A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  “Didn’t I just tell you we shouldn’t see each other again?” she said, grinning, taking the scarf and thanking me. And then she leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Seriously, Andy, don’t phone me, don’t text me. And please, please don’t try to find me on Facebook. But,” – and here she paused and sighed, as though she were thinking twice about saying something, before going ahead – “if you want, send me an e-mail.”

  She took a couple of paces back towards the boat, before I halted her again.

  “Where to?” I called.

  “[email protected]. One word.”

  It was more than half a lifetime later but her casual, over the shoulder, delivery reminded me exactly of the way she’d called out ‘casting’ the day I met her in the elevator. And then I watched her climb aboard the Vaporetto, and a few minutes later, it sailed up the canal.

  What caused the change of mind? Had she regretted what she’d said as soon as she walked off with her friends? Had seeing me again, when she hadn’t been expecting to, suddenly seemed like a second chance? Did the waving of the scarf above my head seem like some kind of symbolic signal?

  None of that went through my mind, as I skipped back to the hotel. No, not literally. Not dignified at my age. But in my head, yes, I skipped.

  *

  I have e-mailed Peggy and she has e-mailed back and I e-mailed back again and she back to me and it’s been going on for a couple of months now, and the last time I even wondered if we might not, at some as yet undetermined point in the future, meet for a few days holiday on a remote little island in the Caribbean or some other place where we might not be seen. In her reply she didn’t say yes, let’s do it, but neither did she reject the idea out of hand, so you never know. That’s another thing you learn as you get older. You just never know.

  And that is the story of Peggy Lee and Andy Williams who begat Bette Davis.

  Chapter 27

  (This is really an epilogue but if I called it an epilogue no-one would read it.)

  When I got back to England, I called Hattie and took her to lunch with every intention of finishing it. But – me being me – I didn’t. My weekend with Peggy had sent me the message in screaming dayglo colours that a weekend with Hattie would have been a sad and empty affair by comparison, but once a blocker-out always a blocker-out, and why spend a lonely Sunday when you don’t have to? I may not be doing the noble thing but neither am I the married man who keeps his lover dangling on a string by always promising he is about to leave his wife. I have made no promises to Hattie – in fact, I’ve been quite frank that I want no more than we have already. But, on the other, less conscionable, hand, neither have I mentioned anything about Peggy.

  A few months ago, completely out of the blue, I got an e-mail – how he found me I still can’t quite work out – from the secretary of the Old Boys Association of my old school. He wrote to tell me they were having their centenary lunch and would I like to go? Tickets were £15 and, for that, I would enjoy a three course buffet lunch (vegetarian option available) with white or red wine, menu enclosed. There would be an address by a former junior minister in a government long since voted out but who was about the most famous old boy the school had ever had. There was a postal address at the bottom of the e-mail to which I could send my fifteen quid, should I wish to accept his invitation. On a whim, I decided that I did wish and sent my money in.

  Last week, I went. I chose my wardrobe very carefully, not because I wanted to stand out, but because, now the opportunity really had arrived to show my teenage peers what’s what and who’s who, I’d decided that might not be a very good idea at all. Yes, I was curious to see who might be there and how their lives had turned out, and no, I probably wouldn’t have gone if I’d just done a ten-year stretch for armed robbery, but really, I just wanted to go along, and, in so far as I could, to fit in. I wore a suit, lightish weight wool, a plain navy blue, three button, single breasted, elegantly cut, neatly pressed, white button-down linen shirt, red silk tie, polka-dotted white, black penny loafers. As I looked in the lift mirror on my way out of the converted Regency building from which my flat has been carved, I thought I had done the trick. Thoughtfully turned out – I was always going to be that – but, for me, pretty low key. And I didn’t take the Porsche and park it where it couldn’t be missed. I no longer have a Porsche, I drive a three-year-old Audi convertible these days, but I didn’t take that either. Today I would be everyman and take the train.

