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NOTE: Because this novel is written in the first person singular and its action takes place in an important sector of American public life, it must not be assumed by the reader that it is in any way a portrayal of any person living or dead, or a description of any existing organization. This book is purely fictional and contains no biographical or autobiographical material. All the settings, characters, and incidents are completely the result of the author’s imagination. This assertion is no mere formality but is offered as a sincere statement of fact.

Nostalgia isn’t the feeling you have when you want to go back, it’s how you feel when you can’t go back.

On that particular Monday morning I was coming in from Southampton on the airline they had set up a few summers before, a couple of flying boats shuttling from Long Island to the foot of Twenty-third Street at the East River. It had been one of those charming week ends they used to write about. But the wonderful week ends in books and in real life went out with Scott Fitzgerald. Nowadays people get together to drink and talk, the way they used to, but since the talk is mostly about power politics, the atom bomb, or the inevitability of war with Russia, the liquor doesn’t seem to produce the effects it should. Personal relations either become or remain as strained as those between United Nations representatives. The stationwagon coming around on Sunday night or Monday morning is always a formal period, never a relief, or a tragedy, or even a climax.

But this week end had been different. As I leaned back in my seat in the plane I recalled it in the way that only the senses can remember. It had been perfect: not too many house guests, excellent liquor and wine, food that had been prepared with skill, fairly intelligent conversation, an extra woman, and no games, not even—or should I say especially—intellectual ones. There was none of that organized fun which spoils so many week ends, no one was asked to take long bracing walks or play endless exhausting sets of tennis. In short, there had been two full days of lounging, eating, drinking and, as my grandfather would have said, philandering.

My hosts had been Charlie and Hortense Mitchener, who have a well-earned reputation for their parties and week ends. Mitchener is the electrical appliance man. He had never been a regular client of ours, although he dropped in occasionally for advice. But now competitors and the newspapers had him over the barrel and were walloping hell out of him, and there is no one as amiable and hospitable as a prospective public relations client who is getting a shellacking in the press.

Every successful hostess, I suppose, combines within herself the qualities of m.c., restaurateur, and innkeeper; a touch of the matchmaker or procuress also helps. Hortense Mitchener had all this; she was attractive in a fortyish sort of way and, in addition, was the soul of discretion, an attribute which I consider the greatest of the minor virtues. And by discretion I don’t mean undue caution, calculating wariness, excessive conservatism, or any of their two-by-four variants. In the guise of a dinner partner I had been offered a girl who at first gave you a startling impression of childlike simplicity and guilelessness. But then, after a while, after the first few drinks and a whispered conversation, she somehow left you with the intuitive feeling that you’d better do something about it before Monday morning rolled around. However, if you felt that this innocent face masked any genuine feminine passion you were crazy. The truth was, of course, that she was colder than a vice-president in charge of small loans, but the dazzling performance she gave in concealing her basic lack of warmth was something to behold. And I had beheld it.

As Roger MacLain would have described it back in the old days, it had been a Julien Hornblower week end, pleasurable and profitable. . . .

When Roger MacLain and I got out of college, we lived in adjoining one-room apartments in a reconverted tenement house in the scabby part of Greenwich Village, on Fourth Street over near the Hudson. It was a fleabag of a place, but we loved it. I had just gotten into the newspaper game, as it was called then (now it’s a profession), and carried my reporter’s police card in my hatband on the slightest provocation. Roger was a poet and lived that hand-to-mouth existence peculiar to poets, doing book reviewing, part-time publicity and once in a while actually selling a poem. When he wasn’t calling on literary editors to cadge a ten-dollar assignment or visiting the offices of his crummy publicity clients, he wore a handsome, armor-plated corduroy brown suit and heavy brogues. In that getup he was something. We two were the core of a crowd of young, hard-drinking, wenching, noisy Villagers who thought high and lived low, who were long on hope and short of cash.

I was one of the few guys in the crowd who had succumbed to the lure of a small but regular salary. The caste marks of the period are pretty well known; almost everyone will remember that this made me something of a traitor to the cause of traditional bohemianism. The members of that highly organized, basically conservative, and rather charming society were expected to conform. Nevertheless, my job had one advantage: I was solvent at least four days a week. Never on Thursday, the day before my shop paid off.

One Thursday evening several of us were sitting around, broke and morosely sober. If someone had shaken the lot of us by the heels I doubt that the operation would have netted more than a dollar and a quarter. And the cheapest bathtub gin in those days came at three dollars a bottle. It was a wonderful drink and was put up in a phony earthenware jug bearing a counterfeit Holland label marked Hultzkampf, or some such name.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a telegram were to come now inviting us all to one of Julien Hornblower’s parties?” Roger said, breaking a long silence.

“Never heard of Hornblower?” Roger said. “Quel bloody ignorance!” He tilted his head and closed his eyes, a man momentarily lost in ecstatic recollection. Then, opening his eyes, he said: “Julien Hornblower is the most generous, extravagant party-thrower in town. You come for dinner at about eight. What cocktails, what food, what wine! Being a gentleman, a scholar, and a patron of the arts, he looks upon talent as the greatest virtue in a male guest. And that lets all you bastards out. But in his choice of women he’s more catholic; as a rule, they’re young and beautiful and when they arrive at his home they must put all stuffy, bourgeois morality behind them. So that lets out professional beauties like models and movie stars. Hornblower’s gals do it because they love it. And the Hornblower penthouse is one of those rambling affairs, lousy with terraces and bedrooms, so that after eating and drinking you can enjoy Venus’ second greatest gift, privacy. The Hornblower parties are sybaritic, corybantic, orgiastic—”

Roger was making a production of it. We sat there in that bare, scratch-pad of an apartment, listening to this mild form of torture.

“And then at dawn,” Roger said, “our host performs his final rite of hospitality. Each beautiful girl receives a costly piece of jewelry and to the starving poets, painters, and novelists who are his guests he gives a nice, crisp hundred-dollar bill.”

It was the eternal daydream. We laughed and kidded him. Since then I’ve heard the same story told as a gag where the tag lines run: “Did all this happen to you?” And the reply: “No, it happened to my sister.”

On one of my bookshelves, behind the three red volumes of Das Kapital, I kept a tobacco tin in which I saved my rent money from week to week against the inevitable first of each month. After Roger’s story there was only one thing to do. And I did it. I broke into the sacred hoard, in violation of every precept of my frugal forebears, and offered to go out and get two bottles of the finest Canarsie gin that money could buy.

But instead of gratitude I received taunts and insults. “Why, you dirty tightwad, sitting on that dough all this time. Sherrod, you sadistic bastard, having all that dough and watching us suffer!”

I remember calling them a pack of ungrateful swine before I went over to Pete’s to get the gin. . . .

The flying boat passed over College Point, where the Sound begins to narrow into the East River. Down below a line of coal barges headed north toward Bridgeport. Leaning back in my seat I wondered why recollections of those days down on Fourth Street had crowded into my mind at this particular moment, why these memories were accompanied by that vague ache that goes by the name of nostalgia. I was certain that even if it had been possible, I wouldn’t have wanted to go back. A starched hundred-dollar bill in those days was something you got only in a daydream; today it would have served merely as an item on my income-tax report. Yes, it was different now and I had come a long way. . . .

It was a long way, too, from that later day when the crowd broke up. Most of the boys disappeared, some went to the writers’ and artists’ projects of the WPA. Roger’s two published volumes of verse brought him a wealth of critical acclaim and no royalties to speak of. For a few years he taught nineteenth-century English poetry at a New England women’s college. Still later he joined Jefferson Clarke and me.

As for myself, it had all been too easy. I had gone from Fourth Street to an arty little joint on Bank Street, and then to an apartment, almost an establishment, in the East Sixties. I had done well enough on my paper, and then considerably better than that in public relations. Not press-agentry or publicity, but real high-powered, jet-propelled public relations.

Jefferson Clarke & Associates (I was the senior associate) was one of the largest and glossiest public relations outfits in the country. Jeff and I numbered among our clients, friends, and acquaintances the great, the near-great, and the would-be great in industry, finance, and government. I had a duplex apartment, a terrace with trees, a Scottish housekeeper, a Packard convertible, a record library that took nearly two months to catalogue and cross-index, liquor cabinets and wine shelves filled to the scuppers, and more money than I ever dreamed was possible.

The plane passed over Welfare Island and began to lose altitude, coming down over the river, approaching Manhattan Island and the reality of Monday morning. It was a Monday morning that still stands out in my mind perhaps because it was the one on which a chain reaction of events was set off. It was the day when I realized that nostalgia is the feeling you have when you can’t go back, for there could be no other explanation for the pleasurable ache that accompanied my thoughts as the plane touched the surface of the water.

A man going home after a long absence, a man who can start the homeward journey at will, is curious, excited, impatient, maybe happy; but he’s never nostalgic. Be sure that when that vague longing hits you, all the bridges to the past are burned, all the roadbeds washed out, all the lines of communication torn down, and there’s no going back.

Whatever feeling about the past I may have entertained coming in on the plane from Southampton and in the taxi going uptown to Mr. Rockefeller’s little business community at Radio City was instantly dispelled as I entered the lobby of our building. The intent, well-heeled crowds, the trim attractive shops, the metal inlaid stone floors, the highly polished basalt columns, the celebrated murals, all these were not conducive to introspection. They constituted, so to speak, a stage setting against which flashbacks seemed out of place. They demanded, instead, a concentration on the business at hand, a preoccupation only with the present.

Jefferson Clarke & Associates occupied the fortieth and part of the forty-first floors of this stone and ferroconcrete temple to American industry and commerce. The executive offices on the fortieth floor were guarded by a chromium and glass-brick reception room, smart, discreet, and noncommittal. The effect was clean, stripped, almost surgical, a décor clearly guaranteeing the absence of peach-fuzz thinking. As I got out of the elevator, our beautiful blonde receptionist gave me the flashing, homogenized, top-level smile reserved only for members of the firm.

There were other public relations outfits in the country that were larger and perhaps more influential than we. Edwin Proctor & Company, the Public Relations Guild, and even Durham & Payne were all top-flight concerns. Yet we held a unique position in this tight and specialized field. We were a conservative group which took seriously our profession of mentor to American business. We were there to divert attention from the less agreeable aspects of commercial self-interest, to teach business how to present its best face to the public: a clean, well-scrubbed face glowing with reasonable altruism. And since we consistently refused to accept political, fund-raising, and amusement accounts, no matter how lucrative, our stable of clients included some of the best of the thoroughbreds listed in the national racing form.

Although we influenced the thinking and habits of tens of millions of people, I doubt if one in a thousand of Americans had ever heard of us by name.

Jefferson Clarke & Associates, as I’ve said, were public relations counselors. We were definitely not a publicity outfit. It’s important to make the distinction. Even today, a quarter of a century after Ivy Lee, the daddy of ’em all, the two terms are often confused by people who should know better. What Lee did to deodorize the Rockefeller reputation after the outburst of public indignation over the Ludlow strike massacre in Colorado provides the classical instance of inspired public relations. Lee did it by persuading the Standard Oil founder and heirs to make million-dollar grants for medical research, religion, art, and the preservation of historic relics, and at the last auditing the beauty treatment had cost about two hundred million dollars. In terms of the public good the Ivy Lee job paid off handsomely. The Rockefellers are better citizens than ever, swell people, they’ve endowed a list of worth-while causes as long as your arm all the way from modern museums to fighting epidemics in China and providing low-cost housing for the United Nations. Ludlow, which was a horrible mistake, is forgotten, and to forget is to forgive. So, in a way, maybe the thirty-three men, women, and kids who were killed in that Colorado tent colony didn’t die in vain, as the politicians say. Maybe in a cockeyed sort of way it was a good thing. Maybe not, but as a public relations man I’m inclined to think that it was.

What I started out to say is there’s a hell of a lot of difference between public relations and ordinary space-grabbing publicity. Even some of the boys of the working press grin when you say “public relations.” To them it’s a euphemism, like “realtor” or “mortician,” and when you say it they think of circus press agents, Broadway publicity men, and nightclub singers who fall in the Central Park reservoir, and leading ladies whose ice gets stolen in time for the bulldog edition, kid stuff like that. Of course, publicity is part of our business, but only part of it. We had a publicity department that was set up like a metropolitan newspaper with a copy desk and a staff of writers, photographers, and contact people for the newspapers and magazines, the wire services, the trade papers and the foreign-language press. We also had feature writers, gossip “planters,” and fashion experts. But all this was subsidiary to the big job. And that was to suggest policy and activity for our clients so that they would appear as instruments for the public good, instead of organizations with their corporate eyes on the managerial control and the quarterly dividends. In short, we were the hired intellectuals, the brain trusters, of modern industry. And quite definitely we resented being bracketed with the flashy dipsomaniacs of Broadway, the platinum neurotics of the advertising agencies, and the whoopsing geniuses of radio, although at times our efforts meshed. We stood in comparison to these bawdier colleagues of ours as Ethel Barrymore stands to Gypsy Rose Lee or the House of Morgan to a Bowery pawnshop.

The need for long-winded explanations like this crowded in on me at the oddest times: at conferences; at cocktail parties; in bed with a woman; while I was shaving or during the last few minutes before falling asleep when the tension is finally sprung. It was as if I were under a constant compulsion of some kind which demanded continual self-justification, so that I often found myself going through a complicated business of extending my identity backwards into the past, winding it up like a reel of film, and then by speeding the motor like a slap-happy projectionist, reeling it all back into the present: the past, the explanations, the justifications, the passing moment. It was a complex kind of game. I did it that morning coming in from Southampton, on the plane, in the taxi, in the lobby of the building, walking down the corridor leading to my office.

I walked briskly down Fat Cat Alley, as one of the boys in the publicity department had once called the corridor that housed most of the members of the Plans Board. The name had stuck. And then into the anteroom of my office where Louise Bailey, my secretary and assistant, gave me a medium-sized but friendly good morning. We had worked too long together, had shared the vicissitudes of too many public relations campaigns, to indulge in any secretary and man-of-distinction nonsense.

Like all the girls in our office, Louise Bailey was easy on the eyes. She was a brunette, too dark if anything, smartly dressed on the hundred a week we gave her, but without distinction. She had a hoarse way of speaking that barely escaped being what’s called a whisky voice, the kind of voice that sophisticated actresses use to indicate: “God, the things I’ve seen—and done.”

“Plan Board’s in session now,” she said, following me into my office. “How was the Mitchener week end?”

“The man doesn’t look rested,” she said as I stepped into my private washroom. She followed me to the door, and as I started to soap my hands she asked: “Who was she?” Like a good, intuitive secretary she could spot an extracurricular adventure with the accuracy of a suspicious wife. I smiled and said nothing. “So you won’t kiss-and-talk, eh?” she said, burlesquing a d.a. in the movies. “Mr. Sherrod, you put me in mind of Major Burlescu, a Rumanian, who said—”

“—who said, ‘I am an officer and a gentleman and even under torture I will never reveal in what hotel I slept with that beautiful woman in white who is now descending the staircase.’ ”

“Miss Bailey,” I said, the formal address being the accepted office substitute for humor, “your conversation this morning puts me in mind of the kind of talk that must go on in a Bennington locker-room. Get that bright mind of yours up out of the gutter.”

“Immediately, sir,” she said. “The Board has been in session about half an hour. Do we get the Mitchener account?”

“We’d better, unless Charlie Mitchener wants the National Fire Underwriters to mark him lousy forever.” I dried my hands and started for the Board room. “Don’t go to lunch until I get back, eh?”

They were all in there when I arrived, most of the account executives who were in town at the time, a few department heads, and Jefferson Clarke himself. Our Plans Board meetings were informal affairs at which very often there was a lot of horsing around but at which also a lot of work got done. Some of the conferees sat around the long conference table, others sprawled in armchairs or on the brace of leather couches. In addition to Jeff (American Wines, Columbia Aircraft, and the Singleton railroads), there were Ken Halsett (the American Beer Council, Steinmetz Engineering), Gregory Evor (Air-Brakes and Couplings, Automobile Credits), Mordecai Schiff (the Tri-City public utilities hookup, Monarch Electric), Roger MacLain, who came with us after his muse had her menopause or something (research and reports), Diana Forbes (promotion and contacts), and Malcolm Sturt (publicity). Beer was fattening, the Steinmetz method of industrial efficiency had been described as “an inhuman speed-up system,” AC credit rates had been termed usurious by at least three state legislatures, American Wines gave people heartburn (we had since gotten a panel of five medical scientists to prove that in nearly all cases heartburn was a psychosomatic symptom), Air-Brakes and Couplings were having labor difficulties, the Singleton roads found competition with the airlines tough going, and Columbia Aircraft sales had taken a sharp dip in the wake of a flock of air accidents. And so on.

If you can imagine a score or so of top industrial, commercial, and transportation outfits, organized like modern power states, you have a fair idea of our clients. And if you can imagine a modern ministry of propaganda, plus some of the policy-formulating powers of a presidential cabinet, plus a shrewd collective knowledge of the modern, scientific use of hokum by men who took themselves lightly but who took their work seriously—if you can imagine all this, you have something resembling Jefferson Clarke & Associates, now assembled at the regular Monday morning Plans Board meeting.

“But who the hell stands up against a bar and eats ten or twelve apples a night?” Roger MacLain asked, as I sat down at the far end of the conference table. “Besides, McSorley’s doesn’t carry apples, only onions, cats, and colorful bums.” This got a big laugh.

“Stirling’s paper on beer came in Friday night,” Ken said, pointing to a hefty manuscript he held in one hand. “I’ve been studying it over the week end. It’s a honey. He calls it—I’ll read you the title, ‘Some Fallacies Concerning the Nutritional Value of Malt Liquor.’ Here’s the part that pays off.” He read: “Beer may be a factor in overweight in some cases, but not because of an unusually high caloric content. It is true that malt beverages stimulate the appetite and aid in the digestion of food, but this may also be said of any zestful drink containing carbon dioxide. Actually, an average glass of beer contains no more calories than an apple.”

“The new boilermaker,” Roger MacLain said, following through laboriously on his original gag, “a slug of whisky and an apple chaser.”

Ken Halsett had been at work on the Stirling deal for nearly a month and now, it seemed, the Beer Council campaign was set to go. First there would be the reading of the paper at a medical convention by Stirling, Dr. Eliot Stirling, the eminent (they’re always eminent) Whittaker Foundation medical researcher. This would get us at least a thousand clippings in the daily press alone, in addition to a couple of hundred beery, philosophical editorials at the bottom of the page. Then there would be the planted gags with the columnists, a glass of beer a day keeps the doctor away, then the mailing of Stirling’s paper to tens of thousands of doctors throughout the country, then the advertising campaign, newspapers, magazines, and radio.

“Nice going, Ken,” I said. Ken smiled, sure of himself and why not, and took a bow.

All this was fun—serious, big-business fun that paid off. And I felt, as we all did in the Board room that morning, that it made no real difference whether the conclusions reached in the Stirling paper were true, half-true, or false. No matter what the caloric content of beer, people would go on drinking it just the same. I had always held that beer was a civilized and civilizing drink and the least we could do for the beer drinkers was to comfort them with the thought that it wasn’t fattening. All three hands washed each other: Dr. Stirling would get his five thousand dollars for writing the monograph, the Beer Council would be satisfied, and the campaign would net us at least fifty thousand dollars.

The Mitchener thing would need some preliminary work before it came to the attention of the Plans Board, so I let it ride, not reporting. The routine reports, the plans in the mill, the gags, the Heavy Thinking were finally out of the way, and we slipped into the last phase of all our meetings, the time when we batted new ideas around, the Plans Board bull session.

Jefferson Clarke hoisted himself up out of the leather sofa and sat down on one of the corners of the conference table. This was the beginning and I knew it was going to be good.

“You know,” he said with a slow smile on his face, “I’ve been thinking about public opinion polls lately.” Well, that was something for a man to think about in our business; he was top man and the boys waited for him to get on with it.

Jefferson Clarke was a short man, five-foot-five to be exact, sawed off, dragging it close to the ground, like so many successful men who come slugging up the hard way. You can go to history for analogies if you like, running the tape measure over physical runts like Napoleon, Franco, Goebbels, Stalin, and people like that. It’s a pretty obvious analogy and hardly worth the trouble, but it leaps to the mind. Not that Jeff packed the danger that any of these did.

Jeff was forty-two, crowding middle-age and desperately fighting it off, but all his efforts seemed to result in a well-preserved fifty. He had sufficient taste to escape being dapper; he had an eager, terrier face and a calm, precise voice that commanded immediate and respectful attention. He had the trick of lowering his voice at the most crucial point in his conversation, so that you had to lean forward to catch what was being said. During his newspaper days he had been an indifferent dresser, but now that he was in the money he had a dressing room off his private office and changed his clothes two or three times in the course of a day. At nine-thirty, when he came to work he usually wore a soft, gray flannel suit or a casual English cheviot single-breasted job. At noon if he were lunching with one of our Wall Street clients, he’d change into a dark double-breasted suit with an almost invisible pin stripe, never chalk. And when some of our Kansas City or Chicago clients came to town for business and lechery, he’d change into something brash and hearty that suited the occasion.

He liked to gamble expensively and nearly always lost, and his sex life was lived on an artificial level with high-class whores and half-respectable gals he picked up around town. When he was through with a girl, he was brutally through.

He lived at one of the better midtown hotels in a luxurious suite. His library was extensive and catholic and he was an omnivorous reader, but he rarely discussed books; it was as though literature with him was a secret, unmentionable vice. Serious, good music, whether it was jazz or classical, annoyed him; he could tolerate schmaltz, stuff like Victor Herbert and operettas, but anything that required attention and emotional involvement was distasteful to him. His lips were thin and straight, at least that was the impression you got; but when he smiled it was something else again, his sense of timing was split-second and he knew how and when to turn it on.

“Gallup and the other boys are all right as far as they go,” he said, and then the slow smile came off his face. “All they can tell you is that you should have locked the stable door.”

Roger MacLain grinned. “Don’t tell me that you’ve discovered a system for predicting public opinion, Jeff.”

A smidge of a smile came back to Jeff’s face. “Let’s bat it around for a while; maybe it’s not as impossible as you think.”

“Every switch in public opinion in the last ten years or so has set the experts back on their heels. Look at the way the Democrats and all the boys stringing along with them were caught with their pants down in the last elections. We sit here in New York trying to figure out what the public will go for next, what it’s going to respond to the day after tomorrow. When management is riding high, we can sell management to the country. That doesn’t require any genius. But look what happened a couple of years ago when labor really cut loose.”

Jeff Clarke reached for his cigarette holder as he spoke, a short, stubby affair, and then took a kingsize cigarette, snapped it in two, tossed one half away and inserted the other into the holder and lit it. It was a habit of his, I don’t know why, but he’d sit through a session like this, breaking them and lighting them almost in a chain. If someone looked surprised when he broke them in half that way, he’d say: “Every man’s entitled to one weakness. This is the only thing I do by halves.” It was an answer, although obviously no explanation. I was inclined to think that this startling, contemptuous act was butt-saving in reverse and it reminded me, for some reason, of one of our former clients who always carried several thousand dollars, in bills of large denominations, sewed into his vest. Anyhow, Jeff lit the half of the cigarette and went on talking.

“Even the writers and editors on the big national weeklies know damn little about this average man they’re all trying to reach and understand. And why should they? Most of them work right here in New York, eat and drink in fancy bars and restaurants; over the week end they visit each other or meet with people so like themselves that the difference isn’t visible to the naked eye. And that goes for the boys in our own cubbyholes, too. Everything they write seems to be the tail end of self-communion. Sometimes when they want to get the feeling of the masses, they go out and talk condescendingly to taxi drivers, waiters, or bartenders. But nine times out of ten, a smart bartender gives you the answer he thinks you want. He’s in the business, too.”

As he spoke, Jeff’s face was mobile and yet always disciplined, always an instrument, like the face of a good actor. It expressed quick awareness of all the unspoken moods and sudden shifts which his words produced, an awareness so acute that it was almost anticipation. It was a cynically amused face, determined and yet restless, controlled and yet sometimes in a flash revealing the gambler’s tension and excitement which were habitually hidden. It could best be described as the face of a man who continually drove a hard bargain with life and then, in his haste, forgot to count his change. It was the face of a state of mind, a generation, an era. And, personally, I liked it.

“In the meantime,” he went on, “everyone is talking about the common man, the little guy as the liberal snobs call him, the fellow who gets shoved around. But no one really knows who he is. I’ve been listening to common-man speeches now for ten years or more. I’ve thought a lot about it because I think we’re going down a new stretch. Well, now, who the hell is the common man? I figure it something like this: he’s a simple, ordinary guy who doesn’t think of himself as the common man. He isn’t a reader of PM or the liberal weeklies or any of the other house organs of salvation, and if he met Marshall Field he’d have one hell of a job trying to make out that English accent of his. If you were looking for the most representative specimen of his kind, you’d very likely find him in some small town in the Middle West. He’d have a certain working skill and the people in his crowd would think a lot of him. He wouldn’t be the muscle-bound, dumb symbol that you see in radical magazines and he wouldn’t talk like one of those monosyllabic sons-of-bitches in what’s-his-name’s novels. The time, he’d tell you if you asked him, wasn’t a quarter to doom or it’s later than you think; he’d look at his watch and tell you. The man I’m talking about is the guy that makes and breaks corporations by his sudden and inexplicable switches in tastes and opinions, who elects Presidents and sends all the experts and predicters to bed with migraine headaches every time one of those unexpected landslides starts moving.”

Jeff paused and went through that cigarette-breaking routine of his. Then, before lighting up, he said: “Somewhere in this country there’s a man who embodies all the characteristics of this common man everybody’s talking about and nobody knows.” He inhaled, and then, without changing his pace or increasing his emphasis, Jeff let us have it. “If we could find this common man, or a reasonable facsimile of him, and if we installed him here in our outfit as some sort of consultant on what makes the mind of the common man tick, we’d have a setup that nobody could beat.”

All this had a familiar ring. I could see it, us going out to find a Jimmie Stewart or a Cary Grant and bringing him in to read stammering dialogue written by a member of the Screen Writers’ Guild. And sitting there, I wondered why those who make movies about the common man never quite capture the feeling of realistic toughness that’s so typical of America. In Hollywood, the common man is always represented as a kind of mild idiot, an ineffectual, half-articulate schmo from Kokomo, a square from Delaware, a guy who looks as though he’s always about to fall into a manhole. The Hollywood common man is a slander on the average guy. He is a character with a series of deficiencies and one virtue tacked on: he plays baseball, or he loves his mother, or he reveres the memory of his father, or he thinks that community singing is a damned good thing. Looking at these pictures you wonder where the real common men of the country horn in—the local labor organizers, the small-town leaders, the engineers, the truck drivers, the tough, realistic guys who helped to make America the most miraculous, gigantic, overpowering, wonderful, and terrifying country that ever came down the historical pike.

Gregory Evor, the air-brake and couplings man, fortyish, tweedy, who always played them safe and invariably broke out in a sweat at the thought of taking a flier, was the first to speak.

“A little of both,” Jeff said. He smiled; he was selling now. “But let’s go on kicking it around.”

“Well, now,” Gregory said, charging his pipe, “I think I get your idea, but isn’t it—” He paused. It was obvious that he felt he could never sell an operation like this to his air-brake and couplings people down in Pittsburgh. “But isn’t it too flashy?”

“I don’t think that flashy describes it,” Mordecai Schiff said. Schiff looked like a young version of old Justice Brandeis. We all liked him, liked him for his quiet wisdom and for a brain that somehow was always several jumps ahead of us all. He had been a boy genius who went straight from Princeton to Washington in his early twenties and started to hang up a record for himself. He would have preferred to have stayed in Washington, but somehow he got caught in one of those interdepartmental rows that were so common after Roosevelt died and the boys from Missouri began to bag the important jobs for the crossroads politicians. Mordecai had done a heavy but beautiful job in his almost definitive book, Propaganda and Opinion, and this was right up his alley.

“If anything,” he said slowly, “it’s classical. It might be a good thing if you could do it, but I don’t think it can be done because your notion, Jeff, rests on one of those outsized contradictions. I don’t want to sound pedantic, although I suppose I will, but public opinion, and that’s what we’re talking about, isn’t a static thing. It certainly doesn’t reside in the mind of any one person, no matter how average he might be. What people think and feel is always in motion because things and situations are never in a state of equilibrium.”

“I don’t think we’ve got a problem in public opinion here,” Roger MacLain said, “so much as the old story of mass ignorance. I hope you’re not thinking of going out into the streets of our great teeming metropolis and picking yourself some articulate, colorful character. If we do that we may get ourselves a character actor, but we certainly won’t have a common man.”

“Somebody did that in the movies a few years ago,” Roger went on, “and it turned out to be one of those things about democracy in one easy lesson. I think that in the end the girl got her man and democracy was saved.”

“I haven’t got anything like that in mind, Roger,” Jeff said. “Why can’t we go about this, if we do, in a modern, scientific way?”

“Let me see if I can make myself clear,” Jeff said. “I’ve always felt that if you could assemble enough information on people it would be possible to predict mass human action, not at the time that the switch is taking place, but before it’s too late. There was once a time when the outcome of a presidential election was a dark mystery, but today the public opinion polls can call the political shots so close it’s uncanny. I propose to create our common man on paper first. Then, when he’s assembled statistically, we’ll go out and find him. We’ll get every available scrap of information on him we can dig up: his average physical measurements, his preference in food, clothing, entertainment, cigarettes, and reading matter. We’ll consult anthropologists on his head measurements; we’ll get psychiatrists to give us a picture of his mass neuroses; the Army and Navy can give us his average weight and height. Gallup and the other boys can give us an accurate reading of his political and social opinions; Crossley, Hooper and the fan magazines can give his taste in radio and the movies; the Institute of Business Statistics can give us nearly everything else. When we’ve got all this information, we’ll have all that we need to sit down and paint a composite portrait of the guy. We’ll know just what he looks like, what he thinks, how he eats, which movie actress he dreams of, how he acts, what makes him tick.” He paused a moment and laughed. “Hell, if this is going to be the century of the common man, and it’s beginning to look that way, then I can’t think of anything better than to have him working for Jefferson Clarke & Associates.”

“But suppose when you find him he turns out to be a colorless nobody?” Diana Forbes asked.

“And suppose he’s absolutely inarticulate,” Diana said, pressing her point. “Suppose he can’t utter a simple declarative sentence without stammering and getting all balled up. That’s one of his characteristics, isn’t it?”

“Don’t worry. We’ll articulate for him. We’ll simply want his honest, untutored, down-to-earth reactions to what our clients are doing and the stuff we send out.” Jeff was batting them back now.

“And what if he turns out to be a mousy little guy, the least photogenic person in the country?” Diana asked, flushing a laugh.

“Now wait a minute,” Jeff said. He wasn’t selling any longer, but he was still smiling. “We’ve got to draw the line somewhere. He’s got to be photogenic, if only for the sake of our art department. We’ll take care of that, Diana. He’ll be a looker, don’t worry.” Then, he turned to me. “What do you think, Jack?”

“When it comes to stunts,” I said, “I’m the office conservative, if Gregory will yield. But this one is really something.”

Jeff, Mordecai Schiff, and I went out to lunch together. After the coffee, Mordecai came back to the common-man idea.

“Don’t you think that it’s late for that kind of a play? Of course, I realize that even if you don’t get the common man, since he doesn’t really exist, you might get a very good institutional stunt. But I was wondering whether we aren’t late even for that.”

