, that he should make R.B. creative director, and the M.D. did just that. This was like turning loose a Black Mamber with learning difficulties. R.B. moved into his own glass walled office and my copywriting partner, and I were moved into one next to it. We were the agency’s senior creative team, but I think R.B. put us there to keep an eye on us and also to occasionally pick my partner’s very astute mind from time to time.
When preparing for a new business pitch, we could see R.B. pacing up and down his office deep in thought and smoke, obviously wresting with some kind of deeply profound analysis of the possible new agency/client relationship, which he eventually shared with us. He slouched into our office, 2 inches of ash bending precariously from the end of his fag and sat down on the sofa.
“I fink,” (didn’t I tell you R.B. lacked any style or conviction in his mode of speech?) “Dis client wants someone to get into bed wiv ‘em,” the profundity of which was mind-blowing, and which he was to use on a couple more pitch occasions. The agency soon merged with another and several members of staff were made redundant, including my copywriter and I. I was summoned into the Black Mamber’s nest one morning.
“We have a bit of a situation,” R.B. hissed, “Because of financial problems, and the fact that there won’t be enough work to go round, some of the staff will ‘ave to go and we’ve got to get rid of you for starters.”
Believe it or not, this isn’t exactly the kind of legal jargon you chuck at someone you’re about to make redundant and I successfully sued the agency and got 3 more months money than I would have been entitled to had my dismissal been handled properly. It had been clear from some time that the agency was going nowhere and it was a relief to get out of there, the real bonus being not to have to share the rancid air perpetrated by Brody a moment longer. Amazingly, Brody considered himself a real lady-killer, but his total lack of finesse in his approach of extending this misguided virtue was to be his downfall. Carol Stern, the M.D.’s P.A, and a lovely, fun-loving Sloane type lady was also the goomatta of Alfred, the agency’s slightly dodgy odd job man and Mr. Fixit. Alf showed me into my freshly painted office on my first day in the agency. It was a very bright, cheap looking bright blue, and Alf explained it had been hanging around on the second floor where the agency flat was and where he kept all his ‘stuff’ and that the paint had to be used up. Alf was amicable enough apart from telling me the company car I’d ordered, a red Alfa Romeo GTV6 2.5, was crap and that I should’ve gone for a Merc. I got the distinct impression that it could be unwise to argue with Alf or ever upset him.
I noticed a large dent in the plasterboard wall about 3 feet from the floor, next to the door. A piece of the stuff, about a foot across, was torn and hanging into the interior of the wall by not much more than a thread.
“We’re keepin’ that for prosperity,” Alf grinned, “That’s where Stuart Mewburn shoved Graham Wallis’s head.”
I’d seen Stuart around but hadn’t yet been introduced. He was a tall fit looking, Canadian, Flamenco guitar player and maker and he and I were to work together and are still great friends today. Alf explained with great glee,
“Wallis, our financial director is a cunt, as you’ll find out. He turned up at one agency Christmas party dressed as a Nazi SS officer, which fitted him like a fuckin’ glove. Anyway, when this was Stuart’s office, he was on the phone one day to his wife, and Wallis comes in wavin’ a bunch of time sheets that Stu hadn’t filled in and demanding that he do ‘em pronto. Stuart asks him to wait a sec ‘cos he’s on the dog and bone, but Wallis walks over and puts his finger on the receiver button. Stuart then asks Wallis how he’d like to leave the room – by the wall or the window? He obviously chose the wall.”
Brody called Carol one day and asked to speak to the M.D., but she told him the M.D. was busy and that things were a little on top of him at that time. Brody told Carol that he’d love to get on top of her. The result was Brody on his knees begging for mercy as a very pissed of Alf held him by the throat. I’d love to have witnessed this and the scene in which the M.D. and the company secretary fired Brody for sexual harassment at Alf’s behest. To my knowledge, R.B. never worked in the advertising business again – not that he ever really had as far as I could see. He was last seen running a shop selling vintage fireplaces in Hither Green - ash to ashes, appropriately.
Hamlet. The mild cigar from Benson and Hedges.
Leftenant Philips: “Er, left hand down a bit, Chief.”
Chief Petty Officer Pertwee: “Left ‘and down a bit it is, Sir.”
L.P: “Aaaah. Yes that’s it. That’s better. Now, just a little bit to the right, Chief…
C.P.O.P: “Just a little bit to the left it is, Sir.”
L.P: “Cri…k…e…y! That’s wonderful. You, know, you’re really good at this, Chief. Maybe you should persue a second career.
C.P.O.P: “No thanks, Sir, beggin’ your pardon, Sir.”
L.P: “Oh, really, Chief. Why not, pray?”
C.P.O.P: “It’s not really for me, Sir, all that scratchin’ around, Sir.”
L.P: “Really. Oh well. Better scratch that one from the old agenda, what?”
C.P.O.P: “Consider it scratched, Sir.”
L.P: “Top hole, Chief.”
C.P.O.P: “No Sir, beggin’ you pardon, Sir. I don’t do that sort of thing, Sir.”
L.P: “Oh. Right ho, Chief. Fair enough. (Thinks: ‘What the fuck is he on about?”)
* * * * * * * *
CHAPTER 9. GREEN ONIONS.
Want some whiskey in your water?
Sugar in your tea?
What’s all these crazy questions they’re askin’ me?
