A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  “I thought you said our script was shit,” said one of them, the mouthier of the two, who clearly felt that, as I seemed to have resurrected their idea, he had gained some kind of higher moral ground. Without bothering to look up, I lobbed a grenade and blew away the ground from under him.

  “It was shit. Cornish pasties, traditional English food being eaten by trendy New York TV star. Pure borrowed interest.”

  “What?” asked the second idiot.

  I put my pen down, and decided to give them a sixty-second lecture on the difference between a good idea and a bad one.

  “Leo Burnett said—”

  “Leo Burnett? You mean he was an actual person?” asked mouthy idiot.

  I gave him one of my best, what do they teach kids at school these days? withering looks. (Not that it wouldn’t be a strange sort of school that taught its pupils about one of the fathers of the modern advertising industry and founder of the massive international agency that bore his name.)

  “Leo Burnett said,” I repeated, “that no ad should have ‘borrowed interest.’ The idea should flow from the ‘inherent drama’ of the product.”

  “What?” asked second idiot again.

  “Your script was shit because the idea did not flow from the inherent drama of a Cornish pasty—”

  “What would the inherent drama of a Cornish pasty be then?” asked mouthy idiot.

  “—whereas my script—”

  “Your script?” said both idiots simultaneously.

  “Whereas my script is a great idea because it flows from the fact that Jerry Seinfeld’s kitchen always has loads of cereal on display and he himself loves cereal. That is not borrowed interest – that, my friends, is inherent drama.” (I wasn’t entirely sure that Leo would have agreed with me on that point but as he was long gone to the place where there is no drama, inherent or otherwise, I had no fear of being contradicted.)

  “Yeah, but all you’ve done is replace Cornish pasties with this chocolatey cereal shit.”

  “So little and yet so much,” I said, getting back to my scribbling. “Although that, in fact, is not my only masterstroke.”

  “Newman is out,” I pronounced, putting a line through the postman’s part, “and Jerry is in.” As I spoke I stabbed an unneeded full stop after his name, for added effect. “There! It’s just Jerry and Kramer. JULIA! Come and type this up. Half a dozen copies. And don’t spare the horses.”

  “Jerry Seinfeld!” they both shouted, as Julia rushed in to collect the silk purse that I had just triumphantly wrought from their sow’s ear. “How much is he going to cost?”

  “Haven’t I told you before? Don’t worry about the money, just concentrate on having a great idea. When will you chaps learn!”

  “Did you know,” asked less mouthy idiot as he slunk from the door, “that Jerry Seinfeld turned down a hundred and ten million dollars from NBC to do another series?”

  Of course I didn’t know that, and the acquisition of said knowledge might have given me second thoughts, as perhaps it should, but, as I’ve explained, first thoughts are my stock in trade, and I had a meeting to go to and Mick Hudnutt – not to mention Hattie and Legga and especially, Lucille – to impress the fuck out of.

  As I raced back to the meeting room – it was Kurosawa if memory serves me right – with a sheaf of scripts in my fist, I did, I have to admit, detect, somewhere in the ether, another of those mysterious shadows cast from the past. (Déjà vu of bees and bonnets probably, if only I had bothered to dig deep enough.) But as I stood outside straightening my tie – purple, Memphis, highly collectable – before making my grand entrance, all I could think about was how I was going to knock ’em so dead they would rue the day they had doubted me. Of course, there would have to be an afterlife for them to do that which I, being a confirmed atheist, did not believe in, but never mind that, you get the idea. Besides, if it meant Legga and Lucille spending eternity rueing the day they doubted my brilliance, the notion of the afterlife might prove so attractive to me, I’d be forced to change my mind about it.

  *

  We waited for the emperor Mick Hudnutt to adjust his toga and give his verdict. I didn’t have much doubt my ingenious offering would get the thumbs up but you never know with clients. (Here’s a crossword clue I once made up – it may not have been that original – after a potential award winner of mine had been strangled at birth by some philistine of a Marketing Director: An unmentionable expletive, with the character of a client, three times over. No lie. A second person is added. 4 letters.)