“Don’t you think an idea like that would have had a better chance when Roosevelt was alive and the air was charged with that kind of thing?”

“Hell, no,” Jeff said, setting his cup down. “Nobody was ever big enough to steal any part of Roosevelt’s act. He was the whole show, as a lot of the boys found out when they tried to crowd him. He was upstage all the time, playing all the parts in the greatest show on earth—” Jeff counted the parts off on his fingers: “President, strategist, humanitarian, war leader, labor organizer, strikebreaker when necessary, diplomat, m.c.—and when things got dull he doubled as a comic. You’ve seen him in press conferences. He was not only the spokesman for the common man, deep in his heart he regretted he wasn’t one. No one without that feeling could have had the universal appeal he had. But now he’s dead and there are millions of people who feel they have no voice. This is just the time for it.”

We played around with that for a while and when the conversation got around to Wallace we got off a few gags and went back to the office.

I spent the greater part of the afternoon trying to convince the president of a packing company not to get himself all gummed up by denouncing the union in his industry in a series of full-page advertisements that his agency had suggested. The agencies were always doing something like that. When it was all over, the afternoon was shot to hell and I was ready for a drink. After five, Diana Forbes and Roger MacLain dropped into my office. Roger had dried up about ten years before and it was something else with Diana. They had both come to public relations for different surface reasons, although I suppose the basic reasons were the same. Well, anyhow, they were both in the chips, which is a consolation for a middle-aged poet and a great help to a good-looking gal.

I got a bottle of scotch out of the liquor cabinet and set the drinks up. After the second slug Roger MacLain loosened up. He had had a hard day.

“If this common-man thing comes off,” he said, after he had patted his mouth with a folded handkerchief, “it’ll be the most disastrous thing since the atom bomb. No water now, please, just pure scotch.” He paced the length of the office, a habit of his, and gesticulated with his glass.

“I get it, Jack,” he said. “We put all this research together, all the charts, all the tabulations, the pseudo-scientific schweinerei, and then I write a fifty-thousand-word analysis on it. Yes, I see it all. A fourteen-carat public relations report, printed on hand-laid stock. We bind it in maroon calf, stamp it in gilt, to be sent to our clients and a select list of prospective clients. After which, we go out into the highways and byways of America to find this Plans Board, interoffice common man of ours.” He put the flat of his hand to his eyes, clowning, as if blinded by a vision. “Into a sleepy, mid-western town, the giant hand of American free enterprise reaches out and plucks a simple, obscure, home-grown citizen into national prominence. Jefferson Clarke’s own common man—initial caps, please, copyrighted, patent pending, completely housebroken, and trained to heel. Mood music, please, professor, music indicating the endless vistas of America, O pioneers, O Christ!”

He stopped pacing, finished his drink at a gulp, bent low at the waist like an actor taking a burlesque bow.

“Now don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’ll do it, all right. I’m only a gelded bird in a chromium cage. I’ll do what’s expected of me, don’t worry.”

That sort of thing was always going on at our office; after hours, of course. Jeff and I didn’t demand of our staff that they have the courage of their convictions in the things in which they didn’t believe. No one in our outfit was ever taken over the coals for lack of faith in automobile credits, beer, automatic couplings, the American way, California wine, the Republican Party, or the Steinmetz system. Why, one of our best writers, a Communist, had prepared some of the most cogent arguments in defense of the Steinmetz system of speed-up. But that was during the war. All that we asked for, at top rates, was a job well done.

Roger had come a long way since he had lost his ideals. I never had them, so it doesn’t matter. But I admire them in others. He had been a damned good poet back in the old days. I remembered him after he made good in a big way and the kids on a hundred campuses were going nuts about him. I remembered the time he lectured up at Barnard, I don’t think he was more than twenty-five at the time. He smiled when Professor Wilkinson introduced him in the special language that professors of English use—“the beauty of most of Mr. MacLain’s lyrics and many passages in his latest narrative poem seems to be inviolable.” And afterwards he stood at the lectern, slim at the waist and abstracted, and read a handful of his poems and discussed them, and every girl in the auditorium, I was certain, felt squirmy and wanted to be in bed with him.

At twenty-nine Diana Forbes was one of the best girls in public relations, smart, no flies on her as the English say, and just cynical enough to get by. But Roger’s brand was just a shade too much for her. She was a sophomore when he was riding high as poet and not paying his rent because he frequently didn’t have it. He was still the fine poet to her and she had never stopped looking like a betrayed disciple when Roger got outside of a few drinks and started calling himself a whore.

“It’s funny how this notion of Jeff’s keeps cropping up. It’s one of the corniest ideas in literature; almost as shopworn as the Cinderella myth or boy-meets-girl. Out of inert matter God and the artist create warm, pulsing life. Humpty-dumpty clods given life and significance by some superior force. God and the artist. A team in classical Greece, on a Hollywood lot, and now if that weren’t enough, here in the offices of the best damned public relations outfit in the country.”

“I’ll write it some day. Satire on public relations. But then why satirize the obvious?”

He drained his tumbler of whisky abruptly, without drawing breath. “Well,” he said, almost choking, “sufficient unto the day. And I’ve had more than enough.” He stood there trying to think of something to say, but nothing came. Then, abruptly, he said good night to us and walked out.

There were two good drinks left in the bottle and Diana and I finished it. She stood there after Roger had gone, leaning up against the side of my desk, empty glass in hand, a neat, good-looking trick, a superbly contrived trick, and I telescoped all the intervening years, the ten years since I had first met her down on Bank Street. She was crowding thirty and she looked it, by which I mean that life had worked some meaning and character into her face, had given it fineness and sensitivity. Which, when and if it happens, is as good a trade as you can make with youth. Back in the old days, before either of us had ever dreamed of becoming public relations people, we had half lived together in that crazy but not completely irresponsible way that youngsters sometimes do. We thought we had a future together, but then Joel Simon came along, as the Joel Simons of this world have a habit of doing—and I was out. But now, as I looked at her in my office, the old business started all over again in my head. I wanted her again, Joel Simon was dead and gone, and I was tired of free-lancing and whoring around, fed up with party girls, the one-night stands, the quick lays. Belatedly, I felt I was ready for some kind of permanency in bed, and for the long haul I could think of no one more suitable than Diana. The little speech, the clever little speech I was to make, was all set in my mind. She was pleasantly flushed and her eyes were soft and bright. It would be easy now that her defenses were down. But I was all wrong. As I slipped my arm around her waist with the best show of casualness I could manage, I ran into a formidable technique of resistance. There was absolutely no response; she neither resisted nor relaxed, she simply stood there indifferent, inert, passive. It was the most eloquent way I had ever known a girl make it clear that no, thank you, she wasn’t having any. My clever little speech went up the spout and I was faced with the problem of making some kind of face-saving retreat.

“Forget it, Diana,” I said with a dry mouth, “pay it no never mind.” And I patted her cheek with a cold hand that I was afraid revealed my shattered self-esteem. But it was a way out at least.

I stayed behind after Diana had left and for a while nursed my impaired sense of masculine dignity. Then I made a few telephone calls and straightened my desk. I was afflicted at that time with what might be called a desk neurosis. Papers had to be neatly piled in the desk tray, reports and documents had to be neatly piled near the tray. The tooled leather holder for the blotter had to be dead center, my lighter so many inches at a certain angle from my cigarette box. Unless everything was marshaled, on parade, I somehow felt uneasy. It was as if by this rite of perfection I was making an effective reply to some unspoken, insistent accusation that some aspects of my life might be in a mess. I took a final and approving glance at the gleaming surface of my desk and, feeling better, I called it a day.

My plans for the evening were indefinite. I had had so much to drink that a light dinner without wine would be enough. After that a sedative evening with a book and a pipe would be just what the doctor ordered.

Outside, a wind storm had come up that threw its weight around in playful and malicious gusts. People coming out of the building lowered their heads, clutched their hats and ran for the shelter of Fifty-first Street. Hesitant, I stood in the doorway and watched a sheepish man pursue his careening hat along the street outside of the AP building. A girl went by and the wind in a lecherous, Coney Island fit sent her skirts flying upward, giving the boys a flash of pink panties and white thighs. Behind me a girl laughed; I turned and found it was Clare Ramsay, our receptionist, the gal with the vitamin-enriched smile.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” she said. She laughed at the hoodlum violence of the wind. I said yes, it surely was terrible. She got out of the way of people coming out of the building and moved closer to me.

I wondered why she was standing there alone so late, it must have been going on seven o’clock and as a rule she knocked off at five. Had she had a drink with a boy friend at one of those basement bars in the building and then quarreled? Maybe. Anyway, the too-ready secretarial-school smile of hers was gone and she wasn’t by any means too hard to take, resting as she did lightly and pleasingly on one’s retina. She moistened her full lips with her tongue as she chatted with me and her eyes did the things eyes customarily do when an ambitious gal gets two or three drinks under her twenty-four-inch belt. It was known in all the Madison Avenue employment agencies—do you want a career in the glamorous profession of public relations?—that Jefferson Clarke & Associates paid top rates for pulchritude and/or brains. Clare Ramsay moved closer to me, out of the way of the practical-joking wind, and it became moderately clear as she chatted away that she was zu haben. All you would have to do would be to invoke the time-tested and elementary formula, nothing nearly so complex and destructive as Einstein’s E = mc² which made atomic terror possible. And, although it could sometimes produce its own exclusive hell, my formula was simple and easy: C + D = B. Let C represent cocktails and D dinner, then, if you’re a member of the firm and not too hard to look at, B can quite easily represent Bed.

She was now telling me how terrible the wind must be out at Rockville Centre where she lived, and she pantomimed a girlish shiver for the member of the firm, cold all over, br-r-r! Out on Long Island, roaring in from the sea, the wind wasn’t a lewd city slicker but a natural, elemental force and you never can tell what it might do to a girl on a lonely suburban street coming up from the station. Yes, this was obviously the point where a gent with a sense of timing would have said something about getting out of the doorway and how about a cocktail over there at the Holland place in the next block, let’s make a dash for it, yes? But I said nothing of the kind. Instead, I thought not of the warmth and pleasure of having this girl in bed with me, but of the inevitable personal embarrassments in the morning, the business of the bathroom, the awkward speech about how this was not to alter our office relationship, the feeble strategy of arriving at the office separately. And I had had enough of that, if you don’t mind.

Ineptly, but since it didn’t matter, I said: “Well, I think I’ll have to be getting along.”

“I think I’ll make a break for it, too,” she said. There was an edge of disappointment in her voice, I imagined.

I patted her arm, indicated that the door was not irrevocably closed, that the matter might be negotiated some time in the future.

Head bent low, bucking the wind, I walked toward Fifth Avenue, leaving Manship’s gilt monstrosity behind. I liked walking home, even in this buffeting wind. The streets were not crowded and I was soon off on that endless, unspoken conversation with whomever it is you talk to when you’re alone. Some people call it thought, which, of course, is absurd; it’s a debate.

That evening, I admitted and denied and admitted again that I wanted Diana Forbes. Crossing Fifty-eighth Street I listened with some astonishment as I was scorned for using Clare Ramsay as a neat, small-minded revenge against Diana. Diana had frozen at the touch of my arm; Clare had offered me her smile and her simulated shiver, and I had been the bleak executive, who never gives nor receives. Or had Clare merely been standing in the doorway, period?

The debate continued until my doorman called the question with his: “Good evening, Mr. Sherrod.”

All that evening, as Mrs. Ferguson served me my dinner and later on through the night until I went to bed, vaguely dejected, I relived all that I could remember of what had happened since I had first met Diana Forbes down there during the Bank Street days. . . .

I remember that at the time I had stopped getting excited about four-alarm fires, Park Avenue murders, Stork Club brawls and semi-literate political bosses. My reporter’s police card which entitled me to cross police and fire lines, no longer caused me to feel that I was one of the lesser elite. As I remembered it that evening, it must have been the year before Jefferson Clarke and I went into public relations. One of the radical magazines had thrown a fund-raising party at a distinguished comrade’s home in that big apartment house down on Sheridan Square. I’ve since forgotten what the cause was, the Scottsboro boys, constitutional rights, or the Popular Front. It was something like that. Anyhow, I went; someone had virtually forced the ticket on me and I wanted to see what a Commie shindig was like. The place was filled with noisy Communists and their girls, and drinks were sold at an improvised bar for the benefit of the cause. In one of the bedrooms a crap game was in progress with a sizable kitty going to the Scottsboro boys or rather the Scottsboro committee or whatever it was. One of the reporters on my sheet spotted me and asked me over to the bar for a drink. The Newspaper Guild was a new thing in those days and we were all feeling radical as all hell. My colleague was pretty high, which was not remarkable, and he was accompanied by a very young, attractive but bewildered girl who obviously was not a Communist. Communists nowadays look like ordinary citizens, just as whores today are indistinguishable from respectable women, but back in those days they could be spotted on sight.

The girl was Diana Forbes. After we had been introduced we stood to one side and talked and kidded the comrades for a while and then my lushed-up colleague excused himself, saying that he wanted to shoot some crap for the benefit of humanity. The chance of breaking the house at a Miami crap game wouldn’t have tempted me to leave this particular girl with another man, but that was the Guildsman’s affair. We stood at the crowded bar and talked, covering just about everything that might be said in record time. The civil war that had broken out in Spain the year before took about four minutes flat. Heywood Broun, the Newspaper Guild, and journalism, being closer to our hearts, took a good half hour, after which we spoke about ourselves. Somewhere in the course of the conversation she told me that she came from Albany where her father was a Unitarian minister. (Roger MacLain, when he met her at the office years later and learned this, put down his glass in astonishment and said: “But Unitarianism isn’t really a religion, it’s the editorial policy of the New Republic.”) But that night we drank to Albany, and to Schenectady, and to Troy, and to all the other New York State towns ending in “y,” and all the while she stood there trying to look as if she belonged with these Village characters, radicals, unpublished poets and novelists, and real, no-kidding newspapermen. But she failed beautifully. It was a fine evening for us both. Diana’s escort had become hopelessly involved in the crap game and refused to leave until he won back some of his losses. “You take her home like a good guy, will you, Jack?” That was the beginning. I saw her the next day, and then like a good tactician skipped two days, after which I saw her for four days in a row. We talked. In wop joints down on Mulberry Street, at Sweet’s at the foot of Fulton Street during lunch time, at Nick’s on Seventh Avenue, in a dozen bars during the weeks that followed; we talked as though we were never going to see each other again. We talked of love and sex, John L. Lewis, Bach and Vivaldi, the brotherhood of man and Communism, America and New York, Bix Beiderbecke and Paul Whiteman, political science and Tammany Hall, justice and the Moscow trials, Hoover and the New Deal, the AFL and the CIO. But mostly we talked about ourselves.

She had come down from Vassar a short while before, where she had been something of a prodigy, with a quiet but magnificent determination to write. At college the bi-sexual young man who taught Lit. 4 once said in class that Diana Forbes had—she mimicked as she related it—“an absolute gift for words, a pure felicity of expression.” Finally, like so many girls with a pure felicity of expression in one way or another, she came to New York where, after a few stumbling starts, she got a job on one of the liberal afternoon papers where talent and facility in beginners barely paid for the rent and the groceries.

We met for lunch or dinner whenever we could. Then, one day the eruption of talk came to an end. We sat propped up at bars, not drinking much and not talking much either. There was a tension, a vague sense of depression, affecting our relationship. It grew, I suppose, out of what I imagined to be a rigid moral attitude, as I then described it to myself. Diana was not quite twenty when I first met her and the difference in our ages seemed vast at the time; I felt almost avuncular. During that second stage of our relationship all my ingrained, adolescent Calvinism was there to preserve Diana’s honor, an unhealthy attitude, I now realize, but there it was with its inevitable consequences. I was old enough to know better, but experience doesn’t mean a thing when it runs up against a man-sized moral conflict. I had spent more time than I should have with trollops, bar-flies, pickups, and plain out-and-out whores. The newspaperman in me, the pagan, the youthful cynic, said what the hell, Diana was a gal like any other. Yes, I had to admit she was easier to look at, more sensitive, more intelligent, than anything that had come my way so far. And yet I could never allow myself the exciting fantasy of having her in bed without conceiving it in terms of near-rape. It sounds silly, I know, but in those days I felt that if she had been a striking brunette instead of a slim blonde, it all would have been easier. You think of dark women, or at least I did at the time, and you think of Spanish shawls and French dames on the Left Bank in Paris and those Mexican girls who preferred toilet water to aqua pura. But a fair gal was something else again. The rules were written about fair girls, they were the symbols in song and story, and although I had left the songs and the stories behind, the symbols were still with me and I had a hell of a time repressing them.

I had come up from the fleabag on Fourth Street and was now living on Bank Street. I had a two-room apartment in one of those done-over brownfronts. It was furnished with inexpensive modern furniture, Navajo blankets, peasant ware, and two Van Gogh prints, good German ones, the self-portrait and the rain-drenched landscape. It was much later that the drugstores got around to selling them on the bargain counters and they were given away with newspaper subscriptions. I had books and a record player and now that I had Diana, life was pretty sweet. I was doing an early trick at the time and I was usually home at about three in the afternoon, so that by the time she called later I was rested, shaved, and had had two anticipatory drinks. She always looked alive and fresh, even after a tough day’s work. Eight or ten hours spent interviewing the blasted survivors of accidents, doing leg-work for the rewrite men who got the by-lines, phoning in stories from foul-smelling booths, did nothing to her except give her an enormous appetite.

“Where would the growing child care to eat this evening?” I asked. She named the spot.

We ate at Luchow’s over on Fourteenth Street, wallowing in pig’s knuckles and sauerkraut and several steins of beer. I was in a beer mood that night without the benefit of public relations. It was the first warm spring evening of the year, perfect beer weather, and I was young.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” I said toward the end of the dinner, “that murder is seldom committed on beer?”

“This is how I figure it. Whisky is all right for people with a yen for action and violence. Three drinks and you’re ready to build a factory or declare war on your neighbors—”

“Wait a minute, let me finish, please. But beer, on the other hand, is the drink of philosophers. It goes with conversation and not doing much. All the aggressive nations sure can put the hard stuff away. A good Russian can carry enough vodka to kill a beer-drinking Hollander. To the Englishman beer is something that goes with beef but for real, serious drinking it’s whisky all the time, while here in America beer is for hot nights or for the tail end of a boilermaker. As for the Irish—”

Diana lifted her small nose from her stein and quietly exploded my theory of beer gemütlichkeit.

“That’s a beautiful philosophy, Jack,” she said, “and it’s a pity it isn’t true. Beer, as you may have heard, is the ritual wassail at Nazi party conventions. And the whole dirty business started in a Munich beer hall.” She grinned at me over her stein.

“Oh, well,” I said, “if you’re going to use facts, there’s no use carrying on this kind of a conversation.” And I signaled the waiter for two more steins.

“How about going over to Nick’s,” I suggested, since it was still early. “They have beer too, and we can dance.”

“All right, then, let’s get a million cans of beer and we’ll drink every one of them over at my place. Yes?”

We climbed the three floors to my apartment and I went ahead and switched on two of my table lamps in my small living room. You could get that room into a corner of the one I have now. But I loved it. Diana stood in the center of the room, amid the alien Navajo blankets and the peasant ware, and I felt at that moment that this was where she belonged. Forever, if that’s how she wanted it. But on any other basis, if that was how it had to be.

Marry her or burn, but even if you do marry her don’t enjoy it too much, said all of my Calvinist ancestors, standing behind me, a long line of life-haters going all the way back to hell and gone, who had fought for the glory of God as if the very devil was in them. But it was spring and they were helpless.

I opened the windows and let in the evening air and the street sounds, cars shifting gears, the ganged-up kids playing noisily, the hoarse, blurred sound which is a New York City street at night. It was fine in the room; it was our room, it was the only room in the world. There have since been other rooms, better, swankier, fancier, but that room— There was a word in the room that evening, part of the verb to be, and the tense was the present and the mood was subjunctive. So, you see, there really wasn’t much to say and we didn’t say it. Instead, we opened some of the beer and listened to the radio, tuning it low so that it sounded as faint as an honest man’s conscience. And then, somehow the evening was over. It was finished before we knew it. The voices and shouts of the kids in the street went off-mike and then faded altogether, one by one the windows across the street went black. There was still plenty of beer left, at least half-a-million cans, but we weren’t drinking now.

“Yes, I know.” I had framed the thing I wanted to say in my mind, but when I came to say it a weak acquiescence was all I could manage. “Yes, I know.”

“It’s really too late to go home. Gosh, that long trip up to Inwood! You really don’t want me to make it, do you, darling?”

My heart, not the metaphorical one that kids carve on trees and park benches, or draw on the walls of the winding staircase inside the Statue of Liberty, but that vital, realistic business with auricles and ventricles, skidded into triple-time action, and my mouth suddenly went dry.

“Well, you oaf,” she said, “why don’t you ask me to stay? Must I sit here like a floosie and plead with you?”

And by way of invitation, I started to undress her. But this time not with my eyes. . . .

I left a shaded light on in my living room and opened the door to the bedroom. The covers on my bed were thrown back and she was waiting for me, indistinct but sufficiently visible in the half-light. And then, later, with her head on my shoulder, her hair half across my face, we lay there talking half-incoherently in whispers, talk that was part conversation, part apostrophe. There was a question I wanted to ask her; it came to my lips several times and died there. Well. I would know soon enough. Her body, fragrant with love and perfume, was hot to the touch of my impatient hands and responded out of its own wisdom. Then—

Then, it was as though all the protons of our individuality and all the neutrons of our love, miraculously charged and in constant motion, were fused into a new, nameless element. It was as if all the forces that kept me earthbound had lost their power. It was as if in the ensuing moments of violent crisis I had taken to flight and was now out there in space, alone, out there in a universe of blinding, whirling constellations. Dark and splintering light. And then, slowly, sustained by the billowing parachute of life, I drifted back, swinging in slow wide arcs, as the present rushed up to meet me, through all the light years of those few moments, but slowly, back into that room on Bank Street, back into the shaded light, back to Diana who lay there beside me, back to the moisture and perfume of her body, to the slow, even, spent breathing. Then I fell asleep.

We both had to be at work early the next morning and the alarm clock shook us both out of a perfect and deep sleep, which is murder after a night of love and an orgiastic, interplanetary excursion. We showered and dressed in a hurry and had orange juice, toast, and coffee at the counter of a Seventh Avenue drugstore.

It is easy to be a Calvinist in the morning and my conscience, or whatever it is, was hard at work. Surrounded by tired, dragged-out-of-bed faces at the drugstore counter, I said nothing until we were walking to the subway station. My ancestors were giving me the business.

“You know, Diana,” I said, as the butterflies began to stir, “I think the smart thing for us to do would involve a trip down to City Hall.”

“Oh, Mr. Sherrod, this is so sudden,” she said. “Do you say that to all the girls in the morning?”

“But there have been other girls and there have been other mornings, have there not, Mr. Sherrod?”

“Thank you. I’m very flattered.” She spoke as though she were reading lines from a cute, sophisticated college play. At that point I lost my sense of humor and protested her light-mindedness with some heat. I realized too late that no angry declaration of love is ever convincing.

“I tell you I love you,” I said, almost shouting. “It’s different with you.”

“I believe you, darling,” she said quietly. “And please don’t shout, people are looking at us. I’m not twenty yet. I have no intention of marrying anyone just now, much as I love you. Besides, this isn’t the time nor the place to talk about it.”

And that’s how it was for more than two months, more than sixty days of unwedded bliss, although as with all love there was a tapering. Then by the grace of God and our managing editor, interchangeable terms on all newspapers even now, I was assigned to a national story, first in Washington and later nearly all over the country. It was an exciting story and it got me on page one for nearly a week running with a half-column cut. When I returned to New York late that fall, Diana was waiting for me at the station. She ran forward to greet me as I came up the ramp, she threw her arms around me and kissed me as I fumbled stupidly with my luggage. We had a quick one at the Commodore bar and she told me she had only an hour or so, she was working on a feature story and wouldn’t be free until dinner time. Would that be all right? It was fine. Sure, it was. But I felt, as we stood there taking our drink, that something had gone wrong. No, it was more than that. Outwardly she was warm enough, she did all the intimate little things, but it was as if she were thinking of two things at once and before we got into the cab—“I’ll drop you off at your place and go on to the office”—I knew that the jig was up.

She was to call me at six and say what we would do about dinner. At six-thirty she hadn’t called and her office said that she was out on an assignment. At ten after seven still no call, and that cold, forsaken feeling at the pit of my stomach had settled down for a long visit. Then the telephone rang and the butterflies rose for flight and then subsided as I walked to the table to answer. It was Diana, voluble with apologies and, darling, would I mind very much if instead of coming up to the apartment we were to meet at some restaurant. All right, where? At the Lafayette in about half an hour or so.

We met in the café and had a few drinks at the marble-topped tables and then went into the dining room. We talked about my trip, about her work, but all the time the talk was oblique and kept going off at tangents. You mustn’t let her do it, I said to myself as we were eating, you must do it yourself. And, sure enough, I did it.

“Tell me, Jack,” she said when the coffee came around, “do you think it’s possible to love two people at once?”

It was a clumsy gambit, not at all like the girl who walked with me to the subway station following our first night together. Do it yourself, I said to myself again, kill it.

“Look, Diana, sure, one can love two people at the same time. One can, but I can’t.”

That did the trick, and I almost regretted it in the next few minutes. There was one of those silences, and I felt grateful that the people at the next table were talkative and noisy. Well, that was how she wanted it, and I pretended not to notice that her eyes were filled with tears. I ordered another half-bottle of wine and we both made a brave try at drinking ourselves out of a bad situation. Which, of course, never works.

After taking her home that night, I went back to my apartment to spend a sleepless night. I lay in bed reconstructing our first meeting and all the exciting times we had had together. Then, like most people who spend sleepless nights, I fell asleep.

We saw each other several times in the course of the next few weeks, but each meeting was a painful business. We were both polite, considerate of each other in all the small matters, which is certainly not the way of people in love. Once when we were both high, we made the sickening mistake of trying to recapture the past in bed. Then, when things became unendurable, she told me who it was.

It might have been worse. My rival at least was a desirable guy. I knew Joel Simon, not very well, but I had met him a few times. He was a rewrite man on one of the afternoon papers, one of the few fast men in the business who could take it without large doses of alcohol, afternoon rewrite being what it is. He was a member of the Guild and I had run into him a few times at meetings. He was a dark, serious, handsome Jew, quiet and detached in an odd sort of way. He carried with him a sense of his ancestors, intense, withdrawn from the old abominations of the world, kinsmen of the Lord; they whose dark, gentle laughter and tears the blinding world despised. I remembered having been to a small party at his apartment following a Guild meeting. There were about ten of us, but unlike most newspaper parties in those days this one didn’t end in a noisy, boozy finale. We sat around and drank (there was some whisky for those who wanted it) and talked while our host played some fine records for us. I remember him distinctly now, leaning up against his mantelpiece, saying, “As long as you can be satisfied with inexpensive women, good music, and sherry instead of whisky, you don’t need a hell of a lot of money. You’ve got the world dead to rights and you can tell any city editor to go to hell when the ride becomes rough.”

He made a strong first impression and on the whole I rather liked him on the few occasions when I met him after the party. Of course, I didn’t know him too well, but when Diana told me who it was I knew that I hadn’t much of a chance against him, assuming that I still wanted to struggle for Diana. He was, as I’ve said, intense and articulate as hell, and there was a kind of esoteric quality about him that made him a very special dish for a girl just down from Vassar. Yes, he was a perfect setup for a girl fed up to here with her stuffy, upstate background and Lit. 4 and the prissiness of the campus up at Poughkeepsie. She was escaping something, a set of values to which she might ultimately return, but in the meantime it was a man like Joel Simon who could best symbolize her rebellion, rather than myself who in so many ways was more closely identified with her Anglo-Saxon past. There was another reason, I think, for Diana’s attraction to Simon. In Germany, Jews were being tortured in the Gestapo prisons; women who were married to or slept with Jews had their heads shaven and were paraded through German streets to the jeers and catcalls of the populace; thoughtful and mild-mannered Jewish scholars and scientists were humiliated, forced to clean public toilets as a gallery of Nazi hoodlums looked on; synagogues were violated and burned. It was not difficult for a sensitive girl like Diana to feel a deep sympathy for as attractive and intelligent a member of this persecuted religious minority as Joel Simon.

But I must be honest with myself. I find myself here describing an attitude I did not have at the time. Nearly ten years after the events I can allow myself the luxuries of tolerance and wisdom, but during those first few weeks I had to reconcile myself to the bitter fact that I had been jilted. It was hard to take and, as I recall it, I was not above a kind of smoldering anti-Semitism, despite my avowed liberalism. If Diana’s so damned sorry for the Jews in Germany, I said to myself at the time, why doesn’t she contribute some money to one of their relief outfits or subscribe to an anti-Nazi magazine or write to her congressman or go to a mass meeting at Madison Square Garden and whoop it up for justice and decency and let it go at that? Why in hell must she show her sympathy for Einstein by falling in love with Joel Simon? With cheap cynicism I explained it away by saying that so many women often express their social or political sympathies best in bed.

But that solved nothing and in the end I lost out completely. From the moment that I fully realized that I didn’t have a chance with Diana, my work lost all interest for me. With the world going to hell and the Jews getting the most desirable women—this was how I put it to myself at the time—being a plughorse member of the working press seemed the most pointless thing in the world. And it was at this point that Jefferson Clarke re-entered my life.

Some men attempt to deaden the ache of unrequited love, as it used to be called, with alcohol, drugs, religion, or radical politics; any of these, of course, will be effective if you work hard enough at it. In my case it was something else. I fled to public relations. Jefferson Clarke, who used to be a newspaperman himself and whom I had known almost from the first day I arrived in New York, had just gone into the business. He had opened an office in the Graybar Building and in a remarkably short time found himself loaded with more work than he could handle. He phoned me one day and asked if I would have a drink with him the following afternoon.

His office looked as if it had been done by a stage designer for one of those one-set plays in which everything—national affairs, love, conspiracy, the second-act gimmick and, of course, the denouement—happens within the confines of three walls. It was furnished like a Park Avenue living room: the floor was heavily carpeted from wall to wall, there was a handsome liquor cabinet and a cocktail table and comfortable chairs. The only evidence that this might be a place of business, instead of what it appeared to be, was a Sheraton breakfront desk on whose lowered writing surface there rested a neat pile of letters. I had just come from the noisy, littered city room of my paper and I surveyed the elegance of Jeff’s office with the disapproval, if not the disdain, of a hard-working, underpaid reporter.

“All the work, the typing, the mimeographing, is done in the other offices,” Jeff explained with the self-satisfaction of a theatrical impresario. “This is where the heavy thinking and drinking is done. My clients love it. They love to get away from the grind of their own offices and come here and tell me how everybody misunderstands them. It’s like psychoanalysis; people go for it because the subject under discussion is the most fascinating in the world—yourself. And you needn’t look around like a vice crusader in the reception room of a bawdyhouse.”

“Don’t be stuffy. Here, let me fix you a drink.” He opened a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch and poured the drinks. “This is a great business, Jack,” he said, “I’ve got one client alone that nets me two thousand dollars a month.”

Not to be impressed, and with a fake unconcern for the fleshpots, I said: “So, all right, it’s a fifty-dollar joint, but it’s still a whorehouse.”

