Living Room (7 page)

“Well,” she continued, “Saturday mornings I pretend to shop.”

He wasn’t sure he heard her correctly. “Groceries?” he asked.

“No, no, no. I go to Saks, look around, try on things, go to Charles Jourdan, look at the shoes, I like the window at Hoffritz, Hammacher Schlemmer is a ball if you don’t buy anything, I really enjoy that.”

“Does it help you understand the consumer market?”

This time Shirley laughed. “It doesn’t help me understand a goddamn thing, it’s just fun, like solitaire. I have one friend who really likes solitaire, too, and we get together on Sunday evenings mostly, listen to music, and play solitaire.”

“How do two people play solitaire?”

“On opposite sides of the room.”

Was he letting himself in for a kook?

“Could we talk about the job?” asked Shirley. “I mean what you might have in mind, okay?”

“I had in mind,” he said slowly, studying her reaction, “a position which would enable you to work on many different accounts, reporting to the creative director and no one else except perhaps me from time to time. It’s our most interesting copywriting job, beholden to no account, working on whatever needs troubleshooting.” He relit his pipe. “There’s a hitch. I have a fair number of copywriters in the agency who are hit-and-miss. They come up with some good ones and some not-so-good ones. I’d like to get in someone whose track record for being on the nose is somewhat better than, say, my doctor’s. You’d be on trial. If you blew a big one, you’d be out because I couldn’t demote you and get away with it. My clients who stick with us do so because they find us reliable. What they don’t know is the amount of hit-and-miss that goes on before they see the work. I’d like someone as reliable as our clients think we are.”

“Would you like me to meet with your creative director?”

“Marvin? No. He’d find a reason not to hire you.”

“Wouldn’t it be difficult working for someone who hadn’t had a hand in the hiring?”

“Yes.” After a moment, “That bother you?”

“Yes.”

“Could you live with it?”

Shirley thought about the two-weeks’ worth of disappointing interviews. This was the one opportunity. She shouldn’t tell him that. What she said was, “I’d like to think about it overnight.”

*

The next morning Crouch phoned her. “What do you think?” he said in a voice that was not so casual.

“If you’ll think of it as a two-way trial,” said Shirley, “I’m game. If I blow a big one, you terminate me. If you all blow a good idea of mine, I’ll leave.”

And that was how Shirley Hartman became the youngest person in advertising to hold the position of number-one troubleshooting copywriter in a not-so-small agency. The first few weeks were rough. Not in terms of work; she loved the brinksmanship of the challenges that were put before her, Crouch in the hope that she would succeed, Marvin Goodkin, the creative director, in the hope that she would fail. It was the attention she received from others in the agency, who referred to her, inevitably, as “the princess” or “Arthur’s fair-haired boy.” After a time, some of the people relaxed because their own jobs were not threatened and because Shirley seemed to have brought a new vitality and hope to plans, campaigns, and even meetings. The staff began to talk of her as “a natural.”

Once, during her early months at Armon, Caiden, Crouch, Shirley woke up from a bad dream in which she was trying to sell the Constitutional Convention on a somewhat different version of the Declaration of Independence, and as she awoke, she was being driven from the chamber not because of the substance of her changes but because—and this is what gave it the nightmarish quality—
she was the only woman there,
depriving her colleagues of an all-male atmosphere conducive to serious discussion. She went to see a Manhattan doctor about a prescription for sleeping pills that might keep her from dreaming as much as she did.

*

The history of the world is the history of one-half of the world: men. If Shirley Hartman had been born in any of the centuries that preceded her own, her chances of being known to us would be minimal. Without a royal pedigree or the extraordinary genius of Marie Curie or Jane Austen, Shirley’s birth and life would not have been recorded in the annals of malekind.

It was her fortune to be born in a century in which the jostling of radio, newspapers, TV, created a void: all those media and what to say? With only so many wars, elections, crimes and financial scandals to report, the void was filled with gossip passing as news. The media encouraged the proliferation of celebrities in every field of endeavor because the more there were, the greater the chance of filling the begging space between advertisements. Thus Shirley Hartman was born in an ideal time to become famous.

Word of her accomplishments spread, first through the industry via items in
Ad Daily
and
Ad Age
,
and then through the women’s page of
The New York Times,
which ran a feature on women in advertising, and finally westward as a result of an AP story headlined “Girl Wonder in Advertising” that was reproduced in whole or in part in one hundred and sixty-one newspapers. Her growing self-confidence, which began to declare itself in wit and candor, caused her to be invited as a guest on more than one television talk show. She was asked to sit on the dais at several industry meetings, and now that women were beginning to be acknowledged as economic human beings, Shirley became a sought-after speaker at business conventions, a catch as a dinner guest. She was propositioned by men and by employers, and while she sometimes agreed to the former, she merely reported the latter to her boss, Arthur Crouch, which added to his pride and her pay.

The next turning point in Shirley’s life had nothing to do with advertising. It was the result of what came to be called in the newspapers, and later in history books, the Great Harlem Fire.

CHAPTER SIX

THE GREAT HARLEM FIRE shook the conscience of New York City. To demonstrate the hopelessness of Harlem, a group of militant blacks set fire to a tenement in such a terrible state of disrepair that it was deserted first by its helpless occupants and then by the runaway landlord. Gutting the eyesore building was not an entirely bad idea; it was surrounded, however, by other tenements in bad shape and filled with people who had nowhere to move to.