  “Well,” said Mick, “Yeah, interesting. Very interesting. Tell me again about how the Kramer thing works, you know, the twirling you were talking about.”

  So I read the script once more, adding – with a demonstration – the tiny, yet surely DADA and Cannes winning embellishment I had come up with while the meeting had actually been going on. This meant doing an impersonation of Kramer but since I was now on to series seven, I had him – hairstyle excepted, of course – pretty much off pat. Kurosawa had a shiny maple floor – was Maple particularly Japanese? – and, as I was wearing leather soled Church’s, I could do the Kramer slide into Jerry’s kitchen without too much difficulty. My late added stroke of even more genius was to have him twirling and whirling and somersaulting as well – you could do anything with special effects if you paid a geek enough money – to signify his never previously experienced delight at the taste of the chocolatey thingummies that weren’t chocolate at all. I didn’t demonstrate the actual somersault but my twirl and whirl went off well I thought.

  “Yes, yes, not bad,” said Mick Hudnutt, now apparently convinced – apart from one proviso. “I assume you’ve checked the money out.” He looked now in the direction of Vince and Hattie. They were the sober, responsible suits, not one of the off-with-the-fairies creatives like me.

  “Well …” said Hattie, looking at Vince, desperately.

  “Well …” said Vince, looking at me, threateningly.

  “Well,” I said, “I always say, have the great idea first, then let’s worry about the money—”

  “Well, that’s all very well for you to say, but—” said Mick Hudnutt.

  “But,” I cut back in, “we’ll be talking to his agent the moment this meeting’s over. Two things you may be absolutely certain of are – one, that Jerry Seinfeld knows a good idea when he sees one – and two, that money is not the first thing on his mind.” Yes, I thought, we can be absolutely certain that money is not the first thing on the mind of a guy who turns down one hundred and ten million dollars.

  Really, I mused, thrilled with my own clever-dickery, I could have stood in for the PM at PMQs. I had just answered an impossible question by deflecting it with the pure, unchallengeable truth. And yet not answered it at all. Delusions of grandeur perhaps? Can’t be ruled out. They are generally held to be a sure sign you have lost the plot, and looking around at all the open mouths facing me, I had an uneasy feeling that the general view was that I very possibly might have done. I made my excuses and bade sayonara to Kurosawa.

  *

  I told Julia that I was taking the rest of the day off and promptly did. I drove to Florence’s and India’s school, hung about outside for an hour – pretending to read the paper, trying not to look suspicious – and waited for them to come out. Then I bribed them with promises of Frappacinos and the like and took them off to Whiteley’s to see the only film that seemed vaguely suitable, something called ‘Inspector Gadget’. I called Alison, brushed aside the ‘what about their homework?’ complaints and dedicated myself to perfecting my future role of indulgent, divorced dad. India and Florence sat on either side of me at the cinema, each clutching a carton of popcorn the size of a dustbin, and played their parts to perfection. India didn’t complain that it was a boy’s film and Florence wasn’t snotty about it being a kid’s film. I can’t say ‘Inspector Gadget’ did it for me, bu
t I didn’t pay that much attention. I spent quite a lot of the movie with rather blurry vision looking from one to the other thinking that not everything about my marriage to Alison had been such a disaster after all. When we got back to New Pemberley, we all told Alison we’d had a lovely time, and I think we all meant it. Alison did her best to look happy about it, but somewhere behind her eyes you could see she felt the little stab of hurt that the left out parent always feels. And which you never quite get used to.

  A little later, before being banished back to Bayswater, I went to India’s bedroom to read her a story, and Florence joined us, as she seemed to like to. Half way through whatever it was I was reading, India interrupted me to ask, out of the blue, “Are you having a party for your birthday, Daddy?”