“You know, Jack, you mustn’t confuse the legitimate sale of high-priced talent with prostitution. Every phony and failure who can’t make the grade likes to think that success and prostitution are identical. It’s a convenient and consoling thing to believe when you’re not in the chips. It sustains that cringing, whimpering ego that all failures have, and that may be satisfying under the circumstances, but it isn’t true. You know as well as I do what public relations—no, not press-agentry or publicity—you know as well as I do what public relations is. My job is to advise my clients on the most effective way to get along with the press and the public. I’ve been everything in the newspaper business from police reporter to a Washington correspondent and I now have a certain professional knowledge that I can offer—”

“A certain skill maybe, but not my soul.” It was corny, but I said it; I was in that kind of self-damaging mood that afternoon. Jefferson Clarke looked at me with the quiet expression of a man into whose hands Providence has delivered an opponent.

“And what does your soul say to you when your sheet comes out and endorses some Tammany crook or covers up some stinking scandal, or when your publisher wants one of his mistresses plugged in her new show. What kind of a house would your soul say that you work in?”

“My publisher may be a whore, but I’m not. I just work in the joint. I don’t make editorial policy.”

“Well, I do. I sometimes do even more than that. I start the activity on which editorial policy is often based. My clients are geniuses at production and organization, but the human equation which you and I know as newspapermen, escapes them completely. From the public relations point of view most of them are morons. I’ll tell you what I mean: one of my clients, a manufacturer of farm machinery, comes beaming in here this morning, he’s got something that’ll make a great story, page one, he says. What’s the story, I ask him. Wait’ll you hear this! The Italian ambassador in Washington has sold him a bill of goods on Mussolini and all my client has to do to get one of the most coveted Italian decorations is to finance one of those cultural fascist outfits operating in this country. Smart, eh? So I had to spend nearly all this morning explaining to him that the way things are going in Spain, Il Duce’s little bauble might prove embarrassing a few years hence. I convinced him in the end, but it was tough going, brother. For good, solid advice like this, I am paid by this particular client a retainer of fifteen thousand dollars a year and I earn every dollar of it. So, you see, it might be proper to call me a kindergarten teacher for politically and socially backward industrialists, or a nursemaid for businessmen, but when you call me a whore you’re all wet.”

“I stand corrected,” I said, still determined to do a pratfall. “You’re not a slut, you’re a high-class courtesan.”

He shook his head patiently. “I don’t understand your great fondness for images associated with the brothel. You don’t seem to understand that I don’t do it on my back, but on my fanny, ten hours a day, driving sense into the heads of men who know their jobs as I could never know them, but are damn fools when they deal with the public through the press.”

He filled our glasses again and grinned as I sat there thinking about what he had told me. He knew far better than I did why I was ribbing public relations: it was the last self-righteous outburst before acquiescence.

“Look, Jack,” he said, after a while, “you’re not a baby any longer. How long are you going to get all steamed up about stories that you really don’t give a damn about? In this business, instead of reporting them, we make them. You’re a hell of a good newspaperman and you’re not always carrying a chip on your shoulder; we’ll make a crack team. The most you can hope to make as a member of the working press is a hundred and a quarter a week, unless you go abroad or get to write a successful column. And by that time, nine chances out of ten, you’ll be bald and nursing a honey of an ulcer. You can come with me, and I’d like to have you a lot. You’ll start at two hundred a week and expenses. If you pan out the way I think you will, you can write your own ticket—up to a half-interest in the outfit. How do you like that?”

I went home to my apartment on Bank Street and even as I entered my living room it seemed shabby. I spent most of the evening daydreaming.

I phoned Jeff a few days later—an exercise of the will kept me from calling him the following morning.

Down at the paper, I told Roy Watkins, our city editor, of my decision. Watkins was fifty, cadaverous, with a nervous hand at his perpetually tortured diaphragm and a glass of bicarbonate of soda on his desk. He looked at me with the eyes of a dead fish.

“Okay, Sherrod, it’s all right with me,” he said in a flat voice. “I suppose you expected me to pull the one about if I meet your mother I’m not to tell her that you’re a press agent but that you’re playing a piano in a two-dollar joint?”

“I pulled something like that myself when Clarke first asked me to take the job.”

“I’ve been in this business for more than thirty years. It was fun when I was a kid. But all I’ve got to show for it now is a few hundred dollars in the bank and one of the liveliest ulcers east of Hollywood. Listen, Sherrod, if anyone pulls that piano-player gag on you, tell him to go frig himself.” He started to play around with some copy. “Good luck to you, kid. Take everything that isn’t nailed down. Good night.”

A year later—in the movies—they would have had me slumped over a table in a cheap bar at the tail end of a three-day bender, sloppy around the chin. Two reporters, members of the Screen Actors’ Guild, enter, coming down the steps to the dive. They look pityingly at the soak at the table. Dialogue: Used to be one of the best men in the business. Who? The lush over there. Yeah? Yeah. Poor bastard, he went into publicity. Couldn’t take it, eh? No, look at the poor son-of-a-bitch now. End dialogue. Except that’s how it didn’t happen.

It seems that I was born for public relations. I enjoyed the conferences, the three-hour lunches, the feeling that I was helping to make news instead of waiting in outer rooms with my pocket bulging with half-moist copy paper, my fingers smudged with the soft lead of copy pencils, taking down with great care the unparsable utterances of some stuffed shirt. I now stood behind the stuffed shirt, helped to shape his policies, approved the speeches that one of our ghosts had prepared for him, a statement no longer unparsable but written in correct, succinct English prose which was printed not in one but in all the papers. I even enjoyed the conference dinners and if the post-prandial speeches were boring, I reminded myself that so were the windy reminiscences of the legmen, slotmen, and copyreaders over at Pete’s on payday. I had had my fill of spending hours in steaming telephone booths phoning in stories to rewrite men recovering from tough nights. “Spell it again, will you, Jack, I’m shaky as hell this morning.” “P as in Peter, E as in Edward, T as in Thomas.” And then the old gag: “T as in what?”

Jeff and I hit it off from the first day out. He was the innovator, the idea man, the executive, and I came through after him, mopping up, the trouble-shooter, the administrator, the perpetual vice-president, hesitating, worried, carrying the ball when it was passed to me, but always filled with misgivings right up until the contract was signed, the campaign well under way, until the checks were all paid. As Jeff had predicted, we made a good team, supplementing each other. I visited the plants of our clients, I spoke to superintendents, workers, labor leaders, and I listened to the tight-lipped talk of industrial engineers. In those first few months I learned a lot about American industry and its leaders on both sides of the fence that I had never suspected from reading either the Wall Street Journal or the works of our naturalistic novelists. The businessmen I met were neither as astute nor farsighted as the former would have you believe, and the workers and the labor leaders were not as idealistic, noble, or progressive as the latter pictured them. The crude, dumb, lecherous bastards who were usually presented in radical novels could never have organized and built our industrial plant (although there were one or two such guys), and no slap-happy, verbose idealist could have withstood the rigors of twentieth-century production. My new experiences confirmed something I had long suspected but couldn’t prove: that the literary stereotype of the ruthless, red-faced, cigar-in-the-puss boss is as false as that of the gentle, altruistic, come-to-Jesus worker. On both sides they were like most Americans in the aggregate, efficient and dawdling, shrewd and gullible, idealistic and tightfisted, broadminded and bigoted. At a company or a union dance it was sometimes hard to tell the workers from the junior executives. I remember one important labor-management conference where it was difficult to distinguish between my clients and the trade union leaders, except that the labor people were better tailored and usually better informed.

At the end of the first year with Jeff I was doing fine. I had brought in a few new accounts, I had handled a profitable campaign almost single-handed and I felt it was time to talk turkey. There wasn’t much talk. Jeff cut me in handsomely. I was flying right and the golden buckshot didn’t seem to weigh me down at all. I was now living in a different world, a world of fantasy come true in which the sense of the marvelous found frequent expression in my work. And so it wasn’t surprising that during all that year I hadn’t run into Diana once. Then one day, at a press conference for one of our clients, she turned up, representing her paper. The intervening year, the life she had been leading, had worked a subtle change in her. The last traces of baby fat had vanished, the angles, planes, and lines of her face were more definite so that more of her basic personality came through.

The conference was held in a suite at the Waldorf and when it was over and Diana had phoned her story in I invited her to have a drink with me. We went down to one of the cafés on the lobby floor, a corner called The Oasis, where we ordered drinks and talked. A Swedish client, whose fine glassware was soon to grace a million American homes, had introduced me to aquavit and how it must be served, the bottle encased in a solid block of ice. I was passing through a period of enthusiasm for it and I took it as the Scandinavians themselves prefer it, with a beer chaser. This amused Diana, who was a loyal, one-drink gal.

It was early in the afternoon and the café was deserted. The electric stars in the ceiling twinkled with mechanical regularity as we talked. After the third drink Diana loosened up and I forgot all about the mechanical stars.

She and Joel were living together; no, not married. Joel had a principled feeling about going down to City Hall and getting permission from a Tammany hanger-on, with a paunch and a whisky breath, to sleep with the woman he loved and with whom he intended to spend the rest of his life. That was the way she talked that afternoon. It was adolescent and beautifully foolish and I restrained an impulse to say that there were cities nearby whose administrations were decent and honest. Sitting there under the phony GE sky, I saw that we were now miles apart and I experienced that clean, empty, surprised feeling you have when you realize that a love affair is over and that you aren’t hurt. The cocktail crowd was beginning to come in when we were about through. She said something about having to hurry home and prepare their dinner and I said that cooking a man’s dinner regularly was as good a marriage certificate as any. Then I put her into a cab.

About a year after the press conference at the Waldorf, I read that Joel Simon had been killed fighting in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. I telephoned her to express my condolences and asked if there was anything I could do and if there was, would she call on me for whatever she wanted. I heard nothing from her for nearly a year, although I saw her by-line on stories from time to time, then one morning she called on the telephone and asked for an appointment to see me.

“I want to get out of the newspaper business, Jack,” she said, when she arrived. “I’ve had enough.”

She sat back in her chair and looked at me unsmilingly. It occurred to me that she looked more widowed, more shattered by Joel’s death, than if she had been married to him, but maybe I was in a romantic mood at the time. I don’t know.

“I want to get away from scurrying around town, meeting deadlines, phoning stories in to rewrite men and—”

“I’d like to try my hand at public relations. Do you think I could make a go of it?”

“All right, then, I’ll talk to Jeff Clarke about you. You’re as good as in, Diana. And now let’s go out and have a drink. Yes?”

Jeff liked her from the beginning. So did all her clients. She worked hard and while Lit. 4 and her feeling for pure expression went down the drain, she was soon in the chips. Of course, she lost something in the deal. It was a kind of idealism, a breathless devotion to principle, and as a defense she developed a keen sense of self-interest. But that was better than taking to drink or smothering your sorrow in promiscuity. She bought her clothes at the best Madison Avenue shops, and don’t let anyone tell you that they weren’t worth the money; she took lunch at those French places in the Sixties off the Park and she often dined with friends or clients at the Colony or Voisin’s. It’s true that her escorts weren’t kids who had the guts or the brash foolhardiness to go halfway around the world to get themselves killed in a war involving the freedom of another nation. And anyway, as she once said to me in a confiding moment, happiness was a cause that had been betrayed and the best you could do was hope for some sort of reasonable adjustment. But that’s how it is with deals, and when people say “give and take” they aren’t fooling. Another time, it must have been more than a year after Diana came with us, I took her down to Nick’s in the Village, although I know I shouldn’t have, and we sat around and heard the boys improvising a slow blues, winin’ boy, while the youngsters and their gals up front stopped dancing and stood about just listening, transfixed, life’s sweet stavin’ chain, the facile heartbreak of the original melody now made real and fundamental, now containing all the ache and loneliness in the world. And sitting in one of the booths on the side, I saw her eyes fill with tears and there was a hard, bitter expression on her face and I knew that she was cursing war and fascism or whatever it is that takes young men away from all the personal things, the only things that have real meaning, and kills them in some far-off place, the name of which you can hardly pronounce but will never forget. Yes, we got along fine.

These were the things I thought of that evening as I sat in my living room after Mrs. Ferguson had served my dinner. Once or twice in the course of the evening I went to the window that faces south and watched the lights in the buildings around Grand Central escalating into the darkness above. . . .

It isn’t very long since that Monday morning when I flew in from Southampton and ran into the Plans Board meeting at which Jefferson Clarke cut loose with his ideas about the common man. But it’s been long enough for me to have changed my mind about a lot of things, particularly about being competent and doing a craftsmanlike job for the things in which you really don’t believe. All of us, Jeff Clarke, Roger MacLain, Diana Forbes, the others, and I did a job on the common man that public relations men won’t forget in a hurry and neither will a lot of other people.

And many things have happened since to all of us, some of it good and some of it not so good. But back on that Monday morning all of us at Jefferson Clarke & Associates were riding the crest.

I got up the next morning feeling fine, as I usually do. I lit a cigarette, got into my dressing gown and sat down near the window ambling along with my thoughts, if that’s how you can describe the slow movement of images when you first come out of sleep. Then the thing hit me. It was like a doubletake or the way you react the morning after a great loss, when you’ve lost the best job in the world or an unbelievably accommodating girl friend or when someone terribly near to you has died. You wake up into the old, comfortable world, sleepily reaching for a cigarette, back into the world of tobacco smoke, coffee, toast, and the morning paper, a familiar and routine world. And then, wham, as the comic-strip artists say, you suddenly remember precisely what it is that you must now reckon with or do without. After that, you go about your business, thinking, making the slow adjustment. That’s how Jefferson Clarke’s plan for us getting ourselves a custom-built common man hit me that morning after I got up. Only it wasn’t with a sense of loss, although it was violent enough. One minute I was smoking that first cigarette of the day, the only one of all the fifty-odd I ever seem to remember, and the next minute I was sitting straight up in my chair with a feeling of apprehension, maybe it can be described as a feeling of pleasant apprehension—a sense that somehow the lives of all of us at the office would be greatly changed.

Mulling the plan over in my mind, I walked over to the full-length mirror in the door leading to my bathroom and looked appreciatively at the reflection of my best friend and most lenient critic, John F. Sherrod. Sherrod, the former newspaperman, who now keeps his stocks and securities in an outsized safety deposit box at the Chase National Bank. Sherrod, the young newspaperman who was going to write that novel but who wound up as a member of the firm of Jefferson Clarke & Associates, molders of public opinion, mouthpieces for American industry and free enterprise, mass manipulators. In the mirror I saw a man pushing forty, but not too hard and not too eagerly, on whose face there were no ravages of time except for faint crow’s feet at the corners of the eyes and even so you had to look closely to see them. There was not a trace of gray in the almost black hair, the eyes were clear and steady and the lips were thin and firm, proclaiming strength of character and determination. But I knew better! The man was reasonably tall and there wasn’t a sign of sedentary fat around the waist. What with good barbering and tailoring he could get away with it for another fifteen years, maybe longer. I ran my hand over my unshaven cheek and smiled to myself.

Jeff’s project took first place in my mind again as I opened the door of the bathroom, slipped out of my bathrobe and started to lather my face. I put a fresh blade into my razor and looking critically at the right side of my face started to shave, moving the razor down lightly from my cheekbone.

Myth, mythos. I had it! Of course, it was a myth. The common man of Jefferson Clarke & Associates would be a myth personified, in the flesh. The American people—what was I saying?—all people live and die by myths. It is because of these myths that people are able to go on with all the rottenness and meanness and the despair of life. The glory which Napoleon promised his hungry, flea-bitten troops was a myth. It was a myth that saved Stalingrad. If Bonaparte or Stalin had offered their troops reality they would have fled from the battlefield by the tens of thousands. And in each case, wherever a myth exists, it must be personified, with either a real or a symbolical figure. Stalin, the grim, silent champion of the proletariat; Uncle Sam, the lean, tight-lipped defender of liberty; Johnnie Q. Public, the little runt who always comes out on top in the end, but if only they would cut his taxes; Aunt Jemima, boy, what pancakes; Miss America, she comes from the other side of the tracks but if she gets half a break she, too, can marry a millionaire; John Bull, stubborn as all hell, but don’t twist his tail, brother. There were a million of them. And why not M. Citoyen, Gospodin Tovarisch Ivanovich, Signor L’Uomo Qualunque, Mr. Average Citizen. Yes, why not bring him to life? In the flesh. In person, not a movie. In reality, not as a political slogan. As he really is, not as an abstraction in a sociological thesis. Yes, right here in America, the birthplace of the common man. A common man in whom all the mass virtues would exist: honesty, patience and fortitude, frugality, simplicity, industry, and sound common sense, all the copybook virtues, set ’em in caps, printers. Step up, ladies and gentlemen, lookit, he lives, he breathes, he moves! All right, I know, I know, when we find him or manufacture him out of the most expensive public relations materials he’ll be set to work to sell the products and services of the Jefferson Clarke & Associates’ clients. So what? That’s the way they do things in this circus. You want the Boston Symphony Orchestra? Then you’ve got to take the radio commercial, which is my idea of a bargain. You want to laugh with Fred Allen, then you’ve got to hear Fords or tea-in-teabags plugged, you close your eyes and try not to think of cold teabags looking like dead mice, that’s the price and it’s not exorbitant. And even if you’re a liberal who reads the newspaper columns of Mrs. Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, and the others, you’ve got to read the patent medicine and Spam advertisements that help keep the papers going and help pay the syndicate costs of the columnists, liberal or reactionary.

But that’s no reason why our common man, like Mrs. Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, and LaGuardia, can’t be a Force for Good. Being a Force for Good is damned good business these days and Jefferson Clarke & Associates can ride the liberal trunk line with the best of them. We were the first public relations people to advise our clients that it was bum business to buck the unions. We were the first to convince them that you could do business with labor, we showed them how you could get the labor leaders to discipline your labor force. We showed them how you could raise wages, step up production, raise prices, and come out way ahead. And if we did all that, and more, we could make our common man an instrument for democracy, too. Sure, he’ll be working for our clients, but that’s no reason why he can’t also be for peace, international justice, freedom and democracy, why he can’t be for the hungry and the homeless, the afflicted, the persecuted, the oppressed. Sure. Why not?

“All right, Jefferson Clarke,” I said, addressing my absent partner, “you’ve convinced me. It’s a great idea. I’ll buy.”

I was going through those short, tricky strokes, shaving the corner of my mouth, and at that moment my razor slipped and cut a deep, quarter-of-an-inch gash in my lower lip. I cursed myself for a careless fool and when I looked into the mirror I saw the blood, more than a trickle, streaking down my chin. It was only a cut but just the same I felt faintly sick at the stomach and I broke out into a mild but cold sweat. I bathed the wound in cold water repeatedly and applied the styptic pencil, but still it bled, and so for the next five or ten minutes my mind was diverted from Jeff Clarke and our common man to the more immediate problem of staunching my own blood. Finally, I managed to dry the damned thing up, after which I dressed and went down to breakfast.

Wearing a light gray, chalk-striped suit, a soft, bashed-in felt hat, and a cut at the corner of my mouth covered with a thin streak of hardened blood (what the well-dressed masochist will wear!), I stepped out of the elevator into our reception room. Still blonde, still homogenized, her hair piled high in cunning ringlets, Clare Ramsay, evidently unscathed from her encounter with the lecherous wind out in Rockville Centre the night before, gave me the customary, enthusiastic top-level morning greeting. Bygones were bygones and this was a new day, a day in early spring. There would be other evenings when the wind blew or the rain marched across Rockefeller Plaza in slanting sheets and we would stand together in the shadow of the doorway.

I paused at her desk to make the polite and foolish inquiry and she said yes, but the wind was really something out at Rockville Centre, and then she spotted the cut.

“My, but you have nicked yourself, haven’t you, Mr. Sherrod?” Her crayon-blue eyes were filled with solicitude and her full rouge-red lips were puckered in sympathy. “You really ought to get one of those new electric shavers. My father—” But I wasn’t listening any longer. I cut her short by agreeing with her and moved along.

As I came through my outer office, Louise Bailey looked up from a copy of one of the slick weekly magazines and went through her morning protocol. She had not been reading her magazine but rather studying it, marking paragraphs and sections on the margin in pencil. I had once picked up one of her annotated magazines and read the marginalia: protagonist introduced, heroine enters story too late according to Professor Hawley’s theory, action delayed by description, and other choice bits of How-to-Write-Popular-Fiction mumbo-jumbo. She had been a great secretary until she sold two stories to the pulps and then something happened to her. When her first story was accepted she told me frankly that as soon as she made the grade with the slicks she was getting out. Did I mind very much? No, I didn’t mind very much. It was an occupational hazard and Louise Bailey wasn’t the only one in our outfit who hankered after the delights of the Literary Life. Our radio and publicity departments were staffed almost to the scuppers with frustrated writers who were planning that novel, that play, that slim volume of verse, writers who were using Jefferson Clarke & Associates as a stopgap. And with nearly every one of them the stopgap became a way of living, which is how it is with stopgaps.

“I’d like to see one of these sons-of-bitches who does his work because he likes it,” Jeff had once said, and since then he had devised a way to keep our writers chained to their jobs. It was a cruel way, and except in only one case it had worked beautifully so far.

“Staff meeting in Mr. Clarke’s office at ten-thirty,” she said as she put the sheet of paper before me. “He called a few minutes before you came in.”

The meeting was routine. We discussed with our department heads matters of finance, personnel, and policy, all the dull but important things that keep an organization going. After it was over I stayed behind to gab with Jeff.

He was in great shape that morning. Bouncy and euphoric were the words, the ingredients of the mood in which he usually got a new operation under way. He was more like an impresario than a businessman at such times, a master of ceremonies rather than a smart counselor of industry. As he spoke there was a communicable tension.

“How about our common man?” he asked, leaning back in his chair. “Did you sleep on it?”

“I nearly butchered myself thinking about it while I was shaving this morning. You know how I feel about stunts, Jeff, but this one is different. It stands up.”

“I was up half the night,” he said, “figuring the angles.” He was good at that; we all were. It was our business. “First, we’ve got to get the report written, the composite portrait of our guy. We’ll find out what the hell this common man who’s always upsetting the applecart really looks like.”

“About fifty thousand dollars, by the time we get through with it. What difference does it make? Can you really see this thing to the end?”

“Sure, I can. I was thinking that we ought to have Gaige in on this, so he won’t blow his top when the bills start coming in.”

Jeff flicked the switch on his intercom. “Walter,” he said, speaking at the instrument, “can you step in here for a few minutes?”

There is a matrix from which all treasurers are cast and Walter Gaige was no exception. You know him and his kind, no matter what his name. His head was bald and narrow, he wore dun-colored clothes with a conservative show of neatly-folded handkerchief, and his hands looked as if they had been sandpapered. Without seeing him, you know that he catches the 8:26 out of Larchmont and doesn’t run to catch it either. You know his favorite little jokes, like the one about the factory that employed one hundred men and two women and when one of the men married one of the women a statistician reported that fifty per cent of the women were married to one per cent of the men; you saw the thin smile, the pressed sleeves of his coat, the high shine on his shoes. I always wondered what his sex life, if any, was like; two to one with no takers in sight it must have left Mrs. Gaige as fresh as a daisy. As Gaige came into the room he wore that preoccupied, worried expression that so often accompanies great concern with figures.

“Sit down, Walter,” Jeff said. Gaige complied, almost creaking. “We’re heading into a deal that’s going to run into some expenditures and when the bills start coming in we want you to know what it’s all about.”

Gaige smiled; yes, yes, the idea-men were at it again. He looked and was a fuddy-duddy, but he was a whiz at the conservation of funds. He nodded gravely and Jeff outlined the scheme briefly for him. To bill a client, to foot the bills for a saturnalian party at one of the hotels for a batch of visiting firemen, to make out the annual report were all the same to him. We were going out to find the common denominator of the American people in the flesh and install him in our office. That was the way Jeff put it. But Walter Gaige raised no eyebrows. His response to this was purely formal. Who signs the bills and who okays the vouchers? Was there a limit on the budget for the project? No, there was no limit and I was to sign the bills. After we had gone into that at some length, he said that he would run along now, if we didn’t mind. We didn’t and he ran along.

“We’re going to do a job on this that’ll make the boys in the business want to go back and take refresher courses,” Jeff said. “I think we ought to have MacLain in here.” He worked the communications gadget and asked Roger to join us.

“I know how it is with MacLain,” he said, while we were waiting for Roger to come in. “He’s likely to go off at a tangent or on a bender. But if he lets himself go on this he’ll do a job of writing that’ll get him a bigger reputation than anything he’s ever done. Get him a couple of assistants and a bright, ambitious young statistician to help him with the charts. Bright, ambitious, and flexible.”

Roger came through the door looking well rested, fresh, almost eager, which was rare.

“Fine. But it won’t last. I think I’ll recover. Why? What are you two birds cooking up?”

“Well, we’ve decided that you’re to be the portrait painter of our common man,” Jeff said. “No abstractions or surrealism, just an old-fashioned picture with lots of good, sentimental brush strokes. I’d like you to drop everything you’re doing and get started on this as soon as you can. Go as far as you like and give it everything you’ve got. Get all the statistics, charts, and other information that you need and then sit yourself down and write a complete job, a definitive job on the common man. Dig down and get the origin of the idea, tie it in with the history of America and then go on and prove that this is the country of the common man, which it is, brother. After that, let’s have the figures and the statistics and end the job with a section on the common man and public opinion. And don’t spare the horses.”

“Go as far as you like. Fifty or sixty thousand words, as much as it needs. We’ll send the report, when it’s printed, to our clients and prospective clients as well as anyone else who’s interested. But write it as if you were writing it for the general public, so that the press and the magazines will want to reprint big hunks of it. From our own point of view we want to indicate that we’re in the public relations business and the common man is our baby; we think about him, we worry about him. And then, if and when this report of ours gets the attention it deserves, we’ll go out and find him.”

“Maybe we’ll run a contest. Or maybe we can discover some other way. That isn’t important now. We’ll find him, all right.”

Jeff got up and walked to the wall facing his desk. On it there was a map of the United States. It wasn’t just an ordinary map. It had been painted on the wall and showed our clients, in miniature drawings, strung clear across the country. The commercial artist had done a good job. There were the blast furnaces at Pittsburgh, Gary and Lackawanna complete with sheets of red flame, the white and blue glass factories at Cleveland, the slaughterhouses at Chicago, the marshaling yards at Kansas City, the neat office buildings that housed the branches of our credit outfit in about thirty cities, the high-tension power lines of Tri-City running across twelve states, and the wine presses northeast of San Francisco Bay set in clusters of off-color purple and pink grapes. Yes, it was more than an ordinary map showing political subdivisions, rivers, mountains, and railroads. It was a map showing the range and extent of the clients of Jefferson Clarke & Associates, it was also a road map showing how far two former newspapermen had come in a short ten years. We were rather proud of it.

“No matter how we find our common man, this is where we’re likely to find him,” Jeff said, standing at the map with a pencil in his hand. “You draw a line from the state of Washington to Key West—” He traced the imaginary line in the air over the map. “And then another line from Maine to southern California. And if you place a compass at the point of intersection—” He gestured to show what he meant, describing an arc with his first finger using his thumb at the fixed point. “And if you trace a circle a hundred miles in diameter here, that’s where you’ll find your common man.” He withdrew his fingers from southwest Missouri and faced us, tickled with himself.

This was to be a production, all right, and just as in the movies this colorful map of the United States filled the screen. It would burst like a paper hoop at the circus and through this torn-apart opening, under a giant magnifying glass, you would see the tree-shaded streets of some U.S. Middletown, the common, ordinary folks of this small Missouri town, ole Doc Parker’s drugstore and the kids having cokes, a bunch of veterans hanging around the courthouse. And then there would be a closeup of a white clapboard house of a typically average American family. In this simple house— Music: Up and behind. Cut!

“I don’t know,” Roger said. “You could find a common man anywhere in the country, in New York, Chicago, or any large city as well as in a small town.”

“It’s your baby, Roger,” Jeff said, putting his hand on MacLain’s shoulder. “Do the job as fast as you can but remember it’s got to be good and it’s got to stick. We’ve given the green light to Gaige, so from here out you’re on your own. If you need anything, no matter what, ask Jack, he’ll see that you get it.”

After Roger MacLain had left us, Jeff said, “No fooling, Jack, what do you really think of it? I thought you looked sour at the Plans Board meeting yesterday.”

“No, I like it. You know how I feel about stunts. They’re all right for Broadway and Hollywood. It isn’t that they’re usually undignified, which they are, but I think that corporation public relations ought to play it straight. But this one is different.”

“I feel the same as you do about stunts, Jack. But from here out dignity in public relations, as we used to think of it before the war, is out. Everybody is playing for keeps like never before and the old stuffed shirts are sure going to be by-passed unless they loosen up and get off their fannies.”

But there was no fun in his eyes as he took a cigarette from his pack and went through that ritual of self-assurance.

“Money and fun. And if we play our cards close to the vest we can have the thing that even money can’t buy, and I’m not talking about love, either.”

Now that was something! I wanted to pursue the idea further, but the phone rang and he was saved by the bell. It was long distance: Cleveland. I listened for a while as Jeff spoke. From snatches of conversation I got the drift. A client had ignored the conclusions in one of our reports and now had his hands full with a hostile state legislature. The talk at the other end seemed to be very contrite. Jeff looked up at me and grinned, gesturing as though to say, “How do you like this one for a prize Goddamned fool?” I gave him the sign and he waved to me as I moved out of his office.

Like no sensitive poet on earth, Roger MacLain was leaning back in his chair, his hands behind his neck and his feet on the polished surface of a broad-topped desk. It was all a matter of moods. Today he was a public relations executive, full of bounce and ideas, but the next day for no apparent reason he might go sour, bitter, and disappear on a bender that sometimes lasted a week. This meant that we had him, for all practical purposes, on a part-time basis. But when he came through, as he usually did, he paid off handsomely, like a parlayed bet. Roger was dictating to Edith Corey, his secretary, when I entered his office. Roger’s inability to get along with his secretaries was notorious. First, for no good reason at all he would overwhelm them with personal attention and intimacies and then, when the office honeymoon was over, for equally obscure reasons he would turn on them. This had gone on so long that at last we decided to stick him with the Corey girl, to teach him a lesson. She was a bitter pill, an earnest, purposeful dame, shop chairman of our office workers’ union, a niggling perfectionist in her work, and a devoted reader of a brace of earnest, purposeful, niggling, perfectionist, liberal weeklies. She was also an active self-improver and took courses at one of the Village cultural schools, liberal currents in modern literature, Monday and Thursday evenings, $20, register before October 15. All these are matters of taste, but she was also a habitual and neurotic dress-puller-down. You looked at her, and no matter how decently covered she was, there she was tugging away at her skirts like a nervous virgin trapped in a dream on a burlesque runway. She was now tugging away at her dress as I said good morning and sat down.

“I’m dictating some notes on the little guy,” Roger said. “I’ve done a little research already. Elementary stuff. To get the feel. Relax, Edith, Mr. Sherrod and I are going to gab for a while.”

“No, stick around.” He looked at me and smiled. “It’s always wise to have an amanuensis handy in moments of public relations parturition. You never can tell when you’re likely to have a miscarriage.” This was pretty bad, way below the MacLain standard, and Miss Corey glanced up at the ceiling, registering long-suffering tolerance. “Anyhow,” Roger went on, “before getting the statistics and the results of the surveys, I thought it might be a good idea to see what the masters had said on the subject. So the aging former poet, knowing that he would be stuck with the assignment, burned a few midnight kilowatts and browsed among the reference books.”

