Before Midnight

"You have to know the background. I started my business twenty years ago on a shoestring. I worked hard, but I had some luck, and my biggest piece of luck was that a man named Lippert, an advertising man, got interested. The firm's name then was McDade and Lippert. My product was good, but Lippert was better than good, he was great, and in ten years my company was leading the field in dollar volume. It was sensational. Then Lippert died. Momentum kept us on the rise for a couple of years, and then we started to sag. Not badly, we had some ups too, but it was mostly downs. I still had a good organization and a good product, but Lippert was gone, and that was the answer."

He looked at his folded handkerchief as if he wondered what it was for, and stuck it back in his pocket. "In nineteen-fifty the LBA people submitted some names for a new line we were getting ready to start, and from the list I picked Pour Amour. I didn't learn until later that that name had been suggested by a young man named Louis Dahlmann who hadn't been with them long. Do you know anything about the agency game?" "No."

"It's very tough, especially with the big ones. The men who have made it, who have got up around the top, most of them spend a lot of their time kicking the faces of the ones who are trying to climb. Of course that's more or less true in any game because it's how people are made, but advertising agencies are about the worst, I mean the big ones. It took me two years to find out who thought of that name Pour Amour, and it was another year before Dahlmann was allowed to confer with me on my account. By that time he had shown so much stuff there was no holding him. There was a lot of talk--you may have heard of him?"

"No."

"He wasn't very likable. He was too cocky, and if he thought you were a goddam fool he said so, but he had real brains and there's no substitute for brains, and his were a special kind. I don't say that Oliver Buff and Pat O'Garro and Vern Assa haven't got brains. Buff has some real ability. He's a good front man. Lippert trained him and knew what he was good for. Now he's the senior member of the firm. For presenting an outline for an institutional campaign to the heads of a big national corporation, he's as good as anybody and better than most, but that kind of approach never has sold cosmetics and never will. I've been one of the firm's big accounts for years, and he has never personally come up with an idea that was worth a dime."