Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Roman, though he struggled not to show it, gradually began to find the whole thing funny. He shook his head. “Chocolate sculpture,” he said. “Well, as furious as I was the day of the pitch, I sure would have been sorry to miss it. It was one of the most demented things I’ve ever seen.”

John, relieved, ordered two more drinks.

“I guess I can see why you didn’t tell anyone,” Roman said. “Still, I wish you’d told me a week ago, at least.”

“Why?”

Roman smiled into his scotch glass. “’Cause I went to Canning and said I wanted somebody else to work with, that’s why.”

Next morning they went together to Canning’s office; with a viselike contraption balanced on his knees, the boss was trying to tie his own flies. “We kissed and made up,” Roman said.

“Thank God,” Canning said. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

“So who were you going to partner me with?” Roman asked.

“I hadn’t even thought about it. Things like this happen all the time around here. It’s like a fucking junior high school. Now go and sin no more.”

Everything became as it had been. The two of them came up with some spots for a fruit juice that won the account for the agency (now called Canning & Leigh) and led to Dale and Andrea — laid off in the wake of the Doucette disaster — being rehired. John and Roman even got to go to Malibu to oversee the production of the first two spots. It was a different world. Their director was about seventy-five years old, with a deep tan and long, chalk-white hair; he showed up on the set the first day scowling and waving a rolled-up copy of the script.

“Where’s the cum shot?” he barked at them. “You left it out.”

“Sorry?” said John.

“Fucking New York,” the director said. “They think they invented everything. Do you know how many commercials I’ve directed?”

“Excuse me,” Roman said, before the director could supply the number, “‘cum shot,’ is that what you said?”

He looked at them murderously. An assistant was walking by with a tray full of unrefrigerated bottles of the fruit juice, to be used as props in one of the shots; the director grabbed one off the tray, unscrewed the top, tilted his head back, and poured the juice into his mouth from a height of about eight inches, so that some of it splashed off his perfect false teeth. He then lowered his gaze to Roman and John again, juice dripping off his chin.

“Idiots!” he said.

When they returned from the coast it was winter, just like that. The sun bounced off the roofs and the store windows. The plows came by after each snowfall to expose the streets, and the parked cars, up to their door handles in the resultant gray drifts, stayed half-hidden like cats in a meadow for weeks at a time. John wore his sunglasses on the walk to the subway in the morning, his breath steaming in front of him. The months that passed so quietly included his thirtieth birthday. He was less worried about growing old than he was consternated by the idea that thirty years — an enormous wedge of time — had now amassed behind him, without any correspondingly enormous sense of having lived.

He had never really stopped waiting for the promised communication from Mal Osbourne, though he wasn’t certain of the tone of his anticipation: amusement, or genuine excitement at the prospect of a career change, or simple curiosity as to whether the “exciting new venture” his erstwhile boss was planning had any existence at all outside the broad boundaries of Osbourne’s ego. Then one Saturday afternoon in April, John and Rebecca came home from the Twenty-third Street flea market with an oval mirror and a wall clock; by the time Rebecca had finished holding the mirror up in a couple of different places, hanging up her coat, and checking for phone messages, John had gone through the mail and had read the letter from Osbourne twice through. He held it out to her without a word and went to the kitchen, laughing soundlessly and shaking his head, to make them both some tea.

Dear Colleague:

In 1973 I entered the advertising business as an intern at Doyle Dane Bernbach in New York. The Creative Revolution, so-called, had carried the day — I remember there was a great big blowup beside the elevator of Bill Bernbach’s great “Lemon” ad for Volkswagen, the ad that started it all — and a revolution seemed to be taking place outside the tiny confines of our office as well. In music, in literature, in radical politics, it seemed to me that what was happening was less a political movement than a movement to restore the idea of truth in language, of plain speaking — a kind of democratic speech to set against the totalitarian language of the times. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” — I wonder how many of you reading this will even be old enough to remember that one. Anyway, advertising seemed like a part of this process. After a hundred years of the hard sell, honesty and plain speech was making its way into the unlikeliest place of all, the language of commerce. It was an exciting time.

Recently I turned on my television and saw another spot for Volkswagen — I don’t even know who has the account now — which ended with the tag “Perfect for your life. Or your complete lack thereof.” And it came to me at that moment that, thirty years after the “revolution” I thought I was a part of, our world seems to me to be held together right now by irony alone. Our culture propagates no values outside of the peculiar sort of self-negation implied in the wry smile of irony, the way we remove ourselves from ourselves in order to be insulated from the terrible emptiness of the way we live now. That wry smile mocks self-knowledge, mocks the idea of right and wrong, mocks the notion that art is worth making at all.

I want to wipe that smile off the face of our age.

As most of you know by now, I have severed my ties with the agency which formerly bore my name. I have decided to devote the remainder of my working life to a new venture: I hesitate to call it an ad agency because that implies that it will be like other ad agencies for which you have worked, or are working. It will not. True, we will create advertising, and that advertising will be paid for by clients: but the advertising will be unlike anything the world has ever seen.

I am writing to you to ask you to join me in this venture. My letter will be postmarked from Charlottesville, Virginia, where I am overseeing renovation of the building which will house our activities. In other words, in order to join me it would be necessary to leave your current homes and relocate to this town, whose beauty and whose intellectual heritage (for those of you who have not visited before) are an integral part of the history of the United States.

By accepting this offer you will be on an automatic partnership track. In the meantime, though, I will do my best to make your salaries commensurate with the salaries you draw now. I don’t want the sacrifice you’re making to be any greater than it has to be. Besides, if our mission is to fail, then the fact that fair salaries may hasten that failure by a few months is by no means a negative prospect.

I will contact you upon my return from Virginia. Please take advantage of these weeks to talk over with your loved ones both the exigencies of this decision and the potential rewards of putting your unmatched talents toward a noble and original, uncorrupted, ambitious purpose. The language of advertising is the language of American life: American art, American politics, American media, American law, American business. By changing that language, we will, perforce, change the world.

Yours truly,

Malcolm Osbourne