This is the craziest party that could ever be
Don’t turn on the lights cause I don’t wanna see
Mama told me not to come
Mama told me not to come
She said that ain’t the way to have fun, son
That ain’t the way to have fun, son
Open up the window, let some air into this room
I think mommas chocking from the smell of stale perfume
And the cigarette you’re smoking about to scare me half to death
Open up the window, let me catch my breath
Some radio is blastin’
Someones knockin at the door
I’m lookin’ at my girlfriend
She just passed out on the floor
I’ve seen so many things
I ain’t never seen before
Don’t know what it is
I don’t wanna see no more
Mama told me not to come
Mama told me not to come (mama told me)
She said that ain’t the way to have fun, no (no, no)
That ain’t the way to have fun, son
Mama told me, mama told me
Mana told me, mama told me
Mama told me not to come (mama told me not to come)
That ain’t the way to have fun, son
That ain’t the way to have fun, son
That ain’t the way to have fun, no, son
That ain’t the way to have fun, son (mama told me)
Mama told me, mama told me
Mama told me, mama told me
Mama told me not to come (mama told me not to come)
That ain’t the way to have fun, son
That ain’t the way to have fun, son
That ain’t the way to have fun (oh no, no)...
I worked with Ian Giles a few times in later years but the hag incident was never mentioned. He was fun to work with and we got on really well. He was also really good at his job and very popular amongst the famous, young creative elite in the business. I used to take my Fender Stratocaster guitar into the agency, and when I had nothing to do, would sit and play. This didn’t upset my writer at the time, Stuart Mewburn, himself a classical guitar player and later, becoming one of the best luthiers in the business. I’d been teamed with Stuart, a copywriter, and laid back, cynical Canadian, Jack Nicholson look-alike, by the management who’d tried to get rid of him to no avail. He was far too clever. They’d say, ‘If you don’t tow the line, you know what you can do.’
Stu’ would reply, “No, why don’t you tell me,” knowing they had no legal right whatever for firing him, and that if they tried, he’d have them for breakfast, and then lunch for good measure.
When Stuart Mewburn and I were put together as a creative team we got on really well. Stuart from Niagara Falls, and I travelled to Miami together in 1986, to shoot a hair commercial for Alberto Culver. It was the first and only time I’ve ever been to the good old US of A, and definitely the last. We stayed in the twin pink marble towered Papillion Hotel in Miami Keys, originally built by the Mafia, and boasting a huge Henri Moore sculpture in its Grand Canyon sized foyer. We made the trip in May, and the place was so hot and humid, you were drenched from head to foot after one step on the pavement outside the hotel. I froze on the first occasion, wondering whether I should proceed with my exploration of the local district or return to the over-air-conditioned refrigeration of the hotel, when I was approached by a brash, overdressed 40ish woman in a black lace dress, high stiletto heels and Hollywood makeup.
“Hey, Buddy. You got a dime? I need to park my car and I don’t have any change,” she shrieked.
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t. I’m British, and I’m over here with a film crew.”
I don’t know what I thought she was supposed to make of that particular bit of information, but her response was abrupt and a tad aggressive, “Well, that fucking figures!” To my relief, she turned on her tottering heels, and marched away in the opposite direction, obviously looking for another victim. Her attitude and obvious hatred of Brits was reflected by the huge cop, who, on examining my passport after we’d landed at Miami airport, asked me what I was doing in his precious bloody America. I told him, as I later told the hag on stilts, that I was there to make a film. He didn’t seem impressed in the slightest and asked me where I was staying.
“Er, I don’t know.”
He dropped his left hand onto the pearl butt of the gleaming six-gun displayed in an open, Wild West style holster hanging on his hip, “You’re over here on some kind o’ business and you don’t know where you’re stayin’? What kind o’ crap is that?”
The film didn’t really work out and never ran, largely due to director, Roger Lyons, not paying much attention to Stuart and I on the shoot. We’d picked him because of his recent fame brought about directing a couple of Levis films for the then, top of the tree agency, BBH. (Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty.) 4 commercials hit the mark with their young target audience, including ‘Laundrette’, where a young guy strips off his jeans in front of a load of girls and puts them in a washing machine, and ‘Bath’, where another young dude puts his jeans on a climbs into a cold bath to take part in the famous Levis shrink-to-fit process. All the films used 1960s hits, like ‘Stand By Me’ and ‘What A Wonderful World’, ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’, for sound tracks.
Roger seemed like a nice guy to begin with, full of enthusiasm, characterised by his energetic rushing around on set, acquired by his years as the most successful first assistant director the industry had even seen. The 1sts job was always to make sure everything and everybody was in position and ready to rock by the time the director was ready to roll, a task, which Roger fulfilled supremely, never taking prisoners. I guess our failure was down to some kind of lack of cummunication, but I always thought, unfairly perhaps, that we just weren’t famous enough industry-wise, unlike the co-creator and art director of the Levis commercials, the now SIR John Hegarty.
Roger’s enthusiasm and, arguably, impatience, cost him his life a few years later while on another shoot for BBH on the cliff tops of the Amalfi Coast in Italy. The film was for Lynx Deodorant, the scenario based around an open top sports car balancing like a sea-saw over a precipice next to curve in the road, the car obviously appearing to have crashed through the Armco barriers, leaving a panicking female in the passenger seat as her driver attempted some kind of rescue. Roger was back behind the camera, but unhappy with how things looked, rushed forward to the scene to help things along. Satisfied with the response from the actors, he leaned back against where he thought the Armco barriers was forgetting parts of it had been removed. He fell to his death in a tree some hundred feet below. Needless-to-say the campaign was scrapped by both agency and client.
David Gardner, Ian Giles’s agent, happened to be walking past Stuart's and my office one December day in 1984 as I was playing the Strat. David told me Ian was giving a Christmas party in his studio in a couple of weeks, that he was looking to get a band together for the event, and would I be interested. The other members of the band were to be Richard Foster and John Horton, a famous pair of creative superstars and creative directors at the Abott, Meade, Vickers agency, Irish art director, Brian Morrow, and film director, Graham Rose. I agreed to join in but said that a rehearsal was essential.
