A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  (Was this the truth, or had he told Charles Mullins that I was in from the beginning? I chose to believe him but I wouldn’t bet my life – professional or any other version of it – that he wasn’t lying through his teeth.)

  My second question was:

  “So what’s in it for Charles?”

  “Well, we haven’t promised him some kind of hidden interest in the agency, if that’s what you mean.” (It wasn’t, it hadn’t crossed my mind. I suppose such things happen, but the advertising business, in my experience, despite what people may think, isn’t that crudely corrupt.)

  “No,” continued Geoff, “what’s in it for him is that he likes what he gets from McConnell Martin, but he doesn’t want all his eggs in one basket. This way he gets another agency but he’s also getting McConnells – in his mind that’s who we are – all over again. It’s what he knows and what he likes. And he’s got a stick to beat them with when he needs it.”

  My third question was this, and I remember the words precisely:

  “Isn’t Gerry just going to sue the arse off us? Sorry, I’ll rephrase that; wouldn’t Gerry just sue the arse off us? Surely there must be something in a board director’s contract that stops him from doing something like this?”

  (Note 1. In the very act of drawing attention to the fact that I had first said ‘isn’t’, had I not indicated that I was already half way down the slippery slope to buying into their scheme? I am pretty sure I can recall seeing Vince steal a sideways look – just the smallest of smiles – at Geoff at exactly this point.)

  (Note 2. I had never bothered to read a word of my own board director’s contract.)

  Vince spoke now, the first time he had said anything.

  “Gerry’s not going to do a fucking thing. You think he’s going to call Charles Mullins out on this? Yeah, right. McConnell’s biggest fucking client! They’re twenty per cent of the agency’s billing. No mate, he won’t like it, he’ll kick up seven kinds of shit, he’ll call us treacherous bastards, but in the end, he’s got no option, he’ll wear it.”

  And Vince was right. He wore it. In public, Gerry even pretended to claim that we were starting the new agency with McConnell Martin’s blessing. Not a bad tactic; always best to look big if you can.

  And Vince was right too about how Gerry would react in private. He did threaten us, he did kick up seven kinds of shit, and he did call us treacherous bastards.

  And as I sipped thoughtfully from my second glass of complimentary Air France Chablis, I couldn’t help but reflect that, as far as Geoff and Vince were concerned, he’d had a damned good point.

  On Geoff’s recommendation we hired a firm of solicitors to sort out the paperwork. Some piggy-eyed, thin-lipped assassin they put on the job drew everything up and in due course, it was off to their offices in Mayfair for the ceremonial cutting of palms and mingling of blood. Then it was all about business plans and getting the start-up money from the bank. Of course, a business plan, no matter how good, doesn’t actually get you any money. It just gets you through the door. Once through the door, you have to show them the colour of your money. That bit is called providing collateral. To get the readies needed to get our agency off the ground we had, quite literally, to put our houses on it, or at least that part of them that one bank or another didn’t already own. After three months of insanely frenetic activity, during which period there were also a couple of personal milestones, the birth of my second child, India, and my fortieth birthday, we opened our agency in the spring of 1990. The picture in ‘Campaign’ showed the three of us leaning on a fire-escape of our new office in Frith Street. (Fire escapes, for some inexplicable reason, were the kind of background favoured by ‘Campaign’ photographers.) Geoff, short and lean, on the left, Vince, no taller and already thickening on the right, and me, by at least half a head – half a gleaming, shaven head – the tallest, in the middle. It was the logical way for the photographer to arrange us and it carried a symbolic significance too. In terms of public perception, I was the main man, the one with the reputation, the one on whose coat-tails the others were riding to success. How soon they forget!

