The Purple Decades (22 page)
Read The Purple Decades Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
One of them told him the reception room looked like a San Francisco whorehouse while having his shoes shined at his desk in his office. They were both sitting there talking, the usual, except that a Negro, about 50, was squatted down over a portable shoeshine stand shining the American's shoes. But he kept right on talking about the San Francisco whorehouse and Fabrilex as if all he had done was turn on an air-conditioner. He also had an “executive telephone.” This was some sort of amplified microphone and speaker connected to the telephone, so that he didn't have to actually pick up a telephone, none of that smalltime stuff. All he had to do was talk in the general direction of the desk. But of course! The delicious â¦
baldness
of it! Who gives a damn about subtlety? Just win, like, that's the name of the game, and theâââAgency had
£70
million in accounts last year.
baldness
of it! Who gives a damn about subtlety? Just win, like, that's the name of the game, and theâââAgency had
£70
million in accounts last year.
They always took him to lunch at places like the Four Seasons, and if it came to £ 16 for four people, for lunch, that was nothing. There are expensive places where businessmen eat lunch in London, but they always have some kind of coy atmosphere, trattorias, chez this or that, or old places with swiney, pebbly English surnames, Craw's, Grouse's, Scob's, Clot's. But the Four Seasons! The place practically exudes an air-conditioned sweat of pure huge expensive-account â¦
money.
Everybody sits there in this huge bald smooth-slab Mies-van-der-Rohe-style black-onyx executive suite atmosphere taking massive
infusions of exotic American cocktails, Margaritas, Gibsons, Bloody Marys, Rob Roys, Screwdrivers, Pisco Sours, and French wines and French brandies, while the blood vessels dilate and the ego dilates and Leonard Lyons, the columnist, comes in to look around and see who is there, and everyone watches these ingenious copper-chain curtains rippling over the plate glass, rippling up, up, it is an optical illusion but it looks like they are rippling, rippling, rippling, rippling up this cliff of plate glass like a waterfall gone into reverse.
money.
Everybody sits there in this huge bald smooth-slab Mies-van-der-Rohe-style black-onyx executive suite atmosphere taking massive
infusions of exotic American cocktails, Margaritas, Gibsons, Bloody Marys, Rob Roys, Screwdrivers, Pisco Sours, and French wines and French brandies, while the blood vessels dilate and the ego dilates and Leonard Lyons, the columnist, comes in to look around and see who is there, and everyone watches these ingenious copper-chain curtains rippling over the plate glass, rippling up, up, it is an optical illusion but it looks like they are rippling, rippling, rippling, rippling up this cliff of plate glass like a waterfall gone into reverse.
And some guy at the table is letting everybody in on this deliciously child-cynical American secret, namely, that a lot of the cigarette advertising currently is based on motivational research into people's reactions to the cancer scare. For example, the ones that always show blue grass and blue streams and blond, blue-eyed young people with picnic baskets, and gallons of prime-of-life hormones gushing through their Diet-Rite loins, are actually aimed at hypochondriacs who need constant reassurance that they aren't dying of cancer. On the other hand, the ones that say “I'd rather fight than switch” really mean “I'd rather get cancer than give up smoking”âNew York!âthe copper curtains ripple up ⦠.
Â
One interesting, rather nice thing he notices, however, is that they are tremendously anxious to please him. They are apparently impressed by him, even though he comes there very much as the beggar. They are the parent firm. Whatever they say about the Fabrilex campaign in England goes, in the long run. If they want to aim it at hypochondriac masochists who fear cancer of the skin, then that's it. Yet they treat him as a partner, no, as slightly superior. Then he gets it. It is because he is English. They keep staring at his suit, which is from Huntsman and has 12-inch side vents. They watch his table manners and then ⦠glorious! imitate him. Old George! He used to say to waiters,
“Would
you please bring some water” or whatever it was, whereas he always said, “
Could
you bring the cheese now, please?” or whatever it wasâthe thing is, the Americans say would, which implies that the waiter is doing one a favor by granting this wish, whereas the Englishmanâclass!âsays
could
, which assumes that since the waiter is a servant, he will if he can.
“Would
you please bring some water” or whatever it was, whereas he always said, “
Could
you bring the cheese now, please?” or whatever it wasâthe thing is, the Americans say would, which implies that the waiter is doing one a favor by granting this wish, whereas the Englishmanâclass!âsays
could
, which assumes that since the waiter is a servant, he will if he can.