The five of us met at Ian’s studio on the Wednesday before the party. I’d never met any of them before but I knew who they were by dint of their reputations. They were all high profile dudes with strings of awards to their names, their work famous throughout the advertising business. Copywriter, Richard Foster and art director, John Horton, had been creative Partners for a lot of years, first really making their names at Collett, Dickens and Peirce, one of the leading creative agencies on the planet and famous for some of the most original advertising ever seen before or since with campaign for: Bird’s Eye; Benson and Hedges; Parker Pens; Clarks Shoes; Hamlet Cigars; Fiat; Heineken Lager, and many more.
Everyone in the creative side of the business dreamed of working at Collett’s, but getting a job there was about as easy as getting a drive in a top Formula 1 Grand Prix team. You might be a genius and they might give you a try but it didn’t end there. You had to sustain the effort. You had to win races. You had to produce award-winning work, consistently, and, if you didn’t, you were history. The competition inside the agency was as fierce as it gets and rivalry between teams red-hot. All this was down to Collett’s Creative Director, Colin Millward, a tough Northerner and an art director himself, who accepted nothing from his creative staff that wasn’t original, breathtaking, witty, and beautifully executed, and that meant everything from TV and Radio to press and posters and would have been the same for postage stamps or milk bottle tops had the agency produced them. A Collett’s art director told me that coming away from presenting work to Colin was tough on the emotions. If he liked what you showed him and he gave you a pass, such was the ellation, you felt you could conquer the world and even other Collett’s creatives. There’d be a long silent, eternal wait as Colin studied the work. He then say simply, yes, with absolutely none of his own emotions given away, or he’d say, “No, I don’t think so,” and that was that.
“It was like getting a life sentence,” my friend told me, “You’d crawl back your office feeling suicidal. You’d probably have a couple of drinks, even get rat-arsed, then go home. The next day you’d do what everyone else did, you’d swallow you pride and start again. Nothing was more important than getting a pass from Colin, such was the respect everybody had for his judgement, the bastard.”
Colin Millward cow- towed to no one, not even the biggest, most important clients. He was in a meeting with Frank Lowe, a senior account director at the time, and the highest of the high senior Bird’s Eye clients. The man had a problem with a poster the agency had produced. Frank said Colin was intransigent and wasn’t prepared to change a thing. The client started to explain his position,
“What you have to understand about posters, Colin….”
“I don’t have to understand anything,” was Colin’s ice cold retort, “And what’s more, I have no intention of discussing with you a subject about which you know absolutely nothing. Good afternoon.”
Millward left the room and the poster ran as was. I was introduced to Colin Millward once by the late photographer, Jimmy Wormser, at Jimmy’s studio. He seemed to me to be a quite shy, sensitive, gentle man with a genuine warm smile. It was just obvious that the man knew what he was doing and that any kind of compromise was out of the question. Richard Smith, who’d been a Collett’s copywriter under Colin talked about the Collin Millward with great reverence, Richard himself being no retiring violet, especially when it came to the work.
“Just remember this, chief,” he once said to me when I worked with him at Benton Bowles in the Seventies, “What we’re after here is perfection, and nothing else is acceptable. Not a fucking thing.” I’m sure that’s what Colin Millward was on about. He just had his own way of expressing it. Not only was his judgment of creative work second to none but it was backed with a uncanny instinct admired and envied by many, including Sir Frank Lowe, who took over the rains at CDP when Colin retired. CDP had been preparing a new poster campaign for Benson and Hedges. They’d come up with a concept that was so different there were no creative critera around that it could be judged against. Everyone in the agency was in awe of the idea but full of doubt at the same time, such was the newness of the thing. They researched it against 2 other ideas and it hardly scored any kind of favour, coming in the least liked of all by a long way. In most agencies, this would represent the death knell of an idea and it would be unceremoniously buried. But Frank had learned much from Colin and wasn’t prepared to give in. He went to see Colin at his home, taking all 3 campaigns with him. He explained the situation and asked Colin what he thought. With no hesitation, Millward nodded at the campaign favoured by the agency.
“Run it,” he said.
The new ‘surreal’ Benson and Hedges poster campaign became one of the most successful of all time. The philosophy was that only a brand leader could have the guts to run something like that. It communicated utter confidence and serenity far above the competition. There were no copylines, no persuasive arguments, just stunning photography depicting the B&H gold pack in a series of weird and wonderful settings. It was a world-beater. Every CDP creative team clawed their way towards more ideas and art directors virtually fought each other to make sure their poster came out next. As far as advertising posters were concerned, nothing ever came close before or since. It sold cigarettes like there was no tomorrow. For those smoking so many fags, there probably wasn’t. Frank Lowe was to become the new Colin Millward, despite not being a ‘creative’ himself. The new CDP slogan, according to Jimmy Wormser, who regularly played tennis with Colin Millward and Frank Lowe, was WFLI – will Frank like it?
IT’S ONLY ROCK ‘N ROLL
In 1980, with masses of awards, a portfolio of work and reputation to die for, Richard Foster and John Horton were poached from CDP by David Abbot, ex creative director of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s London office and then owner of his own agency, French Gold Abbot, to become founding partners and joint creative directors in a new startup, Abbot Meade Vickers. With David Abbot at the helm, himself one of the most celebrated copywriters in the advertising business on both sides of the Atlantic, not to mention, having a reputation as the true Gentleman of British advertising, AMV quickly became a true rival to CDP, turning out work that was every bit the equal of anything CDP produced, and establishing itself at the top of the tree with ground breaking campaigns for Sainsbury’s and Volvo amongst many others. Under those circumstances, I was slightly unprepared for Richard Foster. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t the wild-eyed, scruffy cowboy I was confronted with, in his high-heeled boots, faded jeans and grubby leather jacket. He seemed friendly enough,
“Hello, mate. Nice looking guitar,” but something about his demeanour and eagerness betrayed a definite sense of a edgy unhindgeness, and for someone coming from the legendary David Abbot civilized gentleman fold, the up front essence of “Fuck with me and you’ll wish you hadn’t,” was more than a tad surprising.
