Lovers (21 page)

“That’s exactly what I want to talk to you about, Joe. When Victoria leaves Caldwell, she intends to move out to L.A. I know she’s planning to take a few of our very best creative people with her and open up her own shop. And we can’t do a thing to stop her.”

“Shit! What a situation! I don’t envy you, but I’m sorry as hell for me, let me tell you. I
need
that girl, we’ve won a lot of Clios on advertising she’s supervised, sold a lot of food too.”

“Don’t think I don’t know it. Here’s the favor, Joe. Would you give her some of your business? I was thinking of the three low-cal accounts.”

“Take my business away from you? You’re asking me to take away twenty million dollars of billing as a
favor
to you and give it to a new agency? Are you crazy, Angus?”

“On the contrary. When Victoria walks away, it’s just a question of time before she’ll make a bid for your business anyway,
all of it
. It’s a logical step for her to take. She’s been working exclusively on your accounts since she started at the agency almost eight years ago, she’s grown into the job wonderfully, and now your marketing and advertising guys make a perfect fit with her.”

“Yeah, more’s the pity.”

“Joe, there’s a chance that you’d want to make the move anyway, but you’d feel too much loyalty to me ever to do it.”

“Damn right I wouldn’t. We must be billing a hundred million with you now, Angus.”

“Something like that, Joe, something very close. But my hunch is that if Victoria can make a clean break, taking a few accounts she unquestionably feels she’s earned the right to take, the accounts she’s been involved in most intimately, like the low-cal accounts, she may well feel that she’s being compensated for the years she’s worked so hard. I’m hoping that she won’t be as bitter as she is now, and in the end there will be a lot less of a family feud going on between her and Millicent.”

“The hell you say! Interesting, Angus, very interesting thinking. Sort of a preemptive strike?”

“Exactly.”

“Millicent agree with you?”

“If Millicent ever knew it was my idea … forget it, Joe, my life wouldn’t be worth spit. Things are really tense at home. In fact, my wife and Victoria aren’t talking to each other. I’m the one who’s trying to keep the situation workable. I’m counting on you, Joe, whatever you decide, never to mention this.”

“Hell, you know me better than that. Look, Angus, let me think this over for a day or two. It’s a lot to digest, but, hell, right off the bat, there doesn’t seem to be any reason that it wouldn’t work. We’d keep Victoria and we’d still have Caldwell. Still, give me a chance to think. Are you absolutely sure you’re not going to have second thoughts about this? Twenty million is a big bite, even for a giant agency.”

“I’ve thought about nothing else for months.”

“It’s been as bad as that, huh?”

“Worse, Joe, worse.”

“Just how much do you think we know about Victoria Frost, Archie, besides the fact that she’s a dynamite account supervisor and she’s the heiress apparent at C&C?” Byron asked.

“How much more do you need to know?”

“Well, I’d be interested to find out why she seems so damned
invulnerable,”
Byron said. “She’s only about thirty, same as us, but the longer I know the woman, the more she’s like a fortress to me. It’s not natural. This is not chick behavior.”

“This is not a chick, Byron. This is the opposite of chick.”

“How come she doesn’t have a love life? If she did, with the gossip around this place, we’d know. That still bothers me, although I’d never admit it to anyone but you.”

“Maybe she’s a lesbian. Isn’t that what guys always think when a woman isn’t showing any interest in them? One thing I’m sure of, nobody is asexual when you get right down to it.” Archie pondered the question further. “Asexual means an absence of sex, like a flowerless plant that can reproduce all by itself … Victoria couldn’t be asexual.”

“Maybe it’s all a smoke screen. Maybe she leads a double life as a prostitute in a bordello, like Catherine Deneuve in
Belle du Jour?”
Byron sounded hopeful.

“Byron, I’ve told you to stop seeing those French movies.”

“They say that after four Buñuel flicks you start to grow hair on your palms,” Byron brooded.