And old George got that distinction right off! That's it with these Americans. They're incurable children, they're incurable nouveaux, they spell
finesse
with a
ph
to give it more
tone
âbut they sense the status distinctions. And so by the second time old George is saying “Could you bring me some water, do you think?” and running do-you-think together into an upper-class blur over the top of his sopping glottis just ⦠like a real Englishman.
finesse
with a
ph
to give it more
tone
âbut they sense the status distinctions. And so by the second time old George is saying “Could you bring me some water, do you think?” and running do-you-think together into an upper-class blur over the top of his sopping glottis just ⦠like a real Englishman.
So all of a sudden
he
began to sense that he had it both ways. He
had the American thing and the English thing. They emerge from the Four Seasons, out on to 52nd Streetâkheew!âthe sun blasts them in the eyes and there it is, wild, childish, bald, overpowering Park Avenue in the Fifties, huge cliffs of plate glass and steel frames, like a mountain of telephone booths. Hundreds of, jaysus, millions of dollars' worth of shimmering junk, with so many sheets of plate glass the buildings all reflect each other in marine greens and blues, like a 25-cent postcard from Sarasota, Floridaânot a good building in the lot, but, jaysus, the sheer incredible yah!âwe've-got-it money and power it represents. The Rome of the twentieth centuryâand because wealth and power are here, everything else follows, and it is useless for old England to continue to harp on form, because it is all based on the wealth and power England had 150 years ago. The platter of the world's goodie sweets tilts ⦠to New York, girls, for one thing, all these young lithe girls with flamingo legs come pouring into New York and come popping up out of the armpit-steaming sewer tunnels of the New York subways, out of those screeching sewers, dressed to the eyeballs, lathed, polished, linked, lacquered, coiffed with spun brass.
he
began to sense that he had it both ways. He
had the American thing and the English thing. They emerge from the Four Seasons, out on to 52nd Streetâkheew!âthe sun blasts them in the eyes and there it is, wild, childish, bald, overpowering Park Avenue in the Fifties, huge cliffs of plate glass and steel frames, like a mountain of telephone booths. Hundreds of, jaysus, millions of dollars' worth of shimmering junk, with so many sheets of plate glass the buildings all reflect each other in marine greens and blues, like a 25-cent postcard from Sarasota, Floridaânot a good building in the lot, but, jaysus, the sheer incredible yah!âwe've-got-it money and power it represents. The Rome of the twentieth centuryâand because wealth and power are here, everything else follows, and it is useless for old England to continue to harp on form, because it is all based on the wealth and power England had 150 years ago. The platter of the world's goodie sweets tilts ⦠to New York, girls, for one thing, all these young lithe girls with flamingo legs come pouring into New York and come popping up out of the armpit-steaming sewer tunnels of the New York subways, out of those screeching sewers, dressed to the eyeballs, lathed, polished, linked, lacquered, coiffed with spun brass.
Ah, and
they
loved Englishmen, too. He found a brass-topped beauty and he will never forget following her up the stairs to her flat that first night. The front door was worn and rickety but heavy and had an air hinge on it that made it close and lock immediately, automaticallyâagainst those ravenous, adrenal New York animals
out there
; even New York's criminals are more animal, basic savage, Roman,
criminal
âhe never remembered a block of flats in London with an air hinge on the front doorâand he followed her up the stairs, a few steps behind her, and watched the muscles in her calves contract and the hamstring ligaments spring out at the backs of her knees, oh young taut healthy New York girl flamingo legs, and it was all so ⦠tender and brave.
they
loved Englishmen, too. He found a brass-topped beauty and he will never forget following her up the stairs to her flat that first night. The front door was worn and rickety but heavy and had an air hinge on it that made it close and lock immediately, automaticallyâagainst those ravenous, adrenal New York animals
out there
; even New York's criminals are more animal, basic savage, Roman,
criminal
âhe never remembered a block of flats in London with an air hinge on the front doorâand he followed her up the stairs, a few steps behind her, and watched the muscles in her calves contract and the hamstring ligaments spring out at the backs of her knees, oh young taut healthy New York girl flamingo legs, and it was all so ⦠tender and brave.