John Horton, was quieter, and neater in appearance than his counterpart, but came across as the darker of the two, his subtle comments about this or that, tinged with a viciously sarcastic cynicism dipped in Taipan venom. During, the evening, when I felt the duo were friendly enough, I tentatively asked about some of the other creative luminaries who worked at AMV, one famous name in particular.
“Oh, you mean Andy No-ideas?” was the crushing answer from Horton. I decided not persue further enquiries.
The rehearsal went OK with Richard Foster immediately taking over as bandleader and lead guitarist demoting me to Rhythm guitar. I didn’t really mind. It seemed a safer place to be, Foster clearly demonstrating his considerable superiority as a rock soloist from the moment he blasted off with his 1962 60 grand vintage Gold Top Les Paul Gisbon guitar piped through his Marshal amp at a billion and ten decibels.
We went through a couple of Chuck Berry/Stones numbers – ‘Oh Carol’, ‘Route 66’, and some early Beatles stuff including, ‘Get back’, but Foster was appalled and pissed off to find I couldn’t play the Stones’, ‘Brown Sugar’, his rabid emergency teaching method being a trifle on the impatient side, not to mention bloody nerve wracking. I got the hang of it in the end and we wrapped up the session after a couple of hours with about 8 passable numbers and with me pretty chuffed that King Richard had allowed me a solo spot in ‘Oh Carol’. We were all set.
On the night of the party, the Giles Studio, part of an industrial estate behind Kings Cross Station, was packed to the gunnels with just about every advertising creative superstar I could care to name and quite a few I couldn’t. Foster was twitchy to get on stage and start the assault on the gathering’s eardrums but Brian Morrow, our drummer, was working late directing a commercial. You’d have thought Foster would have been sympathetic, having a reputation for taking his own work seriously enough to kill over, but it would seem right then Rock ‘n Roll was more important than some mouldy old TV commercial. About 20 minute later, Morrow turned up and we went for it. In any public performance for a band using amplification, be it in the Albert Hall, the local village hall, or, in this case, a concrete floored studio in Kings Cross, you need an engineer with a mixing desk to balance the sound, floor monitor speakers that point towards the band members so that they can hear themselves and each other, and a PA to transmit the sound, especially the vocals, above the audience. We had none of that. Our amps were on the floor, the sound absorbed by the crowd. Everyone turned up to max volume, resulting in what could only be described as a blaring racket.
Somehow, we managed to get through the set with Richard Foster stealing my guitar solo and moment of glory in ‘Oh Carol’. As we left the ‘stage’, a young Lowe Howard Spink art director friend of mine, Trevor Kennedy, himself an accomplished guitarist, remarked, “What the fuck was all that? It was just a deafening blur!”
I felt deflated, but Trev’s customary, blunt, Liverpudlian assessment was probably right on the money. What followed can only be described as a musical free-for-all, musical being an optimistic term. After about an hour, advertising’s newest and most short lived band went back on stage and ran through a couple of numbers just to make sure we’d made our point – whatever that might have been, during which time, David Gardener invited any other musicians present to join in. Not the best idea. He might as well have asked Liverpool and Millwall football supporters to share the same end of the stadium. Guitars and their minders appeared from nowhere; amps were plugged in, another drum kit assembled, more microphones and a keyboard set up. Several players joined in with us as we trudged our excruciating way through a very long, very drawn out, very boring, slow blues.
A Cat Stevens look-alike with a beautiful, blonde (guitar terminology for a light coloured guitar) double cutaway Gibson 335 jazz guitar (same type of guitar as played by B.B. King) planted himself in front of the Foster band and began a high powered, soaring solo, his head thrown back, his eyes closed in his own personal ecstacy, He wasn’t in time, in key, or in sympathy with the what the rest of us were playing. Foster, now playing bass, wasn’t in sympathy with the soloist either, and gave me a nudge from his position at the back of the ensemble.
“Tell that cunt to take a hike. He’s fucking everything up.”
This was debatable, but I tentatively leaned over and tapped the guy on the shoulder, “Er, would you mind turning down a bit?” I enquired, but by now, I couldn’t even hear my own voice and Jimmy Hendrix ignored the tap on the shoulder. Foster strode forward, shoved the guy sideways and grabbed a handful of his jumper, perilously close to his throat. It was time to leave. I grabbed my amp, bunged the Strat in its case and made for the door. Getting through the crowd was no easy task and I had to put the amp down for a second, the thing weighing half a ton.
“Hi, Neal. How’re you doing?” I would’ve though that was obvious. I was trying to escape. It was Bob Miller, ex JWT art director turned photographer, and a really nice guy. Bob wanted to chat and I pretended to comply while keeping one eye on then developing riot. Nearby, stood Alan Waldie, ex CDP, now Lowe Howard Spink art director and at the time, Brian Ferry look-alike. He was obviously several sheets to the wind, swaying where he stood, and transfixed by yet another band that had struck up in a corner of the room.
With Saatchi superstar writer and creative director, Jeff Stark on keyboards, they were cranking out a passable interpretation of ‘Green Onions’, made famous by Brooker T. and the MGs, back in the sixties, the unmistakable opening organ riff having a significant effect on Waldie. He was totally mesmorised, being a mean Rock ‘n Roll keyboards player himself, and was obviously wresting with the notion of shoving Stark off the keyboards and taking over himself, the two inch ash of his half smoked cigarette now forgotten and poised precariously inches from his face and about to deposit another avalanche down the lapel slopes of his navy blue cashmere overcoat. He decided to go for it disappearing from view his nose greeting the floor as he stepped forward.