When the first fire trucks arrived on the scene, flames were geysering from the roof. Someone—the sniper was never identified—shot the first fireman off the first truck. In a rage, the firemen put their wounded fellow on the truck; they could get him to a hospital faster than waiting around for the hopelessly slow-arriving city ambulances. The firemen on the other trucks, glancing apprehensively at the rooftops, saw the first truck leave. They decided to leave the scene of danger also. A battalion commander, whose car entered the one-way street from the other direction, tried to stop them. The men shouted obscenities at him (it had never happened before) and took off.

Within minutes a city-wide alarm was out, police emergency
trucks were spilling dozens of cops out into the block. As the fire raged, the police searched the rooftops on the adjoining buildings, and then the rooftops on the entire block. Finally, they were able to give assurances to the other fire companies responding to what was now a four-alarmer. Valuable time had been lost. With the firemen insisting on police protection wherever they moved, they were less efficient than they might otherwise have been, and though hundreds and later thousands of people were evacuated from the area, the conflagration was not contained until it burned
out six square blocks of central Harlem, leaving only stark walls that, for safety’s sake, had to be knocked down.

The event made front-page headlines for days. There was talk of the disobedient firemen being tried for criminal negligence. Then the fireman who had been shot died of his wounds. One editorial said the firemen who had left the scene had been as
justified as someone who shoots back in self-defense. While the Mayor’s Emergency Committee was attempting to relocate the displaced thousands in other boroughs—many spent weeks in the Armory being fed by the Red Cross—a great debate began among the city fathers and articulate citizens in an attempt to turn the thoughts of the city into constructive channels, while the militants sought to keep the pot boiling. There was a debate in the City Council as to the type of high-rise dwellings that should be built on the site and how they would be funded. Many white people as well as blacks insisted that all the City Council was proposing was the creating of new tenements and, therefore, new slums.

Shirley Hartman had an idea. Where to voice it? She wrote an outline of her plan for the Op-Ed page of
The New York Times.
To her astonishment, the very day the article appeared, she was invited to discuss her plan with the Board of Estimate and the City Council.

Though by now she had done a fair amount of public speaking, the experience of addressing the assembled legislators of New York City, seeing before her faces that she had frequently seen in
th
e newspapers and on television, brought a frog to her throat during her opening sentences. She didn’t want her idea to suffer because of poor elocution, so she cleared her throat, apologized and started over again in a voice that was affirmative and controlled.

“Any dwellings built on the site of that catastrophe will be tainted in the minds of the people who live there. You wouldn’t build a high rise over a cemetery. Harlem doesn’t need new high rises to replace the old ones. It needs a chance at a new way of life for the people who have not been relocated, the ones who are still living in the dozens of blocks surrounding the gutted area.”

The television cameras zoomed in on a black councilman, the first to applaud.

Shirley urged that, instead of the high rises, there be built the largest urban playground in the United States, not for preschoolers, who had their swings and slides elsewhere, but for those whose idle hands the devil used for mischief to others. For preteens, there would be a block-long maze, the walls of which were a mini-museum of science and technology, gears to turn, levers that lifted weights, and a steel-ball perpetual-motion machine that could be watched for an hour by an eight-year-old. Local schools should be invited to give special credits to students who mastered the mini-museum, which was really a curiosity box for getting to understand industrial society. And for pure fun, the preteens would have a hall of mirrors, fifteen full-length reflectors that made short kids tall and tall kids short and bent everyone with laughter.

For the teen-agers, Shirley’s plan called for an Audio Box to provide fifty boys and girls at a time with headsets to enable them to hear their favorite recordings but which would produce no external sound to bother anyone else in the playground. “Near the Audio Box,” said Shirley, “I see a cleverly designed obstacle course with fifteen ways for the boys to show off to each other and to the girls; parallel bars,
twenty-foot ropes to climb, an outdoor gym that would beat standing around street corners.”

In her audience there were murmurs about expense, and counter-murmurs that it would be a lot cheaper than funded housing. There were applause and boos.

“Please hear me out,” said Shirley, and because they were being televised, the legislators quieted down.

“I see the entire six-block area surrounded by a border of yard-square mini-gardens, thousands of them filled with topsoil, each allocated to a teen-ager for the season so that she or he could grow flowers or tomatoes and get in touch with the growing seasons in a way few children in Harlem have ever experienced. Think how beautiful it would look during the outdoor months. And believe me, growing vegetables would be doubly constructive.”

For adults beyond working age, Shirley spoke of putting up dozens of triangular checkers-domino-chess tables whose tops rotated to provide a board of the players’ choice, each table sheltered in a plastic cupola that made afternoon-long games possible even in inclement weather. And she suggested that throughout the playground there be placed what she called “stoop chairs,” colorful plastic rockers, their seats connected by ball-and-socket joints to stands anchored in the concrete in twos and threes, so oldsters could sit around and talk or rotate the chairs to face the sun.

Shirley recommended that the six-block area be tended not by Parks Department employees but by Courtesy Patrols, older teen-agers who wore arm bands and received two dollars an hour for maintaining order and cleaning up at the end of the day.

“Now,” said Shirley, “I know the people in this chamber are concerned about the funds for all this. I suggest that the seed money be provided by executives in selected industries at the rate of one hundred dollars for each ten thousand dollars of annual income, tunneled through a tax-deductible organization, and that people like George Delacorte and Roger Stevens be invited to chip in bigger amounts.”

The suggestion for private funding, recorded by television, drew the biggest applause of all from the assembled legislators.

“I suggest to you,” she concluded, “that this playground will attract not only thousands from the nearby tenements but that the mayors of other cities with blighted ghetto areas will send delegations to study this New York plan, that instead of practicing the national sport of reviling this city they will come to emulate it. Even tourists and hardened New Yorkers will come to observe this playground in action. It may result in the first steady incursion of white spectators to Harlem since the days of Small’s Paradise.”