How Did I Get Here? Page 19
That soon passed. I met many American expats in Germany. None seemed to be centered in their lives. Expatriation does relieve you of all the responsibilities of citizenship; you don’t belong anywhere. For some, that grants the pleasure of relief. Many have been estranged from their homeland long enough to fear they wouldn’t fit in stateside anymore. Severed for years from the fast-moving American culture, how could anybody function back home when it all feels so strange? The expat’s place in German life has no appeal to me. An expat may speak the language, know that most stores close by six p.m. and all but one Saturday per month, and myriad other customs. Some may even marry a German. But the expat knows that he or she is dangling between worlds, in a nowhere universe, doomed only to spectate in a society and culture that can never admit them.
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By the end of my second year my energies were often sapped by certain realities: navigating through a different language with no time to grasp a new word or explain an old one; forever under the gun to get everything finished by yesterday; going into the office on Saturday to bang out headlines for a new Mercedes-Benz truck campaign; using body language and charm to persuade Herr Bertram to read a strategy memo before he started writing an ad; jawing with art directors about how magazine layouts need to share a visual identity in order to foster the sense of a campaign.
I’d drive down to Stuttgart on Sundays to meet my friend Dirk Strassl, then a Mercedes-Benz PR man and the best nonracing driver I ever quailed beside on twisty roads. Weekends in Amsterdam were movable feasts with my part-lunatic friend Peter Verstappen in command. Peter ran O&M’s Amsterdam office. He could drink anybody not only under the table, but under the floor. Peter found fun and pleasure in everything he did, exhausting me in the process.
You could travel through five European countries in the time it took to cross Texas. I drove from Frankfurt to Geneva one weekend (how the Germans ended up calling it Genf still bewilders me) with a photographer friend on an assignment. Another time we motored from Frankfurt to Belgium to England to the northwestern Scottish Highlands in golden September sunshine. Then drove hard, through the foul English weather, to catch the ferry to Calais. Driving would never again feel so pleasurable.
With my German friend Klaus Lamm I did the American tourist thing and ventured through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. Hollywood wouldn’t have dared build an East Berlin movie set this decrepit. We walked along a wide, empty, dead Strasse until we spotted a restaurant—well, more like an intention to one day be a restaurant—on the mezzanine floor of the building on that street that seemed least likely to collapse. Sunday afternoons are family time in Germany. We were seated amid groups of sallow kids and bored parents in a large former auditorium. No dishes listed on the Speisekarte were available. Russian vodka outdid water as the GDR’s favorite drink. We ordered coffee; I heard from Oskar Homolka, or his double pretending to be a waiter, what I’d learned to expect. There was a surplus of Russian vodka and Havana cigars, but the espresso machine was broken, apparently forever.
I noticed other customers staring at us and whispering behind their hands. Various lurid scenarios later—Did they take us for CIA agents? Was there a spy-spotter in the house, set to pounce?—came the bland realization that they were envying our clothes. Neither Klaus nor I was a popinjay. God knows what hung in their closets.
One sweet moment touched me: the house pianist, an octogenarian in a tailcoat, had sat grinding out the popular music approved by the cultural guardians of the German Democratic Republic (neither German nor democratic, and a Soviet satrapy terming itself a republic), treacly, innocuous drivel. The pianist caught my eye, bobbed his head, and tore into “Poor Little Robin,” a forgettable Tin Pan Alley relic from the early fifties and obviously the only American music he knew. He was honoring two visitors from what must have seemed like Mars to him and his trampled-down fellow citizens. We smiled back at him, flattered and sad. Those three hours, intended as an innocent lark, depressed the hell out of Klaus and me for days afterward. Fuck you, Walter Ulbricht. And the T-34 Red Army tank you rode in on.
My Frankfurt life elevated my standard of living so far above my Toronto, Windsor, Detroit, and New York levels that I had to remind myself how artificial it was. Without Hank’s compulsive generosity, I’d have had to live humbly: no Mercedes, no grand apartment in a grand house in an affluent neighborhood. No vast corner office furnished by Knoll. And no secretary whose sole responsibility was me—mine brought me a hard roll (Brötchen auf Deutsch) every morning. If Hank ceased to exist or was no longer the managing director of the agency, my life of privilege would implode within days, maybe hours.
