The Engagements (2 page)

They had created a whole new sort of advertising for this campaign, and other agencies had been copying it ever since. In the absence of a direct sale to be made, or to celebrate coal a brand name to be introduced, there was only an idea: the emotional currency attached to a diamond.

De Beers produced less than they could, to keep supply low and price high. Not only did their advertising approach boost sales, it also ensured that, once sold, a diamond would never return to the marketplace. After Frances got finished pulling their heartstrings, widows or even divorcées would not want to part with their rings.

On occasion over the years, she had imagined what the Oppenheimers must look like. The peculiar particulars of their relationship stoked her imagination, making her wonder what their faces did when they saw her newest ideas. Were there raised eyebrows? Slight smiles? Exclamations?

It was unusual for her not to have met a client, but De Beers was prohibited from coming to the United States because of the cartel. The company controlled the world supply of rough diamonds, a monopoly so strong that the mere presence of its representatives in America violated the law. They operated out of Johannesburg and London. Once a year, Gerry Lauck took the ads she wrote to South Africa in a thick leather-bound book for their approval. He kept a set of golf clubs there, since it was easier than lugging them back and forth from New York.

The first time Gerry went to Johannesburg to present market research to the Oppenheimers, the small seaplane he was traveling on made a crash landing off the Island of Mozambique. He used the large mounted maps and charts he had brought along as flotation devices to get to shore. Two others on board died, and
The New York Times
ran the headline
AIRLINER IS WRECKED IN SOUTHEAST AFRICA: AMERICAN ESCAPES INJURY
. Gerry felt that the presentation quite literally saved his life, and perhaps for that reason, he was willing to do whatever it took for De Beers.

Her roommate let out a great snore in the next room, interrupting Frances’s thoughts.

Ann was waiting on a marriage proposal from a dull accountant she had been dating for a while now. After that, Frances would be back on the hunt for a new roommate, as had tended to happen every few months or so since the war ended. Rose, Myrtle, Hildy: one by one, she had lost them all to matrimony. But she was up for a promotion at the office, so perhaps when Ann left she could finally afford to live alone.

When Frances started working at Ayer four years ago, at the age of twenty-eight, she had convinced her parents that it was time for her to move away from home and into the city. But her paycheck demanded that she get a roommate to help with the rent. She wanted a house of her own on the Main Line. Then she’d never have to worry about getting enough hot water in the shower on winter mornings, or tolerating Ann’s nasally soprano as she accompanied Dinah Shore on the radio at night. She relished
and dreamed about the prospect of living alone, the same way most single girls probably dreamed about married life.

Frances ran a finger over one of her new honeymoon ads. Other women never seemed to think about what came next. They were so eager to be paired up, as if marriage was known to be full of splendor. Frances was the opposite: she could never stop thinking about it. She might go to dinner or out dancing with someone new, and have a fine time. But when she got home and climbed into bed afterward, her heart would race with fear. If she went out with him again, then they might go out again after that. Eventually, she would have to take him home to be evaluated by her parents, and vice versa. Then he would propose. And she, like all the other working girls who had married before her, would simply disappear into a life of mother her long list of worriesen94hood and isolation.

Dorothy had once told her that her beau George came home from the First World War and married a butcher’s daughter. She said something clever, which Frances assumed she had said before: “The blow—as keen as that from any meat ax—was considerably softened by the thought that the Women’s Advertising Club still loved me.”

Frances couldn’t picture Dorothy with a broken heart. She was too independent, too sharp, for all that. Say this George had returned and asked for her hand and hidden her away in a nice house somewhere. Wouldn’t she have been bored out of her skull in a matter of weeks?

Dorothy’s father was J. B. Dignam, an advertising pioneer and newspaperman who died when she was twenty. Ever since, she had supported herself and her dear mother, too. They lived in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, for a time, and now resided at the Hotel Parkside, a rooming house in the Gramercy section of Manhattan. Frances wasn’t sure how Dorothy managed.

