The LeBaron Secret (7 page)

With that, Eric LeBaron clears his throat softly, leans forward on the sofa, and makes a steeple of his fingers. “Excuse me, Mother,” he says. It is the first time he has spoken.

Sari throws him a quick look. “Yes, Eric?”

“Excuse me, Mother, but I think I see what these fellows are trying to do.”

Now there is a collective, if inaudible, sigh of relief in the room. All is not yet utterly lost for the boys. Another opinion is at least being offered, and there is a fleeting chance—a fleeting one—that the day may be saved, even though the boys know from long experience that it is Sari who tells her son what to do, and not the other way around.

“I'm not saying I'm one hundred percent in favor of this particular campaign,” he says carefully, and the briefly hopeful looks on the other men's faces fade quickly. “But I see what they're trying to say, and I think I should tell you that what they are showing us today is based on a suggestion of my own a while back.”

“Of
yours?
”

“Yes,” he says. “You see—the idea of an upscale campaign for Baronet is based on a very definite national trend that has been going on for the last ten, twenty years.”

“What trend is that?”

“Wine has become a fashionable drink. It has become the drink of choice for upwardly mobile people, particularly young people—young urban professionals, the people who—”

Sari waves her hand impatiently. “I know all that,” she says. “Are you trying to tell me something I don't already know? That trend started in the late nineteen sixties. Are you trying to tell me I'm behind the times?”

“Of course not, but the point is—”

“The point is that those people, those yuppies you're talking about, don't drink
our
wine. Why, they wouldn't touch a bottle of Baronet with a ten-foot pole! You won't see
our
wine being served at any Park Avenue parties, Eric. On the Bowery, sure. Why, every wino they pick up on skid row is lugging a pint of Baronet Thunder Mountain Red in a paper bag!”

“But what I am trying to say,” he begins slowly, and Sari can see the small forceps scar on his left temple beginning to redden, as it often does when he is angry or upset. No one else notices this, but she does. Good, she thinks, let him squirm a bit. “What I am trying to say,” he continues, “is that we don't have to direct our entire marketing effort toward skid-row winos and Bowery bums.”

“You want to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse—is that it?”

“There is another market, Mrs. LeBaron,” Mike Geraghty interjects.

“I know there is! But it's not
our
market.”

“But is there any reason, Mother, why we shouldn't also try to tap this other market, with an advertising campaign designed to make the Baronet name just a little bit respectable?”

“And turn our backs on the market we've got already? Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? I tell you, our market doesn't read
Town & Country
. It reads the
National Enquirer
and the girlie magazines. It doesn't watch the ‘MacNeil-Lehrer Report,' it watches ball games and prizefights. Our research shows us that. We're sold in
supermarkets
, Eric, to men and women who drive home in pickup trucks.”

“But do we have to concentrate on that market
exclusively?
While this other market is—”

“Don't change horses in midstream—did you ever hear that piece of advice? Don't take your money off a winning horse—that's another.”

“And, while we're exchanging clichés,” Eric says, “there's another about putting all your eggs in one basket.”

“Bull-do!”

The three other men in the room are now all extremely uneasy. It is painful for them to have to witness a member of their own sex being taken to task by a member of the opposite one, particularly when that member of the opposite sex happens to be the man's own mother. Eric, they know, is talking marketing. That is supposed to be his bailiwick, and to talk marketing is supposed to be his right. A marketing vice-president is supposed, at least from time to time, to offer marketing suggestions and advice, and that is all he is doing.

There is a silence, and then Mike Geraghty says, “You see, Mrs. LeBaron, what we have been proposing is some sort of advertising campaign that would begin to add some respectability, some dignity, to the popular image that the Baronet label now has, in preparation—”

“In preparation for what?”

“In preparation for the possibility of introducing a new line of higher-priced wines. Of château quality. With new packaging, with a new label—retaining the Baronet signature, of course. ‘Château Baronet,' in fact, is one of the labels we've been tossing about.”

“Who's ‘we'? Is this some new idea of Joanna's?”

