Living Room (27 page)

Marvin Goodkin always tried to appear cultured and urbane to Cass, which Cass attributed to a shaky self-esteem. Marvin, who lacked flair, originality, or common sense, struck Cass as a man who used mischief recklessly to demonstrate his power. Cass tolerated him because Marvin was obviously of use to Arthur in some way or he’d have been fired long ago.

Cass liked women, especially successful women, which was not true of his colleagues in Dearborn. His concern today was for Shirley. She seemed ebullient, confident, in high gear. He would keep his voice gentle, his manner relaxed.

Arthur ordered the drinks and food at the same time and asked the captain, whom he knew, to keep the service interruptions to a minimum.

“Now then,” he said, turning to Cass, “we’re very anxious to hear the reactions of the folks back home to our radical young lady’s campaign.”

“I’m not a radical,” said Shirley smiling.

“Of course not,” said Cass.

“Sensible,” added Shirley.

Where to begin?
Miss Hartman, you wasted a lot of work. Mr. Crouch, your agency is finished.
Cass remembered the minister in Peoria’s First Methodist Church who, to his boy’s ears, made the Devil sound like a Democrat and God like an honest car mechanic, ready to fix almost anything at a reasonable cost in devotion. Through the tail end of the Depression, all the bad news was interpreted by the minister to be good news held in check by the small fact that the Democrats had not yet been voted out, and as his congregation of angels knew, it was only a matter of time.

Cass leaned across the table as if confiding in friends.

“This could have been handled in two ways. I could have picked up Arthur’s suggestion that a team from the agency come up to Dearborn and present this, but I think you were right to assume that Shirley’s presence
might
have been a liability. She’s charming. But she’s also unpredictable, and I’ve heard her sound off. I like it. But I also know my colleagues in Dearborn. It would have been unfair for Arthur or Marvin to carry the ball, because I know this is Shirley’s idea. Her enthusiasm helped sell it to me.

“It would have been easier for me to have some of you join me for the presentation because any backfire would be aimed at you.” He smiled. “In Dearborn, we always shoot down outsiders first. But I thought I’d chance carrying it on my back and I presented it, perhaps not with Shirley’s enthusiasm, but with one advantage. I converted it to their language, put things in a way they would understand. Right at the beginning I warned them that the bright people in New York had come up with something different. I don’t use the word radical west of the Hudson. They were in a mood to listen. Our previous campaigns, with you and with your predecessor agencies, got us an ordinary share of the market. Dearborn wanted more.”

Cass sipped at his drink. Only Shirley had sipped at hers while he talked; the others were waiting for him. Cass did not enjoy the mock courtesies of rank.

“Cheers,” said Cass. Marvin wished Cass would get on with it. “Surprisingly, the most favorable reaction I had was to the woman’s angle. All these years Dearborn thought it was appealing to women by stressing the looks of a car, the upholstery, the colors, but that’s for yesterday’s women. They recognize that. Christ, some of the car companies are even spending time looking for female board members. Any of you know any black Jewish women with industrial backgrounds who could take being ignored by their fellow board members?”

Marvin, suspicious of where they were being led, did not laugh.

The appetizer Arthur had ordered for all of them was a dish of minute, tender scallops.

Rodgers touched his napkin to his lips. “Good scallops. In Detroit they’re half-dollar size and stamped out of rayfish. To continue. They liked the scooped-out steering wheel to make road visibility easier for shorter persons, men or women. The only negative thing they came up with on that one is that ever since the creation of the wheel, people think of wheels as being round, and aside from airplane pilots, the new wheel would take getting used to. Some people would get upset by the scooped-out wheel and we might lose some loyal customers, but it’s worth trying in the hope that we’d gain more than we’d lose.

“We could have our cake and eat it by making the scooped-out wheel an option, but that—”

He let Shirley interrupt.

“Making it optional takes away from the idea of Shirley’s car.”