  The pictures had already been taken before that first ‘Campaign’ article announcing the launch had been written, and we had the proofs in front of us during the interview with the journalist. Scrawled across the bottom were our names as we appeared in the shot, running from left to right. The journalist assumed that would be our agency name, Bradley, Williams, Dutton, and when neither Geoff nor Vince contradicted him, I, though slightly taken aback, said nothing, thinking it would be a little immodest and rather uncool to announce that my name should have been first; that was most definitely not the kind of impression I wanted to create. So Bradley, Williams, Dutton we became, soon to be commonly referred to as BWD, the W never to completely forget that he should have come before the B and always nurturing the tiniest of grudges as a result.

  As the Airbus crossed back across the channel that tiniest of grudges was recalled and considerably amplified along with all the other little slights and small broken promises of which I imagined I had been the victim over the years. Treacherous bastards, yes, indeed. But who did I really have to blame but myself? Hadn’t the signs been there from the very beginning?

  But at the beginning it was all such a whirlwind – who had time to notice? We had offices to find, and interior design to bicker about, and finances to organise, and cash flow to fret over, and staff to hire, not to mention trying to do the work we were actually supposed to be doing: dreaming up the new campaigns for the business that Charles Mullins had, as promised, delivered to us. One thing we weren’t doing a lot of was cold-calling, touting for business. Because the phones never seemed to stop ringing with potential clients calling us! As much as anything it was pure luck, but our timing seemed to have been incredibly propitious. In 1990, the country was on the verge of going to hell in a handcart, driven there by poll tax protesters who would soon have Mrs Thatcher dead in the water. But, despite the trouble the country was in, BWD had somehow caught a wave that would carry us on to a sun-drenched beach where caskets of pirate treasure lay open and ready for us to plunder.

  I won’t say we didn’t put in the hours – we seemed to be in the office night and day, weekends not excluded – and I think we played our hand pretty shrewdly, but from day one, almost nothing seemed to go wrong and virtually everything went right. For the next nine and whatever it was years, right up to the point where the new breakfast cereal client had come through our door bearing the weight of his seven-million-pound account of which we had gladly relieved him, we had stayed on the same path, unstoppably onward and upward. No longer were we in the original boutiquey little office in Frith Street but now, via two intermediate moves to places bigger and better, we were comfortably ensconced in our gleaming bought and paid for (okay, mortgaged, but still) eight-storey building in Fitzrovia. We had bought a couple of companies, a design place and a PR outfit, so we could claim to offer a broader all-in-one client service, and we were talking about going public in a minor way, by listing on the AIM market on the Stock Exchange. It was either that or fatten up even more and then sell out to someone bigger for a small – no, who I am kidding – a seriously sizable fortune. We’d already had two or three serious offers but had decided we were in no rush, and if we hung on for a while longer we could become even richer. The bottom line – a bottom line with rows of lovely noughts all in the black – was this: if there were an E to P scale for agency start-ups, which, if not quite expressed in those terms, believe me, there most definitely was – to our intense satisfaction our rivals absolutely hated us – then BWD would have had nearly ten years of straight Es, all picked out in the very deepest shade of envious green.

  Looked at like that, despite my current difficulties with Vince and Geoff and sodding Lucille, I still had a lot – and a lot to lose. So as I bade the Air France lovelies ‘à bientôt’ and stepped off the plane,
I resolved to meet underhandedness with underhandedness and to take a leaf out of Gerry Morgan’s book. I too would appear to accept the situation with good grace and embrace the idea of Lucille’s promotion as if it had been my own. Better, far better, to look big than bitter. Then I would kill – no, perhaps not kill, but, shall we say, slowly stifle her, with kindness.

  *

  A few days later – it was Thursday, I believe, that had become shrink day – I was back in Donald McEwan’s comfy mole hole in Richmond. I began, naturally, by sharing with him the happy events of Cannes. (If it surprises you that this was the kind of thing we discussed and consider that I should have been examining instead the long term effects of my potty training or similar, then I can only say that you may well be right, and it might have done me more good if we had. But, as I have indicated, I used Donald as a father confessor as much as anything and with my wife’s shoulder unavailable – of which more later – it was inevitable that it would be his that I would cry on.)

  Donald heard me out and then said, “Well, that doesn’t sound too bad at all.”