“What would we ever do without encyclopedias, Bartlett, and the World Almanac?”

“This!” He reached for a sheet of paper on his desk. “This is going to be a highbrow quiz program. No prizes, only the satisfaction of knowing that you’re lousy with erudition if you get the correct answer.” He read from the typed sheet: “ ‘The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it up or flee from it.’ ” He turned to me. “Who would you think said that, Jack?” Then to Miss Corey: “No prompting, please.”

“It sounds as though it might have been Hitler or Mussolini or some other Fascist,” she said.

“Wrong,” he said. “Sorry, better luck next time. It wasn’t Hitler, Mussolini, or some other Fascist. It was some other quote-unquote liberal.”

“The daddy of them all. The guy who said, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ ”

“Yes, kiddies, Voltaire.” The bottom of one of Miss Corey’s neat, packaged little worlds dropped away, leaving a pained, martyred expression on her round, plain face. “Now how the hell can you reconcile that sort of thing?” Roger said. “A ferocious beast, and I will defend to the death. And don’t think that the modern liberals aren’t equally contradictory.”

“So all right,” I said, “Voltaire contradicted himself. So what?” I got a rewarding glance from Miss Corey for that one.

“It’s a contradiction all right, but it’s no accident. Quote-unquote liberals are always contradicting themselves, always swallowing their words, explaining, backtracking. I’ll tell you why. Scratch the hide of any liberal, no matter how dreamy or myopic he may look, and you’ll find a grubby schemer after power. The little liberals dream of little power and the big ones want nothing less than the world. Of course, in a democracy you can’t go around saying the public is a ferocious beast because the public, the common men and women of this country, vote. But deep down in their scheming hearts liberals really think the public is a ferocious beast that ought to be chained. That’s why you’ll always see them ganged up, hollering their heads off for some cause that will hogtie people in some way like getting them to live in barrack-like developments, or march in parades carrying slogans written by a smart liberal sloganeer, or join leagues, guilds, and federations, or attend mass meetings at Madison Square Garden where everybody’s voice becomes nobody’s and the liberal committee takes over. All this is part of the business of chaining the ferocious beast. But to do a really bang-up job, money isn’t enough. You’ve got to have power. And in this country there is no power without the support of the common man, no matter how you get it. In these days of universal literacy you can’t sell a mouthwash, start a crusade—and it doesn’t matter whether it’s progressive or reactionary—pass a law or elect a dogcatcher, let alone a President, without the approval of the commonalty. Money by itself doesn’t mean a damned thing. Check over your list of top common-man liberals and you’ll find that they’re smart millionaires who know that living down on Philadelphia’s Main Line or on the Upper East Side in New York or at Newport in a musty kind of by-passed splendor is no proof of power. You know that as well as I do.”

He mentioned their names, ticking them off his finger tips: a multimillionaire heir to a mail-order fortune, one of the largest owners of farm land in the mid-West, a Chicago reformer with a talent for marrying into the dough, a former banker who now owned a small but influential chain of eastern newspapers, a socially-conscious industrialist whose liberalism paid off handsomely in his dealings with the Bureau of Internal Revenue during the war, and a senior partner in one of the most powerful banking houses in the world.

“But what about the reactionaries?” Edith Corey asked. “What do they do to the people?”

“Plenty, sister,” Roger said. “They give the common man the business in another way. Scarcity, war, taxes. It’s bad all over.”

“This is all very interesting, Roger,” I said. “But aren’t you confusing liberals with totalitarians?”

“It’s hard to tell ’em apart these days,” Roger said, “but that’s because the totalitarians are having such a wonderful time confusing the liberals, and, brother, they confuse easy. But leave us return to our mutton.”

He reached for the sheet of paper containing the quotes on the common people. “All right,” he said, “let’s get away from Voltaire. Alexander Pope, who could polish a line of verse with the best of ’em, polished off the common man and his wife with this honey: ‘The people are a many-headed beast.’ And even William Penn got off a word of liberal Quaker wisdom. Listen to this! ‘Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.’ Cute, eh? The first New Dealer, very likely. And now here’s another lulu—”

“Do you mind if I step out of the office for a few minutes?” she asked. Roger shook his head and she walked out.

“For the love of gentle Christ,” Roger said when the door of the room was shut, “next time Gaige gets me a secretary let her not be a bleeding-heart lover of humanity. Besides, she’s as ugly as hell.”

“I think you ride the girl too hard,” I said. “Anyhow, there’s no such thing as an ugly woman.”

“Old Jerry Monohan back home used to say that there was no such thing as bad whisky; there was only good whisky and better whisky. That’s the way I feel about women.”

“I don’t believe a word you say,” Roger said. “You’re just getting yourself into a common-man frame of mind, loving everybody, even ugly wenches. Listen, Jack, let’s keep this project clean, disinterested, and commercial. Oh, all right, don’t worry, I’ll do a good job on this report, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to go around like a beamish boy, loving everybody.”

That was the way Jeff wanted it. Be as cynical as you like, only amateurs found it necessary to be sincere in the matter of craft, but be sure and turn out a clean, professional job.

“You’re to have anything you want,” I said, bringing the talk to an end; I’d had enough. “Statisticians, assistants, government reports, a complete special staff, anything. If you don’t see what you want, ask for it.”

“Okay. First, if you love me, Jack, get me a good low-brow secretary. No soul, no special courses at the New School, no self-improvement. Just a pretty face, a cute fanny, and nimble fingers that can take a hundred and fifty words a minute.”

I strolled back to my office on a little unofficial tour of inspection. This always gave me a fine glow of ownership, at which I pretended to laugh, but there was the glow just the same.

Presiding over her desk in the chromium-and-glass brick reception room, Miss Ramsay gave me a bright smile as I passed through. Our décor was a little dated, modern from way back, and we’d soon have to do something about it. A page girl, a cute little trick, carrying copy and interoffice memos, said good morning to me. We didn’t hire, we cast them, and it was a good policy that paid off, since front was part of our stock-in-trade. I would have to talk to Gaige about a new secretary for Roger.

I walked toward the large general office, down the wide corridor leading to it, the walls of which were covered with blown-up stills and photomontages of some of the page-one events we had staged for our clients: A governor throwing the switch in a new hydroelectric power station. “Careful, Governor,” someone had cracked in the crowd, “that’s real juice you’re handling, not the Republican state committee.” And the governor laughed, throwing his head back to reveal the even lines of his dentures. And here he was looking up at a movie actress smashing a bottle of California champagne on a new Diesel locomotive. (We drank the real thing, magnums of English-market Perrier Jouet at the party afterwards.) The Assistant Secretary of War and his aides watching a five-ton block of white-hot steel being swung into position. The industrial might of America, with management and labor playing as teammates, has enabled us—

On the opposite wall there was an enormous blow-up, a vastly enlarged photograph about twenty feet long and running from the floor to the ceiling. It was the picture of a crowd apparently taken at a county fair. Looking at it you saw several thousand relaxed, slack, meaningless faces staring into the camera, life-sized up front and fading off into pinpoints in the distance where you saw the hazy outline of a grandstand. You saw the imperfections: the warts, the wens, the crow’s feet, the acne scars, the sagging double chins, the pimples. And you imagined the rest. Why don’t ya go an’ see a doctor about it? You almost smelled the popcorn, the hot dogs, and the sweat. And for the rest, you imagined that, too. This was the collective portrait of our audience, blank-eyed, slack-mouthed, grinning, staring, a bottomless receptacle into which you could pour anything. This was the crowd, the mob, the pee-pul, the masses, the multitude, recipients of loaves and fishes and quiz-program refrigerators and washing machines. They were the people who sent box tops or reasonable facsimiles, they pulled levers in voting machines, marched militantly in causeless parades, sobbed their hearts out at gooey tear-jerkers in darkened movie houses, damn near wet their pants laughing at corny jokes— Can you gimme a sentence with the word, pencil, in it? Sure, I can. I wear suspenders so my pencil stay up. A storm of guffaws. They sang yes we have no bananas (they did) the music goes round and round (it did) mairzy doats (they do) and open the door Richard (but all the doors were tightly shut and that’s how we intended to keep it).

You didn’t need a philosophy or even an ideology to influence these people. All you needed was the apparatus. Everything was soaked up indiscriminately. It was the machine that did it. These were the faces that George Creel had in mind when he said: “Give me two weeks and the proper machinery and I’ll change the so-called mind of the American people on any given subject.” I liked the blow-up and so did our clients. They looked at themselves in the paneled photomontages with self-satisfaction and then turned to look with equanimity at the vacant, sloppy faces of Voltaire’s beast. But now it wasn’t ferocious and there was no need to chain it. It was drugged. I liked the picture for an altogether different reason: it sustained me in my moments of flagging cynicism. Standing there looking at the photograph, I stroked the dried cut at the corner of my mouth and smiled.

“Yes, that’s where we’ll find him,” a voice said at my elbow. It was a real voice and I damned near jumped. It was Jeff.

I laughed, covering my surprise. I knew whom he meant. “That’s right,” I said, “he’s in there somewhere.”

Jeff smiled, squeezed my arm, and walked toward the reception room. I continued on, strolling through the office. In the general office the pleasant, steady clatter of typewriters and comptometers greeted me, and beyond that, along the other corridor I heard the uneven bursts from the typewriters in the publicity department, indistinct conversation in the conference rooms. The staff was working beautifully. A left-wing writer had once described our outfit as “an eclectic organization compounded of equal parts of free enterprise, slick culture, city room, and Hollywood.” It worked that way and Jeff and I were proud of it; it had been built out of nothing. Of course, what the radical writer had forgotten to say in his article was that he had tried to make the grade with us and had failed. We had no fixed policy against hiring fugitives from the ranks of the socialist or communist parties or any of the splinter-group outfits. After years of trying to sell that most unsaleable of commodities, the brotherhood of man, they found they could ride the public relations bike no hands. The failure of socialism in Europe, the Moscow trials, and the Russian terror generally and the subsequent despair of all the bright young men from Harvard, Yale, CCNY, and Wisconsin had been a godsend to the slick magazines, radio, advertising, and public relations. Some of our best talent came to us after the intellectual retreat from Moscow, and in most cases at bargain prices.

At four that afternoon, Jeff dropped into my office, sank into a chair, propped his feet up on my desk, and asked for a drink. I got out a bottle of manzanilla, his favorite drink that I always kept handy, and filled his glass. I filled mine with gin and a shake of bitters. He smiled a kind of dry smile as I poured my drink.

I knew, but I asked anyway. It was a ritual conversation with slight variations, and you must never step out of line in rituals.

“The nostalgic odor of printer’s ink in your nostrils and the taste of gin in your mouth.”

“That’s because you first tasted it in speakeasies when you were a crazy kid. Pure nostalgia.”

We sat there drinking and talking a while. Jeff, tense and spruce (he was the only man I knew who could be tense with his feet up on a desk), with two cornflowers in his lapel, sipped his drink, and finally snapped a cigarette in two and put one piece in his holder and discarded the other.

“Look, fella, I’ve been wrestling with the phone all afternoon besides wrestling with MacLain. I’m too tired to guess. I give up. Who is it?”

He smiled maliciously. “Adjust your safety belt, brother, this’ll take your breath.”

“Ashley Bennett called a couple of hours ago. Says they’re in some kind of jam, wouldn’t say what over the phone, and can one of us fly out to Chicago, but fast. How do you like that?”

Ashley Bennett, in case you don’t know—which means you don’t follow the financial pages of the newspapers, which means you’re missing the news that makes the news—Ashley Bennett was, among other things, top boy of Iroquois Metals.

On ticker tape being fed into hundreds of stockbrokers’ offices in every large city of America, Iroquois Metals was IRX, off a point trading light, up three points and going strong, declaring $2.60 a share on common and it was a smart idea to have a wad of it in your portfolio. In the CIO offices in Chicago, Gary, Pittsburgh, and Lackawanna, the boys said that Iroquois Metals used to be a tough, union-busting outfit until something hit them and Bennett saw the light. (That, comrades, was our doing, sitting with Bennett and Laswell and the rest of the crowd and hammering some labor-relations common sense into their thick skulls. “Look, Ashley, sooner or later you’re going to have to do business with these boys. Do it now, beat the other metals people to the draw and get yourself a good press into the bargain. Besides, these union people can police your labor force better and cheaper than you can do it, once they’re on your side.”) That was how Iroquois Metals got its enlightened labor policy, as some of the papers called it, and that was how Iroquois Metals products went up in price. But in the end everybody was happy, so happy that nobody noticed that the price index moved up a notch except a few statisticians, and they don’t count. Down in Washington, in the Pentagon Building, they said that the IM crowd could always be depended on to deliver the goods and that, among other reasons, was why Iroquois Metals was getting a flock of those experimental contracts, to keep their hands in, to keep in practice against the day when metal would be flowing across the oceans again.

No matter what Ashley Bennett and Iroquois Metals were to Wall Street, the CIO, and the big brass down in Washington, to us Bennett was a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year client whom Edwin Proctor had snatched from us the year before. Fifty thousand dollars a year is a lot of cabbage, even in top-flight public relations, and IM was a prestige client to boot, but all this didn’t prevent me from despising the chairman of its board. Ashley Bennett had rubbed me the wrong way from the day I first met him. Subsequent meetings did nothing except to confirm my distaste for the man. I admit my prejudice. There it is. And it is out of this feeling that I describe him.

When I was introduced to him in our office just before the war he was in his middle forties, maybe older, and I didn’t like the way he looked. He was a tall, thin man, pale, with anemic freckles on his face and freckles and red hair on his hands. They were not ordinary freckles, but two-tone, inlaid spots which made him look as if he had been peppered with lentils. And much as I dislike freckled redheads, I realize that you can’t in all fairness hold that against a man. And it wasn’t that he wore a belt over his narrow hips and that his trousers were always slipping and that he was continually hitching them up with a gesture that he managed to make obscene. If you can imagine bloodshot oysters, you have a fair idea what his eyes looked like after the fifth drink, but you can’t even hold that against anyone. We all have our infirmities and it was Ashley Bennett’s misfortune that most of his showed. I suppose it was that face of his, which in repose looked like a small-town deacon’s, and the arrogant way he had of speaking, an arrogance that became crude and disgusting when he was slopped up. Which happened from time to time.

For all his money and power and opportunities, Ashley Bennett was narrow and bigoted, and had to be that way at the top of his voice. We straightened him out on some of his hates and public habits but not much. I remember that once after Pearl Harbor some of us were sitting around and drinking in his suite at the Waldorf (he thought that the Waldorf was the best hotel in New York) and Bennett took a list of subcontractors from his pocket, handed it to one of his men, saying: “First thing we have to do on this job is eliminate the kikes. Do you recognize any of these names?” Except once, when Diana left me for Joel Simon, I’ve never been a Jew-lover nor a Jew-hater; to me Jews are people like all others on God’s green earth. And I don’t mean “maybe more so” as Roger MacLain once said. I vaguely suspected that afternoon in Bennett’s suite what I now know to be a clinical fact: that the avarice, aggression, vulgarity, love of dirt, and voluptuousness which the anti-Semite charges against the Jews are the things which all of us suppress in our own deepest natures. The bigot is a man who has lost the fight against his own baseness and must deny it by projecting his evil impulses beyond himself on a helpless minority. As I have said, I didn’t know this at the time, I merely suspected it. I wanted to make one of those caustic cracks that would have compelled him to avow that some of his best friends were Jews. To which I planned to remark that my favorite god was a Jew. Or else I might have stood up and said coldly that I couldn’t remain in a room where that kind of talk was going on. But he was a new client and fifty thousand dollars a year can sometimes act as a very effective brake on the emotions or whatever it was that made me want to get up and take a poke at him. For the next few years we handled his account, setting him up in the public mind as a national figure, a warrior on the production front, a defender of free enterprise, and, at the same time, keeping him in right with the people who mattered down in Washington. It was a good fee and we earned every dollar of it, but in the end Edwin Proctor sold him a line of school-of-journalism public relations and we lost the account. And now he was in a jam; they were always in a jam when they wanted to come back. Fly out to Chicago, but fast. Nothing less.

“Swell. Proctor won’t sleep for a week when he hears we’ve got Bennett back.”

I poured another drink in celebration of the Iroquois Metals jam and Proctor’s discomfiture when he found out that his best client had left him. We looked at each other without saying anything and we both laughed.

Then Jeff walked over to my desk and started to horse around with the intercom. In the years since he had left the newspaper business he had become something of an authority on the economics of mile-long steel mills, cost-accounting systems, and international tariffs—you had to know more than public relations in public relations—yet his face always lit up like a kid’s whenever he played with this office gadget. He sat at my desk now, grinning, as he flipped the “listen” switch into the general office. The voices of the girls, the sound of the typewriters, a ringing telephone came through clearly.

He flipped another switch. This time it was the publicity department. He wasn’t eavesdropping on his staff. He was simply counting his blessings over the intercom, listening to the sounds of the machine he had created.

Malcolm Sturt was out of town and they were apparently through for the day in publicity. But Johnston, one of our best men, was talking to one of our second-string writers.

“Yeah.” (Pause) “Look, Bob, make the release date on that Columbia story Monday a.m.’s. Malcolm is going to tip off Winchell in time for his Sunday night broadcast. It’s right up his alley and it’ll build the story.”

“One of these days I’m going to buy myself a little shack up in Connecticut up around Redding and sit me down and do that novel I’m always shooting my mouth off about. And, brother, let me tell you that . . .”

“What do you say we give him a hike in pay? Let’s make it two hundred and fifty.”

“Simply in the interest of American literature. I can see the novel now. One of those tight, precious things. Short sentences, short chapters, and the reader gets shortchanged. In the first chapter this guy Johnston, a publicity man who knows what time it is, only now his name is Mac, drops into his favorite bar on Third Avenue. He’s really got the money to drink at any decent place on Madison Avenue, but, no, he’s a rebel and so he has to drink with the crumb bums and the sawdust in a joint under the El. And, of course, he meets an inscrutable girl there. She’s a rebel, too. In the end he scrutes her but not before you’ve been dragged through two hundred wide-margined pages of tight-lipped prose; price, three bucks.”

Jeff was enjoying himself. His cigarette holder poked up from the corner of his mouth at a tough angle. The ash tray in front of him was almost overflowing with smoked butts and the halves of the cigarettes he had discarded. He reached for his drink and finished it.

“If we give him another fifty dollars a week he’ll feel that he’s in the money and he’ll never write that novel,” Jeff went on. “He’s a damned good publicity man. Let’s keep it that way.”

“But he’ll be happier up in that shack in Connecticut than he is here, grinding out stuff that he really doesn’t believe in.”

“For another fifty dollars he’ll believe in it.” He took the butt from his holder, squinched it, took another cigarette from his case and snapped it in two. “Besides,” he said, “who the hell is he to be happy.”

For nearly two weeks we made tentative appointments, canceled them, made them over again. First I was to go; we set the time, the hotel reservations were made, and then everything was canceled. Then, Jeff spoke to Bennett over the phone saying that he’d be out over the week end, but that was called off, too, at the last minute.

Anyone in the business would have told you that you couldn’t do that to Iroquois Metals and Ashley Bennett. Nobody ever had. But we were doing it and we were having a lot of fun.

We were stalling, all right, but not for the laughs only. We had no intention of walking in cold on that Chicago conference and depending solely on what Bennett chose to tell us. We wanted to know why he had ditched Proctor and how deeply involved he had become in whatever it was that required our urgent services. Well, there are ways of finding out, ways that are never taught in college courses in business administration, and we found out. Not everything, of course, but enough to give me the edge when I finally sat down with the boys in my suite at the hotel overlooking Lake Michigan.

I had left New York from LaGuardia Airport early one evening. It was growing dark as the plane moved rapidly over Manhattan and half a mile down below the red and green traffic lights marched up the avenues changing colors. We crossed to New Jersey, over Palisades Park, a five-and-dime gimcrack brooch set against the slate surface of the North River, heading northwest. Up ahead there in the dusk lay the pitheads and the slag heaps of northern Pennsylvania and the lush farmland of western New York; it would be dark when we passed over Scranton.

A last look. I turned to take a last look at Manhattan over my shoulder, as if I would never see it again. The sky was pastel in the failing light, an affront to modern painting but there it was and, as I looked at it, something happened at the pit of my stomach: falling elevators, that steep descent on the scenic railway, the sudden loss of a girl, the disastrous telegram at three in the morning. The sky over Manhattan! In Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or any other cities along the eastern seaboard with their narrow streets and low buildings, the sky seems tame, domesticated, flat, and low-slung. But in New York there is a splendor about the sky which seems pure and aloof, held at a distance by the escalating planes and tangents of its skyscrapers.

It grew dark and we headed northwest over the thin strip of New Jersey, on over those God-awful mining towns of Pennsylvania. Down below men stood in the neon glare of drugstores or bar-and-grills and looked up at the lights of the eight o’clock plane, and one of them would let go with a stream of tobacco juice and say: “Brother, when those babies hit the side of a mountain they come apart just like anybody else, and they ain’t pretty to look at, either,” and all the time wishing to Christ he could get the hell out of this town and be in one of them Constellations, maybe with a fancy piece, heading up toward the Lakes, Chicago, maybe California, and him with his woman seven months gone.

It had been a long and tiresome day, and after leafing through a magazine I leaned back in my seat and dozed off. I awoke with a start after a while, coming out of a dream in which I had been stopped at the door of a night club for not having paid my check. I protested angrily that I had been a member of a supper party and that the check had been paid by my host, but the people with whom I had come now appeared to be complete strangers who stared at me with indifference. “You’re not the first fourflusher we’ve had today,” the beefy-faced manager said. Then he grabbed me by the lapels of my coat and, at the same moment, two bouncers pinioned my arms from behind as the manager started to go through my pockets, looking for my wallet. When they discovered that I had no money, I was first shoved and then kicked from behind. I fell sprawling into the street on my face, and at that moment I awoke. It was good to come out of that dream, to pick myself up from the pavement, to escape the derisive hooting of the passersby in the dream and to step into a Constellation a mile up over western New York, up from a kick in the pants to part owner of Jefferson Clarke & Associates. It was a great feeling and you had to think it as some kind of ritual of self-assurance, almost say it aloud—three hundred AT&T, one hundred Santa Fe, two hundred US Steel common—for the blessings of the modern world have to be counted to be believed. I reached for my inside breast pocket and felt for my wallet. Yes, it was there; and looking out of the window I saw a webbed circle of lights hugging a black void. The lights were Buffalo and the void was Lake Erie. And to this side of the city I saw the spurting flame of the blast furnaces of Lackawanna, tongues of fire licking the night, among them one owned by Iroquois Metals. Then I dozed off again, this time going into a deep sleep.

I was awakened by the stewardess, who smiled and asked me to fasten my safety belt. It was a beautiful public relations smile that had taken months of training to develop at the airline school, and looking at it you knew that no plane with a gal like that aboard could ever crash and spread its guts over the side of a lonely mountain anywhere. We were about to land at Chicago, she said. And a few minutes later the Constellation taxied up to the barn of an airport which was the best that the second largest city of America could boast.

I had expected to ride from the airport to the hotel in a cab, but Bennett had decided to accord me ambassadorial honors and had sent his chauffeured Cadillac and a bright young man from his office to welcome me to Chicago. He was a polite young man, a son of one of the minor vice-presidents: Brooks clothes, Peal shoes, a regimental tie, solid kid, bought his clothes in New York. He greeted me with the diffidence of a youngster whose heroes are the stars of Fortune and The Iron Age.

Bennett would have come himself, the young man said, but there had been an accident out at the Gary plant, a serious one, and at eleven he was still out there.

“We were able to get you a very fine suite at the hotel, Mr. Sherrod,” the young man said, as we started down the road away from the airport. That was fine, I said, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to maintain a conversation with this youngster all the way into town. But he was sufficiently sure of himself to remain politely and considerately silent until we ran into a traffic jam about half-a-mile from the airfield. He apologized for the long delay as we waited for more than twenty minutes while a fifty-car freight shunted back and forth at a road level crossing. The kid must have felt that somehow he was responsible.

“We’ve been trying to get an underpass built here,” he said with a sense of civic shame, “but although the money for it has been appropriated for more than a year, they’ve done nothing. You know Chicago, Mr. Sherrod.”

Yes, I knew Chicago. And to me Chicago was not the University and its brilliant young minds, it was not the fine Outer Drive, not Carl Sandburg, or Edgar Lee Masters. Chicago to me was the toughest town in America, “hog-butcher to the world” with the culture of a hog-butcher, a city lorded over by hard-eyed mugs. To me Chicago is a city of unbelievable slums where in spots the population density is the highest in the world, where uncollected garbage rots in the slum streets, where ambitious, hard-drinking businessmen spend money after hours the way it’s spent in a whorehouse of a Saturday night, down the drain—There’s more where that comes from, brother. It’s the city where a Negro panhandler once stopped me on the street and said: “Lissen, boss, kin a cullid man talk t’yuh without gittin’ killed?” He wanted a dime. In New York, all my friends from Chicago after the third drink start telling me about the guts and vitality of Chicago, the Lake whitefish, the Pump Room, the dice girls in every restaurant and bar who have replaced the male pimp in the city’s fourth largest industry (or is it fifth?), the Negro jazz in some of the joints on the South Side (which is really good). But I notice that these friends of mine never go back.

Finally, the freight got going and the traffic jam was broken. Half an hour later we pulled up at the hotel overlooking the Lake.

When the vice-president’s son had me satisfactorily squared away, I strolled through my suite on a tour of inspection. There were flowers in the bedroom— When you get right down to it, there’s a touch of pansy in all these writers—some excellent scotch in the drawing room, a box of Ramon Allones, and a dozen packages of the cigarettes I smoked. Bennett had browned us off when he went over to Proctor, but good, and now he was doing it in reverse, doing it up brown, which was all right with me and clinching proof that our advance information on his difficulties was correct. I unpacked, took a slug of scotch and turned in.

Next day Bennett arrived for his conference with me. With him were George Dodge, treasurer of Iroquois Metals, a little man who looked and sounded like something turned out by International Business Machines, and Martin Laswell, of whom Clarence Darrow once said: “When I sometimes regret having left corporation law I always console myself by taking a good look at Martie Laswell.” We shook hands all round, got off the usual pleasantries, I phoned for lots of White Rock and ice, and then we got down to business. Bennett was standing as we got started. After the preliminary palaver and more of same, he hitched up his trousers over his narrow hips. It was a kind of middle-aged gesture of his body, jitter-buggery, groiny, and on him it wasn’t becoming.

“We may as well lay all the cards on the table,” he said by way of an opening, which meant, of course, that he intended to keep at least an ace up his sleeve. “I never hold back from Martie here or my doctor and I suppose the same thing goes for your public relations man.”

“I’m going to lay it on the line. And here it is: About three months ago my secretary resigned. She’d been with me nearly ten years and knew the business almost as well as I do. We did right by her, gave her a big send-off and a fat bonus check. Then, about a month after she’d left us, Patterson in the Treasury Department calls me from Washington and says he’d like to come out to Chicago to talk to me. It was about the renegotiation of some of our war contracts. Well, Patterson comes out here and we have a long talk. It must have taken the whole of one afternoon and while I’m listening to the son-of-a-bitch I see that he’s talking as if he’s spent a week end with our files. Well, that’s just what he’d done. After he left we took a fast look through our files and we find that this bitch of a secretary had taken enough stuff to keep us on the anxious seat for a hell of a long time. I don’t know who’s behind it all, whether it’s the government or some of the opposition. I wouldn’t put it past some of the boys in this business. But there it is, brother, where Jesus flang it. And we don’t mean to leave it lay—”

None of us had touched our drinks while Bennett had been making his little preliminary speech. He now reached for his drink, took it neat, shoved the whisky glass aside, filled a highball glass half-full of the stuff and knocked it off, straight.

“Have they got anything on you that can stand up?” I asked as he nearly choked on the drink.

And then for more than an hour, with no punches pulled, Bennett told us the story of how Iroquois Metals had operated during the war. Some of it was familiar, some of it wasn’t. In the early days of the war when there had been a shortage of nearly everything, the government had come crawling on its knees. Do you need any money, Mr. Bennett? Glad to finance you. Need any new plants? Glad to build ’em for you. And then there was all that red tape and paper work. First, they told you to make arms as fast as you could, then they slowed you up with insane priority rulings and useless inspections. But IM delivered the goods and came out with E’s from both the Army and the Navy. Sure, there were wild parties at which some of the big brass got stinko. Sure, IM had a platoon of high-class whores on its payroll to take care of the boys. So what? Sure, IM kicked in with campaign contributions. And plenty, too. Sure, they slipped a little folding money to a hatful of cut-rate congressmen who were scared crapless after the scandal out in Oregon. The bastards were ready to doublecross you at the drop of a hat. Did I know what Mark Twain had said? No, what did Mark Twain say? He said that if you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This, Mark Twain said, was the principal difference between a man and a dog.

“You know how it was, Jack,” Bennett said, moving straight ahead and not drinking now. “All during the war, money didn’t mean a damned thing. All they wanted was production and, by Jesus, we gave it to ’em. We had the lowest percentage of defective output in the industry. Yes, I know, the war’s over now. Next year is an election year and every crook in Washington is getting ready to pull the old Judas act. So they get my secretary to loot our files. Our wires are tapped. If they ever get us in front of one of those Senate investigating committees, they’ll murder us. . . .”

Well, that was it. Our information had been correct. The Marshlands committee was getting ready to give Iroquois Metals the works. Not yet, not yet, there was plenty of time, what with the presidential campaign more than a year off. But when the gumbeaters hit the airwaves here was a horrible example made to order.

There they sat when Bennett got through, the top-level trio of the outfit, harried, tense, and martyred, which is how businessmen like to see each other. It shows that they’re thinking things through, hitting the line for dear old IM. It proves that postwar business is no joke with every damned bureaucrat and politician in Washington trying to nail you to the cross.

“I’ve been in business all my life and I thought I knew all the angles,” Bennett said. If you closed your eyes and didn’t see the tight mouth, the unnatural white skin and the bas-relief freckles, the inflamed Blue Point eyes, you would have said that the voice was pathetic. “But they’ve suddenly changed the rules. And this is where your outfit comes in. I don’t have to tell you, Jack, that if you can help us out of this mess, you’ve got our business for the rest of your life.”

“Yes, thanks,” I said, but what I wanted to say was: “You’re Goddamned right!”

Then Laswell took over. This conference had wiped the smug expression from his face. His client was in a legal predicament, but here was one spot where briefs, pleas, demurrers, and writs of certiorari would weigh little on the scale. Something new had to be added and it wasn’t legal legerdemain. A distinguished graduate of the Harvard Law School, class of 1920, finding himself in the disagreeable situation of having to come to a public relations man for a lesson in strategy—shades of Blackstone. Make a note of this, Mr. Laswell, the Earl of Chatham was wrong when he said that where the law ends tyranny begins. Where the law ends public relations begins. Maybe it amounts to the same thing. Anyhow, you are here because you and Proctor scurried around Capitol Hill trying to get a fix in somewhere and it hadn’t worked. You know that if you boys have to face the Marshlands committee and ultimately the courts, you’ll be up the well-known creek and without a paddle. It’ll be bad not only for Bennett but for you too, because you know you’re in it up to the neck yourself, Mr. Vestryman, Mr. Legal Luminary, Mr. Solid Citizen. Do you remember when you stopped to look at our blown-up still of the slack-mouthed mob in our corridor back in New York? You remember how you smiled? What if these people with the slack, relaxed faces came to life because there was a presidential year in the offing? What if the demagogues went to work on them, using Iroquois Metals as the scapegoat? Sure, they could use any one of a hundred outfits, but if they were getting ready to use IM, what then? All the creosote in the world wouldn’t be able to mask the stench.