Bob began talking to someone else, and I made for the door, catching sight of Foster dismembering Jimi Stevens/Cat Hendrix as I went. That was the last I saw of the other band members, though I did pass Richard Foster in a Mayfair street a couple of years ago. He smiled and said, “Hi,” but I was pretty sure he didn’t know where the hell he knew me from and I doubted he spent more than a split second perusing his mental identikit. I’d never deliberately hung out with the advertising glitterati, only meeting a few of them through young friends who’d joined the top agencies. The last D&AD evening I attended was in 1984 and I saw the whole farce through sober eyes for the first time, the creative director of the agency where I was employed who’d booked the table having been fired, so there was little free drink on our table.
Looking down from a balcony, I watched two well known film directors and rivals, jostle each other as one made his way back to his table from receiving an award, the other heading out to collect one. They almost came to blows, which I thought utterly pathetic. It was only 11pm but I went home. From then on, I decided I didn’t want to know about all that paranoid superstar stuff. This was just bloody advertising, not Hollywood, though sometimes I wondered which was worse. The point was finally made when I went to the leaving party of a young team who were friends of mine. They were leaving Lowe Howard Spink to join a new start up agency. The crowd had gathered in the upstairs room of the Coach and Horses pub in Rathebone Place, off Oxford Street, a venue often used for such events. David Horry, yet another ex CDP and now Lowe Howard Spink creative luminary swept in with his entourage in tow and new David Hockney style black owl specs on obvious display. One of my young friends introduced us.
“Hi,” said Horry, furrowing his brow to demonstrate intense interest, “Where are you from?” meaning which famous award winning agency.
“Kent,” I said.
“Oh,” he smiled, “I’m a cunt, aren’t I?”
“You said it,” I said, as we shook hands.
I did admire Horry, not only for the outstanding work he produced at Lowes and CDP but for his sense of humour, especially under stress. When he first started at CDP as a young art director in the 1970s, he was succonded to art director, Bob Ellis, as notorious for his bullying as for his own award winning work. A few times he reduced Horry to tears with his constant denigration technique. Once, when there was a panic on, Ellis sent Horry off to get a fresh layout pad. Horry returned with one at A2 size and Ellis lost it screaming that he’d asked for an A3 one, half the size of the one Horry had delivered. The anxious Horry made to rush of for a replacement.
“There isn’t time, you idiot,” yelled our Robert, “Just cut the fucking thing in half.”
This Horry did…diagonally, from corner to corner. When Ellis formed a new agency in 1979, his ego really went to his head. He often produced a Sooty glove puppet when interviewing job candidates, asking the bear what it thought of their work and playing the Harry Corbett part to the full, getting Sooty to whisper in his ear,
“Sorry. I can’t take you on. Sooty thinks you’re crap and I agree with him.”
I once asked the late John Knight if he’d had to go through the same routine before he got his job as senior art director at the agency. He answer was concise,
“Nah. I’d ‘ave broken the cunt’s arm and Sooty’s fuckin’ neck at the same.”
I didn’t doubt our dyed-in-the-wool Millwall supporter for a split second.
Cadbury’s Flake…Only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate…
The Revengers.
Steed: “I say, Purdy. That’s a rather fetching oufit, Where did you get it, Marks and Sparks? Boom, boom!” Purdy: “Just leave out the pathetic jokes, Steed. You’re just not funny.”
S: “Well, I have to say that’s a matter of opinion, old thing. When we had din dins with Brucie Forsythe the other day, he couldn’t stop laughing, and not a lot makes that old bugger laugh for real.
P: “He wasn’t laughing at your jokes, you tosser. He became hysterical because you wouldn’t shut the fuck up. You just have no idea how excruciatingly boring you are, have you?”
S: “I have, as a matter of fact, old dragon’s breath. It’s part of my character, along with the silly, pink bowler hat and brollie. I think it’s a well crucial ensemble, and anyway, the producers seem to love it, and that’s what’s important, so ya boo sucks to you, Purds!”
P: “That’s just where you’re wrong, Steedy. They’re so fed up with your one liners, the constant stupid, inane grin, the way you trip about on your tip toes, in fact, the whole bloody package, they’ve decided you have to go.”
S: “Go? Go where? Honduras? The Maldives? Chislehurst? Ooh, how jolly exciting. I can’t wait to find out. Hey, Purds. What a lovely new gun you have there. Where’d you get that?
S: “Not fucking Hamley’s. Bye bye, Dickhead.”
SFX: BANG!
* * * * * * * * * * * *
CHAPTER 10. LOVELY, SMOOTH, BROWN, TAUT, YOUNG THIGHS.
I was born under a wandrin' star
I was born under a wandrin' star
Wheels are made for rolling, mules are made to pack
I've never seen a sight that didn't look better looking back
I was born under a wandrin' star
Life can make you prisoner and the plains can bake you dry
Snow can burn your eyes, but only people make you cry
Home is made for coming from, for dreams of going to
Which with any luck will never come true
I was born under a wandrin' star
I was born under a wandrin' star
Do I know where hell is, hell is in hello
Heaven is goodbye forever, its time for me to go
I was born under a wandrin' star
A wandrin' wandrin' star
(Life can make you prisoner and the plains can bake you dry)
(Snow can burn your eyes, but only people make you cry)
(Home is made for coming from, for dreams of going to)
(Which with any luck will never come true)
(I was born under a wandrin' star)
(I was born under a wandrin' star)
I get to heaven, tie me to a tree
For I'll begin to roam and soon you'll know where I will be
I was born under a wandrin' star
A wandrin' wandrin' star
This chapter heading was actually penned by the then 25 years old, JWT copywriter, Richard Barker, as he traveled by train from East Grinstead to Victoria one sunny, summer morning in 1969. He was moved to do so by the young girl in a very short skirt sitting opposite. He just described what he saw simply, accurately, concisely and above all, evocatively, using the art which is second nature to any good advertising copywriter. The subject matter in this case may have been particularly inspiring but a good copywriter can do the same with any object or subject no matter how dull or mundane it may at first seem. A good copywriter can make anything appealing, from truck tyres to toothpaste, from washing up liquid to airplanes, by applying the right sequence of words. This may sound simple, but as with any art, it takes grit, determination, hard work and an irrepressible desire to do the best possible job. Remember Richard Smith’s quote about perfection?