  I walked into the school hall, a place I hadn’t been for well over forty-five years. It still had a familiar smell. Not having a perfumer’s nose I couldn’t have picked out the ingredients, but at a guess I’d have gone for a distillation of disinfectant and beeswax with a top-note of body odour. As unremarkable in this respect, as the school had been in most. I was offered a name badge. It said ‘C.A. Williams’. Someone must have been ferreting about in ancient school archives. I stuck it in my pocket. I hate name badges even when they don’t contain a reference to the dreaded C-word. Horrible, nasty plasticky things that ruin the line of a good jacket. People were standing around in clusters, quite a few of them remarkably elderly. I felt quite buoyed up by my relative youth, but I also noticed that I was about the only person under the age of ninety wearing a tie. I’d tried, but fitting in never was my forte.

  I found my name on a board and from there, the table at which I was to sit. A few people were already nervously in place, eyes flitting around in the hope of seeing someone they might recognise. None of them seemed to know me. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder and I watched as an enormously fat bloke lowered himself into the chair next me. He smiled half-heartedly and grunted. His name badge said S. Wilkinson. This was Stephen Wilkinson, left half for South of England Grammar Schools? I looked closer but saw nothing I recognised. I assumed his Adam’s apple was hidden behind the multiplicity of chins.

  Naturally – this, presumably, was the purpose of a reunion – we talked. I asked him what he did. Retired, he told me. Laid off a few years ago when the company he’d worked for had gone tits up. Never managed to find another job – now he was sixty-five, he just said he was retired. I was about to make a complete idiot of myself by remarking what a coincidence that was, my also being sixty-five, but, fortunately, a voice from a distant mic insisted we stand for grace.

  Over my coronation chicken, I idly asked Steve, as he insisted on being called – predictable yet odd as I had never addressed him as anything but Wilkinson at school – what line of business his old company had been in.

  “Cameras and copiers,” he said, “used to work for Polaroid. In Welwyn – Herts – like I say, until they went bust.”

  So, of course, I went off into raptures about Polaroid and the SX70 in particular. Steve looked at me, bemused – I don’t think he lived in a world where people went into raptures about anything. When I paused for breath he said, “We had this advert once. It said, ‘The Polaroid Generation’. Had a picture of a young bloke with long hair – like we used to have.” He stopped, looked at my smooth, bald head and seemed about to make some sort of remark but must have changed his mind because he just carried on where he’d left off. “And a pretty girl – sort of Marianne Faithfull type. This couple, they were about the age I was – we were – at the time. And I’ve always thought, that was us, the Polaroid Generation. Did you know, at one point, we had eight hundred and fifty people working for Polaroid UK alone? It was the latest thing then, remember? And then, along come all the PCs and digital and what have you, and nobody wants to know. SX70? Bloody museum piece now. Just like us – yeah, that’s us, the Polaroid Generation.”

  I mumbled something about him having a point, and depressingly, I rather thought that he had. Then he said, “Here, you were in advertising weren’t you? I saw you once on Kilroy or something. I said to Jane, my wife, I know that bloke. I went to school with him. You had some wacky green suit on.”

  I rem
embered the show. And the suit. It was sea-green, slightly turquoise perhaps, very smart. Another Ozwald Boateng. But I didn’t think it would mean much to Steve, so I said nothing.

  “You always were a flash bastard,” he said, and laughed. And, eyeing my dress-down, navy three-button, added, “Still are by the looks of it.”

  To be honest, although this really wasn’t what I’d come for – although, if it wasn’t for this, what had I come for? – I was actually quite flattered. Despite my lack of Porsche, I couldn’t help feeling this was working out quite well E to P wise.

  “Always knew you’d end up doing something like that,” Steve said.

  “Did you?” I replied, genuinely surprised, because I’d never had a clue what I was going to do.

  “Oh yes,” said Steve, leaning back, his plate now wiped Fairy clean. “Well, you always were a right clever dick weren’t you. And that’s what clever dicks do, isn’t it? Advertising.”

