Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“ A fundamental responsibility . ” Hopkins was saying.

“What?” Tom asked, bringing himself back to the luncheon conversation with difficulty.

“We people in the business of communications have a fundamental responsibility to bring key issues to the attention of the public,” Hopkins continued. “I think this speech we’ve worked out is an excellent example. ”

Tom couldn’t concentrate, and Hopkins’ voice seemed to fade away. Maria , Tom thought, Maria. Somehow the very name sounded heartbreakingly lonely and forlorn. He felt as though he had been awakened suddenly in the night by the distant echo of a cry for help.

IT WAS eight-fifteen on the evening of the fifteenth of September. The Grand Ballroom of the big hotel in Atlantic City had been changed into an auditorium by filling it with rows of chairs. About fifteen hundred physicians were sitting there holding printed programs on their laps. The room hummed with conversation, which gradually subsided as a tall, white-haired doctor in a dinner coat stood up behind the lectern at the head of the room. The tall man stood there smiling until the room was quiet. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we have a distinguished speaker here tonight, a man whose influence is felt in almost every home in America — every home which has a radio or television set. This is a man who without ever seeking personal fame has been behind almost every public-service advertising campaign which has taken place in the past twenty years. He has been one of the leaders in marshaling public opinion in the fight against polio, heart disease, and cancer. He is not a physician himself, but I think it fair to say that indirectly he has been responsible for saving more lives than any of us. Gentlemen, I present to you Mr. Ralph Hopkins, president of the United Broadcasting Corporation!”

There was mild applause. Ralph Hopkins, who had been sitting in one of the front rows, walked to the platform and stood behind the lectern. He looked astonishingly small, almost frail. He placed a black notebook containing the speech Tom had written for him on the lectern, looked up, and coughed apologetically. Tom, sitting in a back row, thought with astonishment, He’s nervous — the poor guy doesn’t like to make speeches, and he’s scared. Hopkins waited until the applause died down. Then in a small, unassuming voice, he said, “Dr. Stutgarten, and other distinguished physicians: it is a great pleasure for me to have this opportunity to talk to you tonight. As a layman, I feel peculiarly honored to be invited to address this gathering of doctors. I will not keep you long. ”

He paused. The audience waited without a sound.

“Now, we laymen look at disease somewhat differently than you doctors do,” Hopkins continued in a firmer voice. “In the first place, we’re scared of disease and don’t like to talk about it much. When something goes wrong with us, we go to a doctor and put the whole burden on his shoulders. We don’t tend to believe that there’s anything we can do about disease ourselves, and almost the last thing which occurs to us is that the doctor might need help. Of course, there actually isn’t much a patient can do to help his doctor, except to follow his advice, but there is, I think, a legitimate responsibility the public as a whole has toward its physicians. We laymen must make sure we have a broad understanding of the problems the physicians face and the the physicians have the tools they need to find solutions.”

Hopkins looked up from his notebook to smile hesitantly at the audience, then glanced down again. “Now, the medical profession,” he went on, “has done wonders with the conquest of the physical diseases — we all know how the human life expectancy has been extended. But while this progress has been going on, the incidence of mental illness has been rising, as we all know. The question I want to pose here tonight is whether there is anything the public could do to help the doctors conquer this problem. It is my belief that the public has failed the medical profession worst in this area, because the public is the most scared of mental illness and understands it least of all. I am wondering if something couldn’t be done to bring the problem of mental illness into the open and get together the funds necessary to make a major frontal attack upon it.”

It was an odd sensation, Tom found, to sit in the audience and hear the words he had written come back to him. He did not feel very proprietary about the words. If I myself said them, they would mean little, he thought, but coming from Hopkins, they mean a lot. He listened as Hopkins continued to develop his theme. At the end of precisely twenty minutes, Hopkins concluded by saying, “There is a possibility that some organization might be formed, similar in purpose to the March of Dimes, to subsidize research on mental disease, but, beyond that, to banish unreasonable fear. In such an effort, the medical profession would have to take the lead. I think you can be sure that those of us whose business it is to transmit information to the public will do everything we can to help.”

He stopped abruptly and folded his notebook. The audience clapped politely, almost enthusiastically, and several doctors walked up to the lectern to congratulate him. Hopkins stood in the middle of a small circle of physicians, shaking hands and smiling. Then he moved slowly toward the lobby and, followed by a growing group of physicians, headed toward the elevators.

Fifteen minutes later, Tom walked into the crowded living room of Hopkins’ suite and found Hopkins drinking with a group of the leaders of medical associations. Several of them were urging him to start a mental-health committee. “It’s nice of you to suggest it,” he said. “I’m not at all sure I’m the man to take the leadership and I’m so pressed for time. ”

“How do you think it went?” Tom asked Ogden, who was standing in a corner sipping a highball, next to a vase of long-stemmed roses.

“Fair,” Ogden said. “Just about fair, I’d say. The advance publicity wasn’t much. We’ll see what the morning papers do with it.”

As it happened, the morning papers played the story up. Some of them put it on the front page, but Hopkins barely glanced at the clippings Ogden handed him. He seemed much more impressed by the many requests he got from doctors to start the committee. “I didn’t sense a bit of opposition,” he said to Tom. “I know that speech was a lot of work, but I think it’s done exactly what we intended.”

WITHOUT WARNING, on September 16, Susan Hopkins eloped with Byron Holgate, an aging playboy with an affectionate smile. Ralph Hopkins heard about it in his office on one of his own company’s three o’clock news broadcasts soon after he returned from Atlantic City. He immediately called his wife in South Bay. She answered the telephone herself. “Hello,” she said, and her voice sounded so dead that he knew she had heard about it and had not hurried to let him know.

“I just heard about Susan,” he said. “I’ll be right out.”

“No,” she said dully.

“I want to.”

There was no response.

“I want to,” he said again.

“I know.”

“I’ll be right out.”

“I’m tired,” she said. “I’m terribly tired.”

“Of course. Go to bed and I’ll see you in an hour.”

No answer.

“I think I’ll stay out there with you, Helen,” he said. “I think I’ll give up the apartment here in town.”

There was a pause, and then, as though he hadn’t spoken, she said, “Ralph, will you do me a favor?”

“Of course!”

“Have one of your secretaries get me a ticket on one of those cruises that go around the world.”