After five years at Ayer, you got a medal bearing the company motto:
KEEPING EVERLASTINGLY AT IT BRINGS SUCCESS
. Whenever Frances saw one of the medals on someone’s desk, she thought to herself,
Lovely sentiment. That and some money would be nice
.

Ayer employees had a saying:
It’s a great place to work if your family can afford to send you
.

Frances had grown up mostly in Philadelphia, comfortable enough but without much extravagance. The family had one servant, a girl named Alberta, who taught her how to bake pies and braid her hair. Frances’s father, the son of Irish immigrants, worked as a coal yard superintendent. Her mother’s people hailed from Ireland as well, but they had settled in
Canada, where they did an impressive business in construction, putting up skyscrapers all over Ontario. The Pigotts were well known there, but in the States no one had heard of them. Frances’s mother liked to say that to Americans, Canada may as well be Zanzibar for all they knew about what went on across the border.

Her father lost his job at the start of the Depression. They had to let Alberta go. Eventually, they moved up north to Hamilton, her mother’s hometown. Frances was fifteen when they arrived. She would stay until she turned twenty, when better times brought the three of them home. Back in Pennsylvania, her parents bought Longview Farm, a sprawling place in Media, where they now raised goats and horses.

As a teenager, it had been difficult to leave her friends behind and to try to fit in with her Pigott cousins, who were accustomed to all manner of luxury. But over time, Frances came to enjoy life in Canada.

There, she and her father grew closer than ever, the two outsiders. Frances was an only child, and if her father, like most men, had wanted a boy, he never let on. He treated her like neither male nor female, just as his one and only, his darling. Anything Frances wanted to do, he thought was swell. And if she didn’t like something and wanted to give it a skip, that was fine by him too. Her father had saved her from the cotillions and socials and dance lessons that were the fate of all her female cousins.

As a girl, Frances had liked to write short stories. He read every one of them, giving her his critiques.

“You’re not an editor,” her mother once scolded him. “You’re her father. You should just say the stories are grand.”

But Frances thrilled to his criticisms. They made his praise all the "/>
At sixteen, while still in high school, she got a job at a community paper in Ontario, writing a shopping column. She went out and sold the advertising and wrote the ads, too, and made forty-five dollars a week in the middle of the Depression. That had lit a fire in her—she loved writing and selling. Most of all, she loved drawing her own paycheck. Her father was proud.

Frances thought that her time in Canada had prepared her well for working at Ayer. The company president, Harry Batten, was a self-made man who liked hiring wealthy Ivy League types, with a strong tendency toward Yale. They had plenty of clients like that, too. Men with names like du Pont and Rockefeller. Frances was the only person in the copy department without a college degree, but she carried herself with
as much confidence as anyone else, and no one seemed to notice the difference.

Batten was fond of boasting that Ayer had an employee from every one of the forty-eight states.

A Nordic Protestant from every state!
Frances thought.
Well done you!
The agency didn’t look fondly on Catholics, and Jews were out of the question. But then, every agency was like that. She kept her Catholicism to herself. She only called in sick once a year, on Ash Wednesday.

Four years at the agency had gone by in a flash, her grandmother wondering each Christmas with greater urgency than the last when Frances planned to settle down and have a family of her own. Her parents had been older than usual when they married in 1911, after meeting by chance on holiday in the Thousand Islands. Her mother was twenty-eight, her father thirty. Another four years passed before Frances was born. Her mother could still remember all the questions and concerns her older relatives had thrown at her—she had married too late, they said. She was waiting too long for children. These complaints had hurt her deeply. So for a long time, she refused to bother Frances about such things. When the window for nudging opened, it was quite short, as Frances soon turned thirty-two, apparently the age at which everyone gave up hope. Just like that, she went from perhaps only a pitiable late bloomer to a full-blown maiden lady. It was a delight to have the pressure off, really.