Hank, never a diplomat and too busy solving advertising problems to be a politician, had attracted critics and enemies over his years with O&M. The consensus among his opponents was that he was a reckless spendthrift of agency money. Worse, he ignored the proper channels for expending it. What was deemed arrogance really wasn’t. The White Tornado, as he was nicknamed, probably got reamed when the annual accounting was done. Hank took the bullets. He never whined about anything. In rushing to do the jobs of ten people, Hank raided O&M’s piggy bank to buy people and time, cars and airline tickets—whatever speeded up a solution or fended off a crisis this week. He knew more than his colleagues and saw situations only he could solve. And he always believed that money was meant to ameliorate them.
Our relationship was so close, and so fruitful, that certain Bernhard critics in the New York office suspected favoritism unto the edge of ethical impropriety. From an outside perspective, the implications carried weight. If charged with being Hank’s bum boy, who hugely benefited from his largesse by use of the brown nose, I must accept some criticism. My defense is twofold: First, I genuinely admired Hank and worked hard to earn his trust. He was smart. I learned more about advertising from him than from all other teachers combined. I was no goldbricker. Hank couldn’t trust a lazy, no-talent wimp in the position I held. If I wasn’t useful, or blanched at the prospect of hard work, I’d have been on the next plane home. Second, I took what I was given innocently. I had no means of comparing my situation with the prevailing standard because there was no prevailing standard. Mine was a one-shot assignment. I assumed, because Hank operated in the daylight and was incapable of sneaky dealings, that I was being paid and subsidized according to some set of rules.
It was only years after I left Frankfurt that I understood that Hank’s largesse reflected his judgment of how he could run an agency effectively without a professional creative corps. He had inherited a dismally untrained team of copywriters and art directors. He had hit the ground running, without the luxury of picking and choosing from a list of qualified candidates. I was fast, fecund, absolutely loyal, and willing. Until creative professionals were found and hired, I filled the gap. Despite the emoluments showered on me to the point that some might say I was spoiled, I represented a bargain. Maybe a less agitated person than Hank Bernhard could have made a cheaper arrangement, but I ended up feeling no need to apologize. I labored long and hard in Frankfurt. And effectively. O&M got its money’s worth.
I was billeted in three apartments in Frankfurt. The first two fell short: one because it was a wearying half-hour drive to and from the office and was in a neighborhood without residents, so a mite too quiet, verging on the creepy. The second was a tiny single room, but with a balcony overlooking Schillerstrasse, a busy little street with a cigar store selling Havanas directly across from me. My last Frankfurt home lorded it over Mendelssohnstrasse in the affluent Westend. I felt like an emperor—and not only because the building was a big, white, grand kaiserene hulk. High ceilings, oversized rooms, ten-ton Biedermeier armoires, and a desktop big enough to land planes on—the place felt several sizes too big for one person. Its magnificently equipped kitchen, and a dining room large enough to seat the kaiser’s entire general staff, were wasted on me. Food held all the interest for me of One Hou
r Martinizing. No meal was ever prepared in the kitchen or served in the dining room. The bedroom was airy, and the thin coverlet stuffed with goose down did away with a top sheet. German winters can get cold, yet opening bedroom windows is a custom observed in most dwellings. (Germans have fetishized the value of frische Luft into near insanity. Booked into a New York hotel in the heat of summer, German visitors reach their rooms, set down their luggage, and rush to turn the air-conditioning off. The Luft isn’t frische enough.)
On countless evenings I drove twenty miles to the affluent suburb of Kronberg for dinner with Hank and his family. Hank fancied himself a gourmet cook; the banging and cursing emanating from the kitchen testified to his intensity. The fact that dinner inevitably arrived at the table forty-five minutes late testified to his perfectionism. Perfectionism can sometimes be a pain in the ass.