But I didn’t say anything like that. I thought it and I also thought of the fee, and what pleasure I got out of this conference came from watching these bastards squirm. Laswell was getting ready to say something, and a thin film of sweat showed on his forehead. I closed my eyes for a second and saw the possible headlines.

“How are you people fixed in Washington?” Laswell said, Laswell, the smooth lawyer, member of the Bar Association, wearer of pince-nez, licker of dry lips, possessor of highly polished fingernails. Fixed, he says.

“I don’t mean with the NAM and the rest of the business crowd. How are you fixed with these loud-mouthed friends of the common man?”

Sure, we knew Marshlands. But I also knew that if I tipped all of my hand and made a promise, a definite promise, all I could do afterwards was to live up to it, which is not only bad public relations but bad business. The important thing was to feed the growing fear of these men, paint the picture as black as they wanted it to be, and then indicate, but only indicate, the plan of action, and then set the fee.

“Yes, we know Marshlands and we’ve done business with him in the past,” I said. “But it may not be necessary to get to him. The first thing that has to be done is to start building goodwill in the newspapers, over the radio and in the magazines, so that if and when the story breaks the edge will be taken off it. But before we do that our office will have to make a complete analysis of the problem. We’ll want to see everything you’ve got that’ll help offset the adverse publicity when it breaks—letters from generals, pictures of official ceremonies at your plants, a statement from your unions about your labor relations, stuff like that. Then our Plans Board will cook up a plan of strategy and make a detailed outline of day-to-day tactics. And if we think that Marshlands will have to be taken into our confidence, why, that can always be arranged. But I may as well warn you: this is a tough job. We’ll promise nothing except intelligent thinking and hard work.”

“How much is all this going to cost us?” Bennett asked, looking at Dodge. Dodge had said nothing right along. They had simply brought him along to hear the bad news.

“It’s hard to say offhand,” I said. “These are not definite or final figures, but I should say that the advertising campaign alone, that is, if we all decide on it, will run into a million dollars.”

They said nothing, but you could hear the thud. Bennett turned a fine, gratifying white and those freckles really stood out now, but that was all, no swallowing hard and no licking of his dry lips. He had been drinking hard all during the conference, but that sobered him up. Dodge said nothing, he wasn’t supposed to, but Laswell looked as if he regretted that he had studied law. And then the final blow.

“And our fee, over and above all expenses, will be two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“And what will it be if this campaign of yours doesn’t produce any results, Mr. Sherrod?” Laswell asked.

“What do you do in your profession in such cases, Mr. Laswell?” A quarter of a million dollars, it seemed, inspired a lot of formality. It wasn’t Jack and Martie any longer, which was all right with me.

“All right, all right,” Bennett said irritably, brushing Laswell aside. “I’ll buy. What the hell, in the end the government will pay most of it anyway. But we’ll have to spread this out on our books; it’ll look as phony as hell paying a public relations outfit a quarter of a million at a time like this.”

I wanted every last drop of blood. “Not that it makes any difference, but how much did you people pay Proctor?”

“Let that be a lesson to you,” I said, tying up the package. “Never shop in the basement.”

Then I phoned for room service. The waiter emptied the ash trays, brought some more White Rock and ice and took our orders for lunch.

After we had eaten, Bennett asked: “I suppose you and Jeff will handle this account, same as you did before?”

“We’ll be in on it, of course, but one of our best men will actually carry out the decisions of the Plans Board.”

“I don’t know whether you do or not. He’s a really brilliant guy we snatched from the War Production Board and what he doesn’t know about public relations isn’t worth bothering about.”

Money isn’t everything; there’s room in this world for fun, too. So I let him have it. It was wonderful.

“Mordecai Schiff. Do you know him? You must have read his stuff in the magazines. You’ll like him. Has the kind of mind that has all the answers before you’ve finished putting the question.”

It wasn’t fair, I know, because it was just that quality that Bennett detested in Jews. He started to say something.—Uh-uh, Mr. Bennett, careful! Better start practicing tolerance, you’re in a nasty spot, you know. And then he apparently thought the better of it. Finally, he said: “Sure, we’ll work with him, if you say he’s good. War Production Board. Say, that ties right in with this, doesn’t it?” It struck him as amusing and he began to laugh. “War Production Board, boy, that’s a good one!” And he laughed until the tears ran down his freckled cheeks. When he had stopped he asked: “But you and Jeff will ride herd on him, won’t you?”

“Why don’t you give yourself a one-day holiday? Won’t do you any harm. There’s some very fancy gutter I want to show you. Yes?”

Briefly I told him what the pitch was and the tentative fee I had mentioned. He saw the story at once, understood immediately what I had in mind, the report, the newspaper advertising campaign, the tie-ins, the entire five-move three-piece combination, knight rooks businessman, check and mate.

He laughed. “You know, Jack,” he said, “I sometimes think there’s a heavy streak of genius in you. Any man who can flush a quarter of a million dollars out of the IM crowd!”

I made an appropriately modest reply and then told him that I would be back some time the next day. At five Bennett called to say that he would be delayed and it was past six when he knocked at my door. He had changed into an Oxford gray suit and wore a wing collar and blue polka-dotted tie and a white carnation, all of which together with his red hair and white, speckled skin created an off-color scheme. This, I presumed, was his On-The-Town getup.

We had a few drinks in my suite and then went over to the Pump Room at the Ambassador East for dinner. There was the usual crowd. Bug-eyed politicians: as your doctor, I must tell you that if you keep on at this rate you can expect another coronary attack. Top-level businessmen: lissen, Bill, don’t talk to me about free enterprise and what I’ve got to do to save it, I’m in business and I’ve got to make a profit. Visiting Hollywood celebrities: when they send you out on those personal appearance tours on the tank-town circuits, you’d better start saving your money. And the better-heeled members of the local intelligentsia: I know that champagne doesn’t go with shish kebob, but I like it just the same.

Bennett looked around at the glorified, costume-ball steak joint and beamed. “As good as anything you’ve got in New York, you’ve got to admit that,” he said. I made no reply, thinking of Voisin’s, the Café Chambord and half a dozen places in the East Sixties. I joined him in ordering the national dish and the wine of the country, a steak that thick and scotch and soda, may Escoffier forgive me.

We dined and drank (with interruptions as Bennett’s cronies and their ladies came to our table to pay their respects) until ten o’clock.

Bennett’s mink-lined sewer was nothing of the sort. It was a small, attractive night spot and I liked it from the moment we were seated. The men, of course, were impossible, but the jazz was in the Chicago tradition, which is always to the good; the liquor was unadulterated and served in generous glasses instead of in gyp-nips, and the women, both at the tables and in the show, were beautiful. I must have loosened up perceptibly, because Bennett immediately said: “Now, this, you’ve got to admit—” I admitted it freely.

It seemed we had come specifically to see one of the acts in the floor show, the pièce de résistance, as Bennett called it. He pronounced it “peace,” making a pun of it, enjoying his own humor enormously. Then he added, spoiling it all: “But I don’t think she’ll do much resisting tonight.”

Bennett’s “she” was Gloria Dale, more celebrated than the greatest living ballet dancer, more sought after than New York’s most beautiful debutante. Thousands of young men during the war went to their deaths, not with the vision of Democracy before their eyes but with the image of Gloria Dale. Her specialty was ekdysis, as press agents in their archer moments had described it; from the Greek, a getting out, molting. There have been hundreds of striptease acts in the cultural history of America but none was more simple and provocative than Gloria Dale’s routine:

set: The bedroom of a girls’ boarding school. College pennants on walls. Pin-up photographs of movie stars and crooners. A daybed, left, a table, right, on which there is a phonograph; two easy chairs, a bridge lamp. A curtained window, rear. This is a fancy school, the script writer will have you know, where the tuition alone costs twelve hundred dollars a year.

gloria, who has made sleep possible for more young men than sheep-counting, hot milk, or seconal; a cute trick who’s read all the books on Sumner’s Index and has come through unscathed.

Gloria enters, right, straight from the campus. She is wearing blue jeans, moccasins, anklets, a leather golf jacket, and under that you see, when she starts peeling, a sloppy pullover sweater. (“Lissen, Lou, I tell ya this is sumpin diffrent, a bran’ new routine.”) She carries some books which she tosses on the daybed after she enters. She climbs out of her jacket, lights a cigarette and goes over to the gramophone, puts a record on it and starts playing. The machine is dead, the music comes from the orchestra. Then she starts to undress. She takes a yellow ribbon out of her hair, shaking her hair free, then the sloppy sweater comes off and underneath it, instead of Sloppy Jo underwear she’s wearing delicate, feminine underthings. (“Get the idea, Lou? Suspense. First ya think maybe she’s wearin’ BVD’s, but underneath she’s a smart chick who knows her business. Wait’ll I tell ya . . .”) She unhooks her brassière and regards her breasts with innocent curiosity, she caresses first her shoulders, then her breasts. She is completely oblivious to her audience. (“This ain’t no cheap burlycu strip routine like Kelly’s where the broad has a red heart light up near her G-string when she sings ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy.’ She’s alone in her room, see? She’s a school girl!”) Then, off come the jeans, the lazy way, with one soft, rolling wriggle to shake them below her hips, and instead of a pair of dollar shorts you see the finest pair of Vogue panties you ever set eyes on, they’re cut smart and brief, hand-stitched. And so right until the end where the music is up and throaty until just as she’s about to slip out of her panties. Then, socko, she suddenly looks out at the audience in the dark, looking indignantly, as though they were so many lecherous voyeurs. (“Kin ya see it, Lou? Kin ya hear the cash customers breathin’ hard? It’s like she didn’t know they wuz lookin’!”) And now right here the music is away in the background, hardly audible. There’s a horrified look of girlish outrage on Gloria’s face. Eyes wide open, mouth rounded. Why, you nasty men! (Blackout.)

There was a pause after the curtain while the men in the audience adjusted themselves to reality, made a long journey in a few seconds and quickly saw that the deeply forbidden thing was still forbidden. And then there was wild applause as the house lights went up and there was Gloria Dale, the pin-up idol of millions, no longer a talented juvenile delinquent but an artiste, in a beautiful but demure dressing gown, half smiling, looking down under her long artificial lashes, shy, taking her bows.

“What d’ you think of that?” Bennett asked me, as the waiter brought us another round of drinks.

“She’ll be over here later. It’s a little something I arranged for you so that you won’t have two lonely nights in Chicago. It comes high, but we’ll charge it off to public relations.”

“No deprivation,” he said. “Besides, she’s brought a friend along tonight.”

About a half an hour later, Gloria Dale and her friend came over to our table where the drinking continued until we closed the place. There was more drinking at my suite at the hotel and, finally, Bennett took his companion off to another suite in the hotel, leaving me alone with my distinguished companion.

All right. Then in that case I must declare before the entire world, since I’m sure the entire world would like to know it, that Gloria’s millions of pin-up fans in lonely boarding houses, Army camps, and college dormitories are luckier than they think. For the truth is that in the hay Gloria Dale has very little to offer. I know that I’m being a kiss-and-tell cad but this is a matter that transcends mere codes of honor. There was no wide-eyed naïveté, no teen-age verve (actually she is thirty-five), no half-subtle exhibitionism. All that is only in the script. Never for a moment does she allow her companion to forget that she once starred in a movie, that she was queen of the campus of a great university back in 1945, or that she has been had by South American millionaires, nationally known illustrators, successful playwrights, international statesmen—“I happened to be in San Francisco at the time; you know, that’s where they started the United Nations”—movie producers, editors, male (and female, I suspected) stars of stage, screen and radio.

“Simply tell me what you want to prove and I’ll be glad to construct the charts for you.”

Francis Haines, our statistician, was a tall, thin man in his middle thirties, with disarming pale blue eyes, a free-floating Adam’s apple and an upended elliptical bald head. Gaige had assigned him to Roger MacLain for the common-man project. He tossed a sheaf of papers on Roger’s desk and sat back in his chair, the absent-minded professor, m-mn, yes.

“One could prove by means of a suitably constructed chart with a suitable selection of scales that the income of a sharecropper in Arkansas falls very little short of the most equitable distribution of wealth conceivable,” he said, lightly drumming his finger tips on the surface of Roger’s desk. “All one would have to do would be to put the ordinates on a logarithmic scale and the abscissae on a natural scale, after that the rest is easy.” He smiled without mirth, a dry, scholarly smile, q.e.d. “You can prove anything you set your heart on.” And, no kidding, he could—and did.

I knew he would take no offense, so I said it: “A complex way of saying, ‘—but liars can figure.’ ”

“Well, I hope we’re not going to settle that one today,” Roger said, giving him the brush-off.

“No, not today or any other day,” Haines said, getting up to leave. “I’ll have the income charts for you tomorrow,” he said, making for the door.

“Why, our common man, homo Americanus. The Jefferson Clarke & Associates average citizen, copyrighted, researched, tabulated, ordinates on a logarithmic scale, checked and double-checked, custom-built, made to order.” He grinned behind his heavy horn-rimmed glasses and tapped a pile of papers. “He begins to stir. Right here.”

“It’s hard to say yet. But we’re getting the facts, scientific as hell, head measurements, anthropological data, and everything. We know which movie actress’ face lights up the screen of his just-before-going-to-sleep fantasy, the size of his feet, how many cigarettes he smokes a day, type of underwear he favors, union suit or shorts, how he votes, what he reads, religion, and other pertinent information. Sampled opinions, hundreds of them. Man, man, who’s got the common man.”

He was up to his ears in it and he loved it. He lit a cigarette and exhaled explosively.

“What could be more fun,” he asked, “than helping to install a new god in the pantheon of twentieth-century American democracy?”

The intercom buzzed and Roger flicked the key to listen. It was Diana looking for me.

“He’s right here,” Roger said. “We’re gabbing, come on over if you’re not too busy.”

Gray and fresh in a new spring outfit, Diana joined us. Business of gal making an entrance, business of wolfish recognition of her apparel from the gentlemen at the desk. Roger poured the drinks, but Diana begged off; she had a heavy luncheon date where there would be plenty of drinking without this one.

“Sketches for the portrait of a new deity,” he said, waving his hand at the piled-up material on his desk. “A deity who wears a size fifteen-and-a-half shirt, seven-and-a-quarter hat with a snap brim, who votes Republican between wars, drinks milk when dining out, slouches wherever he goes, and if he’s six feet tall, which he isn’t, considers it a personal achievement. He reads the comic strips, likes stag poker, believes that goodwill and being neighborly pay off in personal relations and that character, ability, and honesty get you places in business, particularly if you marry the boss’s daughter. Listen to this, it’s from a section of the manuscript dealing with the ethics of the common man, boiled down from a dozen surveys.” He read: “The average American believes that the family is a sacred institution—” He smiled and paused to pencil a correction on the typewritten sheet. “My stenographers,” he said, “are trained to make the most brilliant mistakes. I, too, believe that the family is a ‘scared’ institution.” He went on: “. . . and is the basis of our society. He believes that sexual relations before or outside of marriage are immoral and that the American democratic form of government is the most ideal and finest in the world. What do you think of that in this year of grace, two decades or so after the sexual revolution?”

“But how about the statistics on illegitimate children?” Diana said. “You’re only proving that people aren’t completely honest when they’re filling out questionnaires or answering public opinion interviewers. You go around asking questions but it’s rare that you get any subsurface reactions. Just before the Tri-Cities strike all our surveys showed that most of the workers loved the company and that some of them felt that the unions had too much power. Two weeks later all the Tri-Cities plants were shut tight. You read these reports and you get a picture of the average man as a kind of amiable idiot who never questioned a copybook maxim or a reactionary editorial. Well, I think he’s smarter than the statistics show.”

“Get the lady a soapbox,” Roger said, but his face slipped a notch as he said it.

“Of course,” Diana said, “if all we want is a convenient peg on which to hang our common-man campaign when and if we find him, then any old report will do, and the more stereotyped the better. But I don’t think that we ought to fool ourselves. We’ve got all this money appropriated for a survey and a report, and we ought to use it for getting some real, useful information. Who cares whether men are faithful or not?”

Jefferson Clarke had come into the office while Diana was talking and he now laughed at Roger’s crack.

“I know that our common-man project is a public relations operation, but that’s no reason why it can’t be something else as well. I don’t see why our report, when it’s written, can’t tell the things that are never mentioned in the public opinion polls, in the official surveys and in business statistics.”

“Like how the millions of common men and women of this country feel about the insecurity, the monotony, the ugliness of their lives. And what they think or hope might be done about it. I’m not talking about the publicized common man that we’re going to discover, surprise, surprise, on Spruce Street in Middletown, or wherever it’s going to happen. I mean the millions of simple people who dream of getting something out of life besides endless worry, crushing boredom, and an occasional war to relieve the monotony. Save your breath, Roger. Sure, this is a soapbox speech and if someone on our side doesn’t make it, the opposition will and then it’ll be too bad. Let’s not kid ourselves, the common man we’re all talking about is dumb, but he isn’t as dumb as we think. He’s nobody’s fool. He’s getting damned sick and tired of seeing science pile it up while his condition becomes more and more hopeless. I think he’s tired of being the perpetual fall guy in all the fancy, big-time schemes that people are always cooking up for him. From the reports and surveys I’ve seen on this thing so far, Roger, I don’t think we’re getting a picture of the real common man. What we’re going to get, if we don’t watch out, is a typical, a priori, public-relations common man. He’ll make good copy and he’ll be good for our clients. If that’s what we’re after, it’ll have to be all right with me. I suppose one phony myth is as good as another. But it seems a shame.”

As best as I can remember that was what Diana said. Of course, it was radical corn, pure Golden Bantam, but it was spoken with a warmth that went way down and a sincerity that was unmistakable, putting me in mind of the Diana I had known back in the old Village days. And in a sentimental flash, which I quickly suppressed, I felt that somehow she was trying to square herself with Joel Simon, Joel Simon who had been dead almost ten years, dead and buried in an unmarked grave on the Ebro. And listening to her, I wondered what Jeff would say, and, in another flash, which I didn’t suppress this time, I was determined that, no matter what, I would go down the line for her. But Jeff said nothing; he merely sat there taking it all in.

“Now look, Diana,” Roger said, “don’t you go making a sawtoothed reactionary out of me. I’ll go along with you in your affection for the people, although if I were stating the case I’d formulate it somewhat differently. But if we’re going to do a naturalistic picture of our common man in which all the warts show, we’ll have to include stuff like this.” He reached over for a sheet of paper on his desk. “A pretty extensive national poll taken almost two years after the end of the war showed that thirty per cent of the adult population didn’t know that the Philippines had been occupied by the Japanese, sixty per cent had never heard of the Atlantic Charter, and ninety-five per cent were unable to name even one of its provisions. But nearly ninety per cent knew who Superman was and eighty per cent could tell you whether or not Lana Turner wore falsies.”

“I know those figures,” Diana said, “I’ve heard them before. For my money, all they prove is that the press, radio, magazines, and we public relations people have done a lopsided job. Apparently, there was a better publicity operation on Turner’s breasts than there was on the Philippines.”

“Or maybe,” said Roger, “people are more interested in Hollywood anatomy than they are in current history.”

“Sure, they are. And let’s get all this into our report and give the most intelligent and fullest explanations we can.”

“If we’re preparing this report for the archives division of the Library of Congress, or as a social document, or as a manifesto of some kind, what Diana suggests is fine. I’d find it a lot of fun doing it that way. But as I see it, it’s supposed to be a build-up for step number two in our common-man campaign. Jeff, I distinctly recall what you said at the first Plans Board meeting. You said: ‘If this is the century of the common man, and it’s beginning to look that way, then I can’t think of anything better than to have him working for Jefferson Clarke & Associates.’ And that makes it a straight public relations operation right from the beginning.”

Jeff took one of those kingsize cigarettes from his case, but this time he didn’t break it. Instead, he fingered it slowly as he spoke. “Sure, it’s a public relations operation, Roger. That’s our business. But that’s no reason why the report can’t be an important contribution to the subject. If it turns out to be the kind of thing they seal up on cornerstones, so much the better. And if sections of it are radical and have a touch of manifesto, maybe it’ll save us all from the firing squad some day. Go as far as you like. Let it be as critical as you please and let the ideologies fall where they may. If it’s a good job, naturally it’ll help sell our clients to the public more effectively. I’ve always said that if an idea can’t be worked in more ways than one it’s no good.”

“Please,” I said, “no epilogues, no explanations, no footnotes. You did a damned good job. History will remember you as the Joan of Arc of public relations.”

“I owe it all to my father,” she said. “ ‘Guile,’ he used to say, ‘is an acquired habit.’ And like a good Unitarian I’ve tried hard not to acquire it.”

“Customers will please refrain from discussing religion or politics at this bar.” I looked at my watch; it was nearly noon. “Tell you what,” I said, “let’s be mature delinquents this afternoon and play hookey. You duck your lunch date and I’ll duck mine. I know a place near Mount Vernon where they do their English mutton chops over smoldering hickory embers. I could drive you there in an hour. We could sit there all afternoon without meeting an advertising or public relations executive. Think of it!”

“I am thinking. But not of mutton chops and an afternoon of freedom. I’m thinking of my lunch date with the new plastics people which I can’t duck and I’m thinking of a desk piled high with work to be done. Make it dinner this evening and I’m your gal.”

“But I have a dinner date,” I said, “with Bob Wheelwright. Suppose I call him and ask if I can bring you along?”

When I got back from lunch that day Jefferson Clarke and I went into conference on the Iroquois Metals deal.

“Personally,” I said after I had outlined the problem, “it doesn’t give me any pleasure to help those crude bastards out of a jam.”

Jeff leaned back in his chair and stroked the base of his skull and smiled. “There you go again! Why should we worry our heads about whether our clients are crude or subtle? The difference between hard customers like Iroquois Metals and the soft-spoken boys over at Columbia Steel is merely two generations of being in the money. Our job is to help the crude bastards to sound refined and to keep the gentlemen from reverting to type. Besides, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, plus our cut on the advertising campaign, covers a multitude of crudity.”

For nearly two hours we sat making tentative plans for the Iroquois Metals campaign. At four o’clock we called Mordecai Schiff into the conference.

“I like this account fine,” Mordecai said, after we had laid it in his lap. It meant an additional twenty-five thousand dollars to him, maybe more. But he didn’t seem excessively pleased.

“Is there anything wrong with Iroquois Metals that you know about?” Jeff asked. “Anything you’ve heard in Washington that we don’t know?”

“I hope it isn’t because Bennett has a reputation for being a lousy anti-Semite,” I said.

“We know you are,” Jeff said, missing the irony of Mordecai’s remark, “and all the more reason why the son-of-a-bitch should be made to eat crow.”

“Eat crow?” Mordecai asked. A patient smile sat at the corners of his mouth for a moment or so. “I’m a public relations man, not a one-man committee for the enlightenment of Chicago bigots.”

“I’m thinking of this outfit, not Bennett,” Jeff said, beginning to see that he’d fumbled the ball, which was a rare thing for him. “All right, he’s a son-of-a-bitch. But he comes to us on his knees, all in a sweat because some politician thinks it would be a smart idea to give Iroquois Metals the works. We’re public relations people and we’ve got a professional responsibility toward our clients. You’re the best Washington man we’ve got, you were up to your neck in war production. That makes you the logical man for this account and when the campaign is over you’ll have Bennett and his crowd eating out of your hand and a sweetheart of an account for as long as you want it.”

Mordecai sat there for a while, not saying anything, thinking. The patient smile was gone from his face. His expression was deadpan now and I knew without a doubt what his decision would be.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a while, “but I can’t take it. I’ll sit in on this account and do what I can, but I don’t want to handle it officially.”

“Don’t be crazy, Mordecai,” Jeff said. “This’ll get you more than twenty-five thousand dollars in the next six or seven months.”

“I hope it’s not that you know anything dirty about some of their wartime operations,” Jeff said, still not getting it. “If that’s what it is, let’s have it and we’ll drop the account right now.”

“I don’t know how to put it so that it’ll make sense,” Mordecai said, speaking slowly and in a voice without inflection. “It’s—” He paused and then started again. “I guess it’s simply that as a Jew I don’t think it would be wise for me to brain-trust the operation. Just a minute, let me finish,” he said as Jeff started to say something. “You see, I had a lot to do with passing on some of the Iroquois Metals contracts when I was with the War Production Board, although Bennett may not know it. And I should say that they were no better or worse than hundreds of outfits that turned out the stuff. But the heat is on now. Both parties are going to need a few whipping boys next year, merchants of death and that sort of thing. If the Senate committee decides to put Iroquois Metals over the barrel they can dig up enough to make it very bad reading. And if they do, I don’t want anyone with the name of Mordecai Schiff demagogically exposed as the public relations account executive for the defendants. My people have enough trouble with the hatemongers as it is.”

“Your people?” Jeff asked indignantly. “Why, you’re an American. Your family was in this country a hundred and fifty years before some of these Irish crooks decided to stop eating potatoes and point and try their luck in America.”

“That’ll cut no ice when some Southern demagogue gets to his feet in the House.”

“No one will have a word to say. It’ll be dismissed on the basis of every man being entitled to the benefit of counsel, legal or public relations. But if there was an investigation and I handled the account officially, every gutter hate-sheet in the country would denounce me as a participant in the notorious but nonexistent Jewish world conspiracy. As I’ve said, I’ll do everything I can to help the account, but someone else will have to mother it.”

“I think you’re all wrong,” Jeff said, “but if that’s how you feel, I’ll go along with you.”

“Thanks,” Mordecai said. He rose and started for the door and then stopped. He started to say something and then broke off.

“It’s all right, Mordecai,” Jeff said. “Don’t say it. It isn’t necessary.”

I waited until Mordecai was safely down the corridor and then I said to Jeff: “I’m afraid I got you into that one. I’m sorry. But in Chicago, it seemed like a good idea, making Bennett pay in blood as well as money.”

“There’s no particular hurry anyhow,” I said. “If the worst comes to the worst, I’ll take it on. Summer’s coming on, we’ll have to do a complete job on the Iroquois books and records. I don’t suppose we’ll start the campaign until the fall or until we’re sure that the Senate committee is going into action.”

Bob Wheelwright was the author of those two remarkable novels: Catch a Falling Star (theme: up from New England respectability); and four years later, Call Back the Heart (the continued use of nothing but logic in human relationships will sooner or later get you into one God-awful mess). The Book-of-the-Month Club took The Heart for its hundreds of thousands of subscribers and Hollywood bought the screen rights, so that Bob’s economic headaches were over forever.

But his novels, the last of which was written ten years before, were not Wheelwright’s sole claim to distinction. For the past three years he had been writing a weekly feature for Deadline, the weekly newsmagazine, a stint that was something between a column and a news article, less relentless than Pegler, more daring and less pontifical than Lippmann. (It was he who had broken the story of the secret deals at Teheran.) It was journalism because of its style and timeliness, it was something more than that because of its insight, observation, and surgical literary skill. It was read and enjoyed by the majority of discerning readers and feared and vilified by the few who sometimes came within its line of fire. But for all its obviously gratifying success, Bob Wheelwright would have felt more in rapport with himself—happiness, of course, being out of the question—if he were still able to turn out a novel from time to time. Once, when we were discussing his long literary silence, he said: “Who in hell can escape or compete emotionally with the headlines these days? Besides, from here out the only writers who will get any kind of satisfaction from their work will be the newspapermen and the journalists.” He said this with an air of conviction that contained, I thought, just the added degree of emphasis to make it unconvincing.

Although Bob Wheelwright had had the breaks as a writer, his luck in wives had been disastrous. He had been through three marriages and out of some subterranean logic proudly listed them all in his biographical sketch in Who’s Who. In the order of their appearance, they had been (1) a Beacon Street girl with a lifeless kind of beauty, an unnaturally white skin, and a barely visible network of blue veins at her temples, who took her divorce with the same passivity that she accepted her marriage— In her own way, Jack, she was really a wonderful girl; when Oscar Wilde said “princess” in his fairy tales he had a girl like Janet in mind, but to the day of our separation, I never knew what she was thinking of—if any. (2) This one was a slumming rebound from Back Bay to Brooklyn, the arty, sullen but terribly attractive young daughter of a successful realtor. I met the family at Bob’s apartment once and looking at them, noisy, crude, gross (one of the Neanderthal brothers was a Columbia tackle), you wondered how in hell a sensitive girl like Martina, this sultry, personable mutation, ever managed to get born into a breed like that. As a protest no doubt against the vulgarity of her family, Martina had overdimensional musical aspirations. She dreamed, no, ached is a better word, she ached for a career as a concert pianist with an exciting debut at Carnegie Hall. Everything was planned down to the smallest detail, even to the color of the dress in which she would make her first appearance. She had a thin kind of genius, but what she lacked desperately was a sound, robust talent, and so, of course, nothing ever came of it. She was a wonderful girl, Jack, a little on the tense side, but really remarkable. But did you ever try to write with someone practicing a single phrase from the Organ Prelude and Fugue over and over again for hours on end? And finally (3), there was Eulalia Herrick, whose stab at immortality lay in the fact that she was a frequent contributor to Carousel—A Quarterly. This, Bob’s last marriage, was a quickie. It was all over in six months. She was a fine writer, Jack— And then as an afterthought: A wonderful girl, but a writer should never marry a writer. It gets so you’re terrified to open your mouth. It’s like Macy living with Gimbel. And that completed the roster.

They were all wonderful, his gallery of women, Janet, Martina, and Eulalia. But now he was living all by himself down there in his unusual apartment where the peripheries of Greenwich Village and Gramercy meshed. And he seemed to be reasonably content in his hard-won and not completely loveless celibacy.

I had called Bob Wheelwright earlier in the afternoon and asked if I might bring Diana along with me for dinner.

When Call Back the Heart hit the jackpot, Wheelwright rented the entire top floor of a twenty-story loft building over a few blocks from the gingerbread tower of the Consolidated Edison Building. He had walls ripped out, cantilevered corner windows built in, a special lighting system installed, and in a few months had himself the apartment that I had always dreamed about.

The living room was enormous and was laid out like a feudal baron’s main hall, where almost everything you wanted to know about your host could be seen at once. Original paintings, a concert grand, books, a Lanvin record player showed you how he spent his evenings; an enormous oak worktable piled high with books, papers and manuscript gave you his profession; the tiled kitchen, which was simply a continuation of the living room, with its copper pots, Italian cheeses, and built-in revolving spit, showed how he felt about food and its preparation. There were two open fireplaces, couches, settees, easy chairs. Once when I had asked Bob why he had not made a separate room of the kitchen, he said: “What! And block off and hide the most human part of the apartment? I should say not.” And then he went off on a long dissertation on the symbolism of the hearth and the decay of genuine hospitality, which he said coincided with the passing of the old-fashioned kitchen. As for the odor of food, he thought it was wonderful, what in all the world smelled better than onion being sautéed in butter or bread being baked? And then he wound up with a piece of typical Wheelwright extravagance: “Most people make a dark secret of their kitchens, hiding them in basements or in airless cupboards as if they were ashamed of their appetites and as if the organs of taste were somehow disreputable. And have you ever stopped to think that the bathrooms in many New York apartments are more elaborate than the kitchens?”