Precisely! Her walk-up flat was so essentially dreary, way over in the East Eighties, an upper floor of somebody's old townhouse that had been cut up and jerry-built into flats just slightly better than a bed-sitter, with the bedroom about the size of a good healthy wardrobe closet and a so-called Pullman kitchen in the living room, some fiercely, meanly efficient uni-unit, a little sink, refrigerator and stove all welded together behind shutters at one end, and a bathroom with no window, just some sort of air duct in there with the slits grimed and hanging, booga, with some sort of gray compost of lint, sludge, carbon particles and noxious gases. And the toilet barely worked, just a lazy spiral current of water down the hole after one pulled down that stubby little handle they have. The floor tilted slightly, butâbrave and tender!
Somehow she had managed to make it all look beautiful, Japanese
globe lamps made of balsa strips and paper, greenery, great lush fronds of some kind of plant, several prints on the wall, one an insanely erotic water-color nude by Egon Schiele, various hangings, coverings, drapings of primitive textiles, monk's cloth, homespuns, a little vase full of violet paper flowers, a bookcase, painted white, full of heavyweight, or middleweight, paperback books,
The Lonely Crowd, The Confessions of Felix Krull, African Genesis
âbrave and tender!âall of these lithe young girls living in dreadful walk-up flats, alone, with a cat, and the faint odor of cat feces in the Kitty Litter, and an oily wooden salad bowl on the table, and a cockroach silhouetted on the rim of the salad bowlâand yet there was something touching about it,
haunting
, he wanted to say, the desperate fight to stay in New York amid the excitement of money and power, the Big Apple, and for days, if he is to be honest about it, he had the most inexplicably tender memory ofâall right!âthe poor sad way the water had lazed down in the toilet bowl. That poor, marvelous, erotic girl. At one point she had told him she had learned to put a diaphragm on in 15 seconds. She just said it, out of thin air. So bald.
globe lamps made of balsa strips and paper, greenery, great lush fronds of some kind of plant, several prints on the wall, one an insanely erotic water-color nude by Egon Schiele, various hangings, coverings, drapings of primitive textiles, monk's cloth, homespuns, a little vase full of violet paper flowers, a bookcase, painted white, full of heavyweight, or middleweight, paperback books,
The Lonely Crowd, The Confessions of Felix Krull, African Genesis
âbrave and tender!âall of these lithe young girls living in dreadful walk-up flats, alone, with a cat, and the faint odor of cat feces in the Kitty Litter, and an oily wooden salad bowl on the table, and a cockroach silhouetted on the rim of the salad bowlâand yet there was something touching about it,
haunting
, he wanted to say, the desperate fight to stay in New York amid the excitement of money and power, the Big Apple, and for days, if he is to be honest about it, he had the most inexplicably tender memory ofâall right!âthe poor sad way the water had lazed down in the toilet bowl. That poor, marvelous, erotic girl. At one point she had told him she had learned to put a diaphragm on in 15 seconds. She just said it, out of thin air. So bald.
Early the next morning he took a cab back to his hotel to change for the day and the driver tried to project the thing in manic bursts through the rush-hour traffic, lurches of acceleration, sudden braking, skids, screeches, all the while shouting out the window, cursing and then demanding support from himâ“Dja see that! Guy got his head up his ass. Am I right?”âand strangely, he found himself having a thoroughly American reaction, actually answering these stupid questions because he wanted to be approved of by this poor bastard trying to hurtle through the money-and-power traffic, answering a cab driver who said, “Guy got his head up his ass, am I right”âbecause suddenly he found himself close to the source, he understood this thingâthe hell with scarves, Pitt Clubs and pale silk ties, and watch out England, you got your head up your ass, and here comes a Mid-Atlantic Man.
Â
His career back with theâââAgency in London picked up brilliantly for Mid-Atlantic Man. His momentum was tremendous when he came back. London was a torpid little town on a river. He began to cultivate the American members of the firm. Certain things about the advertising business that he had never been able to stomach, really, but nevertheless swallowed silentlyâsuddenly he began to realize that what it was, these things were American, bald and cynical, only now he â¦
understood.
Yea-saying!
understood.
Yea-saying!
There was one American woman in the firm, and in the most unconcerned way she would talk about the opening of a big new American hotel that had gone up in London and how the invitation list was divided into (1) Celebrities, (2) VIPs, (3) CIPs and (4) just
Guests. Things like that used to make his flesh crawl, but nowânowâthe beautiful part was the CIPsâCommercially Important People, people important to the hotel for business reasons but whose names meant nothing in terms of publicity, however. Marvelous!
