Jonathan Dee - Palladio

“What the fuck is under those sheets?” Roman said.

Everyone turned to stare, but Osbourne either did not catch the impolitic hostility in Roman’s voice or was able to ignore it. “Not something that any of you have seen before,” he said genially. “Better it should be a surprise, I think.”

“But what if we’re asked questions about it?” Andrea said. “We’ll be asked to defend it, that’s the way these things work, isn’t it?”

“Often,” Osbourne said, “it is. But today I don’t want you to worry about that. It’s all taken care of. Your job today is simple: we all sit on the same side of the table and we project the unspoken impression that we’re all on the same team.”

Andrea frowned, but at the same time, John could see, she and some of the others were visibly relieved. If anyone was going to be put on the spot today, it wasn’t going to be them. Dale sat down in the swivel chair next to John and looked at him as if he had never seen him before.

“Oh, John!” Osbourne said suddenly. “I meant to tell you. I bought the shark!”

John smiled wanly.

At five of eleven a group of young men and women in unfashionable suits entered the conference room, and fanned out uncertainly by the door. The nine CLO representatives stood politely behind their chairs. This was the fourth of the five presentations the Doucette marketing executives would hear in this same conference room in a two-week period: John was unsure why they should seem so nervous. Behind them walked in two older men. The younger of the two, who was nearly bald and wore small, round, horn-rimmed glasses, went straight up to the table and extended one hand to Osbourne, holding back his necktie with the other.

“Mal, I presume?” he said. “We appreciate your coming down today. This of course is Mr Harold Doucette.”

John had trouble suppressing a smile at that sycophantic “of course”: but then he realized that to these junior executives at a family-owned company, and to their own employees, that stony, white-haired, large-featured, clear-eyed visage was probably as scarily omnipresent as a portrait of Mao.

Osbourne walked around the table to shake Mr Doucette’s hand. “We’re honored by your presence here today, sir,” he said.

Doucette nodded curtly. “I was surprised to hear your request,” he said, taking a seat. “If request is the word. This is the only one of the five presentations where my presence was considered necessary.”

Everyone was seated now except Osbourne, who continued talking as he made his way back around the table. None of the Doucette people had touched the food, or even poured a cup of coffee; no one wanted to be seen ingesting in the presence of the old man himself. John saw their surprised expressions and discreet nudges and could overhear some of their critical whisperings about the absence of any slide projectors, any TV and VCR, any sound system. Just the four black-draped easels, like a high school science fair. It was not uncommon for agency spending on a pitch for a major account like this to go well into five figures. In the last week or so, John knew, these same marketing people must have beheld some sweaty, script-holding ad execs wearing lots of Doucette clothing and otherwise making clowns of themselves in this very same conference room.

“I wanted you here,” Osbourne said, “because we have some very serious issues to discuss, issues that are at once fundamental to doing business in the fin de siècle and also somewhat of a departure in terms of past strategy, past ideas; and, with due respect to Mr Gracey here, I didn’t want you to hear these ideas filtered or secondhand.” He sat down across from Mr Doucette.

It was not lost on John that he alone might have reason to find Osbourne’s assured, charismatic manner, his easy command of the room, strange or even ominous, given the amazing contrast it presented to his moody, insular silence when they had last met. All that was strange about it, though, was how connected the two states seemed. It was as if Osbourne were emerging from a sort of chrysalis of personality: developed, brilliant, natural, and inexplicable.

“Doucette’s sales have gone up,” Osbourne said, “in each of the three years since Canning Leigh & Osbourne took over its national advertising account. However, that’s not good enough for you. I understand that. I understand that, at your level, competition, more than money, is the nature of the game. You blame CLO’s advertising for the plateau Doucette seems to have reached in terms of its growth percentage. Well, such cause-and-effect relationships are notoriously hard to prove, but I will agree with you on one thing: our advertising for Doucette stinks. It’s lousy. I can hardly stand to look at it.”

He rose and walked over to the first easel. Pulling the cloth on to the floor, he revealed a blowup of a six-month-old magazine ad for Doucette’s Oxford shirts. It featured a black and white Bruce Weber — style photo of a well-known young movie actress, wearing the shirt with most of the buttons undone, and with the tails tied into a knot at her midriff. “Wear What You Like,” the copy began. John recognized it right away as Dale and Andrea’s work. He didn’t look over at them.

Osbourne stood there gazing at the sample ad for as long as a minute — an expansive silence, as if he had forgotten the others were waiting for him. Then he looked back at Mr Doucette.

“Let me tell you something about myself,” he said, in a softer voice. “I hate advertising.”

John felt his heart racing. He wondered if what he was witnessing was going to cross the line from humiliating failure into a kind of larger-than-life disaster, a Hindenburg of ad pitches.

“I hate it so much I want to kill it. Have you ever hated anything that much, sir?”

Mr Doucette wasn’t sure where to turn his eyes. No one said anything.

“I see something like this, and … and you have to multiply it by like a billion, that’s the problem, to get an idea of the cultural noise, the mental noise, advertising like this creates, you have to look at this ad and then close your eyes and imagine a billion images just like it, all speaking at the same time, all of them saying nothing. A huge, overwhelming, stupefying nothing. Images like this open their mouths and nothing comes out, and yet the noise they make is deafening.”

Jerry Gracey, who had lured Mr Doucette to this meeting with the promise of meeting one of the legendary geniuses of the ad business, had made a tent out of his hands and was looking inside it.

“What I’m proposing today,” Osbourne said, unruffled, “is not advertising.”

“It’s not,” Doucette said, with the indulgent air of a man who is holding his wrath for later.

“No, sir. Not as the word is understood. Because I don’t want to speak in that language anymore. Not that I don’t know it. Christ knows I’m fluent in it. But advertising, traditional advertising, is about nothing. It’s about—” he gestured at the exposed ad — “it’s about movie stars. Its great resources don’t concern themselves with anything important. It’s not about life and death. And I ask myself — why can’t it be about life and death?”

“Death?” Doucette said skeptically.

“It’s just a form, after all — advertising, I mean — and so the question of content is wide open. It’s a form for the massive production and global distribution of simple visual messages; staggering, really, if you think about it. Why should it be limited to the perfection of titillating people sexually? Mr Doucette, you’re a rich man. Because of that, and because of your position of power as the head of a large concern, you have the greatest means of communication in history at your disposal. How are you going to use it?”