“No, actually it was mine,” Eric says.

“Only a suggestion, of course,” Mike Geraghty says, “in an effort to capture a share, at least, of this upscale market.”

“Belatedly,” Eric adds.

“What do you think of the name Château Baronet, Mrs. LeBaron?” Mike Geraghty says. “We rather like it.”

Sari makes a face. “
Château
Baronet,” she says. “Sounds kind of pansy to me. Well, I'll tell you what I think. I think this is all a terrible idea. I think it's worse than terrible. I think it's a lousy idea, I think it stinks.”

Now the sighs are audible.

“Let me tell you something about wine,” she continues, folding her hands across her desk and adopting the attitude of an all-wise mother superior in a convent addressing a group of unschooled novices. “Wine is crushed from grapes, and grapes grow on vines, and vines grow in soil, in earth. In the earth, they depend on rain and on sun—on nature—on sunny days and cool, dry nights. In some of our northern vineyards, like Napa, we let wild mustard grow between the vines in spring. Why wild mustard? No one knows exactly, but wild mustard seems to nourish grapevines in certain areas. Up in the foothills, weeds like clover and vetch seem to work better—no one knows why, but they do. Nature again. Later, closer to harvest time, these weeds are all plowed under, and this also seems to help the vines. Provides soil texture. You see, that's what I think all you boys sometimes seem to forget—you, in your Madison Avenue offices, Joanna in her duplex on Fifth Avenue, even Eric here in his office in the city. You've forgotten the wild mustard, and the clover, and the purple vetch. How many of you have ever watched the bees, the way a hive of bees will attack a vineyard? A single bee can suck a grape until it's as dry and empty and wrinkled as a dead balloon. I've watched this, watched with tears in my eyes, and watched as those bees fell, one by one to the ground, drunk from their drinking on our vines.

“And the larks! ‘Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,' you think, but larks can be some of our worst predators. Those pretty songbirds can be some of our most voracious scavengers—insatiable!—and a summer of larks for us is a summer of disaster. As a girl, I used to watch the Chinese field hands chanting, shouting, flapping their arms, beating gongs, trying to frighten off a flock of larks from the vines. Did no good at all! Forces of nature, you see.” She pauses for effect. “That's what I think you've all forgotten, sitting there in your ivory towers. We're not Park Avenue aristocrats. Hell, we're
farmers
. We work the land. We study the sky and sniff the air for signs of rain. We battle nature every day. We're real people, and we're ordinary people, and those are the people who drink our wine, and that's how we've made our reputation.” And she brings down her fist, hard, on the top of the walnut partners' desk. “And that's how we got rich.”

After a moment, Eric says dryly, “Well, thanks for the lecture, Mother.”

“That wasn't a lecture,” Sari says. “That was a sermon!” She pauses, and then smiles. “Well,” she says, “how about some lunch? I don't know about any of you, but I'm starving.” She presses the button on her desktop and rings for her secretary, Miss Martino.

Eric rises. “Sorry,” he says, “but I can't join you. I have an engagement.”

He can do this. He can escape, with an excuse, but the others cannot. As long as the Madison Avenue boys remain in San Francisco, they belong to Assaria LeBaron. Sari nods a curt farewell to Eric, and Gloria Martino appears at the doorway, notepad and pencil in hand.

“Something to drink before lunch, boys?” Sari asks.

Mike Geraghty speaks first. “I'll have a nice chilled glass of Baronet Chablis,” he says.

“Good!” says Sari. “I'll have a touch of Baronet vermouth”—she winks at them—“mixed with a couple of jiggers of Beefeater gin.”

Eric LeBaron strides into his office on the other side of the building and flings himself into the chair behind his desk. Marylou Chin, his willowy Eurasian secretary, has followed him into the room. “Well,” he says, “she did it again. Let me have it, in front of the whole Madison Avenue gang.
Shit!
”

Ordinarily, Marylou would have simply made clucking noises with her tongue, murmured something noncommittally sympathetic, and then asked him if it was all right if she took her lunch hour. But just in the last few weeks the nature of their relationship has changed, and so, instead, she closes the office door behind them, takes a seat in the small chair opposite him, crosses her legs, and carefully lights a long filtered cigarette, studying his face. “How much longer are you going to let her treat you like this, Eric?” she asks at last.