  “I’m sorry Donald, did you not hear what I’ve been saying for the past ten minutes?” (I glanced at the clock. Shit. As usual, I’d been late arriving and it was already twenty past.)

  “Yes, you told me your company won lots of awards [somehow his precise Scottish enunciation made ‘awards’ sound as meretricious as they really were] and that your colleagues want to give you more support by sanctioning the appointment of a deputy – at considerable expense I would imagine – to lighten your workload.”

  My mouth was already half way open in preparation for saying something like ‘I didn’t say anything of the sort’ when I shut it again.

  Now, of course, anyone with half a brain might have turned my words around and presented them back to me in the way that Donald had done. It didn’t need his dozen degrees and PhD and years of shrinkery to have that kind of insight – if insight it was. But if it had been anyone else, I would probably have dismissed what they had said out of hand. Instead, because it was Donald, and I was in his little basement hideaway, the one place I came to for some inner reflection – even if I did do all I could to avoid it when I got there – what he said sometimes made me reconsider. That is the value of going to shrinks I suppose, or at least, it was the value I got from going to see Donald. Occasionally, it gave me pause and in that pause I had a moment or two to steady the ship.

  But if what he seemed to be implying was right, that I might be just being a teensy weensy bit paranoid, then why? And if the answer to that was the obvious one, that I was, for some reason, feeling particularly insecure, then why? And that always seems to be the downside of going to see people like Donald; the endless introspection, the never ending whys. Because after every why, there is always another one, and where do they lead in the end? Perhaps, I suppose, if I ever let them, yes, back to my potty training but what, to coin a glib but appropriate phrase, really is the use of all that shit? I think, I hope – goodness, I spent enough – that what I may have got from all this, was that, in some mysterious way, all the little promptings from Donald somehow affected the workings of my mind – slightly recalibrated the speed of the whirling cogs – so that afterwards I functioned that little bit more smoothly.

  Eventually Donald broke the silence with an unexpected question that threw me.

  “How old are you now, Andrew?”

  “I think you know that. Forty-nine.”

  “Ah.”

  I got defensive.

  “Well, what’s that got to do with the price of fish? Surely you’re not going to hand me the old midlife crisis line. If I’d wanted the platitudes of an agony uncle I’d have written to the ‘Sun’.”

  I winced even as I said it. But Donald remained as serene as ever, apparently unmoved by my gratuitous rudeness. (As I’ve said he never seemed to judge; never even checked his watch or made a comment when I was – as I habitually was – late for my session.)

  “What I would say Andrew is that sometimes people use a forthcoming birthday – especially those they think of as a ‘big one’ – as being a moment to do a kind of personal stocktaking. But I’m not sure they always place the proper value on what they find.”

  “Are you talking about Peggy?”

  “Peggy, yes, and Alison—”

  “Alison?”

  “Alison, yes, and everyone – and everything – else. Time alters perspective, doesn’t it? That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I thought hindsight was a wonderful thing.”

  He didn’t respond to that so I managed to have the last word, but today, I had to concede, Donald had shaded it.

  Afterwards, in the back of the cab that took me back to the office, I wondered: perhaps it did have something to do with the price of fish.

  Chapter 10

  Pound Ridge, New York and New York, New York, 1979

  We took the Metro North railroad – so much more glamorous a word to my English ears than ‘railway’ – silly I admit, but there it is – to Stamford and from there we would get a cab to Pound Ridge. I was as excited as a kid going to the seaside. It was the first time I’d been on a train in America, and if it wasn’t quite like it was in the movies – I had some vague forties image in my mind, black and white, fellows in trilbies and Katherine Hepburn types in New Look clothes – I was thrilled to discover we were going through places that the movies had made famous. The first station we came to was Harlem, and then a couple of stops later came Pelham.

  “This is the Pelham?” I asked Peggy.

  “Only one I know.”

  “As in ‘The Taking of Pelham 123’?”

  “The very same.”

  “With Walter Matthau. And Robert Shaw.”