Guests. Things like that used to make his flesh crawl, but nowânowâthe beautiful part was the CIPsâCommercially Important People, people important to the hotel for business reasons but whose names meant nothing in terms of publicity, however. Marvelous!
He got to be a good friend of hers. One day they went out to lunch, and there were a lot of people on the footpaths, and suddenly she spotted a woman about 20 feet away and said, “Look at her! The perfect C-1.” One of the innovations, for the purpose of surveys and aiming campaigns accurately, had been to break down consumers into four categories: A, B, C-1 and C-2. A was upper class, B was middle class, C-1 was upper working class or lower middle class, in that range, and C-2 was plain working class.
“The perfect C-1!” she said.
“The perfect C-1?”
“Yes! Look. She's done her hair herself. She's wearing a Marks & Spencer knitted dress. She bought her shoes at Lotus. She's carrying a shopping basket”âwith this she moved right up next to the woman and looked in the shopping basketâ“she's bought pre-cut wrapped bread”âshe only barely turns back to him to announce all this out loudâ“she's bought a box of Wiz detergent with five free plastic daffodils inside”âand the poor woman wheels her head around resentfullyâbut he wants to shout for joy: Bald! Delicious! A running commentary on a London street about a perfect C-1!
That night he took her to theâââTrattoria, underneath those inevitable white plaster arches and black metal cylinder lamps. He came on breezy, first-naming the waiters as he walked in, like ⦠a pal. Over the avocado vinaigrette he told her, conspiratorially, that the Agency was still hopelessly backward because it was run, in England, by the kind of Englishmen who think a successful business is one where you can get educated men to work for you for £2,000 a year and come to work dressed as if they make £10,000. After the wine he told her: “I've got the neuroses of New York and the decadence of London.”
She thought that wasâgod!âgreat. So he sprang it, spontaneously as he could manage it, on many occasions thereafter. He also took to wearing black knit ties. Somehow they have become the insignia of Mid-Atlantic Man. He got the idea from David Frost, who always wore one.
Instead of using Cockney or Liverpool slang for humorous effect, narked, knickers-job and all that, he began using American hip-lower-class slang, like, I mean, you know, baby, and a little late Madison Avenue. “Why, don't we throw itâ” he would be speaking of somebody's ideaâ“and see if it skips across the pond.” He always brought the latest American rock ân' roll records back with him from New York,
plus a lot of news of discotheques, underground movies, and people like Andy, Jane, Borden, Olivier. He always made a big point of telling everyone that he was expecting a call from New York, from Davidâand everyone knew this was a big New York advertising manâDavid!âDavid!âNew York! New York!âhot line to the source! âland of flamingo legs and glass cliffs!âmine! mine!â
plus a lot of news of discotheques, underground movies, and people like Andy, Jane, Borden, Olivier. He always made a big point of telling everyone that he was expecting a call from New York, from Davidâand everyone knew this was a big New York advertising manâDavid!âDavid!âNew York! New York!âhot line to the source! âland of flamingo legs and glass cliffs!âmine! mine!â
Â
But then there were a few disquieting developments. The waiters at theâââTrattoria began
treating
him like an American. He would come on all pallyâand they would do things like this: He would order some esoteric wine, Château whateveritwas, and they would bring him a bottle and pour out a little in his glass and he would taste it and pronounce it good and then one of his â¦
pals,
a waiter, would say, right out loud, in front of the girl he was with: We didn't have any more Château whateveritwas, sir, so I brought you Château thing, I hope it's all right, sir. All he can do is sit there and nod like a fool, because he has already tasted it and pronounced it good Château whateveritwasâoh Christ.
treating
him like an American. He would come on all pallyâand they would do things like this: He would order some esoteric wine, Château whateveritwas, and they would bring him a bottle and pour out a little in his glass and he would taste it and pronounce it good and then one of his â¦
pals,
a waiter, would say, right out loud, in front of the girl he was with: We didn't have any more Château whateveritwas, sir, so I brought you Château thing, I hope it's all right, sir. All he can do is sit there and nod like a fool, because he has already tasted it and pronounced it good Château whateveritwasâoh Christ.
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