I'll Take Manhattan (35 page)

“Hey, Maxi, take it easy. They’re selling clothes and furniture and cosmetics … the editorial pages are just the vehicle for the ads. They make the wheels of American business turn. You know that as well as I do.”

“That doesn’t make me like them,” Maxi said obdurately.

“But you
are
their reader, you of all people. You know perfectly well that you can buy just about anything that you see in those magazines. Look at this apartment … four million dollars, or was it five? Look in your overstuffed closets, look in your jewel box, and then take a good look in the mirror. Just what don’t
you
have? Except for a fourth husband?”

“I’m thinking about my readers,” Maxi said impatiently.

“Oh, so you have readers do you? I knew there was something different about this place but I thought it was the view.”

“I intend to have them, Justin, and I’m not going to give them another overdose of how rich people live.”

“Bravo! What other kinds of magazines have you decided not to publish?” Justin asked, his curiosity piqued by her vehemence.

“All those damn service books:
Good House, Family Circle, Woman’s Day, Redbook, McCall’s
, and anything else that digs, digs and digs some more at every woman’s guilt. Just look at this
Ladies’ Home Journal
ad … they surveyed 86,000 women and eighty-seven percent of them said that ‘women can do anything.’ ”

“Well, can’t they? You’ve always acted as if you thought
you
could.”

“Look what
else
it says—‘We’re here as she presses herself for physical excellence. Offering her sensible diet,
exercise and beauty plans … and we’re there as she presses to be better in other ways too. At home. On the job. In her community … pressing just as hard for excellence as the seventeen and a half million women who read us every month.’ It’s a big, lousy, fucking conspiracy, a
tyranny
, Justin, no poor bitch is allowed to be anything but bloody excellent at all times, in all situations. Press on, press on, and if you drop dead from sheer
pressing
for excellence, at least you won’t have let your subscription lapse!”

“Angelica, go get your mother a Miltown.”

“It’s all right, Justin, I just gave her one. It doesn’t help. Can it kill you to foam at the mouth?”

“I doubt it, sweetheart, your mother’s just suffering from stress.”

“Justin,” Angelica shrieked in alarm, “please don’t use that word.”

“Oh, balls,” Maxi muttered, throwing down a copy of
Family Circle
. “It’s only September, and they’ve got ‘101 Christmas Gifts to Make’ and ‘All-Time Favorite Cookie Recipes’ on the cover and Doctor Art Ulene’s book on
How to Stop Family Problems Before They Start
.… What if you don’t bake, what if you
buy
your presents and don’t want to know more about your family problems at Christmastime than you do already? How
guilty
will this cover make you feel? And it’s the world’s largest-selling women’s magazine according to the masthead. And look at this magazine, just look. It’s called
Lady’s Circle
and it’s really a joyful book: a piece on stomach-stapling that didn’t work, an article about a teenager with a rare, fatal liver disease, another stress article that contains a test on how you rate as a heart-attack victim; and then, for fun, how to crochet a holiday tablecloth. Is crochet a stress antidote? Or a stress add-on?”

“Maxi, why are you even bothering with service books?” Justin asked. “That’s not exactly your line of country. I’ve never seen you making anything more complicated than a vodka gimlet and I remember your being furious that limes had seeds.”

“I have to know what people are buying, what
women
are reading, or I won’t know what to give them that they
don’t
already
have,” Maxi explained, looking as if she had suddenly turned into a toadstool. “It’s obvious.”

“But you can’t be planning to compete with a
Good House.…
Where are your test kitchens, Maxi, where’s your money-back guarantee, where’s your well-earned readers’ confidence? Where’s your reputation for excellence and your position as a trusted friend, not a magazine?”

“Justin, how come you know so much?” Maxi inquired suspiciously.

“I had lunch with someone from Hearst once,” he said evasively.

“I like to bake cookies,” Angelica announced. “Could I have that copy of
Woman’s Day
, Ma?”

“With my blessings,” Maxi said, smiling for the first time that morning. She turned to Justin and raised astonished eyebrows. Baking cookies?

“What’s in that pile?” he asked, pointing to the heap of magazines closest to her.