  I had completely forgotten – or with that peculiar gift I seem to have, managed to obliterate – the fact that my birthday was almost due. I would be fifty in less than a month. I didn’t feel a lot like celebrating for all sorts of reasons, and age is only a number and all that, but if you pretend to ignore those really big birthdays they just loom all the larger, so, half meaning it, I said oh yes, I was sure we’d do something.

  “Okay,” said India. “I think it’s the week after we do our school play. You haven’t forgotten about the play, have you?”

  “No, of course not,” I said.

  But of course I’d forgotten that too. I quietly took out my phone and sent a text message to Julia reminding her to call the school to check the date – there was no way I was going to ask Alison and put myself in the wrong – so that she could put it in my diary. Then I returned to the story. I did my best to sound interested in what I was reading but I was badly distracted.

  Fuck. Fifty. FIFTY!

  *

  “We’ve had an offer from Alison’s solicitor,” said Harriet Braintree to me over the phone. It was not yet eight in the morning – say what you like but she obviously put in the hours – and she wanted to know if I’d like to come in to discuss it. “I’m free for an hour at nine, if you are,” she said.

  Anything to avoid the welcoming committee that I knew would await me at BWD, so I Porsched myself straight around to Lincolns Inn Fields. Once I was settled with a cup of coffee in one hand and a croissant in the other – I made a mental note to have all meetings at Hardy Wiggins this early, as they seemed to offer the best value – Harriet got down to the nitty gritty.

  (Before I invite you to get down with her, a couple of asides.

  1. You may want to skip all the tedious detail – I only wish I could have done. But if you like to have all the facts, here they are.

  2. I refer you back to the E to P scale and my earlier notes. They may need refining. One of the flaws in the whole E to P theory, I have come to realise, is that you can only feel Pity if you feel you are better off than the person you are judging. When the mighty fall, but only fall to a level that most mere mortals could never hope to achieve, you don’t feel Pity, you remain totally Piti-less. That may be your position after you have read the details of Alison’s proposed settlement, as I still seemed – I stress seemed – to be doing okay, a lot better than Stephen Wilkinson probably was. But Stephen, if you’re reading this, can I cheer you up by telling you it gets a lot worse?)

  “Here we go, then,” said Harriet, putting her specs on. “What they are asking for is the house – completely paid for, furnishings and contents – less your personal effects, of course, maintenance for the children and some contribution towards household expenses – and a million and a half in cash.”

  Yes, of course, inside I went how much? In cash? No problem there then, I’ll just check my pockets to see if I’ve got it in loose change. But I tried to maintain a poker face, though I have no idea why as there was no-one there to bluff. It just seemed the thing to do.

  “It’s not that bad,” said Harriet. “Let’s set aside the maintenance side of things for the time being – we can argue the toss about that later. With all your assets – share of house, shares in your company, pension, other stuff, you’re theoretically worth around five five, give or take.”

  (I was about to repeat Frank Connor’s feeble joke, but thought if I’d heard it before, then she certainly would have done.)

  “So,” she said, tapping her pencil on some notes she had in front of her, “according to their figures – and we have no reason to doubt them, do we? – Alison has her bit of the house, about a hundred thousand in savings and about a hundred and fifty in her pension fund. So that’s about half a million. Sixish between you.”

  The figures were beginning to become a bit of a blur. I was wondering if the superannuated pop star had had a better grasp of things. Harriet wasn’t finished either.

  “The house and the million and a half make about two point three. That’s about thirty-eight per cent. Which isn’t that cheeky for an opening bid – and, of course, we’ll say a million five is far too much.”

  My mouth now full of croissant, I raised my eyebrows questioningly, hoping she might tell me what wasn’t far too much. She obliged.

  “If we’re not going to mess around playing silly buggers, we’ll go back with seven hundred and fifty thou in cash and see if we can settle for a round million. With the house that’s around thirty per cent all up which sounds pretty reasonable. But …”

  The inevitable but.

