The Ad Biz: Office Stabbings and Media Guy Origins

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

This is the famous passage from the Statue of Liberty poem. New Colossus and its famous last lines have become part of American history. It's also part of the foundation of the unique inclusion of the advertising business.

Once upon a time in the ad world...

Advertising is the only business in the world that takes in the anti-social, the closet drunks, the outed potheads, your basic weirdos, and embraces the egomaniac braggarts. You won't make it as an account executive with a pothead rep, but most likely you can last as a copywriter or an art director if your pupils are a bit dilated. Eccentrics are drawn to the business and welcomed into it. Your finest selection of eccentric is typically found on the creative side, among the copywriters and art directors.

We get a lot of crazies. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people in our industry who, if they were currently working for Lloyd's of London, would have found themselves in the looney bin (or rehab). At review time their bosses lean back and say, “This guy is really going nuts,” and then have HR call home and say, “ I think it’s time we get him some help him because, you know, he’s doing off things.”

Take a good friend of mine, Mark Lewin*, for example. He’s a real a legend. A flake of epic proportions. Mark once worked for XYZ Advertising* for five hours. He had been hired as a graphic designer and asked to start at eight in the morning because XYZ is a by-the-book shop. Sure enough, Mark shows up on day one right on time He meets some key staff, fills out all the forms you have to fill out on the first day on a job, and then around 1:05 he goes out to lunch. He had a regular Wednesday lunch partner with someone at Tate & McMann*. Well, they had a nice lunch like they always do and the guy says, “Why don’t you come to work with me at Tate & McMann as a copywriter?”

They get down to specifics and Mark is offered a job (better than the one he’s got at XYZ). So he goes down to Tate & McMann meets Danny McMann*, the co-owner of that agency, and accepts the offer at about three in the afternoon.

But he couldn’t resist picking up the phone. He’s still up at Tate & McMann and he dials XYZ and asks for personnel. He says, “My name is Mark Lewin. I was working for you this morning. I worked for you for approximately five and a half hours.” And the woman on the other side says, “Yes, what can I do for you?”

Mark says, “I just wanted to know, have I accumulated any vacation time? I know I’ve only been working at XYZ for five and a half hours, but if there’s any vacation money due me I wish you’d send it to me in care of Tate & McMann.”

Once upon a time, I worked at Tate & McMann. The agency was like a school, except all the kids seemed to be crazy. It was my first real job in advertising. I mean my first legitimate job. I was toiling away taking orders from the big bosses and spending my days on the phone trying to get magazine editors and writers to place my client's news releases. I spent a lot of time on hold getting cauliflower ears waiting for my pitch to start.

I found that the whole place was filled with young guys who suddenly discovered that somebody was going to pay them a lot of money for doing these things called advertising and public relations, and all of us got caught up in the insanity of it and went crazy. A whole group of people slowly went out of their skulls.

I did too.

I mean I put a hockey puck through a plate glass window once...and got promoted for my efforts!

This was my initiation into the world of promotion.

Joy Miller* is an unusual lady. She's extremely demure and a very good creative director. One day I was working with her on some of the first ads I had ever collaborated on. We’re grinding away and her phone rang. In addition to unusual, Joy is a picture of intensity person when she’s working and she keeps working, ignoring the phone. Minutes pass. The phone is still ringing. Five, six cycles of ringing. I looked nervously at the phone, perhaps my brow dropped a bit of sweat, but since I was new I deduce that maybe Joy likes a phone to ring for incessantly before she picks it up. It’s still ringing and she still doesn’t answer it but I can see she’s getting more irritated by the second. It's building up to an explosion. Finally she picks up one of those heavy duty X-ACTO knives and she stabs the phone. Not simply cut the wire or something simple like that. I mean she cut right through it, right from the handpiece all the way through the the bottom of the phone. “That should hold it,” she said.

I looked at her and then I said, “I think I hear my phone ringing, be right back.” I didn’t come back for a few days (hey I was young!) until the commotion settled down and I knew my copy was solid (if not brilliant). Years later, I still see Joy and we have a chuckle about it, along with a good cigar. How many people stab their phones? She didn’t joke around with it, either, I mean she wanted to kill that phone. The funny thing is that even after she stabbed it, it still rang. Joy was much calmer after that little incident.

We had another art director at Tate & McMann, named Phil Silverstein*. In the middle of a brainstorming/strategy meeting, Phil decided to leave his wife. His conversation at home went something like this:

Phil: “I’m leaving you. I have a girlfriend.”  

His wife: “How can you do this to me?”  

Phil: "I told you, I have a girlfriend.” 

His wife: “Why me, why Phil why?” 

Phil: “I'll stay but what’s wrong with having a girlfriend? All the other guys at the agency have girlfriends. Why can’t I have one too?”

His wife decided to go after all the men at the agency, regardless if they were married or not. She got into Phil's smartphone backup and restored his contacts to an older phone. She crafted a plan to call all of the wives and girlfriends on his team to tell them that all of us were cheating. Then Phil informed us that she decided not to make the phone calls, but instead she was planning to go all Lorena Bobbitt on us. That when we all got nervous and searched for a good place to hide if she showed up. In dark recesses of the darkroom in the creative department there was a closet with a false wall that no one knew about except Joy and me. I struck a deal with Joy that if we ever heard his wife screaming on the floor she would shepherd me to the closet and stay there until the storm ended. Every man for himself in this situation. You probably think I am joking, but her voicemail was methodically crystal clear: “I’m going to go up and get all you cheating motherf**kers.”

There are a couple of classic stories involving destructive employees. There is a fantastically insane copywriter named Vic*. During a client lunch at the end of the three-martini era, Vic decided that six martinis was the right limit. He came back feeling depressed about everything (except the client he offended with his filthy mouth). After visiting all of us with offices, he decided to quit the ad world and started tearing up his office...throwing picture frames and printers, tossing a computer monitor into the hallway, breaking the chair. His plan to resign was not to craft a short and sweet letter to HR, but rather to destroy everything in his path.

The only thing he had left to handle was his desk. He ripped his blinds off, opened his window and tried to get his monolith of a desk up and out of the window. By now, all of the noise vibrating from his office attracted the admin staff who rushed his door trying to stop the madness as his desk was teetering in the window pane.

For years people would speak about the legendary Vic desk incident. Myth or reality. I ran into him a few years back at an American Marketing Association event and asked him about the validity of the story. He said, “one hundred per cent it's true, but it was only on the alley side side of the building.” I mean, how can you help but low a guy that realizes that if his desk goes out on the street side it causes problems and potential death, but it’s alright on the alley side? That’s a nutty, yet rational man.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that all of us creatives are out of our minds. Really, I only know of one stabbing that ever took place, besides the phone incident, of course.

A photographer named Maggie* once got into a heated argument with our account executive over an ad, so she calmly stabbed the AE with her high-end fountain pen. Yes, there was blood and agonizing moans, but the AE only needed eight stitches and he lived. The agency had to punish Maggie, so their solution was to send her to Hawaii to photograph a new resort client we had. I ran into the AE in Hollywood, reeking of pot and looking manic. He was carrying his cashmere coat over one arm and his Shinola briefcase in the other. He had a weeklong growth of beard and called me Dan throughout our brief catch-up.

On the whole, there’s not that much violence....to be continued...

*-Names are changed to protect the guilty.