“Shit, I don't know,” he says. “Until they carry me out of here with a ruptured, bleeding ulcer, I suppose.”

“It's—it's intolerable, is what it is.”

“I know.”

“You work so hard, you give her so much, and she rewards you by treating you like some sort of galley slave. Like shit, as you say.”

“I know.”

“You're the one who should be running this company. Not her.”

“I know I could run it a damn sight better,” he says.

“Of course you could.” She shapes the ash on her cigarette against the rim of his ashtray. “Was it—was it the same sort of thing today?”

“Of course. She simply refuses—refuses to consider anything that even remotely smacks of a new idea. Refuses.”

“You've offered her so many good ideas.”

“The Madison Avenue guys had come up with a new campaign that was, frankly, shit. But they were on the right track. But she, of course, derailed them before they could even get the train out of the station. Refused to listen to anything anybody else had to say.”

“Poor Eric.”

“You should have heard her little speech today. All about larks and honeybees and wild mustard and purple vetch—whatever the hell that is.”

Once more she shapes the ash on her cigarette. “You know,” she says, “I've been thinking.”

“Thinking what?”

“There was an article a couple of weeks ago in
Newsweek
. In fact it was the cover story. It was on Alzheimer's disease, that thing old people get. It's like senility. They can remember something that happened fifty years ago, but they can't remember whether they opened the refrigerator door to put something in or to take something out. She's what now—seventy-four? Do you think that might be what she has, Eric?”

“Ha! I wish it were.”

“I mean—well, that thing she did with the plane. That was really pretty crazy. I know how embarrassed you were by that. We were
all
embarrassed. ‘Is that the woman you
work
for?' friends said to me.”

“No, she was just acting up. Just being cute. Just seeing how much she could get away with—she and George Hessler. And I'm sure as hell George had something to do with it. Must have. She let him do it because she thinks he's cute.”

Marylou Chin laughs softly. “Well, he is pretty good-looking,” she says. “But after all.”

“No,” he says, “she's always been like this, I'm afraid, M'lou. As long as I've known her. Which of course is all my life.”

“What about when your father was alive? Was she the same way with him?”

He frowns. “That was a little different. They were more like a working partnership. In business together. Dad was a smoothie, Mother was the toughie. When heads needed to get banged together, that was Mother's job. They came to Dad to apply the Band-Aids. That was what he did best, smoothing over the hurt feelings Mother left in her wake.”

“Poor Eric,” she says again. “It just hurts me so to see what she's doing to you!”

“A working partnership, that's what that marriage was. You know, sometimes I've tried to imagine my mother and my father fucking, and I just can't. I just can't picture the two of them—you know, making love. Fucking. And yet they must have, two or three times at least.”

They sit in silence for a while, and very slowly Marylou Chin stubs out her cigarette. “Well, I know what I think you ought to do,” she says finally.

“What's that?”

“Confront her. Tell her exactly what you think. It's wrong for you to keep your thoughts and feelings bottled up like this. I think you should go to her and tell her that you don't intend to take this kind of treatment anymore. Give her an ultimatum.”

“Ha,” he says. “What good would that do? She'd just say, ‘Fine, get out.' And then where'd I be? Out on the street, without a job.”

“But she'd be a fool—an absolute fool—to let you go!”

“But don't forget, I know her, M'lou. I know her much better than you do, and I've known her much longer. I
know
her, I tell you.”

“Well, even if she were foolish enough to let you go—why, there are dozens of companies that would be just dying to snap you up, all over town!”

“You don't understand,” he says. “This is my career. I'm nearly forty years old, and I've worked for this company for half my life. I've made this company my career. Even summers, home from college, I was out there with the braceros, picking grapes, getting paid by the box lot, working for Baronet. It's the only job I've ever had.”