“I call them the ‘so what else is wrong with you?’ books. Their premise is simply that things are going so badly that you’re desperate for help. Here we have
Woman
and
Complete Woman
, with typical cover lines: ‘Why Do You Let Him Walk All Over You?’; ‘Beat Those Menstrual Blahs’; ‘Conquering Your Shyness’; ‘If Sex Leaves You Wondering “What’s Wrong with Me?” ’; ‘So You Are Not Interested in Sex …’; ‘Banish Boredom, Overcome Hurts, Fight Insecurity, Beat Loneliness’; ‘How to Save Yourself from Yourself.’ I could go on …”

“Don’t! Please don’t. Or I’ll scream,” Justin said, unable to repress a guffaw.

“Ma’s overreacting,” Angelica whispered to him.

“The hell I am,” Maxi snapped. “I’m just seeing what’s being sold on the newsstands and having
normal
reactions.”

“Like grinding your teeth in your sleep?” Angelica asked.

“Precisely! How about this piece on ‘The Number-One Stress Stopper’ by Michael Korda. Guess what it is.”

“Relaxation?” asked Justin.

“Deep breathing and chocolate cake?” Angelica hazarded.

“No, no, my children … ‘Do More … or How to Be a Confirmed, Happy, Unapologetic Overachiever.’ That
SUCKS
!” Maxi flopped on the floor and groaned aloud. “ ‘Do More,’ the man says.
More.
”

“Let me rub your back, Maxi, it’s probably killing you,” Justin said, rolling up his sleeves and flexing his strong fingers.

“How about a brownie, Ma? They say chocolate makes you happy, releases some kind of hormone or something,” Angelica suggested anxiously.

“No, don’t try to make me feel better.” Maxi jumped up from the carpet and picked up the magazines around her and pitched them violently at the magazines that were piled against the walls. “Enough guilt! Enough of your guilt trips about everything from your extra pounds to how you’ve changed your lover into a tyrant; enough guilt trips about how pathetically little you know about how to handle money, about how you can’t accessorize your clothes, keep a neat closet, don’t take enough calcium, haven’t been promoted at work, can’t manage a job and a family too, and need your marriage saved; enough about your nutrition mistakes and how to handle failure; enough about how boring your sex life is and it’s probably your fault; enough guilt about your whole life being depressing and why men are unwilling to commit; enough about why you fuck up job interviews.…
No more guilt trips
!”

“We agree, don’t we, Justin?” Angelica said hurriedly as Maxi whirled around faster and faster but Maxi didn’t hear her and kept on talking louder and louder, her bare feet thudding on the thick carpet like enraged hooves.

“All they do is undermine your self-confidence while trying to tell you how to be, seem, and feel
more
self-confident; they make you feel that it’s impossible for your body to ever be attractive
enough
, that you can and should be doing better, better,
better
, in the kitchen, the bedroom, the boardroom—what, you mean you haven’t been promoted yet? How come you’re not an executive and if so what horrible things does your office furniture reveal about
your character and when will you learn how to manipulate your boss and make office politics pay? And if you don’t work, how come you aren’t at home making a new kind of stuffing for the turkey, how come you’re such a poor pathetic creature that without this magazine you’d never make it through the night? Oh, thank them—thank the good editors for making you feel better about that heel you married, the dozen men who’ve left you, the seventeen different things you do wrong in bed, the only man—naturally a shit—whom you can’t forget; all of which are your fault, bad girl.
BAD GIRL
! Guilt, guilt, guilt! WOULD ANY MAN BUY A MAGAZINE THAT TOLD HIM EVERY MONTH WHAT A SCHMUCK HE WAS? No, my children, he would not.
If I read one more article about bulimia I’ll throw up
. God damn it to hell, isn’t there a single magazine a woman can buy that loves her just the way she is? What did I just say?”

“You’d throw up if …” Angelica cried hysterically.

“No, after.”

“Doesn’t any magazine like women?” Justin ventured.

Maxi jumped up and down. “THAT’S IT! That is fucking
it
! The reader-friendly magazine, the magazine that loves you and doesn’t try to change you, the magazine that wants to amuse you, that exists for your pleasure and
only
your pleasure. FUN. The magazine that doesn’t give a shit if you eat too much or can’t find a guy, or should have known better or need help. Fun, I say! There’s already more help out on the newsstands than anybody could possibly use. FUN! Did you hear me? FUN!” She opened her arms wide and jumped up and down, flinging the last of the magazines away, kicking as high as any Texas cheerleader, strutting her stuff.