Several times a week I dined at Café Kranzler, a musty survivor of at least one world war and probably the least hip restaurant in Hesse. The decor was haute German bourgeois circa 1910, summoning comparisons with old postcard views of grand hotel lobbies. The high-ceilinged dining salon, roomy as a barn and furnished in post-Biedermeier upholstered chairs and low round tables, exuded the sort of dignity that encourages hushed conversation. I wallowed in nostalgia for some vague, unidentifiable past. Waitresses in black outfits scuttled about. The house pianist and a violinist gently serenaded an elderly clientele with Franz Lehár and Sigmund Romberg light-opera songs and Viennese waltzes.
The Kranzler newsstand stocked the daily lifeline of American news, the Paris Herald Tribune, a legendary but by then feebly unenterprising newspaper. Daily news that had been cutting-edge in The New York Times two days earlier now had the cutting edge of a butter knife. The paucity of reliable American news, in that pre-Internet age when information circulated not in seconds but sometimes weeks, drove me to depend on British media. Whereupon I discovered that British journalism often tasted richer, wittier, and meatier than most of its American counterparts. The Economist, The New Statesman, and The Sunday Times (of London) Magazine amounted to a trifecta that satisfied my curiosity about the world while exponentially expanding it. My sopping-up of English journalism bred in me the sneaking suspicion that perhaps Time magazine wasn’t the omniscient interpreter of the civilized world after all.
Life at Heumann, Ogilvy & Mather Frankfurt churned on through the months and then years. My lone involvement with our television advertising,* a small media element, involved sending two agency TV producers and me to London for a shoot. The studio we used, tucked into a small building on Wardour Street, was, like all film studios, crammed with a Collyer brothers maze of film-related paraphernalia. The star of our spot was Rotbart. (In addition to Mercedes, the agency handled Rotbart, Lufthansa, Shell Oil, and a few others.) The commercial featured a man at a bathroom mirror, stunned by the smooth closeness and affordability of the new Rotbart blade. A TV spot sucks up all the energy that can be drawn from a crew, and a timetable from hell aided the air of total confusion. Under the heat of lighting and the stress of getting footage in the can, filming a commercial becomes an expensive ordeal of boredom so sustained that, after three or four hours, it’s impossible to care. Lunchtime was an opportunity to escape. My two companions, one a graying veteran of TV production and the other a smirking, repulsively chummy gofer, had used the studio before and knew just the place for a swell lunch. Off we went.
The Raymond Revuebar looked nothing like a restaurant, because it wasn’t. An atmosphere of erotic gloom seeped from a passageway of drapes in pitch darkness. My companions now became my hosts and led me to our table. My questions about lunch were smilingly rebuffed; this, said the older producer, was a banquet of a superior kind. The tinny pit band’s overture heralded the lifting of the curtain. An Amazon in feathers posed for a long moment, then proceeded to strut, bend, and gyrate slowly, while picking off her feathers to reveal a patch of golden-brown skin. Further picking and shucking followed. The band played mood music for people in the mood to contemplate sex. After fifteen increasingly suspenseful minutes, the Amazon stretched out on a chaise longue, naked as a jaybird and frozen in her pose.
England allows women to strip in public. The catch is that once she has attained total nudity, the woman isn’t allowed to move a muscle or an eyelash. I sat and watched another eight or so comely ecdysiasts perform their exhibitions of the penultimate moment before coitus interruptus. Eight times was more than enough. The Raymond Revuebar killed my hunger for a few hours.
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Advertising was my life. I gave my energies and hours to the cause of selling. I had so completely adopted the mercantile pursuit and the society and customs it spawned that I had isolated myself from other interests and other people. Yet Frankfurt was where my career as an artist leapt overnight from an abandoned failure, all but forgotten ten years later, to the equivalent of a home run in my first big-league at bat. My dedication to advertising, to Ogilvy & Mather, even to Hank Bernhard, was about to crumble.
All because my friend Brock Yates liked World War II military aircraft as much as I did. Yates, an automotive journalist and the nearest thing to Hunter S. Thompson I ever knew, crashed through life at speed. Brock founded the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, a flagrantly outlaw sprint from New York to Los Angeles that attracted every nutbar car maniac in America. There were no rules. Miraculously, nobody got killed. But it was typical of Yates. He flicked an anarchic finger at convention everywhere he ran into it, earning such a reputation for aggression that his nickname was the Assassin. He wrote an article in the eighties, a blistering attack on Detroit’s foot-dragging stupidity about automotive design, titled “The Grosse Pointe Myopians.” Everything he wrote was a blistering attack on something or somebody.