  “But they’re only doing it this way because they know getting the money out of your company may not be straightforward. Basically she wants a nice clean payoff without any hassle and to achieve that, she’s willing to take a little less than she might get. Look, theoretically, you’re left with a total pot of three and a half million, maybe a tad more. Which doesn’t sound too bad.”

  No, it didn’t sound too bad.

  “But £600,000 is stuck in your pension fund, and you have to negotiate with your partners over the rest. How are your relations with them? People can be funny you know. You may be getting on famously but when they think you’re negotiating from a position of weakness, they may try to take advantage.”

  Indeed. And when you’re not getting on famously, they certainly will.

  “Still, all in all, my advice would be to see if we can work with this.”

  Well I wasn’t paying £450 an hour not to take her advice, so I did. I agreed that she should call them back and haggle. Not that we would ever use a word as indecorous as haggle. Meanwhile, I would talk to my partners.

  I drove back to BWD with certain issues relating to non-chocolate chocolatey breakfast cereal to discuss and a lot more besides.

  *

  “Take a seat, Andrew,” said Geoff and I did as obliged and sat in one of the cappuccino brown Corbusier leather chairs he had chosen for his office. He, being BWD’s CEO and thus the man who would have to deal with our clients’ top brass, had gone for a modern but slightly more sober style of decoration than I had. Had a couple of nice abstracty paintings too – while he was working his way round from the seat behind his glass desk to take a position half sitting on the front of it, I wondered if the A in EBITDA stood for art, or whether the pictures on his wall would one day disappear home in the boot of his Beemer. (636 coupe.)

  I hadn’t even made it as far as my own office before the announcement came that the main event on this day of reckoning was to take place immediately. I’d called ahead to Julia to tell her I was on my way in and she was waiting for me in reception with a concerned expression and a message that Geoff and Vince needed to see me urgently. Not exactly a surprise though I had thought I was a little senior to be abruptly summoned to the headmaster’s study. Perhaps that little blow to my pride set me off on the wrong tack from the start. Or maybe I would have been arsey anyway. I suppose I usually was.

  Vince was already there, seated on the matching sofa, serious face, leaning forwards. Body language wise, they were both telling me, as if I needed to be told, this was not a day for l
arks.

  “Not going to muck about,” said Geoff. “Total fuck-up yesterday. I spoke to Mick Hudnutt myself last night. Spent two hours licking his arse – not a pleasant business, but needs must. I begged him – begged, Andrew, I’m hardly exaggerating! – to give us another chance and Vince has spoken to Lucille and she has got the whole creative department trying to come up with something. He’s given us seven days. My bet is the business is already as good as gone.”

  “Seven fucking million,” added Vince.

  I felt, as you always do, and never being averse to a bit of combat – providing there is no prospect of actual physical pain – that I had to mount some kind of defence.

  “It was – it is – a fucking good idea.”

  “No Andrew,” said Vince. “It was a fucking insane idea. We’ve been fucking up since the day we won this account. Remember? That first bloody meeting that you refused to come to? Do you? And ever since, we’ve been on the back foot. We’ve bombed out one time after another. And then – then I come to you and ask for your help, you sit on your fucking arse for weeks and then at the last minute, come into the meeting like some fucking demented whirling dervish,” – he didn’t like my whirls? That hurt – “and come out with this madness.”

  “Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “Stop you! I tried for Christ’s sake. I kept looking at you,” – had he? – “but you were away, gone, unfuckingstoppable. And okay, I’ll admit for a moment you had me half sold,” – ah, so he had liked my whirls – “but I didn’t think even you would be so fucking idiotic as to offer up Jerry fucking Seinfeld – to a client who is already getting ready to fire us – without at least finding out if he might do the job first.”

  He sat down, suddenly looking defeated – the sort of look they hang you for in Australia. I almost felt sorry for him.

  “Well, we don’t know he won’t.”