Diana and I arrived a little after seven. It was months since I had seen Bob, that’s the way it was with us, and the greetings were noisy. He was wearing his work clothes: tweed slacks, a maroon cashmere sweater, and moccasins.

“I’ve just finished a six-hour stretch at the typewriter. It’s hell. But there’s nothing wrong with me that a few cocktails and dinner won’t fix.” He kissed Diana. “Come on,” he said, leading us to the bar. It was a real bar, not one of those cute things they sell for suburban rumpus rooms. God knows where he had picked it up, but there it was in one corner of the vast room with its banged-up brass rail and its smooth well-worn wood. And now behind it stood Ballard, who for ten years, through thick and thin and three wives, had been Wheelwright’s factotum, barkeep, chauffeur, and when necessary his confidant and boon companion. It was Jim Ballard who was able to make the most difficult last-minute reservations; he knew all about important stories long before they broke; he knew what salt- and smoked-fish did to hangovers; and he knew the telephone numbers of Bob’s blondest blondes and would go and fetch the gals at midnight, if it was that kind of party.

The cocktail glasses, four-ounce beauties, were imbedded in shaved ice. Ballard shook the martinis instead of stirring them, disregarding the nonsense about “bruising” the vermouth. He set them before us. From the bar we could see four nearly-brown squab chickens revolving on the electrical spit before a bank of glowing charcoal, and the slices of dark truffle under the suprêmes. You heard the sound of the birds roasting, the dripping of the juices, and the odor did special things to your olfactory nerves that nutritionists will never understand.

“L’chaim,” Bob said, raising his glass to Diana. He knew her back in the days before Joel Simon went off to Spain. She repeated the outlandish toast accurately, but when I tried it I fell on my face, tripping over the guttural. “Do you know what it means?” Bob asked us. Diana nodded and took half of her drink at a gulp, although she usually sipped her martinis.

“No,” Bob said, “it’s Hebrew, the ancient language, it means to life, to life itself, to everything that lives and breathes, to life as opposed to death. The complete and final statement of affirmation. The perfect toast for the atomic age.”

He smiled, sipped his drink, and then said: “After mud in your eye, bottoms up, here’s how, I searched around and found l’chaim. I like it.”

He excused himself, got down from his perch at the bar, walked over to the spit and ladled some hot basting liquid over the birds. In the center of the room, under a two-story, curtained studio window, Ballard was beginning to set a long refectory table for dinner. Bob returned from the blue-tiled kitchen and stepped behind the bar to mix the next round.

“Good for you,” Bob said. “You know, I agree with Dr. Johnson, the old Tory bastard, that there are few ways in which a man can be more harmlessly engaged than in merely making money. People who are in the business of making money may be stuffy, single-tracked, or pretentious, but they’re seldom dangerous, except perhaps to themselves or their families. But look out for the boys with the lean and hungry look for power. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to cut them down, when I can.”

“And what are you two conspirators up to these days?” Bob asked, turning to me.

“A common man, and we’re making him not out of clay or marble but out of statistics and charts, and in the end we’re going out to find him, an office guinea pig,” I said, scrambling it deliberately.

And I told him. I told him all about Jeff’s little project in all its shining detail, the arguments pro and con. I told him about Schiff’s technical objections, and how Diana felt that maybe the project might be a Force for Good.

“It should be done up as a comedy with lots of flip dialogue,” Bob said. “Or maybe it could be done as a musical and in the end the common man, this Mr. America, marries Miss America. The big scene would be where Mr. Average Citizen chooses his dream girl from among the forty-eight beauties. Music by Cole Porter, choreography by—”

“Now, wait a minute,” I said, “this is our idea, we saw it first. Are you a friend or do I have to rush out and copyright it?”

“Joking aside,” Bob said, “the only thing I like about this common-man talk is that actually, no one in this country believes he’s a common man. It’s always some other guy who lives at the other end of town. And I think this refusal of the average American to consider himself a common denominator is a healthy sign. It means that the last spark of individuality has not yet been snuffed out of the American people. That’s why your plan to create one for public relations purposes will be successful. He’ll be the personification of the myth, the national scapegoat. You see, in order to have a nation of common men, you’ve got to have people with a sense of simple dignity, people with roots and traditions. Not the kind of morons who nearly bust their operations laughing when the m.c. of a radio quiz program squirts seltzer in the face of a common-man contestant. ‘You’re all wet,’ says the m.c., ‘rattan is vegetable, not animal.’ When you get right down to it, all this gab about the common man is reactionary. It’s a twentieth century way of maintaining the gulf between the new elite and the mob. And it’s damned effective, if you ask me. Squirt seltzer in their faces and in the next breath tell ’em that this century belongs to them. There was a time once when we were a nation of common men and women, independent, shrewd, and hard, but that was a long time ago.”

“In the early days of the country,” Bob said, “before everything got standardized and uniform, before everything got so big you couldn’t control it.”

“You’re thinking of the ideal common man, who never even existed even in the time you’re talking about,” Diana said. “Those cracker-barrel philosophers and tobacco-chawing village wits considered themselves very uncommon.”

“You’re against standardization, uniformity, and bigness,” I said to Bob, “but how are we to transmit news, entertainment and opinion to a hundred and forty million people except by methods that have proved to be successful in the mass production industries? A hundred years ago Horace Greeley started the Tribune with three thousand dollars, but twenty years ago when the Kansas City Star changed hands it went for eleven million. The hand-run press went out with the village blacksmith. Today communications is the largest industry in the country.”

“As I live and breathe,” Bob said, clowning, “Mr. Information Please himself.”

“And that’s why,” I went on, fast, “opinion is uniform in this country. If you want the kind of civilization that gives you mass-produced cars, radios, and refrigerators, you’ve got to take what goes along with it. Everything, all the way down the line.”

Bob had prepared another shakerful of martinis as I was talking. He poured us each a drink.

“You know as well as I do,” I said, taking up the thread of the conversation where I had left off, “that publishers and radio and movie people are haunted by two fears: the loss of reader or audience interest and adverse reaction. The kept press that Upton Sinclair used to write about now gives him columns of space for book reviews and personal publicity, not because Sinclair is any different today—he’s as banal and dreary as ever—but because the press has changed. Instead of being kept by big business, the press is now kept by its readers.”

“It’s democracy,” Diana said, “and it isn’t terrible at all. Anyone is at liberty at all times to tune out a dim-wit radio program and listen to a symphony orchestra, a reader of the Daily News can always switch to the Times or the Trib and any time a scanner of Look develops the necessary intelligence or taste, he can always start reading the Atlantic or Harper’s. That’s democracy.”

I shot Diana a grateful glance. It was a beautiful forward pass and I carried the ball for the rest of the play. “And because of this diversity of interest,” I said, “and the fear of publishers and others to incur adverse reader reaction, smart propagandists find it possible to get a story over to millions of people. More than once the publicity people for the automobile workers’ union have run circles around the gilt-edge public relations people for General Motors. If the press were not kept by its readers, the big newspaper chains wouldn’t print a line of pro-labor news. But they do, not out of any fixed class principle but because millions of readers now demand labor news. The same man that wants to know how Dick Tracy made out and what nag paid off in the fifth at Hialeah, also wants to know how the printers made out in Seattle. That’s the new common man for you. He doesn’t look like the village blacksmith or a vaudeville rube, thank God, and he doesn’t talk like Bill Nye. Our statistics show that he wears fairly good clothes and rides in a good low-priced car; he goes to the movies every week and he reads the funnies sometimes, but he also reads a serious book. The press and the radio didn’t create him—he created them.”

At the other end of the room, Ballard tinkled a bell signifying that dinner was ready.

Sometimes, after one of his dinners, Bob Wheelwright liked to say that if he could manage to write with the same passion and dedication with which he cooked, he might be the greatest novelist of his generation. Of course, that was highly debatable, but it made good listening. But certainly his squab chickens that night were not debatable in any sense. They were light golden brown, subtly fragrant; their breasts had been studded with truffles and their cavities were stuffed with goose liver that had been marinated in Madeira.

We took our coffee at the other end of the enormous living room. We sat around for a while over our coffee and cognac, and eventually when the talk petered out, Bob went to his record player and put a disc on the turntable. It was the opening side of Bruckner’s Seventh. We sat there for nearly an hour listening to the brooding music, to the sudden breaks, the unhappy Teutonic atavism of the piece, ideal for breaking up a gay evening, a party buster. When the symphony had ended, Bob filled our glasses and put another record on the machine.

“I think you’ll like this,” he said. We did. It was a French orchestral version of one of the Bach preludes, Homme pleure tes grands péchés. In the seven or eight minutes it took to spin both sides of this record, I sat there listening to it and forgot the talk about the common man. The music was full, rich and serene and listening you wished to Christ that you hadn’t been born into this century of public relations, Brooks Brothers suits, Manhattan projects, and Knize toilet water (and you can keep your penicillin), but into the one that ended when all hell cut loose in the cobblestoned streets of Paris and the mutual throat-slitting started.

It took most of that spring and the better part of summer for Roger MacLain to prepare his report on the common man. He did a double shift, coming in early in the morning and hammering away at it until late at night. Liquor was out. “I’m on the wagon,” he would say as the drinks were set up, “deal me out. You see in me a victim of my own subject matter. I’ve become infected with it. I’m now a hard-working guy, abstemious, moral as all hell, a man who sees aught-point-seven movies a week, a socially useful citizen who pays his taxes and who has no time for futzing around.” When all his material, stacks of it, had been sifted, digested and properly collated, he went off to the country to write the final draft.

Then one morning, about five weeks later, I ran into him in the corridor leading to my office. He was slopped up to the gills. And I knew the report was finished. He stood there against the blow-up of the county fair mob, unsteady, a brief case under his arm, trying to light a cigarette, the butt end of which was spit-soggy. If only he hadn’t smiled; but he did, and when he spoke his talk was fuzzy around the edges.

“Hello, Jack,” he said, swaying, “it’s in the bag.” He tapped the leather case under his arm. “The report.”

A cute blonde page girl went by, saw us standing there, a two-man barbershop chorus, sweet Adeline, but she didn’t crack a smile or even say good morning.

“Average American knocks off three-point-four gallons of hard liquor a year, something like that, and I’m catching up on myself. And you know something else?”

“Seventy-three per cent of all family dwellings in Ohio are made of clapboard. Fire hazards.”

He handed me his brief case and I took him by his arm and led him to my office. I sat him down on my sofa and at his request—there was no arguing with him—let him have a bottle of scotch and a carafe of water. Then I went to my desk and for more than an hour I sat there reading what he had written.

Like most newspapermen, I like to think of myself as hard-boiled. In my time I had covered police headquarters, I had interviewed the great and the not-so-great, I had helped to uncover sleazy political deals, I had seen suicides covered with blankets in kitchens from which the last trace of gas was not yet gone. I suppose I have written millions of words in my day, news stories, features, articles, publicity, and this, out of a sophomoric kind of cynicism, gave me the feeling that I knew all the tricks of the trade. And so I had come to feel that words set down in consecutive order, any words, any order, were so much copy. But what Roger had set down was writing of an altogether different kind; it was neither slick journalism nor smart public relations. It was solidly thought out, deeply felt, as direct and moving as a cry for help and as honest as the rough hand of an old cabinet-maker. It ran to more than two hundred and fifty pages of typescript and each page of it had been written out of the author’s guts. The graphs and the statistical tables were there, but Roger had done that rare thing—he had taken lifeless facts and given them everyday meaning and broad human significance.

There was a story running through the report, the story of the development of the common man. It was a story told with warmth, insight, and understanding. America had always been a nation of common men, he wrote; this, indeed, had been the common man’s birthplace. This common man had existed in every period in our history, he changed with the times but he was always there, outsmarting the British in the Revolutionary War, opening the West, booting Administrations out of office, keeping life in America fluid and changing, struggling against all efforts to reduce him to a number, a cipher, an anonymous unit of the mass. Sometimes the struggle went against him, but not for long as such things are measured. And then Roger came down to the present. Here you got the full picture of the common man in the fifth decade of the twentieth century, a picture that contradicted the sloppy faces staring from the blow-up in the corridor. “There are those,” he wrote, “who say that the common man is a myth, an abstraction. He was no abstraction to Paine, Franklin, Whitman, Thoreau, Garrison, who were themselves common men. No, he is as real as America itself, as varied, as contradictory, as breathtaking, and here are his outlines and dimensions.” Then followed page after page of description and delineation, his physical makeup (the anthropological measurements were there), his tastes, his whims, his love of sport, his gullibility, his opinions, his easygoing tolerance, his blind spots of bigotry. Like a novelist, a poet turned novelist, Roger had created a character who was alive and real. And on the last page, he wrote: “We shall be great only if we overcome the spirit of disillusion, which is so universal today, and return to the faith in the wholesomeness of the common people. Europe today is a warning of what happens when that faith is lost.”

I put the last page of the manuscript down slowly, wanting it to go on, feeling light and purged, as if I, not he, had gone through this cathartic experience. The guy sure could write. He had lost nothing since those crazy creative days down in that flea-trap over near the North River waterfront on Fourth Street. You either had it or you hadn’t and nothing except yourself could ever kill it.

Fingering the last page with reluctance, I said: “Roger, this is a damned sight better than any of us bargained for. You’re a lucky fella. All the dough any writer ever needed and still able to turn out stuff like this. That’s as close to a perfect break as anyone in his right mind would ever want.”

He didn’t answer, and for a moment I thought he had had a sudden attack of authorial modesty, something with which he was rarely afflicted. Then, swinging around in my chair in the direction of the couch, I saw the reason for his silence. The talented, lucky fellow, the guy with the perfect break, lay there sprawling on his back, stinko, in the fifth and final stage of a bender—jocose, morose, bellicose, lachrymose, comatose—out like a light. His mouth was partly open and there was a half-strangled quality to his breathing. His jacket was bunched up in the middle; his tie was all cockeyed, rather tight, I thought; and one hand hung limply to the floor. He looked like a sidewalk victim in a gang killing, Hood Gets His, the kind of picture you see in the double truck of the Daily News. If that was the way he wanted it, it was all right with me. Each man to his own pleasure.

I reached down and loosened his tie, opened his collar, pulled his jacket down and took off his shoes. Then, I picked up the manuscript and started for Diana’s office.

In my outer office, Louise Bailey looked up from her typewriter, a woman of ambition and determination, still trying to make the slicks. There was an understanding between us that she could work on her own stuff when she had the time.

As I spoke, I looked down and read the last few lines of dialogue she had written: “‘In some fashion,’ he said, ‘you bring back the magic of my youth again.’ The ecstatic mood of love, surging and powerful, welled up within him. ‘I feel God only knows what stirring inside me. Oh, darling.’ Then he reached for her hungrily.”

Hot spit! So that was what they taught them in those fiction courses. Dialogue is action, keep the story line straight, experimentation is fatal if you want a market, and never forget sound motivation. He reached for her hungrily. Her what?

I passed up the opportunity for a crack and suggested it would be a good idea if Roger were not disturbed.

Like one of the cardboard characters in one of her machine-tooled stories, she looked at me knowingly, one writer talking about another, and said yes, she understood. In a pig’s eye she did.

After tossing the report on Diana’s desk, I went back to my office, washed up, and left Roger on my couch to sleep it off while I went out for a long lunch with Jeff, who later caught the three o’clock train to Washington. I did a moderate rave on Roger’s report.

“He could hardly see when he brought it in,” I said. “He’s lying on my couch right now, dead to the world. But he sure can write. Can you imagine what he’d do if he went off the sauce?”

“You never can tell. He might turn out to be another stuffed shirt. You know, it’s quite possible that he drinks and writes the way he does for the same reason.”

“Diana. I’ll have a dozen copies made so that the boys can kick it around at the next Plans Board meeting.”

Along about five o’clock Diana came by, sat down at the side of my desk and did a thirty-minute ecstatic handspring about the report.

“If Wallace could write that way about the common man, he’d—” she started to say.

“If he could write that way he wouldn’t be a politician. Besides, Wallace drinks yogurt, not whisky. Would you like some?”

“Yes.” I poured some for her, diluted it with water, and then doled out a thimbleful of English gin for myself.

After the second drink, she went off on the report again with that Joel Simon look in her eyes. She couldn’t fool me. It wasn’t the report, it was the boy who had died in Spain.

“This will be the first time that a strictly commercial public relations operation will be used for a socially-conscious purpose.”

“Maybe you’re right, Jack. But isn’t it a damned shame to use an inspired thing like Roger’s report just to plug Tri-City and Monarch Electric and the others?”

“You and Roger. He sits up there in the country cold sober writing this thing, but when he has to bring it in, he’s paralyzed. And now you’re going starry-eyed in sympathy with him. Look, darling, don’t go getting your sweet little self in a socially-conscious uproar. Our job—Roger’s, yours, mine—is to provide our clients with bright ideas and deathless prose, for which we are paid something better than union rates. That’s the price. They don’t pay off for uplift, except in the brassière industry.” Diana said nothing, she simply sat there listening, finishing her drink. “Roger isn’t drinking because he’s doing public relations. He’s drinking because he isn’t writing poetry, and he isn’t writing poetry for a reason that I’m not competent to give you. Anyhow, no matter how you look at it, it stinks. So, here, let me spike your drink.”

I took one of her hands in mine, but this time I didn’t get the familiar straight-arm or, worse, that limp, passive resistance routine. This time she held my hands with some feeling, returning the pressure. She had an eloquent way of saying nothing and I know perfectly well what was now being unsaid. That maybe she had made a lousy deal. That escape into easy money isn’t necessarily an escape. That it isn’t necessarily pleasant work, even if you can get it, as anyone can tell you who has succeeded. That sometimes the crudest thing you can wish for an enemy is that his wildest dreams of avarice come true, so that he can really know what it means to be unhappy, because then his last defense is shot to hell and he can no longer blame it on not getting the breaks or not having the right connections. That she was as full of regret as an author over his past dedications, as nostalgic as an old, sentimental vaudevillian, which meant that she wanted to but couldn’t go back. No soap, the dedications were in print and vaudeville was dead. No soap because time is irreversible, and people who talk about turning the clock of history back are talking out of their hats. No can do. All you can manage sometimes is to put the hands of the clock back, which is self-delusion, like daylight saving time. Real time is always there, doing its stuff, unwinding like a movie whose end has not yet been written by all the members of the Cosmic Screen Writers’ Guild because they all haven’t been born yet. All of that.

I knew as I sat there at Diana’s side that this surprising warmth, this unexpected pressure on my hands wasn’t meant for me. It was meant for Jack Sherrod, the symbol. The symbol of her early days in New York and her first taste of adult freedom. The splurging on payday—let’s blow the bonus—the whooping excitement over the first by-line, the stories and books that were going to be written, the marathon weekend parties where everyone went dutch, either chipping in or bringing his share of the makings: a bottle of gin, whisky or sherry, a few bottles of club soda and ginger ale, loaves of fresh rye bread peppered with caraway seeds, assorted delicatessen and don’t forget the mustard, a carton of cigarettes—if we all had the same taste, we’d all smoke Camels—and the talk that finally petered out at daybreak, and the couples, kids, who had found each other at this party and were now in love, sitting on the floor away from the rest, in one of the corners, maybe, not talking. All of that, too.

She was insane for wanting to go back, even if she could. Maybe it would be poetic justice if she tried it, with the cobwebs of youth out of her eyes, as I had done one night the winter before.

The eternal defense of the gin drinker, if Thackeray could go for it, why not Jack Sherrod. It’s good for you, especially with bitters.

“Yes, mister,” she said, which is enough to take the steam out of a man under the usual circumstances, but that wasn’t how she now meant it.

I pushed her down gently, my hands at her waist, and then I came down alongside of her on the couch.

“This is going to be easy,” I said to myself. “A combination of nostalgia, sympathy for a poet turned alcoholic public relations man, and about four shots of whisky. You can’t ask for a setup any better than that.” But it was no use, maybe because it was too easy. That thing called masculine pride got between us. Or at least that’s what I called it at the time. I wanted it the hard way, not from a gal whose heart was slopped up in all directions and who had come to look upon me as something of a symbol. No, thanks. Nevertheless, I made a stab at it, more reflex than anything else, making with the tactility and osculation, slipping my hand up under her dress, but I must say without much conviction, and reaching over to kiss her. And so I tapered the second kiss off into what a girl might expect from Uncle Harry, palsy-walsy, an understanding squeeze of the arm and a friendly pat on the fanny, or as near to it as I could get. Then, and I might have known it, she started to cry.

Of course, I did all the customary things that a man does when a woman cries. At first I felt sheepish, then vaguely guilty, and as the tears and sniffling showed no signs of abatement, I became irritable and angry. Finally, when it was all over and she was repairing the damage to her face, I said: “Dinner?” And she said yes.

We had dinner at the Chambord, which is the last of the great taverns of the world, now that France is more concerned with vitamins than Vichysoisse. It is an unpretentious place over on Third Avenue, in the shadow of the rust-streaked El, among the steak joints and swap shops, and for some reason (maybe it’s the excellence of the food) the nine-day celebrities and the Broadway loudmouths never seem to have gotten around to it.

Emotional tension is supposed to leave you without an appetite. I don’t know. In my own case I’ve always found that an emotional outburst leaves me famished. We sat there for some time, eating in our own good time, not talking much, savoring the food and the wine. At the end of the dinner, in a different mood, we got onto the subject of Roger MacLain’s report again.

“I’m going to suggest at the next Plans Board meeting that we have the report printed and give it wide distribution, thousands of copies, and let it go at that,” Diana said. “It’ll give us all the build-up we need as experts on public opinion. But I’m afraid that if we go through with a campaign to find Mr. America, it’ll cheapen everything.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “but that isn’t how it’s going to happen. Mordecai Schiff and maybe one or two others will string along with you, but Jeff and the others will see the report as a damned effective springboard—I might even say a dignified springboard, if you can imagine such a thing—for the campaign to find our common man. Even Gregory Evor will go for it. Our clients will love it. You know the new twist—if you’re a money-grubbing or power-hungry bastard do it behind a front of humanitarianism. More than one spokesman for the pee-pul” (that’s how I said it), “the little fellow, the common man, has used it as a screen. The smart ones would sooner yell ‘red-baiter’ than have to defend themselves against the charge of being crooks or slippery operators. Not that any of our clients are either crooked or slippery, far from it. There’s a general atmosphere of guilt right now and our campaign will make it possible for everyone to go on having lots of predatory fun without the accompanying pangs of conscience. Jeff hasn’t thought it out this way, but being an intuitive public relations man, he knows it just the same. So if I were you, darling, I’d give over.”

Roger didn’t show the following morning, as he said he would, or the one after that. But he came in on the day of the Plans Board meeting looking as drawn and rattled as a snare drum in action. The report had been read by all of our people and almost without exception everyone did a cartwheel over it. Even the young geniuses in the radio and publicity departments were impressed—pretty good for a middle-aged guy, if you ask me.

At the meeting, Mordecai Schiff sounded off exactly as I expected he would. The report was an important contribution to the literature on the subject, he said; it was written with great feeling and with extraordinary insight, Jefferson Clarke & Associates should be proud to launch it with their imprimatur (yes, that was the way Mordecai spoke at meetings), it merited the widest possible distribution, but— But the plan of finding a common man in the flesh now seemed unnecessary. Roger had found him and had brought him to life in the pages of his report.

Mordecai sat there, one arm flung casually over the back of his chair, like a youthful, wise and amused professor having it out with a group of bright sophomores during an informal bull session. He looked at the plan from several points of view, but not once did he openly say what I knew must surely have been in his mind; that the plan was too smart, that it would lend itself to cheapness, and that it might result in difficulties which none of us could now foresee.

When Schiff got through there was little left for Diana to say except that she went along with him; she said it beautifully and with lots of conviction but in the end it made no difference. I said nothing, knowing that in any case Jeff and the boys would have their way. It was another public relations operation, no more or less principled than most. There would be lots of office excitement, bales of newspaper clippings, press conferences, popping flashbulbs, our clients’ fees would be hiked, and in a year or so it would all be forgotten. Next year there would be something else. There always is. I knew, of course, that I was letting Diana and Mordecai down by my neutrality, but in those days I subscribed to the theory of Enlightened Self-Interest. And when you’re enlightened that way you know on which side your tail is truffled and you never stick your neck out if you can help it. What the hell, Roger had written this inspired report, there it was, nobody could ever take that away from him no matter what they did with it, and it seemed silly to me to get in a sweat because it was going to be used as a springboard for a public relations stunt.

Now that they had read the report Ken Halsett, Gregory Evor, and Malcolm Sturt saw the pitch from Jeff’s point of view. It was a honey. All those big corporation executives scrambling aboard the common man’s bandwagon, all rights reserved by Jefferson Clarke & Associates. Air brakes and humanitarianism, public utilities and the common people, Monarch Electric and the dream of Walt Whitman. It was a natural. And throughout all that meeting, Roger sat there with the shakes, listening to the praise. But sometimes when the going got fulsome he smiled. It was a taut, teeth-gritting smile and it made you feel as if you yourself needed a drink.

He did it deftly, with dispatch, and in a painless sort of way so that no one of any consequence felt slighted or hurt, and yet, at the same time his remarks carried his own ideas forward. Which, of course, is the way to run a meeting, no matter what its purpose, as any smart politician will tell you.

“Let’s not burn our bridges until we get to them,” he said with a smile that took all the sting out of the remark. “The first thing we’ve got to do is to get this report printed and then see that it’s made available to everyone who counts in this country. I would suggest that we shoot the works on this one. Ten thousand copies, the kind of print job that’ll make people proud to have it on their desks, and let’s send it free, gratis, to a select list. That’s the first thing. After that, when we start getting the response, there will be plenty of time to think of the next step. But whatever it’ll be will be done with dignity and taste. And now I think that all of us owe a vote of thanks to Roger for a damned fine piece of writing—” And then, for the first time at any of our Plans Board meetings, we all applauded.

On the way out, Diana gave me one of those stiff, second-act smiles and kept on going and I knew that whatever residue of feeling we had managed to keep alive since the days down on Bank Street was now definitely stretched out on ice. Which was all right with me.

Later, Jeff dropped into my office. I hadn’t had time to talk to him when he came back from Washington, either about the Iroquois Metals thing or about Roger’s report. So he now stretched out on my couch, put his hands behind his head, and said: “Christ, I’m dead for sleep. Those bastards in Washington never seem to sleep. I was up half the night and some loud-mouthed son-of-a-bitch kept me awake coming in this morning. Couldn’t get a compartment. Do you mind if I slip my shoes off for a few minutes?”

I said no and he slipped them off, rotating one ankle with his hand, easing the tension.

“Give it to him today. And a month’s pay. And insist that he take a vacation. Tell him that he can’t come back until he gets some color in his face.”

“It’s no use, Jeff, you know that. He’ll go up to some resort in the Adirondacks, spend all his waking hours with his foot on the rail and then come back, the way he did last year, saying that a good summer resort is a bar with trees growing outside.”

“Well, give him the bonus and his vacation pay anyhow and let him go to hell any way he likes.” He sat up again and started his ankle-twisting routine again. “Believe me, I could do with a vacation myself. I’m as tense as a frightened gal on her second date.”

“Not until this common-man thing is moving along under its own steam and we’ve got the Iroquois Metals business cleaned up. How’s Bennett coming along?”

“He might well sweat. Dolan told me that after the elections the War Contracts Committee is going to mount quite a show. If half the rumors in Washington are true, the rosters in some of the Federal pens will read like the membership lists of some of our better country clubs. I managed to buttonhole Marshlands as he was leaving to catch a plane. Rode out to the airport with him, but he was entirely noncommittal.” He let his rather small foot drop to the floor and went off on another tack. “What the hell got into Schiff and Diana at the meeting today?”

“You’d think that, as an old New Dealer, he’d be at home with this one. After all, our common-man operation will only be a repeat performance.” This struck me as amusing, but I didn’t want to give him any encouragement. “And what the hell was Diana doing sounding off as if she was the main attraction at a Madison Square Garden protest meeting?”

“Did you know that her guy was killed in Spain?” This was a complete non sequitur, but at the moment it made sense. For me, at any rate.

“What the hell has that got to do with it? Besides, she can’t pin that one on the dirty reactionaries when she’s in one of those come-to-Jesus moods of hers. I had the Empire Arms account back in the days of the Spanish Civil War, that was just before you came with me. You must have seen the dope in the files. Empire had a fifty-million-dollar contract with the Negrin government, but Roosevelt refused to lift the embargo on arms to the Loyalists. We worked like hell, but it was no use. If the embargo had been lifted Franco would have been beaten, I would have gotten a beautiful cut and maybe Diana’s boy friend would be alive today. Maybe not. But what the hell has all that got to do with her soapbox performance at the Plans Board meeting?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe she feels that it makes her a stockholder in Millennium, Inc.”

Manhattan, all twenty-two square miles of its jutting mass, baked slowly in the August heat. You stepped out of air-cooled buildings and ran smack into a solid wall of shimmering heat like the kind that strikes you when you first hit the Mojave. You started out from your apartment in the morning, bathed and cool, smelling of toilet water, crisp in a fresh lightweight suit, but it was no use, before noon it looked like a dish rag. The nights were no better, except in air-conditioned movies and bars. But then how many times a week can you be bored to death even if it is cool, and how many Tom Collinses can you take in a night without falling on your face? Roger MacLain took his bonus with elaborate and cynical thanks, accepted the tapering plaudits for his report, and went off somewhere to a bar surrounded by Nature instead of Park and Madison Avenues. Diana and I worked preparing the report for publication, but she was coolly polite to me, like a Trotskyist compelled by economic determinism to work in the same office with a Stalinist, that constant look of hurt, betrayal, and superiority. Finally, the report went to the printers. And I went to Chicago.

Not that Chicago is anything of a welcome change from New York in August. When I arrived they were enjoying a spell of Kansas weather, the hot winds blowing in from the plains, and breathing became something more than purely reflex. But I hadn’t come for the climate, so it didn’t make much difference.

My little mission to the city of the dice girls was made easier by a news story that broke the day I arrived. A couple of smart cookies had parlayed a ton of pure, unadulterated gall and a letterhead into nearly fifty million dollars in war contracts, aided and abetted by a string-tie congressman who took his cut at bargain rates, the poor sucker. The year before the Marshlands committee had put them through a Senate wringer and now a jury in the Federal District Court had found them guilty on a hatful of counts and the judge had fined them thirty thousand dollars each, which was peanuts, and had sentenced them to six stanzas in the zoo, which was really something to chew on. The story was plastered all over the front pages, there were editorials full of high moral indignation and the columnists were saying that this was small-time stuff, wait until after the elections when the new crowd in Washington settled some old scores.

This was a lucky break for me, because when Bennett came to see me he looked like a man who had had a nightmare in surrealistic Technicolor only to awaken and find it was true.

“I see they gave the Templeton boys the business,” he said by way of a blunt opening gambit. “Six years!”

“What do you fellows hear in Washington? Friend of mine saw Jeff and Marshlands at the airport.”

I fell into a deliberate silence and let him sweat it out for a while. Finally, when I thought it was bordering on cruel and unusual punishment, I said: “Oh, the usual rumors, nothing specific.”