“Four!” Archie exclaimed. “Obviously you don’t pay attention to that great warning, ‘Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.’ ”

“Who said that?”

“Jean Cocteau,” Archie answered quickly, counting on Byron not to check the facts. “But look at it this way. Our superior, Victoria Frost, never, ever called Vicky, deals with a great many men in positions of authority, especially at Oak Hill. Maybe her surface is self-protective, merely a smoke screen, a device? One of the many ways legions of women are learning to cope with men in business?”

“Nope. There’s more to it than that, Arch,” Byron said, who, after several years of working closely with her, still felt personally put off by Victoria’s manner that was as poised, polished, and professional as that of a distinguished career diplomat in his posting before retirement, the final posting which is always, by tradition, his most prestigious.

In the course of the last few years, not only had Victoria’s outward behavior become seamlessly, almost disconcertingly smooth, but she had perfected her early leanings toward the severely avant-garde, faultless, expensively unadorned exterior of a fashion nun. If she abandoned her blacks and browns and went so far as to wear taupe or
white, they appeared as startling as magenta and orange would on another woman. No softening wisp escaped her French twist, and she confined the color on the pure cream of her skin to a clear red lipstick. Her features were both classic and mysterious, for they couldn’t hide, to perceptive men’s eyes, the fact that something important was being deliberatively left unexpressed. This gave her a fascinating quality that was more than beauty, and made her the object of endless speculation among those who worked with her.

There was passion there, Archie and Byron had long sensed it, but a passion concealed behind a barrier that prevented them from even guessing what it might be.

One day in the late summer of 1982, just before her thirtieth birthday, Victoria Frost invited both men to dine with her at home, the first time they had been so honored, although, in the course of the last two years, she usually accepted the invitations they tendered to the large, informal parties they sometimes joined forces to give, arriving and leaving alone, without the slightest embarrassment.

They were astonished by her apartment and the exceptional ease with which the room embraced them. Still, as they both knew, such invisible victories never came cheap, although the neighborhood was not at all what they’d expected.

Byron and Archie exchanged amazed glances when they were greeted by Victoria, wearing snug red suede trousers, an oversized pink silk shirt cut like a man’s, and a pair of magnificent carved-jade earrings. She had undone her hair and brushed it away from her face. It wasn’t just that she looked a decade younger, but that she had become a different person from the woman they knew from the office, relaxed and easily approachable, one quality she had never achieved for all her consummate professionalism.

Throughout drinks and dinner served by a maid in the small, candlelit dining room that departed in no way from
the atmosphere of the living room, the three of them exchanged nothing more significant than business gossip. They returned to the living room for coffee and brandy. With the brandy, Victoria told them quietly that she had decided to leave the Caldwell agency and open up on her own.

“Don’t ask me to explain why I’m doing this,” she said, her fine-boned face intent and her precise, clear voice suddenly fierce. “Obviously, both of you have to know that it could only have to do with deep-seated, insoluble problems with my mother, but I just can’t give you any details, not now, and probably never. I’m taking three of the Oak Hill accounts with me when I go. You two created those campaigns. You know that I consider you the most talented team in the agency, and I’d like you to join me.”

She paused for an instant to look at their faces, stiff in astonishment. She resumed speaking on a slightly gentler note. “Look, guys, if you turn me down, I’ll be very disappointed, since Joe Devane really respects the two of you, but he’s already agreed to accept another creative team if I can’t persuade you. In other words, this move doesn’t depend on the two of you, much as I want you to come.
It’s going to happen anyway
, with you or without you. I can pick anyone, any creative team I want, from any agency in town, so long as they’re willing to take the chance and become my partners. Not incidentally, those three accounts bill twenty million dollars. If you say yes, the three of us would become equal partners in the new agency.”

“Wait a minute, Victoria,” Byron said, as stunned by her proposition as by the vistas it presented. “Leaving an agency and starting another is one thing, taking Caldwell accounts with you is another. Especially since you’re family. Jesus!”