Good copywriters are by nature passionate about what they do and will defend their craft to the death. Photographer, Max Forsythe, who was a CDP art director back in the late sixties/early seventies, told me of an incident he’d witnessed involving the celebrated copywriter, Ben Travis, and an account director, when something B.T. had written was not just brought into question, but changed without his authority. The usually docile, and gentlemanly B.T. summoned the offender to his office.
The Fool: “I didn’t have a choice, B. You were out of the office on a shoot, and the client was in reception…”
B.T.: “I’m only going to say this once. You will, never, ever, change anything – not a word, not a comma, not a semi-colon of anything I write for this agency without recourse to me. Do you understand?”
TF: “Look, T., I mean fair’s fair. What was I supposed to do? You know that Quinn is an uncompromising bastard at the best of times and it’s not like I changed much, just a couple of words he’d said he wasn’t comfortable with and he was here to discuss the changes…”
B.T.: “Didn’t you hear what I just said? You will, never, ever, change anything I write for this agency without talking to me first.”
According to Max, the account director came crashing backwards through the open door of Travis’s office and hit the wall on the other side of the corridor before sliding Hollywood style to the floor, having been whacked firmly on the nose by B.T.’s fist. B.T. was mortified by what had happened. He asked CDP’s creative director, John Salmon, for advice on how he could make amends and Salmon suggested that taking the account director out to lunch might be a good place to start. A venue was arranged, a table booked, all was looking fair and dandy as the two men met in B.T.’s office at 12.30 on the actual day of what was to be the official apology. B.T. stood up and began putting on his jacket, apologizing profusely for his behaviour, but reiterating his demand that no–one other than he was allowed to alter his copy in any way. The account man concurred but began pleading his particular case all over again as vehemently as before. The next second, he found himself sliding down the same wall in the same corridor.
When Richard Barker arrived at 40 Berkeley Square that day, he proudly showed his newest creation to Barbara Lines, a young copywriter whose office adjoined his. The two of them spent the next 15 minutes rearranging the order of the words before deciding that Richard had got it right in the first place. Had this been the PC infested 1980s and Barbara a feminist, Richard could have found himself in serious trouble, been crucified, burned at the stake, or even worse, branded a male chauvinist pig.
ALTERATIVELY
There are a few copywriters, I’m sure, who would claim that what I’ve written about the passion of their trade is, and I quote, ‘a load of bollocks’. Fair enough, when you consider these are the views of a mere art director. Melissa Story, whom I worked with for a couple of years in the early eighties, probably fits that particular bill as comfortably as the thigh-length, high-heeled, pirate-style leather boots she wore back then.
I was introduced to Melissa when I was interviewed for an art director’s post at 1979. Her entrance into the room is unforgettable. There were the boots enhanced by a totally black outfit including what I could see of black trousers above the tops of the boots, a roll necked sweater, and what seemed like a foot long a long fag holder to match. Her hair, cut almost in a short Richard III style, was auburn, her nose long and sharp, her make up as immaculate and pronounced as her voice, her smile wide. She offered her right hand, deftly switching the fag holder to the left.
“Hello, Neal. I’m pleased to meet you,” she said with enveloping warmth. Immediately, she scared me half to death. My instinct was to retreat, but there was nowhere to run to and I wanted the job.
Having read English at Cambridge and taken part in Footlights along with the likes of Germain Greer and Clive James, Melissa was famous for writing headlines with teeth, and having accomplished that on numerous occasions, said she found the business of writing ‘body copy’ a ‘fucking bore’. That said, I still wouldn’t have guaranteed the survival of anyone who messed with what she did write. It actually didn’t do to cross Melissa on any level, as I was to find out pretty early on in our working relationship. She once showed me two very similar headlines she’d written and asked me which I preferred.
“I think that one has more poke,” I said trying to be helpful. The way she responded, you’d have thought I’d said something deeply offensive and personal.
“I absolutely HATE that expression!” she hissed like a very pissed off cobra, “Can’t you think of something intelligent to say?”
I’d never heard anyone with Melissa’s type of voice swear until I met her and I never got used to the idea. She said ‘cunt’ quite often. Actually, I’d never heard anyone with a voice quite like Jane’s. Posh wasn’t a big enough word to describe it. She used to say she could shatter a wine glass at 20 paces and I believed her. Imagine Her Majesty, the Queen, screeching at the top of her voice – sprinkle that with a few granules of Joyce Grenfell, chuck in a pinch of Margaret Thatcher and some essence of Maria Callas and you’d get pretty close to what Ms. Story actually sounded like. Most people hated the sound of her voice, but at least it was an early warning of her approach, giving them time to run for cover on the premise that it’s better to be a scared rabbit than a dead one.
Melissa and I and art director, Chris Porter, were once thrown out of the Ritz because of her behaviour. I don’t mean any old Ritz, I mean THE Ritz in London’s Piccadilly. She’d decided one evening after work that we’d go there for cocktails and we’d been in the bar for about an hour with Melissa having consumed God knew how many of the establishment’s very expensive cocktails including mine a couple of times. Her voice started getting embarrassingly loud and several people complained to the waiter who came over and quietly asked if Madam would kindly keep her voice at an acceptable decibel level so that other patrons could enjoy some peace and keep their eardrums in tact. Her response was clear and concise.
“Why don’t you tell them to fuck off and take their miserable, insignificant lives elsewhere?” she said without looking round and swallowing another cocktail in one.