“It’s different with us. We’ve never been in better shape and just the same IM is off twenty points since June. My hunch is that some insiders in Washington and New York are pushing it down.”

“Well, why don’t you ride with them and buy in cheap when Marshlands gives you a clean bill of health?”

He must have thought this was grim humor and he gave me a skin-stretched smile. “Yeah,” he said, “when is right.”

The murderous heat from the Kansas prairies, which explains so much about Kansas and the Kansans, came in through the open windows and made a mockery of the oscillating electric fans. So I fixed a couple of drinks and, after the illusory relief that followed the second round, we got down to cases.

Down to cases with Ashley Bennett in that hotel drawing room was everything that a Chicago industrialist whose files had been rifled might want to talk about after he had seen a headline that read “Templeton Weeps in Court at Stiff Sentence; Congressman Stunned.” Getting down to cases involved the kind of candor that a Freudian psychoanalyst gets from a patient who painfully has come to realize that he had better get it all up or else go back to those sleepless nights lying in the dark, chain-smoking, wondering how many sleeping pills it took to make a fatal dose. Not quite as desperate as all that, but something like it.

He talked for eight solid hours, taking time out for the customary but necessary interludes, but mostly to drink, and not getting as plastered as you might imagine. Now and then he telephoned his office for files, clippings, contracts, or photographs to prove or highlight a point he was trying to make. Each time they were brought over by the well-mannered squirt who had met me at the airport the first time, the vice-president’s son. Each time Mr. Private Enterprise, Jr. knocked discreetly on the door, entered with the attaché case under his arm, and respectfully handed the stuff to his half-slopped boss; you, too, can be successful. And when it was all over we were almost knee-deep in the stuff, the two of us in our shirt sleeves, half-drunk, sopping wet with the heat and the alcohol.

But it was worth it. For I now had the complete and unexpurgated story of Ashley Bennett and Iroquois Metals and how the boys had fought the good fight against the enemies of democracy and the American Way of Life during round one of the holy crusade, more to come. It was a spotty saga in which the dragon-slaying protagonists were motivated by varying degrees of patriotism and self-interest. Of course, there was the usual amount of dirt that you’ll find wherever the stakes are high, no more and no less. But nothing as dirty, for example, as the story of the woman who said she hoped that the war would last long enough for her to pay off the mortgage on her home. Going around praying to God that the bloodshed continues until you pay off the fifteen hundred dollars you owe the Middletown Building and Mortgage Company is a heartless thing to do, but no Senate committee is going to pay you any mind because that sort of thing is perfectly constitutional. But God help you if you’re big enough—not too big, mind you—to come in handy as a scapegoat for a nation groping to find a way to lessen its sense of guilt.

Although rarely mentioned out loud, one of the credenda of public relations is that there is no man that sinneth not and that sooner or later, mostly sooner, the work of the flesh is made stupidly manifest. The Freudians call this the eternal struggle between the instinctual drives and the nemesistic Super-ego in which the latter nearly always gets the decision. The theologians say it is the conflict between God and the Devil in the human heart. You can take your choice of terminology; it all amounts to the same thing. In any case, Ashley Bennett, being born of woman, was no exception. Despite his native shrewdness and business acumen, he had left fingerprints, canceled checks, phony income-tax deductions, telltale expense-account vouchers, incriminating letters, and various clues of all kinds, all over the place. And there on the floor of the hotel room lay the proof and the feeble defenses against the usual imbecilities, all the damning evidence that would make him a pushover for the slick lawyer of the Marshlands investigating committee.

“Mr. Bennett, I show you this letter dated January 11, 1943, addressed to Representative Wilbur E. Post of Illinois, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, in which you remind him of certain financial favors you extended to him in the past and in which you ask him to use his good offices to secure a commission in the United States Army for your nephew, one Gerald Cooney, and I ask you if—”

The newspapers would call it nepotism and corruption and it would be plastered all over the late editions the same day. But in the meanwhile you would sit there facing the committee, sweating pure ice-cold White Rock, realizing in a hopeless kind of way that it would be no use to tell them that you were only trying to do the best you could for your sister’s no-good son, the same as any member of the committee. Because what good is money if you can’t buy the things that money isn’t supposed to be able to buy? And don’t worry, the boys over in the National Press Building would be plenty smart, knowing just what it takes to raise the blood pressure of commonalty. They would play it all stops out, pandering to the lingering bloodlust and wartime jealousy, remembering that every time the casualty lists were published some half-crazed old man would come stumbling into a bar-and-grill and get loaded and start talking—Why did it have to be my boy? That’s what I want to know. And the bartender putting on his best sympathetic face and everyone else standing around quiet and respectful, offering condolences. It took a hunk of American scrap iron in the top of his son’s head to get him all this respect and attention and the vindictive juice-head made the most of it.—Why couldn’t it be one of them Roosevelts who got to be majors and generals just because their old man is in the White House, yeah—and the malicious letters from grief-demented mothers pouring in by the thousands until Mrs. Roosevelt had to write something about it in her column, poor woman. And so the flashbulbs would go off in your face, scaring hell out of you and making you look ridiculous, and then right smack they would go off again because when you jump like that the boys have got a real picture, brother. And the next day the papers would run the telephotos showing a middle-aged man: the wispy hair, the close-set eyes, all the imperfections would somehow be exaggerated and the freckles wouldn’t be any help, either, on account of freckles are cute only on teen-age national marbles champs. And millions of poor slobs looking at the pictures would say: “Look at the ugly son-of-a-bitch! You can tell by looking at him that he’s a crook.”

Well, I had the whole story, the entire text including footnotes, the complete unexpurgated narrative, as I’ve said. Most of it was dull, the uninspired stuff that businessmen hand each other in locker-rooms and bars. And listening to it you wondered how free enterprise had come to last as long as it has. And, of course, there were interludes of heavy-handed, unimaginative lechery, nearly all of the performers bought on the hoof: out-and-out whores, $50; hat-check girls who had learned to speak like debutantes, $75; models and nightclub entertainers, $100; an occasional Hollywood tart passing through, $150; at least these were the prices his publicity man had listed on his swindle sheet. All of which was tabloid fodder and would be played for the laughs by Marshlands.

But what the Senator would not play for the laughs was the relationship between Bennett and Rep. Wilbur E. Post (R., Ill.). It was a solid, mutually profitable relationship with Bennett getting pretty nearly everything he asked for in Washington and Post receiving a considerable sum of money over a period of nearly three years.

“No.” He looked like an adolescent caught in flagrante behind the barn. “We marked the checks as campaign contributions. No single one was over five thousand dollars.”

I thought of my stake in it, AT&T, Santa Fe, et al., and once again shuddered for the fate of Free Enterprise.

“Have you got the canceled checks?” I knew the answer; it was written all over his face. But I got a sadistic belt in asking the question; so would Marshlands.

“No. They were among the things that disappeared when that bitch of a secretary of mine quit.”

Then a strange thing happened. As he continued talking, piling detail on detail, explaining, sometimes getting stuck in a quagmire of silence and then coming out of it, spilling his guts, I began to feel sorry for him. Ashley Bennett, the tough operator, the Jew-hating bigot, the man who continually boasted about how he had shaken down his competitors, aroused in me an adulterated kind of pity. You simply can’t hate a man who has succeeded in turning your stomach, however slightly.

It was late when this one-sided conversation petered out. There was the muffled, thrumming sound of the electric fans as they shoved the hot Kansas air around the room, and there was, surprisingly, an odd look of contentment on my client’s face as if the session had had a therapeutic effect on him.

I called room service and ordered some iced coffee and a salad for myself. But now that Bennett had achieved some screwy kind of absolution or abreaction, take your choice, he was famished, and despite the sickening heat demanded a two-inch porterhouse and a pitcher of beer.

We showered, and after the food had been brought up and wheeled into the room, Dr. Sherrod took over and prescribed.

“Now, listen carefully,” I said as he cut into his rare, bleeding steak. “You’re in it waist-high, but if you’re a good boy and you follow doctor’s orders, we’ve got better than fighting odds that we can get you out of it.”

“First,” I said, “you’ll have to start by loving your fellow man. Or at least you’ll have to go through the motions.”

“You’re going to stop being a nineteenth-century robber baron and you’re going to make like you’re an enlightened, modern industrialist.”

He looked at me with a blank, uncomprehending expression, a forkful of steak poised in mid-air. Imagine a lynching Georgia cracker at a meeting of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and you have a fair idea of his expression at that moment.

“There are three ways of getting out of this mess,” I said, talking down so that he couldn’t possibly misunderstand me. “One, you make a big fight at the committee hearings and in court with the best legal talent that money can buy. But I suppose that Laswell has told you you haven’t got a chance, and he ought to know. When a lawyer calls in a public relations man you may be sure that the track is muddy.” He nodded.

“Two,” I said, ticking it off on my third finger, “you can make a stab at bribing Marshlands, since every man has his price. The trouble there is that Marshlands’ price isn’t money, and what he wants you’re not in a position to offer. Besides, you’ve probably tried bribing him through Proctor already, and it hasn’t worked.”

This was a wild guess, but I knew from his aggrieved sputtering protest that it was a ten-strike. Besides, (a) I knew all about Proctor who was a hot-under-the-collar advocate of the free market, tempered by bribery when necessary. Besides, (b) in such matters I always proceeded by asking myself the crucial question: “What would I do in a situation like this if I were a tube-tested, vitamin-enriched bastard?” The latter technique acquired for me a reputation for being able to predict the actions of some of our competitors and clients with better than average accuracy.

“Three,” I said, “we might go out and shop for a brand-new, spotless reputation for you and Iroquois Metals, so that when and if the Marshlands charges are made public they will sound utterly incredible. Now, follow me closely because this is how we’re going to work this pitch. From here out you’re going to stop being a tough, hard-skinned industrialist. Overnight you’re going to mature into a liberal, farsighted statesman of private initiative. Every time Marshlands or any other so-called liberal makes a speech in the Senate about how much he loves the common man, Iroquois Metals will applaud like crazy right out in the open. You will run full-page ads in papers all over the country, reprinting excerpts from Marshlands’ speeches. At the bottom of every advertisement there will be a modest italicized statement in brackets saying Iroquois Metals and you as its president are dedicated to democracy and an era of abundance for the American people and that this advertisement is one of a public service series. After two or three months of that, anyone who says you were guilty of anything more than a mere technical violation of the election laws will be denounced in the liberal press as a dirty, red-baiting, fascist stooge of the National Association of Manufacturers. There will be much more to the campaign than what I’ve just told you, but that’s the gist of it. Do you get it?”

I could see by the glittering, cunning quality of his eyes that he had quickly understood all the implications of the scheme. He had actually stopped eating.

Why should I tell him it was an old dodge? Why should I tell him that the last time it was pulled in a big and hearty way was when Henry L. Doherty’s public relations man got the old stockjobber to become a Santa Claus front for raising funds for the Warm Springs Foundation and they came up with the idea of the President’s Birthday Ball? After that, people stopped thinking of Doherty as the man who had stuck them with tens of millions of dollars of nose-diving Cities Service stock, and pictured him as a kindly old codger whose carborundum heart bled out loud by the column (with pictures) for the paralytic kids and the forgotten man. It was an old trick and the professional magicians have always used it. Misdirection, they call it—something you do to divert the attention of the suckers while the undercover switcheroo is taking place. So, all right, I sure was a genius.

It was nearly midnight when we wound it all up: the probable cost of the advertising campaign, the date of the kickoff, and how our fee was to be paid. Without batting an eye he said okay when I asked for a check for one hundred thousand dollars.

“Sure,” he said, “if you think that’ll make the cheese more binding. Certified, if you want it that way.”

He slipped into his jacket, took a drink fast, then another for the road, and asked: “It’s not too late for a little sport. How about it?”

“I’ve got a pair of babes waiting for me over at the Palmer House. Don’t you think we ought to christen this deal?” He wiped the corner of his mouth with two fingers.

“Well, if you change your mind, here’s where you can get me until about four in the morning.” He scribbled something on a slip of paper and put it near my telephone. “If a girl with a Southern drawl answers, don’t hang up, she’s yours and paid for.”

“Okay. When do you want to pick up your check and those contracts you want to see? How about twelve and then we could have lunch together?”

“Let’s make it later. I may want to sleep right through, and so might you.”

After he had left, I took another shower and went into the bedroom and stretched out buck naked, aching for sleep. But it was no go. I tossed around, hot and sticky, depressed and sleepless. I must have lain there for more than an hour and then there was a ripping burst of thunder far out over the Lake, then more and still more, followed by grandiose lighting effects, flashes of lightning putting a sheen on the dark, night-slick water. Then it rained, great sheets of it driving against the façade of the hotel. I hopped out of bed and shut the windows of the drawing room.

I awoke the next morning after eleven with the emery sand gone from under my eyelids, but still feeling depressed for some unaccountable reason. I looked out of the window and saw that it was a bright, sunny, fresh-washed day. I shaved, showered, and under the stream of water reflected that only a Calvinist with an ingrowing soul could feel dispirited on the day when he was to pick up a check for a hundred thousand dollars. Later, I had some coffee sent up, just coffee, and I sat drinking it, smoking and moping until well after twelve, when I began to think seriously of food.

The dining room, when I got downstairs, was crowded and a small group of about a dozen people were waiting at the entrance for admittance.

Shifting from foot to foot, I must have stood there for nearly half an hour as parties of two and three were seated, and each time he beckoned a party the maître gave me a sick, is-it-my-fault smile.

Standing there near me, unescorted and also waiting for a single table, was a girl who I should have said was in her early or middle twenties. She was tall, sun-blonde but doubtless terribly expensive (the mood of Mr. Ashley Bennett was still on me) and altogether splendid. After the fourth couple had been seated I turned to her and said: “Excuse me, but if you wouldn’t mind sharing a table with me, I think we’d get seated sooner.” I got a small, polite smile for my pains. “No, thank you,” she said, “I don’t mind waiting at all.”

Finally, we were seated at opposite ends of the dining room, out of sight of each other, and by the time I had finished my lunch she was nowhere to be seen. The rebuff and now this disappearing act depressed me further, gully-low, so that by the time I arrived at the IM offices whatever it was that was giving me the business had me hanging on the ropes. And the sight of the check for a hundred grand, surprisingly, made me feel no more chipper. I spent an hour with Bennett and Laswell, putting the finishing touches to the deal. My plane reservation was for the next day but I lied about it, wanting to spend the evening alone. At five I was back at the hotel.

I rested for a while, lying on my back on one of the couches in the drawing room, and daydreamed of myself as the young, hard-hitting Federal attorney in the case of The United States vs. Ashley Bennett et al. I enjoyed the role until reality intruded itself in the form of an outsized check made out to the order of Jefferson Clarke & Associates, and that was the end of the daydream. Later I got up, washed, spruced up, and fixed myself a gin rickey, not too heavily spiked. Then I turned the radio on and listened to a news broadcast, slow disaster announced in the bright, lying accents of salesmanship, after which I mixed myself another drink. Sipping my gin and lime, I planned the evening: a late dinner, some drinks maybe, and then along about midnight I would hear some authentic jazz. Not the slick, tired stuff you mostly heard in New York, nor the brassy razzmatazz they called jazz in the movies, but the real thing, played by the people who lived it, and the living wasn’t easy and I knew where to find it.

By the time I got around to having dinner I was fairly well lit, not loaded, just lit. Or maybe not even lit, merely high, in that wonderful state where with smart spacing you could last all night.

After dinner I lost some of that elation and I dropped into what the hotel people called their cocktail lounge. In reality it was an elegant bar, but “cocktail lounge” was a pleasing genteelism to these virile, upright, mid-Westerners to whom bars, I suppose, were places where their hawg-butchering ancestors drank. Anyhow, there it was leading off the lobby, discreetly announced in small neon script. When I entered there wasn’t a cocktail in sight; highballs, straight shots, collinses, rickeys, sours, tall pilsner glasses, but no cocktails. Not very much lounging, either. I edged into an opening at the crowded oval bar and ordered a drink. But I wasn’t comfortable there and, after a while, I looked around for a place to sit. I found one in one of the far corners of the lounge.

I turned my head to case the joint. Sure enough, there she was, the sun-blonde who had given me the icy brush-off while we were waiting for tables at lunchtime. She sat there, one table diagonally removed to my left, alone, forbiddingly erect, looking straight ahead, a half-emptied glass on the table before her. I was about fifteen degrees outside of her field of vision; if she had moved her head slightly to the right we would have been face to face.

I settled back to observe and perhaps later to plan the necessary strategy to break some ice.

The atmosphere of the place, the chintzy, sentimental music, the too-subdued lighting, the women, the smooth service, were reminiscent of a high-class call house. The murals had been done by a well-known popular painter of The American Girl. In this instance he depicted—and there is no other word to describe it—a series of woodland scenes, lush green, in which doe-naked dryads played oops-a-daisy in glens and clearings, peered from behind trees, untufted nymphs with the faces of the hundred-dollar babies you saw at Bennett’s parties. But despite all this, there was a tight capsule of sexual prohibition encasing all this atmosphere, so that everything was canceled out in futility.

I wondered why this girl should have entered the lounge alone and why she should sit there so challengingly. Obviously she was in the wrong place, or in the right place under the wrong circumstances. Very interesting, the man said to himself as he flagged the waiter.

After my drink arrived and after I had observed her more closely, I wondered why I had first thought she was another of those expensive girls you see around hotels where the heavy sugar is foregathered. Now she seemed to be nothing of the sort. She had beauty, all right, but it was the kind of beauty that rested on an off-center quality which I greatly admired. There was none of the Hollywood, cover-girl, measured perfection in which the two-dimensional effect is given in a flash and then is as quickly forgotten. She was, as the men were fond of saying in the last war, well stacked. And I was pleased to see she was one of the few women that season who hadn’t carved herself a new shape at the peremptory commands of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She didn’t have to. Her figure was a cross between Renoir luxury and that icy, lesbian, slim elegance that fashion writers used to call the American Look. She carried her head and shoulders with a certain air of distinction, square to the world and it had better take notice, and yet with considerable grace. There were areas of blurred shadow above her rather high cheekbones and I was compelled to guess the color of her eyes, which in the dim lighting of the place I imagined to be gray or blue, very likely gray.

I derived a strange, vicarious pleasure out of sitting there looking at this girl, and though I tried hard not to stare I found it almost impossible. Then, unexpectedly, she turned her head in my direction and for a second perhaps her eyes rested on me, cool and without the slightest hint of recognition, and then she looked away. No score. But in that moment I was overcome by a feeling of suffused guilt; the feeling I used to experience when my mother caught me in some act of mischief. And then, as if an act of expiation were now required of me, I stupidly upset my drink. This caught her attention and she looked over, smiled sympathetically, and then looked away again.

The waiter hurried over and cleaned up the mess and brought me another drink. I was now quite determined to speak to this exquisite gal. This decision involved the question of techniques. Of which there are many. And most of them straight off the cob. There is, I recalled, thinking back, that very hoary routine of the proffered light for the unlit cigarette. Or the sad, lonely, nostalgic smile. But I was too old for that sort of thing. Or some clever remark scribbled on a card—“Gentleman, unattached for the evening, seeks companionship of beautiful, lonely young lady. Intentions reasonably honorable or not, just as the occasion requires.” Or the fluttering of the right hand under the left side of the jacket, see, heartbeats, all for you, lady! No, that was no good. I had to think fast; she might suddenly get up and walk out on me. So I decided on a more direct approach—why do it the hard way?—and even before I had thought it through, I was on my feet and had taken the two necessary paces to reach her table.

She saw me coming and looked up in straight-armed surprise. I smiled, and bending over her, said: “I hope you’ll forgive me for this violation of good taste, but I want very much to talk to you.” Her protective expression turned to one of mild neutrality, yes, her eyes were gray, and before she could frame a response, I went on rapidly: “No, we haven’t met before—that is, not until I spoke to you outside the dining room today. And your face doesn’t look familiar. Perhaps that’s what makes it so delightful.”

Finally she spoke: “ ‘A’ for trying and ‘B’ plus for originality. Why don’t you bring your drink over here?”

She nodded pleasantly, making me very welcome. “How are you, Mr. Sherrod? And mine is Margaret Cornell.”

Well, the pick-up phase of this little comedy was over. It was a date now, a date without benefit of formal introduction. Boy meets girl, buyer meets model, salesman meets cigarette girl, editor meets research worker, public relations man meets girl, occupation unknown. Two more or less unhappy people in search of a mutually shared illusion. What difference did it make? It was in the best tradition of our native folkways, of the American ethos. Ethos, mythos, pathos, bathos. . . .

I opened with the customary gambit: a biographical question. But she wasn’t having any. No autobiography of any kind, neither mine nor hers. No life story. No description of that inevitable small mid-western town—I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Glensboro? No thumbnail sketches of a harsh but sound mother and an odd, understanding, fuddy-duddy father, God bless him—but then when I was fourteen years old . . . It always happened when they were fourteen. No, none of that.

“Let’s be adult about this,” she said. “We’re never going to see each other again. I’m on my way through Chicago, and so are you. So let’s both be relaxed about it and enjoy ourselves without all the clever, nasty techniques of dating.”

There was a sharpness in her tone as she spoke, but it was a dryness that was admirable, a tart, metallic quality.

“Let’s have a wonderful evening,” she went on, elaborating, “and then let’s forget it. Every chance meeting doesn’t have to be loaded with significance. Don’t you think?”

God knows, I’ve had my fill of Walt Whitman, thanks mostly to the wartime radio. You know the stuff I mean, stuff written in a Central Park South studio with an open copy of Leaves of Grass close at hand. And dialogue like this: “voices: Mill towns, steel towns, mining towns, tobacco towns, farmhouses, railroad sidings, statues on the common, kettles of sorghum molasses, night courts, factories, daily newspapers, crematoria, all the ever-so-vast panorama of our great land. an american: But, look, Joe, how can all that add up to democracy? Seems to me that democracy is something so big, something so all-embracing, that only—”

Of course, the stuff they’re writing today is altogether different on account of the new party line which arrived day before yesterday, parcel post, from somewhere over the drink. But now, change of scene back to the story; but now sitting in the hotel cocktail lounge, started by Miss Cornell’s talk, a few of the old boy’s lines got started in my mind. And very good lines, too, considering that they weren’t avant garde any longer.

“This. ‘Once I pass’d through a populous city, imprinting my brain for future use, with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions;

“ ‘Yet now, of all that city, I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain’d me for love of me . . .’

“Yes,” she said, “something like that. Except that it’s a little too early to tell about that for-love-of-me business.”

“Yes, very well.” And she spoke it: “ ‘Day by day and night by night we were together,—all else has long been forgotten by me. . . .’ ” She looked up, smiled, and finished her drink. “Yes, that’s about what I mean. And please don’t look surprised, there are schools west of the Hudson, you know.”

I ordered another round of drinks and we sat for a while not talking. Then I said: “Do you like jazz?”

We finished our drinks and on the way out of the hotel I said: “You know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be night-by-night. Day-by-day will be quite all right, if that’s how you want it.”

At the revolving door she stopped dead in her tracks and said: “Who are you to argue with Walt Whitman? Do as the poet says and quit holding up the parade.”

We crawled the wonderful pubs of Chicago until long past midnight, making five or six of them in about four hours. Not the hotel bars with clienteles as square as a city block, nor the fency-schmency places on Michigan Boulevard where the décors somehow seem to cancel out the effects of the alcohol. But the out-of-the-way spots in some of the side streets around the Loop and, later, the intimate, groovy joints over on the South Side where the trade was checkerboard and the music was straight New Orleans. None of that Greenwich Village fatigue or Fifty-second Street frantic, phony bebop, but uncorrupted New Orleans in a straight line from Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong.

On the way over our taxi driver, full of gutter wisdom and White Supremacy, asked: “Sure you know where you’re goin’, mister?”

We dropped into a place in a basement near Thirty-fifth and State, ordered a drink, and standing against the bar listened to a brown gal in a hoarse, pleasant voice sing Down-hearted Blues:

She stood there relaxed and not squirming and grinding like so many white singers who act as if they had every intention of raping the mike. And then she sang some Jelly Roll Morton, really riding it out.

Along about one in the morning we wound up at The Black Cat and listened and danced to a small band that was better than anything I had heard outside of the Apollo up in Harlem. There wasn’t a recognizable name in the outfit, but there was a tailgate as good as Teagarden at his early best and a trumpet that had all of Armstrong plus a youthful, jetting, buoyant melodic line that was no-doubt something.

The drinks were small and watered and we had them fast. Then the brown gal up on the stand started to sing Mamie’s Blues, the first of them all, if you can believe Jelly Roll Morton:

And listening, I remembered all the places I’d ever heard the anonymous, low-down lament of this people not yet out of the gallion: the underpaid field hands, the common laborers, kicked around and shortchanged, their women, menials, two-bit whores—give me a lousy dime—crowded into the most sickening slums in all the world. And yet, in all this music, there was no challenging outcry, not a single note of protest; simply acquiescent melodic suffering.

It was some time later that it occurred to me that there was the subtlest kind of protest against the oppressing whites in the blues and in real Negro jazz. I realized that the lyrics and music in the blues and in genuine jazz descended to the lowest levels of suffering, down into the dives, down on the levees, into the unpainted shacks, all the way down. And yet in the music, in the way it’s played by Negroes, there is a subtle taunt. For this heartbreaking, melancholy folk music declares that the Negro is free from the white man’s restricted way of life. It seemed to say: “White man, you stuck with those bloodless women in that big house of yours, but you can’t make love like Ah do. Ah gets drunk, Ah hells around, Ah’s free, the way you kin never be.” Of course, this sexual taunt is a myth, a lie, but it is effective because it’s an unanswerable lie. And the Negroes themselves know it’s a lie and that’s why, when you get all excited about the blues to most intelligent, cultured Negroes, they take it as no compliment. But there it is: the slide of Kid Ory’s trombone, lemme slip it to yuh, babe; the one-note glissandi, the expert tonguing, know what I mean, doll? the steady four-four pumping beat, stay with me, honey, it won’t be long now. . . .

We danced until the place closed. The floor was small, of course, but we didn’t need much space because we were doing it on a dime which is the only way to dance to jazz.

We hadn’t talked much about anything except the music, the blues singers we’d heard, and the places we’d visited. When we decided to get back to the hotel, I knew as little about Margaret as when we started out. Nevertheless, we had managed to establish a fine and very acceptable rapport. Proving, I suppose, that there is a special kind of wisdom in the finger tips and in the tactile sense generally, which is a handy kind of intelligence to have around when you’re getting to know a girl. In the taxi going back to the Lake front, I touched her face lightly with my fingers at the point where her cheekbones seemed to soften into shadow. She responded with a nuzzling movement of her head, implying unspecified acquiescence.

“Which would you like,” I asked as we got out of the cab, “a brisk walk along the lakefront or a nightcap?”

So we walked along the Lake parkway until we had exercised some of the alcohol out of our brains. Then we went up to my suite to start the process all over again.

There are several ways in which a woman can cope with the first few minutes when she finds herself Alone with a Man in a Hotel Room. She may freeze, smile politely, and sit nervously on the edge of her chair—I’m afraid this is all very informal. (The trapped virgin, or at least that’s the impression.) Or she may take over and fill the glasses, empty the ash trays, examine the furnishings, and exclaim with bloodcurdling cheerfulness—my husband should see me now! (The housewife on a vacation.) Or, finally, she may be at ease in a case-hardened way and look with mercenary appraisal at your belongings—gentleman I met had this suite two weeks ago, politician or something from Racine, a big spender. (Whore.)

But Margaret Cornell fell into none of these obvious categories. She played it straight, honest, unaffected. She took off her hat and gloves, looked around the room casually but with approval, and then walked to one of the windows and stood there for a few minutes looking out at the Lake while I hustled up some drinks. When I announced them, she turned, completely at ease, and joined me. We drank, but not very much now, and the talk was good, warmed by a growing intimacy. Later, we both stood at one of the windows and watched the early dawn put a dull silver patina on the surface of the Lake. Then we undressed, she in the bedroom, I in the drawing room, and went to bed. Yes, just like that, no fuss, no nothing.

At noon the telephone rang, breaking sadistically into my sleep. I came out of it reluctantly and between one ring of the phone and the next I retained in an impressionistic way all the recollection of Margaret’s full and exquisite passion a few hours before. The generous giving, the healthy, pagan pride of her body and its subtle skill, and in particular one moment toward the end—the room was then filled with sunlight—when she turned toward me, buried her head in my shoulder, and wept, a very unpagan thing to do. I knew, of course, that her tears, like all tears, were a reproach and I also knew that the reproach was not intended for me. . . . The ringing of the telephone did not awaken her and I answered it as quickly as I could, so as to leave her undisturbed.

It was Jeff calling from New York. How had I made out with Bennett and when did I expect to return? I told him. For a minute or two, after I had hung up, I sat on the edge of the bed, smoking, half-asleep. Then, I felt Margaret’s hand on my bare arm.

“I said it didn’t have to be loaded with significance,” she said. “But I didn’t say you had to act like a husband taking it for granted first thing in the morning. One telephone call from your office and you’re the typical American male—”

“Don’t be a little fool,” I said. I leaned over to kiss her, putting my cigarette out carefully.

“Last night you didn’t bother to put your cigarette out with such care.” She moved her head away slightly. “See, there’s the burn.” She nodded toward a black scar at the edge of the night table.

I covered her mouth with my hand. “Don’t talk, darling, never talk into a kiss.”

She smiled and closed her eyes, the smile remaining fixed after I had kissed her again as if a change of expression would do violence to her mood. I rolled over closer to her and the nerve endings in my finger tips telegraphed superfluous information. . . .

This, she had said, was to be something without significance, which is a sloppy, escapist way of thinking since all relationships have significance one way or the other. A way of escaping into the future. For me the present contained this girl and it was significant enough for me. Give yourself memories, she had said a few hours before as we were walking along the Lake parkway. Very well, then, one more memory, lady. . . .

Then—to telescope a little time, about five minutes—the sounds that had been tuned out by our great preoccupation with each other now slowly returned: the hiss and rumble of the traffic, a low plane overhead, a banging door, a shout in the street.

We showered and dressed, taking it easy. Later in the hotel dining room, where there was now ample room, we ate ravenously. It was a great breakfast or lunch or whatever you want to call it; I refuse to use the bastard word. It was also a great day and for both of us it would soon be over, so we sat there ordering fresh coffee, chain-smoking, and the waiter kept coming along every now and then bringing us clean ash trays. I felt a little put out that this was to be, in retrospect, nothing more than a one-night stand; but that’s how this was being played and I consoled myself with the thought that there are worse tragedies in life. And so entering into the spirit of the thing, we thanked God for Walt Whitman, old Walt with the battered hat. He didn’t have to conceal his inverted feelings in a secret code of unintelligibility, which is how the lads do it today on account of the love that dare not speak its name. Whitman spoke it and damned all the philistines to hell. We thanked God for his great book, Leaves of Grass, and for the gentle, sentimental poem, Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City, for we were in a sentimental mood, which is a good thing once in a while and those who deny it are liars. We offered thanks for the Brooklyn Eagle which gave him his first good newspaper job, for his having written “resist much, obey little.” We gave thanks for the village of West Hills on Long Island where he was born, and for Camden where he spent his peaceful, declining years, and we damned to hell James Harlan—may his name live in infamy forever—the Secretary of the Interior who fired the poet from a miserable $600-a-year job because he considered Leaves of Grass obscene, which reminded us of Samuel Johnson’s crack to Boswell, “Indecent? No, but your question is.”