Brock was also witty and decent (at least in person). We’d both grown up in the atmosphere of war, and as kids were besotted by the fighters and bombers that filled the skies. Something in my nature, and Brock’s, generated an appetite for every scrap of information, every design detail and characteristic of scores of military planes. American, British, German, and Japanese planes piqued our curiosity. But so did Russian, Italian, French, Australian, Finnish, Polish—every example of every warbird extant. In the small Ontario town of Simcoe, I was recording my savvy by drawing planes; over in upstate New York, young Brock Yates was doing the same.
In early April 1970 I was admitted to a Frankfurt clinic for emergency surgery to remove a pilonidal cyst. One afternoon as I lay abed napping, a fat envelope arrived. Brock had sent me half a dozen pencil sketches: aircraft of the RAF, the Luftwaffe, and assorted belligerents, lovingly drawn, sprinkled with idiotic figments of an informed imagination.
Satire had found a new subject. I couldn’t let Brock one-up me. By next morning I had sent off in return a sheaf of aircraft drawings, all of them ridiculous inventions but dead serious in the look, the purpose, and the nationality of each. Brock had kicked open a Pandora’s box. The following weeks filled the air and our minds with airplanes of all nations. No country was spared; Brock and I cashed in on arcane knowledge acquired years before, knowledge patiently waiting to become nuggets of warplane-satire legend. We never talked about it, but it’s possible, perhaps likely, that we thought we were satirizing fictitious airplanes. What we were actually satirizing were the stereotypes of each nation in their broadest, most caustic and vulgar form.
The exchange cooled off after a month. Brock had other fish to fry; I was finally pronounced healthy enough to leave the Klinik and waded back into the advertising fray. In late July a letter from Brock arrived in an envelope too flat to be carrying another spate of stupid-aircraft renderings. Inside was a single sheet of paper. Brock’s distinctive scrawl said, “Hey McCall! Playboy’s going to make a humor piece out of those airplanes of ours, and you’re illustrating it. Hurry—it’s already on deadline!”
I didn’t have time to write or
call Brock and wax indignant over having my services subcontracted out. The assignment terrified me. I hadn’t even thought like an artist in precisely ten years. Now I was virtually ordered to deliver eight tight color renderings of lunatic World War II military aircraft. Some workspace improvisation was necessary. For example, my drawing board was the coffee table in my apartment living room, so low that I had to bend over it. In a backbreaking siege, I sat hunched over my paintings hour after hour. Every minute I could steal—before work every morning, late into every weekday night, and every hour of every weekend—I gave to the project.
The article Playboy ran in the January 1971 issue I had titled “Major Howdy Bixby’s Album of Forgotten Warbirds.” That fluky idea, a transatlantic collaboration between a couple of amateur airplane buffs illustrated by a failed commercial artist who hadn’t so much as lifted a brush in a decade, won Playboy’s humor award for that year. That success ripped open a seam of reflection previously buried under more immediate concerns. Doing that silly piece had been gratifying. More meaningfully, it had been fun—an emotion I’d almost forgotten during my recent career. The article and its absurd success revived a passion for drawing and painting I assumed I had neutralized years ago. One article in one magazine didn’t prove to me that I had finally wearied of the madcap Bernard pace. Of carrying the Ogilvy & Mather banner in a vacuum. Of fixing and saving ads but never achieving anything beyond quenching creative fires. I was getting disenchanted with advertising itself.
Meanwhile, a sense of homesickness and isolation from the one culture I understood was rising. Three years were enough. My learning curve had flattened out, and staying longer would only perpetuate the tension, the frustration, and the inevitably mediocre outcome of trying to build a solid structure with inferior materials. It was time to repatriate. I dreaded telling Hank that I wanted out. I braced myself for an angry explosion, ready to grimly hold to my decision while Hank berated me for abandoning him, then as the detonation cooled, urging me to stay and see the mission through.