The waiter discreetly vanished as only waiters know how reappearing a minute later with our bill on a silver salver and his own message which he delivered discretely leaning close to Melissa’s left ear.
“The rest of the clientele are not going to ‘fuck off’ as madam requested but madam very definitely is as soon as she’s paid her bill.”
Melissa didn’t say a word. She drained another glass, stood up, threw her blue fox fur round her shoulders, and with maximum panache despite being pissed enough for any mere mortal to have fallen flat on their face, stormed out into Piccadilly and into a cab someone had ordered leaving Chris and I with a bill we’d need a mortgage to pay. Even when Melissa was pissed, she was always in command of any situation. This is what I remember from a research debrief on some work the she and I had done for the re-launch of a famous Beecham’s shampoo.
“…So it has to be my conclusion that the script fails to deliver on several levels, the most significant being that the notion of ‘double take’ as described in the action and by the MVO as a response to hair shine attributed to the product didn’t come across as a desirable motif to the discussion group as a whole.”
The mousey, be-spectacled researcher in the one piece knitted frock leaned back in her chair with a satisfied, smug half smile and waited for the client to comment. She’d smiled at the end of every negative she’d delivered, of which there were quite a few, and seemed to enjoy shooting our proposed commercial down in flames. Jane hated her kind. To Ms. Story, the researcher was typical of the Guardian Reading socialist types who worshipped the opposition leader of the time, Neil Kinnock, and loathed Margaret Thatcher and everything she stood for. She worked for the sort of research company that was staffed by people just like her, who adored any chance to bring the advertising industry into disrepute in any way they could, and to highlight the incompetence of one of it’s over paid, overrated, in her view, eminent creative teams, was a huge bonus. She seemed to have forgotten that the industry she thought so vile paid fifty percent of her wages. Unfortunately for her, however, she hadn’t allowed for the eventuality of coming across someone of the calibre of Melissa Story. There were about 10 of us sitting in a semi circle in a presentation theatre listening to the mousey woman’s debrief – half from the agency, half from the client end. The sounds of bums shuffling on chairs from the agency account people as they felt their bowels shift involuntarily and a few seconds uncomfortable silence followed until Jane’s voice cut through the atmosphere like a machete through a ripe melon.
“Were they blind?”
“I’m sorry…?” The researcher blinked flickeringly in the direction of Melissa’s voice.
“Your research group. Were they blind? Perhaps they were hard of hearing as well.”
The researcher smiled uncomfortably and looked around the circle of people for some sign of support. There was none. Not even, Ed Wolsey, the senior client from Beechams, relished the idea of mixing it with Melissa. She was fairly pissed having lunched at the Natraj with a girlfriend and a couple of other colleagues from her previous agency and had consumed at least one bottle of wine herself and probably a couple of brandies.
When Melissa was pissed, she was no less coherent than when she was sober. She was just a bit slower and usually swayed in her seat in the manner of a cobra weighing up the pros and cons of a strike. “I don’t quite follow, “ Miss Mouse, the researcher, tried.
“In which case, allow me to explain,” Melissa said in the most condescending manner imaginable, almost falling sideways off her chair but skilfully managing to maintain her balance and pulling herself upright. “I assume the group members understood the ‘double take’ concept; that they did know what a double take was, given that it’s been a comedy device since time immemorial and was used by Charlie Chaplain, Buster Keeton, Laurel and Hardy, The Pythons and in just about every comedy genre one could ever imagine?
“In fact I’d hazard a guess that most of the women in the group experienced a double take first hand on their wedding night, either to the positive or the negative, when their new husband removed his pyjama trousers.” Someone giggled then coughed loudly trying to disguise it. The cobra wasn’t even smiling. Miss Mouse just reddened, her smile awkwardly fixed and she uttered something like:
“Mmmmm…” <
“Excellent,” declared Melissa, “Then we have established the research group weren’t blind. I assume you played them the music track?”
“Yes, it was part of the animatic*.”
“Yes, I rather assumed it would be, but did you play the track separately?”
“No, that would have been unrealistic…”
“An animatic is hardly realistic, it’s just a moving diagram of a proposed commercial. These were not realistic conditions in which you were conducting your research. Furthermore, I should point out, as you seem to have overlooked that fact, that…”
And so it went on. It was like being present at a ritual execution. What pissed off the researcher and probably the client, was that, as usual, Melissa was right.
Sometimes, it was fun to watch Melissa going for the juggler of some poor sap or other. There was always a professional reason for her doing so, at least in a work situation. She would always listen to reason or suggestions from anyone, which may have improved the effectiveness of the job in hand but if the suggestions weren’t constructive or a just random opinion, she was totally intransigent. Nothing would ever persuade her to compromise. She demanded very high standards of professionalism from herself and expected nothing less from any one else involved, from art directors, creative directors account people, producers, outside resources, such as TV production companies, including directors and even clients. Jane was piercingly intelligent, fearsomely articulate and used the power of her extraordinary voice to maximum effect. I never saw her wilt or waver under pressure. She only once lost an argument in my experience, and even then came out the winner.
Having both recently joined the agency, Melissa and I had been briefed to come up with a TV commercial to support an existing poster campaign for the Milk Marketing Board. Neither Melissa nor I particularly liked the posters, and, as the advertising was to promote milk as an integral part of the average British family’s daily food intake, Melissa came up with the idea of singing babies which we both thought would make a hilarious and memorable film. Melissa had asked me if I knew the words to the Australian song by Slim Dusty, A Pub With No Beer. I knew them well and we transposed the words to include milk instead of beer, so the theme of the commercial became A House With No Milk. Before presenting the idea to anyone, we had to be sure that babies could be filmed in such a way that their lip movements could be synchronized to appear that they were sing the words of the song.
