Truth in Advertising Page 0,14

a bad dream, calling out. They go to their child, walking naked through the quiet house with the new Restoration Hardware furniture, tramping quickly through the hallway to their perfect daughter’s room, pulling on a pair of boxer shorts and almost breaking their neck doing it.

“What is it, pumpkin?” they coo.

“A dream, Daddy. A bad man chasing me.”

“There’s no bad man, honey. You’re here with Mommy and Daddy and Chuckie,” they say, referring to the filthy dog who farts and slobbers all over the furniture, bought on credit. They hold her, this three-year-old bundle of loveliness, caress her silky-soft downy hair, pat her tiny back, and say, “Shhhh. Shhhh. Do you know how much Daddy loves you?” as they lay her down and pull the covers up to her chin. They kiss her cheeks again and again and hear her say, laughing, “Stop it, Daddy, you’re silly,” and know that she is all right, know that she will sleep, know that she will wake in the morning with no recollection of what has gone on here tonight in these two minutes, know that they themselves will never forget it, know that they will never leave this child and go to France, know that they will never again fuck a twenty-one-year-old, know that they will show up for work bright and early at the job they hate because of this girl.

I should admit that some of what I just wrote in the previous paragraph was from a spot I did for life insurance a few years ago. I apologize. I get carried away sometimes. But that’s my job. And Lauderbeck, Kline & Vanderhosen is one of the premiere agencies in the world to do that job. At least, that’s what we always say in our press releases and in our presentations. We use the word premiere because it tested well with focus groups.

Let’s meet the team.

FRANK LAUDERBECK (SENIOR AND JUNIOR)

“I want to die on my way to a client meeting,” Frank’s fond of saying, usually to the horror of his audience. Frank’s father, Frank Sr., started the agency in the late forties. Apparently Frank Sr.’s war duty (due to flat feet and horrendous vision) included a stateside posting to the War Department, where he wrote and edited newsreels on the war’s progress. They say he was a whiz. There he met Walter Kline, an MIT grad who was an early adopter of market research, number crunching, unearthing trends through the sifting of massive amounts of data. They built an impressive agency during the post-war boom years. Frank Sr. groomed his oldest son for the job. Groton, Yale, summer internships at the agency. The man-boy showed zero aptitude for the creative side of the business, but took to account service like a Swiss to fondue. He loved the schmoozing and the golf and the martinis and the pleasing. But he wanted the keys. He had his own ideas. It would be years before the old man finally ceded control, which he did one summer afternoon, the office half empty, the old fellow at his desk, apparently concentrating hard on a memo in front of him. It would be several hours before the cleaning staff found him dead at his desk, a number-two pencil frozen in his gnarled hand, halfway through editing a print ad for Froot Loops.

They say brainy Walter Kline never cared for young Frank, whose easy charm had morphed over the years into cockiness. Walter did the worst thing he could do to Frank: he left him on his own, disappearing one day, leaving his wealth to his family and taking a single suitcase to a Trappist monastery in the French Alps.

The agency faltered. The work turned bad. Clients dropped off. They couldn’t win a new business pitch if they were the only ones in the room. Frank went through a few creative partners until a fortuitous meeting in the bar at Grand Central one evening with his old Groton roommate, Dodge Vanderhosen. Dodge had been known as someone with a decidedly artistic bent at boarding school. A diminutive man, he had been asked to be a coxswain but kept falling out of the boat. Instead, he put his prodigious efforts into arts and entertainment, editing the school newspaper (he did the drawings and photography), heading up the cheerleading squad (he wrote the Groton fight song, “Let’s Try Not to Lose Today”), and was big in the musical theater departments of both Groton and, later, Williams. That evening, Frank, already