“But things like this have been done from time to time, as you must be aware. Of course it’s not considered quite cricket, I know that, but some of the biggest agencies in the business started out that way. Think about that. It’s historic fact.”

“It’s true, it’s happened before,” Archie said slowly. “But
you
know why you’re doing this, and we don’t. Can’t you at least give us some details of
why
Joe Devane has decided to go along with you on this? Caldwell has handled his business forever. If it weren’t for Caldwell, he might just be another food manufacturer.”

“No, Archie, I can’t. Not even if you decide to come with me. But I can tell you that I would never ask you to leave your jobs unless I was absolutely sure that the situation was going to work out. I’m leaving my own job, abandoning my future … what better guarantee do you have than that?”

“Can you tell us
how
it would happen? That’s a minimum to ask,” Byron said. He and Archie had long dreamed of having their own agency, but they’d never envisioned such a bandit’s scenario.

“Very simply and quickly,” Victoria said, “the three of us would resign together and form a new agency, Frost, Rourke, and Bernheim, or Frost, Bernheim, and Rourke—the back end’s up to you, as long as my name comes first … after all, it’s my idea. Within a week or so of our departure, Oak Hill will put three products up for review: Answer Soups, Lean and Mean Breads, and Thinline Desserts, the whole nine yards. Y&R, Ogilvy & Mather, and of course the incumbent, Caldwell, will be invited to bid for them. So will our new agency. After the normal competition we’ll be awarded the three accounts. It’s a transparent device that fools nobody, but it isn’t illegal.”

“Victoria, Byron and I have to talk about this,” Archie said.

“Of course,” she answered, rising. “But I need your answer in twenty-four hours. Yes or no, I’ll still always think you two guys are the best.”

They’d come, Victoria thought, as she got undressed, they couldn’t resist. First, let them give her their assent. Then she’d tell those two unattached bachelors about the move to the Coast. Frost, Rourke, and Bernheim—Frost, Bernheim, and Rourke? What difference did it make,
when “Caldwell Frost” was the way people would end up referring to the new agency before the year was over?

“She has so much more to lose than to gain,” Byron said.

“Yeah, but she’s going to leave Caldwell anyway.”

“We hardly know the Caldwells, they couldn’t pick us out of a police lineup,” Byron pointed out. “I haven’t even seen them since the last Christmas party.”

“Still, it
is
a question of integrity.”

“Victoria has more right to our loyalty than the Caldwells do. She’s the one we work for, the person we’ve been reporting to.”

“Byron, you’re stretching it.”

“She said her problems were insoluble.”

“We don’t have problems with them,” Archie countered.

“We’re not partners in their agency, either. This is the chance of a lifetime.”

“Damn right it is,” Archie said through his teeth. “What price being Mr. Clean?”

“Too high to pay. You want to sit around and see another creative team take over the accounts we launched? Three years of our life and some of the best ideas we’ll ever have went into those campaigns.”

“So you want to do it?” Archie questioned.

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“We
are
a team,” Archie pointed out.

“You’re asking
and
you’re telling. You’re dying to do it.”

“So are you,” Archie said quickly.

“We both want to do it and we both think it’s wrong,” Byron groaned.

“But it’s going to happen, with us or without us. We can’t stop it, so why shouldn’t we be in on it?”

“I can’t think of a single reason, beyond ethical ones.”

“If we’d been that deeply into splitting ethical hairs, we should have gone into religion instead of advertising,” Archie decided, and settled the question.

Everything happened exactly as Victoria told them it would, although Archie and Byron weren’t prepared for the amount of attention they got in
Adweek, Advertising Age
, and
The Wall Street Journal
, as well as in the advertising sections of the business pages across the country. The change of three food accounts from one agency to another would not normally have been seen as more than a small news item, except for the mother-daughter angle. Dozens of journalists were fascinated by the rift in what had seemed to be a dynastic family relationship. The split between mother and daughter, about which, maddeningly, not a single detail emerged, was the subject of enormous amounts of newsprint.