“Right,” said Cass. “And one man objected to the scooped-out
wheel on the grounds that a pilot’s movements are slight, and if you’re getting a car into a parking place, particularly if you don’t have power steering, you really need to twist the wheel around, and it might be harder to do with a scooped-out wheel.

“The door edgeguards are easy. Cost is nickels. Like hubcaps they are detachable objects, hence subject to stealing, but otherwise okay. The five-by-seven lit mirror made a couple of the fellows smile, but the majority liked it. Problem is that within months five guys’ll be out on the market with cosmetic mirrors as a cheap accessory that can be plugged into the cigarette lighter, so it’ll be an advantage only the first year and stand up only as part of a larger package.

“I guess what they’re saying,” continued Rodgers, “is that you’ll be able to buy one of those without buying a Ford.”

Why didn’t Cass see these points when they first discussed them, give her a chance to rethink them? Could it be that the men in Dearborn were hard-nosed, practical people, and that Cass, like her, was a bit of a dreamer, which is why he worked for them and not vice versa?

Cass checked his notes. “Now, making steel-belted radials standard on Shirley’s car is interesting. We all know it’s inevitable. We also know it’s economical—in the long run. But it would raise the initial cost of the car, hence there might be an advantage in being the last to make steel-belted radials standard rather than first, see the point?”

Marvin, Arthur, Shirley nodded.

“Disc brakes are also inevitable. However, with them it’s not just the higher initial cost. They cost a lot more to fix. There’s bound to be a consumer resentment.”

“What about safety? Steel radials and discs are safer,” said Shirley.

“A family will pay for safety right after it’s had an accident. There’s little Ford can do about human nature.”

“But isn’t there a social responsibility…?”

“Ford’s social responsibility is to its stockholders. If it raises the price of its cars above Chevy and Plymouth, we’ll get a smaller chunk of the market. What we want is a bigger piece, right? Look, let me be clear. We like the
idea
of playing up the safety side rather than the machismo of fast starts, quick pullouts, emergency use. It’s the cost that could kill us.

“But they did go for the safety-glove compartment that opens upward rather than outward. We’ll have to test that one. It might not add to cost, but it’s possible that in a collision, a mere magnet wouldn’t hold or it wouldn’t catch fast enough. It’s worth testing, though. One of the fellows thought that Shirley’s idea for a stronger spring and magnet was a complex way of achieving a simple objective, trying to keep the glove compartment closed in the event of a crash. A positive lock, you know a small deadbolt arrangement, would do it. The pushbutton locks everybody uses now are flimsy.

“Nobody balked at the built-in tissue dispenser. They all hate the cardboard box sliding around on the rear window.”

Rodgers looked at each of them. The main course had been served but no one had started on it. “Why don’t we eat? I’ll try to carry on between mouthfuls.”

After a while he said, “Now let’s get to the unfavorable items.”

“I thought that’s what we’ve been talking about,” said Shirley.

“Look, we’ve been talking about the pros and cons of basically good ideas that are possible to put in in time for a campaign next year, if they test out and don’t add appreciably to costs. Things that call for major body changes are three years off and so can’t be incorporated into next year’s campaign unless we alter body dies. Crocker filled us in on
those
costs.

“Getting the bottom of the trunk compartment level so that a woman can pull luggage out instead of out and over is a great idea, but that’s a body change involving body-die alterations and finding a place to put the wires that go across the inside of the bottom lip now. Two years minimum.”

He saw the desolation in Shirley’s face. Should he stop?

“So where are we?” asked Arthur, who was holding but not smoking a forbidden cigarette.

“What we have is a campaign that
might
work if you allowed for three years start-up time. But by then, some of the elements, steel-belted radials and disc brakes, for instance, wouldn’t be useful because everybody’d be doing it. We’ve had a presentation from another agency that’s not quite so radical, but interesting. We’re not ready to switch. We’d rather Armon, Caiden, Crouch went back to the drawing board. We need an advertising and promotion campaign that can work next year.”