At her previous agency, Melissa had worked with Bernie Stringle, the director famous for shooting the long running Chimp commercials for PG tips tea. We met with Bernie at his Soho office and showed him the script. He loved it and confirmed it would not only be relatively simple to shoot, but great fun to do.
Bernie added that working with babies would be a doddle after chimpanzees.
"At least babies aren’t dangerous,” he said, “People assume those monkeys are sweet little creatures, but they’re anything but. We have to be so careful. At any time, one of the little fuckers could get the hump suddenly and rip your arm off.”
Copywriter and creative director, Peter Gooding, moved independently from our previous agency to the one where Melissa and I now worked about the same time as I did – October, 1979. He was hired as joint creative director along with another writer, Keith Rankin. I’d known and worked with Peter on and off for several years since he and I shared an office at JWT. He was always abrasive, his point of view intelligently rationalized but delivered by steamroller leaving any leftover protagonists mentally crushed.
Melissa’s approach to discussion was cold, lazer-like and delivered with an intense irrefutability, which also left opponents feeling totally brain dead. It was an interesting situation, then, when Melissa presented Gooding with the singing babies script, all-the-more-so as he turned it down. He argued that the commercial bore no resemblance whatever to the poster campaign. She argued it didn’t need to. He argued that the TV and posters had to be part of the same campaign. She argued that as ‘singing babies’ used the same end line as the posters, ‘Put Milk First’, that both were part of the same campaign. He demanded we produce an alternative TV treatment, which used the imagery of the posters literally.
She said he hadn’t yet provided a valid reason why singing babies wasn’t acceptable and that she didn’t do alternatives. He said he had to have an alternative TV treatment to show that the agency could follow one idea through all media and if he had that, he would also table singing babies as a possible other route to go. She asked him what he meant by –‘he’d table’ the script. He said he would be presenting everything to The Milk Marketing Board the following week. Jane told Peter Gooding she always presented her own work to clients. Gooding told Melissa that wasn’t possible in this case because, as new creative director on the milk account, he was being introduced to the client for the first time, and that he would be presenting the work. By this time, the voices of both Gooding and Melissa had reached screaming pitch and people were running for cover, particularly the creative team who’s office they were using as a battlefield. I’d also had enough and went back to our own office and shut the door to try and block out the noise, unsuccessfully. The screeching suddenly stopped and seconds later Melissa entered the office shaking with rage.
“If I’m not allowed to present our work, no other fucker is going to,” she snarled, then marching over to her waste bin, she tore the singing babies script into pieces and dropped them into the bin, grabbing a can of lighter fuel from the desk. She squirted petrol onto the shreds and, ripped a strip off her newspaper, lit it with her lighter, and dropped that into the bin. Leaving me with the bonfire, she grabbed her coat and went to lunch. She came back moments later, “I suppose we’ll have to do the alternative shit, but it can wait till tomorrow. I think we both need a drink. Come on, let’s go and have a long lunch. I think the fire’s almost out.”
The next morning, a Friday, Melissa called me from home to tell me she couldn’t move due to a recurring back problem and that she would see me on the following Monday. She’d also called the creative directors’ secretary and Peter Gooding came to see me. He told me that whether Melissa liked it or not, we’d have to do the alternative TV and that if I got stuck, he’d be available to help out over the weekend as the client meeting was on the following Monday afternoon. I called him on the Saturday morning to arrange to meet up but there was no reply so I just got on with it. I managed to come up with some reasonable ideas, which I scratched down as storyboards. I thought Melissa would be angry that I’d capitulated, but she seemed to like what I’d done and even made some suggestions about some of the words.
When P.G. came by to pick up the work, he also seemed in a buoyant mood and I thought maybe he and Melissa had gone out to dinner together or shagged each to make up over the weekend as they both seemed quite friendly – until P.G. asked Melissa for the singing babies script.
“And what script would that be?” she said, glancing up from her Daily Telegraph, “Oh, that script? Oh, no, I don’t have that any more. I didn’t think you were interested. You did spend some time telling us how wrong it was, after all. No, I don’t have a copy. No, our secretary won’t have one. I typed it myself. No, I didn’t use carbon paper – it was just a rough draft. I threw it away after our meeting last Thursday and the bins have been emptied twice since then. Sorry.”
Melissa went back to her newspaper and, judging by the size and colour of the back of P.G.’s neck as he left the room, I thought he was going to explode.
Outside the office, Melissa was a lovely, funny, warm natured lady and, believe it or not, and after we divorced, we became great friends. We did some great work together, (I think) After Melissa quit advertising, she became a successful novelist and writer for several newspapers. I read an article in one of them, which described a dinner party at which she was a guest among several luminaries from the world of politics and the arts. One of the guests was criticising a recently appointed bishop, saying he thought the man lacked panache. Melissa commented:
"I didn't think bishops were generally noted for their panache."
Typically, brilliantly, Melissa Story.
An insider, CDP art director, John Foster, and a friend of Melissa’s, who was on the D&AD jury at the time, told us that the RAF ads she and I had produced were voted into the annual but eventually rejected by the committee because they came from McCann Erickson, considered by the industry elite to be a crap agency. They were probably right, but at probably right, but at least someone in the agency was trying. For the ad, I shot an aircrew and Jaguar jet at dawn at RAF Cottershall for one of the ads with John Clarridge. Halfway through the freezing cold session we got a call on the field telephone to say that two of our party had been arrested and were in the guardroom. Melissa and Chris Porter, who was taking over from me as Mellisa’s partner, had been up late drinking the night before, and had been approached by an MP as they crossed the parade ground on their way to the location. The MP asked them who they were and where they were going and apparently, Melissa gave a similar retort to the one she gave the Ritz waiter, resulting in her and Chris's immediate arrest. What a fun business advertising could be.
No one knows the secret of the Black Magic box.
Prunella Scales: “BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL! BASIL!”
Timothy West: “The name’s Timothy.”
PS: “Shit!”
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