  *

  Once again, Steve had been right on the money. Because that is what we do. And I would be a liar if I said I feel any shame in being either a clever dick or an adman. (Despite being retired and out of the game, I am, still, an adman to my bones.) You see, I really do think admen are genuinely and, in a way, admirably, clever, and, to try to avoid being accused of sexism, may I add here that women – Lucille Wood, for one – can be admen too.

  Think about it. You go to a film or a play or watch some telly drama and you know it’s all pure fiction and that they’re just actors but, if it’s any good, you buy into it. It’s the willing suspension of disbelief thing, isn’t it? But, at least, it’s a fair trade. In exchange for the suspension of your disbelief they are giving you laughter or tears and a story. But advertising is pure subterfuge. We’re not showing you a funny commercial for the sake of making you laugh – we’re trying to get you to part with your money, something most sane people are naturally disinclined to do. And yet still, if it’s done well enough, if we wrap it up in a story that’s funny or charming or dramatic enough, you’ll suspend your disbelief and go along with it. How bloody clever is that? (And before you tell me that advertising never gets you to buy anything, let me tell you that everyone says that, and, if that were true, why would there be any advertising at all?)

  No, no-one is more skilled than us in promoting the suspension of disbelief. Not even the purveyors of the ‘great’ religions. What is faith but choosing to believe in what you cannot know? Ergo, the suspension of disbelief. The religious chaps are clever, I’ll grant you, because the promise of an afterlife that you can’t prove won’t happen is a jolly good idea. But admen can’t get away with that. With the exception of political ads – and we won’t go there now – the law makes us back up our claims with some kind of proof. So, can you see what I mean now? We admen really are clever dicks.

  Some people, most in fact, while conceding we are clever dicks, will, in the next breath, dismiss us as shallow. When Mavis died, I found some old primary school reports of mine. At the age of seven, my primary school form teacher had written, ‘Andrew is a clever boy but needs to be more thoughtful’. See, they had me off to a tee even then, and, clearly, even then, I was an adman in the making. Well, people don’t change do they? You are what you are what you are. But don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying you don’t learn lessons if they’re hard enough. For instance, and bearing in mind the debacle that followed my telling Peggy about the girl with the green spiky hair, although I confessed to her about the Cyril business, I made no mention of my reaction to seeing her in the wheelchair, and never will. I am sure she knows me well enough to know that was exactly how I would have reacted, but she doesn’t need to know that was how I actually did. Yes, you can learn. But no, you don’t fundamentally change. So, ‘clever but needs to be more thoughtful’ – yes, to slightly misquote Hovis, it’s as true today as it’s always been.

  But there’s a bit of a paradox here. Because, though we may be shallow, don’t we admen also touch on what is most profound? Is not the suspension of disbelief, the very stuff of life? Not only for the faithful, choosing to believe in the life everlasting. But for the rest of us too, the people like me who know perfectly well that life is just what happens between two lots of oblivion. And yet, though we know it perfectly well, do we not carry on as if we will live for ever? Isn’t the thing we dread most the news that we might have some terminal illness, even though we know that life itself is, by definition, terminal? And what is that if it is not the suspension of disbelief? Except, possibly – definitely – the suspension of sanity.

  My other favourite song of Peggy Lee’s, the other one that she’s really well known for, is ‘Is That All There Is?’ (Written by two other people I think of as geniuses, Mike Stoller and Jerry Lieber, who also wrote ‘Hound Dog.’) When you listen to ‘Is That All There Is?’ you’re unable to stop yourself from seeing how it cuts, so unsentimentally, right to the heart of things. Yes, indeed, you say to yourself, that is all there is. Yet, the moment it’s over, you carry on as before, living in the fantasy world of the permanently cloudless sky. The suspension of disbelief is something we seem, literally, not to be able to live without.

  Are you still with me on all this? Or, are you just shaking your head, and saying, oh do give over, stop being such a clever dick? Really, I don’t mind. Either way, I win. (Please spare a thought for Donald McEwan here. He had to put up with this kind of thing for years.)