  “Well, I don’t believe they’re here all the time.”

  “Blimey!” I said, star struck like a tourist being taken around Bel Air. But when I looked out of the window, and I saw what a dreary looking place Pelham was, I sort of wished I hadn’t seen it.

  But the next stop really did get me going. New Rochelle. It wasn’t actually until I heard the announcer say we were approaching Nooroeshel that I realised its true significance.

  “You don’t mean—” I said, breathlessly.

  “What now?” asked Peggy, who was trying to read ‘The New York Times’ or, at least, a very small portion of it, the tonnage of the Saturday edition being such that you wouldn’t make a serious dent in it in a year. Her tone suggested that my childlike wonder might have begun to wear a little thin.

  “Well, I never realised until now that Nooroeshel was actually New Rochelle – in fact, I never realised it was an actual place.”

  “What the hell are you talking about Andy?”

  “Nooroeshel!” I said. “It’s where they lived in ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ … Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore … with their twin beds … what were their names in the show now? … Rob … Rob and—”

  “Laura.”

  “That’s it. Rob and Laura. Rob and Laura … PETRIE! Got it. Rob and Laura Petrie and little Richie.”

  She grinned and made a little noise, a sort of ‘oh boy!’ sound.

  “You know who else lives here?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “My parents.”

  “Rob and Laura Petrie lived in the same town as your parents?”

  “For years. Rob and Laura dropped in all the time.”

  “Now,” I said “I am seriously impressed.” And, slightly tragically perhaps, I really was.

  On we went, me playing the wide-eyed naïf and her the savvy New Yorker, all the way to Stamford.

  During one of my calls to the Gardner Inn we had discussed how Peggy and I were to get there from the station at Stamford, and Mrs Gardner – she and I had got quite pally after so many conversations – very kindly volunteered her h
usband to pick us up.

  “Oh that’s good of you, Mrs Gardner, but I’m sure we can get a cab or something,” I replied, hoping that I sounded just helpless enough that she wouldn’t take me at my word.

  “No way, Mr Williams! Dan’s always in Stamford. He’ll be glad to do it.”

  Result!

  Dan Gardner turned out to be a florid, chubby but muscly looking chap of about fifty with an unimpressively sparse beard. He was waiting outside the station as promised, standing by an enormous estate car, one of those gas guzzlers with fake ‘woody’ side panels, beloved of suburban America.

  “Jeep Wagoneer” he proudly told me in response to my polite enquiry – made not because I was particularly interested in the answer so much as to break the slightly awkward silence in which we were travelling.

  “’75 model. Eighty thousand miles and runs like new,” he added, affectionately tapping the steering wheel like he might the neck of a favourite steed. There then followed one of the usual ‘you from England? I have a cousin in Lye-cester’ conversations which left me wishing I’d never opened my mouth and Peggy suppressing a giggle in the back seat. (I had sat in the front, not wanting to make Mr Gardner feel like a chauffeur.)

  Soon, we pulled on to a gravelly drive and the photo in Karen Brown’s book came to life. I don’t know from which colony this ‘colonial’ something or other took its architectural cues – it didn’t seem very likely that the Pilgrim Fathers would have had anything similar – but it was absolutely perfect to my eyes, the very picture of Technicolor America. If Doris Day or Rock Hudson had come strolling out of the front door, I wouldn’t have been the least surprised. The lawns of the so called front yard, bordered by flowers bigger and brighter than anything you get in England – just like everything in America is – were perfectly manicured and from one corner of them sprang the essential stars and stripes, billowing gently in the breeze.

  We stepped into a wood-panelled hallway out of which grew a wide staircase, which if it wasn’t quite sweeping was certainly the next best thing and up which our bags were promptly whisked by a young chap who had appeared from nowhere before the door was closed behind us. Also there, with beaming smile and hand outstretched, was Mrs Gardner, a curious mixture of the chunkily sexy and slightly grand – sort of Shelley Winters meets Barbara Bush.