“We heard you, Ma. Everybody in Trump Tower heard you.”

“What is this fun book going to be called?” Justin said with a flashing look of pleasure at the sight of his adored sister back to normal form again.

“It’s already got a name, Justin. I picked
Buttons and Bows
when I had my chance. But times have changed,” Maxi said gleefully, “and so has the name. I’m shortening it to
B and B.
”

“
B and B
? What kind of name is that?” Angelica asked.

“Do I know? Does it matter? Bread and Butter, Bosoms and Bottoms, Benedictine and Brandy, Balls and Bums, whatever suits your fancy. It’s called
B and B
and that means F-U-N!”

“Zap-proof. Fucking zap-proof!” Rocco said, angrily throwing down the issue of
Adweek
he’d been reading. He looked out of the window of his office on the forty-third floor of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and noted with annoyance the red neon sign of the Pepsi bottling plant on the other side of the East River. Coca-Cola was his client and Pepsi was the loathed enemy, until the almost certain day when Pepsi would become the client and Coke the enemy. “Anyway,” he added, “this story is totally sick. Imagine having to go for zap-proof by shooting eight and a half hours of film and editing it down to a thirty-second television spot. No matter how good it might turn out to be, I say it’s a sign of something fundamentally wrong.”

“We have nothing to do with that spot, Rocco,” Rap Kelly said soothingly. “It’s for somebody’s deodorant soap. You should stop reading the trades.”

“Don’t turn into a philosopher, Rocco,” added Man Ray Lefkowitz, the third partner of the firm of Cipriani, Lefkowitz and Kelly, the hottest advertising agency in New York. “When you give the public remote-control units for their TV sets, it stands to reason that they’re going to zap the commercials.”

“If it
had
been us, I’d have killed whoever directed that soap commercial with my bare hands,” Rocco said somberly. “Hitchcock he wasn’t.”

Manny and Rap exchanged glances. Was Rocco going into another of his occasional phases which they privately called yearning-for-print-freakouts? When the two of them
had lured him away from Condé Nast three years ago it had been the hardest selling job either of them had ever gone through, including the battle to get the Chevrolet account. Rocco hadn’t wanted to admit that magazines were dodo birds as far as getting graphics to the attention of the masses was concerned. He had wanted to stay buried in print forever, Rocco had, until together they’d wrestled him out of his fixation.

Manny Lefkowitz, that brilliant copywriter, still remembered his winning argument. “Rocco,” he’d said, “it takes more time and energy and decision to turn the page of an ad, particularly when you’ve
paid
for a magazine, than it does to zap a commercial, since it is your right, as an American, to see a commercial coming at you for
free
every time you turn on the television. Who’s the bigger challenge to an art director? The willing consumer, the veritable captive audience of a magazine who’s intent on amortizing his investment, or the absolutely fed-up-with-commercials audience watching television who only wants the show to come back on? Don’t bother to answer—it’s obvious. So if you’re the best art director in the world, as Rap and I think you are, then television advertising is the only medium worthy of you. It’s your next step, Rocco, you can’t help but admit that.”

“I admit it … but I just don’t know … where’s the
white space
, Man Ray, where’s the layout?”

“On that blank screen, Rocco, and you know it. It means you’ll be grabbing people quicker and grabbing more of them … millions and millions more. And you have to sell them something, not just entertain them. The major difference, Rocco, is that magazine layouts are essentially the print equivalent of jerking off—all you’re doing is making pretty pages for the advertisers to plant their ads
around
 … it’s pure self-indulgence. With commercials you live or die in that split second before forty percent of the viewing audience decides to zap you. So you have to be better than in print. Not just good,
great.
”

“Jerking off?” Rocco said, offended.

“With all due apologies to the magazine business, it’s a century behind its time. A page doesn’t
move
or speak to you and nothing is ever going to make it do so. Get off the
pot, Rocco, don’t be like that guy who said nobody would ever go to talkies.”

“Yeah, Rocco, don’t be totally dumb,” Rap Kelly chimed in. He was the cat-burglar, business-getter of the threesome, who specialized in being indecently smarter than he sounded, and won many an account that too-slick talk had lost.