They finished their meal in monastic silence. When Arthur signed the check, the amount seemed much larger than it would have had they had a green light. The specter of cost-cutting darkened his thoughts.

“I’ve got to make the seven o’clock back to Detroit,” said Rodgers, “but I’m available until then if you want me.”

Arthur’s slight cough drew attention. “Cass, you’re not just Ford to us, you’ve become a friend. Deal it straight. Are you sending out feelers while you’re here?”

“No,” he said. “They’re doing that from Dearborn.”

He looked at the strained faces around the table.

“It’s only backup, just in case. We have to have a new campaign. Soon. But I’m sure you’ll come up with something more practical. We’ve lost quite a lot of time.”

Rodgers parted from them outside the Seagram Building, and they were silent for a minute or two as they walked slowly back to the office.

Shirley wished she did not find compromise difficult. Successful people compromised all the time. Had her campaign really been as sensational as she had first thought? Should she have consulted someone more knowledgeable about the engineering aspects? And why the hell hadn’t Arthur and Marvin been more of devil’s advocates instead of letting her expose them all? Shouldn’t she have gone through channels?

Not intentionally, she had let Arthur down.

Marvin was probably the only one to derive any satisfaction from the lunch meeting. Her star had been shot out of the sky and he hadn’t had to pull the trigger.

Shirley knew she wasn’t perfect. But her imperfections were intolerable to her. She lived by applause.

“I guess we better sleep on it,” said Arthur, his face like death.

In her office, Shirley turned the lock so that not even Twitchy could come in. And then, her mother’s voice beaming unintelligibly into her ears, she put her head down on her folded arms and cried.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

WALKING BACK TO HIS HOTEL, Cass regretted his one lie. While the task of recruiting a new agency was being handled from Dearborn, he had been asked to follow up certain leads with a few phone calls in New York, avoiding any meeting that could become the subject of gossip.

Cass also wondered whether he had held out too much hope. Crouch’s people had a leg up. They could start on a new campaign immediately. A new agency would have to get acquainted, learn the ground rules, be more careful. A first presentation was important. A wrong start was like a bad wedding night. Perhaps he should have encouraged Arthur more. Disheartened people do not develop good campaigns.

*

Arthur’s secretary buzzed him on the intercom. “Mr. Rodgers is calling.”

So soon after lunch? Was this the final word, sparing the others? He picked up the phone in slow motion.

“Hello, Cass.”

“Your hello sounds like goodbye.”

“Well, Cass, I thought this was the kiss-off call.”

“On the contrary. On reflection, I thought the meeting ended a bit too negatively and I wanted to set the record straight.”

“How much time have we got? Cass, deal it straight. I can’t take stories now. Please level with me. How much time?”

Cass thought a minute. “In one sense, none. But if you came up with something workable within a few days—I know that’s short, hold on a minute—before we get too tangled up with other agencies’ presentations, there’d be a chance.”

“Cass, if there was really a chance, I’d put the whole team on it full time doing nothing else.”

“Arthur, we don’t need a team. We need one brain thinking. Henry Ford the original was a single-minded, narrow-minded bastard, a genius who invented the continuous work-flow that made mass production possible. He wasn’t a committee man. Committee men are sometimes nice guys, but nice guys are seldom geniuses. Right now you’ve got a problem with us that isn’t going to be solved by brainstorming.”

Arthur said, “You make it sound so hopeless.”

“Maybe I didn’t say it right at lunch. In Dearborn we’re so involved with what our competitors are doing, and with habit, you know, more trim, less trim, deluxe this and that, headlights that open and close, pure, useless crap. Shirley’s basic idea was great. Sure it had lots of flaws, technical and competitive problems that are really our concern not the agency’s. The main point is that we need a campaign that will give us a bigger share of the market for next year’s models, and the cars can’t be changed. Those dies are made. Hold on a minute, Arthur, let me finish. If I were you…”