  And whilst on the subjects of advertising and people I think of as geniuses, I have one more little thing to add, one more virtuoso to admire, and then I am going to finish. The chap to whom I am referring was an adman himself – the late Hal Riney.

  In the late eighties he wrote some commercials for a wine brand in the States called Bartles and James. In this campaign there are two old boys who, we are asked to believe, are Mr Bartles and Mr James telling us about their wonderful wines. If I recall correctly, they were sitting on the porch of some sort of old fashioned homestead, as they talked to camera. None of this may strike you as being particularly exceptional but it was all so charmingly done and the two old chaps so endearing, that you wanted to believe. Were these two old guys really Mr Bartles and Mr Jaymes? Did a Mr Bartles or a Mr Jaymes even exist? Who knew? Who cared? They were lovely. And even someone like me, a pro, who knew all the puppeteers’ tricks, was more than willing to suspend my disbelief. In fact, as I only recently discovered, two actors called David Joseph Rufkahr and Dick Maugg, respectively, played the parts, and a brilliant job they did too. The dialogue was written and delivered in a very humble, folksy way – the very antithesis of selling. It was an incredibly difficult trick to pull off, but they – actors, director, Hal Riney – managed it to perfection.

  There is an unwritten rule in advertising that you may steal ideas from any source – movies, plays, books, wherever – but to nick something from another ad is bad form. That, in adland, is plagiarism. It may surprise you that admen have such scruples but I assure you that most do. Anyway, using that rule as a guide, that you may steal from one creative form to use in another, I am now going to steal from Hal Riney’s Bartles and James commercials.

  The crowning glory of these commercials, is something I have never ever seen done in any other ad. At the very last moment of every commercial in the campaign, Mr Bartle in his humble and folksy way, turns to the camera – the viewer – and speaks. He delivers not the obvious clever-dick advertising line you expect, but smiles gently and says simply and quietly, “Thank you for your support.”

  When I first saw that I got goosebumps. I loved it. I ran around forcing other people to watch it. To be so seemingly, convincingly guileless. What could be cleverer than that? Did I believe a word of it? No. Yes. Yes. No. It didn’t matter. What mattered was, I wanted to believe it.

  And so, in tribute to Hal Riney, and on behalf of Peggy, Florence, India, Bette, Spot, Alison, Donald McEwan, the treacherous bastards, mouthy idiot, Bart an
d Brett, the Manatee and all the rest, I am going to steal his idea.

  Thank you for taking the time to read our story.

  Acknowledgements

  So many people to thank for their help in getting this on the road. (In a couple of cases, unknowingly.) Notably, and in no particular order – and with grovelling apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten – Bill Campbell, Simon Scott, John Bacon, John Donnelly, Dave Waters, Brian Byfield, Graham Nunn, Paul Collis, Hannah Phillips, Laurie Phillips, Sam Evans, Nicola Gill, Peter Bennett-Jones, Lisa Harriman, Geoff Howard-Spink, Daniele Ferreyrol, Joanna Dickerson, the late Dr Derry Macdiarmid, all at the London MeetUp Wednesday night writers’ group, and, last but not least, Amy Frolick.

  And, for their forbearance, thanks to Amar and the girls and boys of Starbucks, Queen’s Park, where much of this was written, and to Ian ‘Mac’ McArthur on whose boat bobbing in the Caribbean a good deal of the rest was. (Second location marginally preferable to the first.)

  Thanks too to John Bond, Silvia Crompton, Daniela Rogers, Annabel Wright – the dedicated publishing pros at whitefox. And to Viki Ottewill for her tremendous work on the cover design. And to Justin Hackney for building the website and for other bits of invaluable techno-help.

  Above all, supercharged more-than-I-can-ever-thank-you thanks to the hugely supportive Maureen Lipman and Carol Birch, and to the fabulous Rosie Bowen.

  I didn’t listen to any of them but I’m sure that I should have done.

  Song titles in this book

  ‘You Are the One that I Want’