She worked for the most powerful advertising agency in the world. She found her job far more exciting than any man she had met in the longest. Even this—staying up until all hours, jittery with the fear of not getting it right—even this thrilled her.

The irony of her situation wasn’t lost on her: she was a bachelor girl whose greatest talent so far was for convincing couples to get engaged.

When Frances joined Ayer in ’43, 103 employees were at war—10 percent of the agency. The only clients they took on during that time were the Boeing Airplane Company and the U.S. Army. Advertisements for luxury goods were seen as vulgar. From June 1942 until September 1943, De Beers advertising was confined to spreading the word of the company’s contribution of industrial diamonds to the war effort. After that, jewelry advertising resumed, but they had to be sensitive about it. In 1945, Frances created a new campaign, unlike anything that had ever been seen in American magazines before. The ads celebrated the weddings of real American GIs who were returning home to civilian life, and the girls they had left behind. They featured illustrations of actual ceremonies and
stories about the couples. At the same time, important information was given about diamonds.

During the war, Ayer made increasing use of women. Out of nec Oppenheimerall, and essity, they were hiring girls on, and not just in clerical jobs and the steno pool, but in executive and semi-executive roles. There was Dolores in business production, and Sally in the media department. Two women in accounts, and Dorothy in public relations, of course.

In the copy department, there were now a total of thirteen men and three women. The women were meant to provide the feminine point of view when it came to creating campaigns for products that females would buy, or at least influence the purchase of.

For De Beers, Frances’s own desires were no help. Instead, she studied her coworkers and her friends and her roommates. What did they want most? Well, that was easy—they wanted marriage. What did they fear? They feared being alone. The war had only heightened both sensations. She played off of that. She tried to say that the diamond itself could prevent a tragic outcome:
The engagement diamond on her finger is bright as a tear—but not with sadness. Like her eyes it holds a promise—of cool dawns together, of life grown rich and full and tranquil. Its lovely assurance shines through all the hours of waiting, to kindle with joy and precious meaning at the beginning of their new life to be
.

Much of the time, the ads appealed to men, since they would be the ones buying the rings. They did a lot of rather fancy advertising about gentlemen—about good taste and accomplishment, and how both ideas could be conveyed through the ring you gave your beloved, even if you didn’t actually have either one.

A friend had recalled one night during the war that her beau wrote to say he was worried about what might happen to her if he didn’t come home. Mortality was on his mind, and, Frances reasoned, the minds of others like him. And so she wrote,
Few men can found a city, name a new star, shatter an atom. Few build for themselves a monument so tall that future generations may point to it from far off, saying, “Look, that was our father. There is his name. That was his lifework.” Diamonds are the most imperishable record a man may leave of his personal life
.

It was all very dark and heavy-handed. Gerry Lauck thought it was brilliant.

Frances closed her eyes for a moment. She should sleep some, or else she’d look a fright at the morning meeting. But what to do about the signature line? She arranged a handful of magazines in the shape of a fan on the floor, all open to her ads.

In
Vogue: Your diamonds glow with loveliness at every wearing. Theirs is a timeless charm transcending every change in fashion
.

In
Collier’s: Wear your diamonds as the night wears its stars, ever and always … for their beauty is as timeless
.

In
Life: In the engagement diamond on her finger, the memories will shine forever
.

She had clearly long been surfeited by this idea of permanence. She closed her eyes and said, “Dear God, send me a line.”

Frances scribbled something on a scrap of paper, taking it to bed with her and placing it on the nightstand. She lay down fully dressed, without getting under the covers, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Three hours later, she woke to the alarm and looked first thing at the words she had written:
A Diamond Is Forever
.

She thought it would do just fine.

As her feet hit the cold hardwood, she heard Ann in the hallway making for the bathroom. In her roommate’s casMen made mistakes and when they asked forgiveness, women forgave. It happened every day.d himselfe, the engagement couldn’t come soon enough.