We said all that, splitting the erudition, such as it was, between us. And when we had finished, I asked how come she was up so well on her Whitman. I dropped my guard on that one, but she was decent enough not to let me have it.

“Sheer intellectual osmosis,” she said, smiling tolerantly, “the same as most people—reading, listening to an occasional lecture and some research, but not much. I did my master’s paper on him.”

But she didn’t go any further and when I started to probe and ask leading questions, she cut me off by looking with surprise at her wristwatch and saying that she had to catch a train at five (destination pointedly unspecified) and that she hadn’t packed yet.

She was determined to be the gal I had casually met in the populous city and who detained me for whatever it was she felt about me and the time we had so pleasurably spent together. All I had was her name and the knowledge that she had majored in American literature, which wasn’t much, but that was the way she wanted it. And so I let it ride, but not without leaving the door slightly ajar just in case she ever wanted to put her foot into it.

“Look,” I said with a feeling of dejection, fishing for my wallet, “here’s my card. If you ever change your mind, write, wire, or phone collect and I’ll come out and meet you anywhere you say.”

She took the card without looking at it, thanked me, put it into her purse, and then she rose. That was how it ended.

I caught the next plane to New York and slept like a pampered baby all the way in.

Early the next month the first copies of Roger MacLain’s report came off the presses. Our production department had let itself go on this one and it was a beautiful thing to see: a three-color title page, unusual typography, heavy antique stock, pages of statistics showing rows of egg-headed little men and women—“fifty-three million Americans wear glasses”—and then battalions of faceless people with heavy horn-rimmed glasses. “Seven out of every ten American families prefer a dog to a cat as a family pet and only one in twenty keeps a canary”—and then facing the page was one of those visual statistics things showing a great big Fido, a smaller Minnie, and an infinitesimal canary. And marching through this human-interest stuff were other, weightier, more pertinent graphs and charts and Roger’s exciting, fine narrative. The job was bound in deep maroon calf with gilt lettering which read: “America’s Common Man—A Public Service Study—by the Staff of Jefferson Clarke & Associates.” Each copy set us back five dollars and we printed ten thousand as a first order.

It was an impressive job, even though I say so myself as shouldn’t. Copies of it, together with a smart covering letter, went to newspaper editors and columnists, radio commentators, college professors, clergymen, and such other opinion molders with a taste for headlines as might help the campaign get properly mounted. For the convenience of the boilerplate press we sent along a news release and a canned editorial. We got off to a beautiful start. The office began to hum and throb as the results started to come in: hundreds of clippings, scores of editorials, telephone calls from newspapermen and a call from Life saying they planned to give the report one of their double-truck spreads. Then it started to come in on the office news ticker:

TP 104

ADD 1ST LEAD, COMMON-MAN REPORT, WASHINGTON

AFTER HAVING READ EXCERPTS OF THE CLARKE REPORT INTO THE CONGRESSIONAL RECORD, REP. DELMORE (DEM., N. Y.) SAID THAT HE PROPOSED TO SEE THAT COPIES OF IT REACHED “SOME OF MY NEO-FASCIST COLLEAGUES HERE IN WASHINGTON.”

“I’M CERTAIN,” THE CONGRESSMAN SAID, “THEY WILL BE GREATLY BENEFITED BY IT.”

MORE RC216P

TP 115

ADD 2ND LEAD, COMMON MAN, WASHINGTON

SEN. YANCEY PULVER (REP., MO.) POINTED OUT THAT SINCE THE REPORT SHOWED THAT THE AVERAGE AMERICAN LIVED IN A TOWN OF LESS THAN 10,000 POPULATION, IT WAS OBVIOUS THAT THE COMMON MAN IS A REPUBLICAN.

THE LAST PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION RETURNS, SENATOR PULVER SAID, REVEALED THAT THE SMALL-TOWN, GRASS-ROOTS VOTE WAS OVERWHELMINGLY REPUBLICAN.

MORE RC321P

TP 213

ADD 2ND LEAD, COMMON MAN, WASHINGTON

IN REPLY TO SEN. PULVER, DEVLIN KELLY, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CHAIRMAN, SAID: “IF THE COMMON MAN EVER SHOWED UP AT A REPUBLICAN CONVENTION HE’D BE KICKED OUT AS AN UNWELCOME INTRUDER. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN THE PARTY OF THE COMMON MAN.”

MR. KELLY SAID THE NEW YORK PUBLIC RELATIONS FIRM OUGHT TO BE CONGRATULATED FOR THE EXCELLENCE OF ITS REPORT.

RH410P

TP16

NEW YORK RELIGIOUS EDITORS

REV. DWIGHT HOLLEY, PASTOR OF THE MIDTOWN LUTHERAN CHURCH, WILL PREACH THIS SUNDAY ON “THE COMMON MAN AND GOD.”

EP 901A

TP132

DR. IRVING BLEDSOE, PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM AT GOTHAM UNIVERSITY, SAID TODAY THAT THE JEFFERSON CLARKE REPORT ON THE COMMON MAN WILL BE REQUIRED READING FOR ALL STUDENTS OF JOURNALISM AND PUBLIC RELATIONS AT THE UNIVERSITY.

DR. BLEDSOE REFERRED TO THE REPORT AS “THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF THE AMERICAN MASS MIND THAT IT HAS BEEN MY GOOD FORTUNE TO READ SO FAR.”

RL316P

To have the report the subject of Congressional wisecracks, sermons and springboard press releases was all very fine, but it was small change when you started to tally it. You don’t pay off on news ticker items. You do in publicity but not in public relations. The call we were anxiously waiting for was late in coming, but in the end, as we knew it would, it came. It was from Senator Marshlands. He had just finished reading the report and—bro-ther—he was wondering if it would be asking too much for us to fly down to Washington tomorrow and have lunch with him and talk, nothing special, just talk about the report.

The publication of America’s Common Man had the office jumping and Jeff and I were ankle-deep in appointments. But we killed our schedules for the next day and flew down to meet with the Senator.

Sitting in the plane as we flew through a spell of fog over Philadelphia, I leaned back and closed my eyes and thought of Senator Thomas Marshlands and how he got that way. You’ve seen pictures of him in the papers and magazines and at the newsreel theaters: square, solid face, high cheekbones, the heavy-lidded, half-smiling eyes, the high forehead and the shaggy unkempt hair. The smart ones all have uncombed hair or falling forelocks to show that they are too completely engrossed in the affairs of the common man to have time for interest in themselves. And, of course, there was the ill-fitting store suit and the baggy pants and the tie which somehow was never in place. Looking at Marshlands, the conditioned constituent thought of lonely mid-western homesteads, husking bees, church suppers, the jet of tobacco juice accurately aimed at the spittoon, Grant Wood’s hatchet-faced farm women and village philosophers beating their gums around Courthouse Square. Sold in advance, they heard the folksy speech, saw the big hulking frame wrapped in the wrinkled Sears-Roebuck suit and that was enough—“sure, you can tell by looking at him that he ain’t one of them slick, fast-talking crooks.”

When you watched Marshlands at work during one of his public performances, you might be inclined to write him off as a loud-mouthed demagogue, all noise and soft and rotten inside. Or else, as the opposition did, you might put him down in your books as a glib idealist, a dreamer with a talent for making page one and loving it, the broad, toothy, grass-roots grin, mitting himself before a howling mob at Madison Square Garden or at the Hollywood Bowl. But if that’s as far as you went you were crazy. Because deep down inside the man there was a core, a solid metallic core of indestructible hardness. The aw-shucks simplicity, the unashamed juggling with facts, the outrageous smears, the corny tremulous concern for the common man—all this was strictly for the customers.

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said that whenever a man starts to cast a longing eye on high office, a rottenness begins in his conduct. But that’s only half-true. What goes with the taint is an abrasive harshness which grows in the dark until it can grind steel to powder. We Americans sometimes think of our politicians as illiterate, venal hacks with gravy stains on their vests, or cheap crooks in $200 pin-striped suits whose motto is “Make me an offer,” or simple, small-town guys with straw in their hair, suckers for every visiting European statesman. But this is pure fiction. The truth is that there is no country in the world where the game is played with more squint-eyed ruthlessness. They don’t come any harder than our boys, who play the game without ever batting an eye and for keeps, and there is no mercy in their hearts, as Europe will discover when the chips go down for the final hand.

Anyway, Tom Marshlands had cast a longing eye on the 21-gun salutes, the private, gleaming DC-6, the hordes of Secret Service men who swarm whenever the President appears, on all the trappings and symbols of the “highest office within the power of the people of the United States to bestow.” And the rottenness had begun in his conduct, the sickness had gone deep into his soul, and his head and heart fused into the requisite steel. A wisecracking newspaper pundit had once remarked that if Marshlands was an idealist, he was as idealistic as a weasel in a hencoop, and that if he was a dreamer, he dreamt in terms of double-entry bookkeeping. Which was no truer of the Senator than it is of most politicians—if you forget the accidental figures of real stature, like old man George Norris or the elder LaFollette. That’s the way they’re built, since every mother’s son of them has his covetous eye on the office next above. The Senator was good at his business, smart, and if you were going his way, as smooth and pleasant as twenty-year-old bourbon.

These were the things that passed through my mind as our plane headed south. And I had the notion, as we passed over Baltimore, that whatever it was that Marshlands wanted to talk to us about had to do with some momentary tactic in his obsessive plan for some day becoming President of the United States.

The Senator met us at the airport in a new Cadillac sedan and drove us to his home, his chauffeur sitting alongside him. The Marshlands home formerly had been an embassy for one of those eastern European countries that got swallowed up after the war. Jeff and I had been there before, several times, during the negotiations to take the teeth out of the chain-store legislation in Marshlands’ home state. He led us into his library to have a glass of sherry while we waited for lunch to be announced.

As the majority stockholder of one of the most successful fertilizer corporations in the country, his salary as United States Senator was peanuts. He was married to a beautiful if somewhat corn-fed gal from back home who ran his establishment with quiet intelligence. You’ve often seen pictures of Mrs. Marshlands in Town and Country and other carriage-trade magazines: Mrs. M. as a gracious hostess; Mrs. M. and her debutante daughter just before the coming-out party; Mrs. M. as one of the best dressed women in the nation’s capital, and no clothes horse, either, let me tell you; Mrs. M. poring over a prop Senate document with her husband, his constant companion and helpmeet, which was a lot of malarkey because the Senator needed no help from his gracious, good-looking ever-loving. But she was, if I may borrow an idea from Veblen, a hefty and handsome hunk of conspicuous waste and he loved her for it, among other things.

No matter how cheap and noisy the Senator was on the hustings, in committee and in intraparty maneuvering he was a quiet, skillful parliamentarian. And in his private life, if not a loyal husband, he certainly was a devoted one, fidelity being entirely another matter. He was also an extravagant and doting father, and always a considerate and discriminating host. Once during a campaign for re-election, his opponent exposed him as an un-American gourmet and a fancypants host and the charge damn near ruined him. By way of rebuttal Marshlands went up and down his state sampling the heavy, greasy victuals in hundreds of rural kitchens, smacking his chops and pronouncing it the finest, rib-stickingest food on God’s green earth. He won the election, all right, but he heard the returns from his room at a private hospital where he was laid up with a violent attack of gastroenteritis.

The Senator gave us the kind of lunch that has a tendency to throw me off guard. At such times I get lost in the excellence of the food, I relax and slip into a world of fantasy where people have you to lunch because they’re genuinely fond of you and not because they’re on the make. But this is only a tendency, from which I have learned to recover quickly. And with the coffee Marshlands got down to business.

He talked about the report and in the beginning it was nothing to write home about, mere talk, just as he said. Well, boys, there was no doubt about it, he liked it enormously, yes, sir, enormously. A fine job, a great piece of writing. Eloquent. A public service. And the response to it must surely be gratifying to us. It wasn’t every public relations operation that can get sections of itself read into the Congressional Record. Although he could think of livelier publications than the Record, nevertheless you couldn’t dismiss the prestige, dull or not dull.

Marshlands sat there talking to us, and his face was that of a man who was almost dozing after a fine lunch, watching the smoke of an English-market cigar curling up around his nose and eyes and enjoying the fragrance. But I knew that the thing that kept him awake at night was now throbbing in his mind, and that all we had to do was be patient and he would spring it, sure enough.

“Boys,” he said, and the voice was still slow and lazy, “I’ll tell you what I would do if I were in your shoes.”

“Yes?” Jeff said, and his voice almost matched the Senator’s. But Jeff slipped up, this once. He forgot that he had a lighted cigar working in the ash tray and he took a cigarette from his pack and snapped it into two and put one half into his cigarette holder.

“A book is one thing,” Marshlands said, “but no book, no matter how eloquent and brilliant, can be as effective as a man.” Jeff and I swapped hair-trigger glances; the old horse thief was jumping the gun on us. “Six months from now most of the people who’ve read the book will have forgotten it. But if you could find someone who measures up to the pattern of your common man, why, then you’d have a propaganda setup that could get you anything you wanted in this country, and leave all of your competitors tailing miles behind. What do you think of that?”

“Senator, we think a lot of it,” Jeff said. “We always did, ever since we got the idea of the report. That’s what we had in mind from the very beginning.”

“I might have known that you wouldn’t miss a trick.” But now the Senator wasn’t a man nearly falling asleep over a cigar, his eyes weren’t heavy-lidded and he wasn’t just talking for the hell of it, slow and easy. He sat up, alert, and leaned across the table.

“Ever since I ran for the legislature as a young man back home,” he said, “I’ve been shooting my mouth off about the common man. I was for him as a kid at college, waiting on tables for my tuition when Roosevelt was an unsuccessful Wall Street lawyer, and when Wallace was playing at politics and Yoga with his old man’s money. The common man is my baby. I’ve written a book about him—well, all right, it was ghosted—I’ve written dozens of magazine articles on him and made hundreds of radio speeches. Maybe I didn’t invent him, but, by Jesus, I did something to the idea that made it seem real and important. And now you boys come along and horn in on something I’ve been building for more than fifteen years. I don’t blame you. The idea is in the public domain and the only thing that surprises me is that someone hasn’t tried it before now. My proposition is simple. When you find your boy, I’ll endorse him up to the neck, right out in open meeting, so that millions of my people will know that he’s the genuine article, accept no substitutes. For which I will expect him to endorse me and my program. It’s as simple as that. What do you say?”

Patience and fortitude, as LaGuardia used to say with a touch of hysteria in his voice over the radio in New York during the war, patience and fortitude. And here we were about to get everything we wanted on a platinum platter and no fortitude, either. Just patience, just sitting back there in New York waiting for Roger MacLain’s little opus to take effect, waiting for the right telephone call from Washington, and here it was all coming true. I thought of Ashley Bennett out in Chicago, liberalism’s man of distinction of tomorrow, tearing into that steak and suddenly looking up, a forkful of rare beef suspended in mid-air—boy, you sure are a genius! No doubt he was still worrying, still biting his nails down to the quick, still getting drunk, still wondering if— And here he was, not knowing it, out in the clear, as good as sprung, case dismissed. Now we wouldn’t need the advertising campaign, but we’d go through with it just the same, never give a double-crossing client an even break, and because of the fifteen per cent agency commission, all in all four hundred thousand dollars in fees and commissions, more to come, and we hadn’t even started.

Marshlands’ question was purely rhetorical, so instead of waiting for an answer he went right on saying more of same with slight variations. When he was through he repeated the question, this time expecting a reply. He looked at me, because I’m easy, I suppose, but I let Jeff take it. He took it neatly and, at first, played hard to get. Talk me into it, mister.

“Well, you see, all of our clients are nice, conservative businessmen who believe in free enterprise, old style, and, frankly, I’m wondering how they’d feel about sharing a stunt with a radical like yourself.”

Marshlands smiled, leaned back in his chair, and went back to his cigar-smoking, somnolent routine.

Jeff reached into his pocket and handed a list to the Senator. Marshlands gave it a quick once-over, lightly, and he smiled again. It was the kind of soft, almost pitying smile you sometimes see on the faces of confident fighters just before the decisive blow comes hammering into the opponent’s jaw.

“Quite a stable you’ve got there,” he said. “Nice boys.” He closed his eyes, still smiling. “Most of them.” And he took a slow, leisurely puff of his cigar. “Not all of them, though.” And the smile was gone from his face. “There’s a few of them here who are as interested in saving free enterprise, old style or new style, as I am in promoting interplanetary flight. What they want is a fast million dollars as often as possible and the country can go to hell. Take the Steinmetz crowd. Why, if they had their way they’d have production up and wages so far down with that phony labor cost-accounting system of theirs that we’d be in a tail spin before we knew it. Or Tri-City. Those sons-of-bitches have done more to block cheap power for the farmers in my state than any other outfit I can think of. I’m not blaming you boys. I know it’s a tough fight trying to keep some of these boys in line. And I know you’ve straightened them out more than once. But for the love of Christ don’t talk to me about free enterprise and how worried your clients are about saving it.” He looked at the list, more carefully this time, and then his eyes narrowed. “Or take this patriotic bastard, Ashley Bennett. When did you take him on?”

“We had him before the war,” I said, “but he came back with us about a month ago.”

We had the Senator where we wanted him. And sure enough, he came through, getting set to uncork a right to the jaw.

“Yes, Senator,” Jeff said, “we know. We know all about it. That’s one of the things we wanted to talk to you about this afternoon.”

Marshlands’ Adam’s apple did one upward convulsive twitch and then, as he brought himself under control instantaneously, it came down slowly. The Senator was smiling again, but it was a different smile.

“You boys play rough,” he said. And then he got to his feet. “Let’s go into the library. This is going to be a long conference.”

It was a long conference. But when it was over we had everything we wanted. And so had the Senator. Our common man, when we found him, was to make his debut under the patronage of Marshlands; together, they were to do a little national barnstorming. No direct political tie-up, you understand, just an occasional public appearance together. In return for which, if you want to be crude about it, the Senator allowed himself to be convinced that Iroquois Metals was no better or worse than scores of other war contractors. In return for which we would have Ashley Bennett do penance in the newspapers, via full-page advertorials, by pleading for peace, reasonable government controls, housing, and racial tolerance, so that all men might know that IM and its president were dedicated to democracy and that these advertisements were part of a public service series. In return for which the Marshlands committee would return to us all the files on the Iroquois Metals case, and we could forward them to our client at our discretion.

As the plane took off at the Washington airport, Jeff said: “You know he’s poison to some of our clients.”

To which I replied: “There’s an antidote for that kind of poison. And we have it.”

To which I added: “And if some of them don’t respond to the treatment, to hell with them. It’s time we weeded out some of our clients, anyhow.”

He nodded in agreement and a few minutes later he nodded in sleep. He was astonishing that way. Trigger tense, always alert, he could slip into sleep in the first free, relaxed moment.

An hour later, as we were approaching Philadelphia, he awoke, lit a cigarette, and said: “They don’t come any smarter.” It was as though there had been no interruption in our conversation. He was wide awake as soon as he opened his eyes. “I can understand why he plays ball with the CIO and the liberals. Votes. But why in hell does he play footie with the Commies? What’s the percentage and where’s the pay-off?”

To which I replied: “The odds are better than even money and the pay-off will come, I should say, somewhere around 1952.”

“Yes. If and when we have to go to war with Russia, and the ‘if’ seems to be shrinking by the minute, no one will be a more effective spokesman for the government than our friend. He’s been a consistent isolationist, except during the last war. He’s a pacifist, a hot-under-the-collar liberal, the most articulate friend of the common man in the country. Former pacifists always make the best war propagandists. Remember Wilson’s ‘too proud to fight’ and Roosevelt’s ‘not one American boy shall be sent to die on foreign soil’? Along about 1952, when the war will be just about ready to break, our friend will be invaluable. He’ll be able to say that he fought the good fight for an understanding with Russia, that he was ready to make every concession, but that now there is no way out of it. And precisely because of his past, he’ll be the best man for a top wartime cabinet appointment or even the Presidency itself. You see, the difference between Wallace and Marshlands is that Marshlands knows where he’s going.”

If you say “A,” then “B” is inevitable right on through the series. So we moved forward with gathering speed, carried along by the momentum set in motion by the publication of Roger’s report.

We had barely paused for breath after the Marshlands deal when Mel Hubbard phoned and came over to see us. There was a proposition he had, but wait until he told it to us.

Hubbard was the new type publisher. He looked like a young Wall Street customers’ man, he entertained like a Hollywood scout, and he thought like a comptometer except that you never heard the click and whir of the mechanism. He was an astounding success.

“The boys over at the office think you’ve got the makings of top-of-the-list best-seller in that common-man thing of yours,” he said. “And we want to publish it. Personally I think it could make one of the big book clubs. But there’s no time. It’s got to be out before all this wonderful publicity cools off. Ordinarily, it would take six months to get the thing published, but since you have the plates we can have the reviewers’ copies out in about thirty days. We’ll give you an attractive contract—”

“Now I’ve seen everything,” Jeff said, after Hubbard had left. “Our common man is in the bag plus royalties. Brother, you can start thinking about getting yourself an onyx swimming pool.”

“We’d better start finding our little guy,” I said, “unless we want one of our competitors to jump the gun on us.”

“Don’t worry, nobody’ll jump the gun. This is our operation, signed, sealed, and branded with the mark of the Clarke-Sherrod ranch. Nobody can steal it now. Besides, you know our closest competitors; nice, clever operators who go about telling prospective clients about mass psychological impulses, the dynamism of symbols, the R factor in mass motivation, and all that crap. We’ll give Proctor and the other boys a practical lesson in mass psychology that’ll keep them taking notes for the next five years. This is one for the textbooks. Let’s not start looking for our guinea pig until Hubbard gets the book out, then, at the height of the publicity, we’ll spring our lad. Yes?”

He sat down at my desk and started to fool around with the intercom, listening in on the various departments, and after a while gave it up.

Later in the day Hubbard called to ask what about an author for the report. The firm name was out. You could get all that in on one of the flaps of the dust jacket.

“Let’s give it to Roger,” Jeff said. “God knows he’s earned it. What do you say?”

“Roger,” Jeff said, “hold your hat. Flamingo House is going to put your report out for the trade. Hubbard says it’s a natural.”

“Twenty per cent straight royalties, on account of they’re using our plates.”

“That makes it just about perfect. A self-sustaining public relations job. Cost to the house, zero.”

“It was a fine piece of writing, Roger, and Jack and I think you ought to be cut into the royalties. What do you say to twenty-five per cent of our cut?”

“I’m the grateful type employee, nothing disgruntled or revolutionary about me, and I say thanks. But by way of an advance, I’ll take four fingers of scotch.”

“Oh, and another thing,” Jeff said to Roger, “Hubbard thinks the book ought to have an individual by-line instead of the firm name. It’s your book and your name ought to be on it as the author.”

“Never mind the by-line,” Roger said, holding out his glass, “it’s liquor I want.”

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s damned generous of you to offer me the by-line, but it wasn’t my idea, it was yours. When I write under my own name the stuff’s got to come from my own insides. I’ve got to give it to myself without the help of anyone else. Besides, you’ve always said that the perfect public-relations man glories in his anonymity. I’ll take the cash and let the credit go.”

“All right,” Jeff said, “don’t say I never offered you a decent break.”

We finally decided that the book should appear under Jeff’s name, with the flaps on the dust jacket carrying an extended plug for the outfit. We sat around most of the afternoon drinking and talking, and by five even Jeff’s face was flushed and the talk was convivial and delightfully aimless. But somehow Roger got around to telling Jeff what he had suppressed earlier in the afternoon: “Don’t think I was modest in turning down the by-line. I’ll go upstairs all right, all right, but somehow I just haven’t got it in me to love the customer.”

Shortly after Roger and I had closed the Iroquois Metals deal with Marshlands, I called Diana into my office to give her part of the glad tidings. Ever since she thought I had let her down at the last Plans Board meeting we had played it distant and formal.

“You know,” I said, “Jeff and I had a long session with Senator Marshlands in Washington the other day.” (Slightly mounting interest.)

Marshlands was right up Diana’s liberal alley: the era of the common man, we’ve really got to take a conciliatory attitude toward Russia, against Wall Street imperialists and warmongers; a strong stand for racial equality in every speech except in those states where white supremacy was a hot issue, things like that.

“He had read Roger’s report and called us for a luncheon date at his home. And guess what?”

“I can’t guess—tell me.” (A liberal gal dying to be convinced.) She still stood at the side of my desk, an employee. A silly game, I thought.

“He thought the report was a natural. But before we got around to telling him how far we intended to go, he pulled the rug out from under our feet. This is the way he put it: ‘Boys, no book, no matter how smart and eloquent, can be as effective as a man.’ And then he went on to say what he would do with our common man if he had him. It was as if he had listened in on our first Plans Board meeting. He said the common man was his baby from all the way back. He actually suggested that we go out and find him. It’s perfectly all right, he said, for us to exploit him commercially provided he does a little barnstorming for the Marshlands program.”

Diana’s face went through the successive expressions of a liberal discovering that he hadn’t been betrayed after all. In the following order: guarded suspicion, incredulity, and then slow elation.

“This isn’t a gag?” she asked. “You know how I feel about Senator Marshlands.”

I knew, all right. I saw that very special look in her eyes and I knew how she felt about anyone who said he stood for the things Joel Simon thought he went to Spain to die for. All the noble things, all the broadly stated things that can never be pinned down to monosyllabic affirmation, so that the more they were explained the less you understood.

But I knew something else now; I knew how Joel Simon had really died. Ken Burton—you’ve seen his by-line—who occasionally did one of those fast yet exhaustive features for Life and who had fought in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, had come over to see me a few days before. He wanted some dope on our chain-store account and we went out to lunch to talk about it. Back in the middle thirties Ken had been a hopped-up fellow-traveler who went along with the comrades for more than the ride. The Spanish civil war was just his dish. He came back from Spain after the debacle and no one heard much about him for a couple of years. He didn’t write any bitter articles or books about his “betrayal,” nor did he go about full of breast-beating guilt. Instead, he just sat it out somewhere, getting straight with himself and then, one day, he turned up on his job on Life, a new man. He was completely without illusions, but not cynical; and he wrote, when the mood was on him, like a man who had solved all his problems. You could get him to talk about almost anything—psychoanalysis, supersonic aviation, literature, Spanish wines, chess—anything but his war experiences in Spain. He knew the score about the Communists, fellow-travelers, and eager liberals, and he knew all about what had really happened in Spain. But he wasn’t talking. He had had enough.

After we had eaten and I had given him the dope he wanted on our chain-store people, I thought a trade might be in order. There was something I wanted to know.

“Back in the thirties,” I asked, “did you know a rewrite man called Simon?”

He thought for a while, repeating the name to himself, and then said: “No, why do you ask?”

“He did rewrite on the Post when Stern had it,” I said. “His first name was Joel. Joel Simon. I don’t know what name he used in Spain. He was with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was killed on the Ebro. Did you know him?”

I went into details about Joel, his appearance, the way he talked and then Burton’s eyes lit up with the quick light of sudden recollection, but in the next moment they went blank and noncommittal again.

“Yes, I remember him,” he said after a short pause, having thought it through. “Sure, I do. What about him?”

“Well—er—he got a bullet square between his eyes, a neat hole that you could hardly see, less than an inch above the bridge of his nose. Does that answer your question?”

I looked at Ken Burton carefully. He was in his late thirties, as slim as he had been when he went off to Spain, no gut, no lines in his face and his eyes were steady. But not now. Now his eyes dropped and one hand went to the water glass, then both hands.

“Yes, that answers my question,” I said. “But only partly. Tell me more.”

Burton didn’t look up and kept cooling his hot hands on the cold, sweaty water glass. I could see that all this was painful to him, so I dropped the subject and ordered two more cognacs. After we had them he warmed up and talked.

“Did he distinguish himself in any way?” he asked, repeating my question. “No, not unless you call suicide an act of distinction.”

“What else would you call it when a man gets down on his knees and virtually begs to be shot? I got a bellyful in the first month in Spain and I said to myself, ‘Ken, you’ve made the biggest mistake in your life. The important thing in a mess like this is to survive.’ But this Simon character didn’t want to survive. He volunteered for the most dangerous jobs and out on rest, with the place lousy with Russian secret police, he would get to talking about how Moscow was supplying arms to the Loyalists, cash before delivery. He carried a newspaper clipping which had Stalin saying that he’d wipe out any liberal or socialist opposition in Spain just as he’d done in Russia. We all knew that the Communists had control of nearly all the key posts and committees in the rear. The Communists in the Brigade knew it and were tickled to death. The wise non-Communists, like myself, kept their mouths shut. I was through by that time. But Simon went around shooting his mouth off. Then, one day, somebody put the finger on him and we found him dead, his hands tied behind him, with a bullet between his eyes.”

My guts went cold as I listened to Burton’s story. I suppose this was what I had wanted to hear, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked. I should have known that it might be something like this. Hemingway had come back from Spain and had told the same story about the Communists wiping out their dissident allies, and so had Dos Passos. And those who said that Spain had been the proving ground for World War II were right, and those who warned us against the Russians were right, too. All of which proved something. . . .

I urged Diana to sit down and she did, and finally she accepted a drink and we sat there talking about how wonderful the common-man project would be and I agreed, saying nothing about Ashley Bennett and Joel Simon, because in those days I played the game according to the old and hallowed rules. And later we went out to dinner and she felt gay and elated after the first few drinks. But whenever I thought of Joel Simon, my hands became weak and moist and I put up the kind of front that should have entitled me to a card in Actors’ Equity.

The tempo of our office was stepped up a notch by the publication of Roger’s report. Jeff and I interviewed prospective clients, mostly small-timers, who needed us more than we needed them. The brush-off in these cases was easy. We asked far more than they could possibly pay, a retainer of twenty-five thousand dollars a year and so much per operation. That was the last we saw of them.

An unsigned article in Deadline slugged “Big Business Majors in Sociology,” bearing all the fingerprints of Bob Wheelwright, referred to the report as “possibly the first step in a vast national public relations operation in which the tragic plight of millions will be reduced to an Homeric gag. That’s how big business operates these days. . . . The report is released as an institutional job, but clearly it is the work of Roger MacLain, erratic but brilliant public relations analyst. If Jefferson Clarke & Associates can get some cheesecake into this act, it may be good for a long and profitable run.”

“You don’t want Deadline to get the reputation of not being able to call the shots, do you?”

I laughed with a show of heartiness but with the emptiness at the pit of my stomach that public relations men feel when top-echelon journalists start seeing through an operation. Then I remembered that I had given the show away like a fool at that dinner at Bob’s apartment.

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t write the piece,” Bob said. “One of our bright lads did and he came to me for a bit of avuncular advice, which I naturally gave him.”

“Well, then,” I said, writing it off, “how’s about a drink this afternoon. The Ambassador bar at five. Yes?”

Hubbard, the publisher of our trade edition of America’s Common Man, the little hustler, all arse and pockets, did some legerdemain with the printers, the paper people, and the binders, and the book was out in jigtime. Of course, to do this in these days of shortages and labor difficulties required stalling on two serious novels and a volume of poetry. But he made it all right, and in less than eight weeks the reviewers had their copies of the book. There was a big build-up campaign and by the date of publication the book was off to an explosive start. Quarter-page ads in the provinces, and two full pages in the book sections of the Times and the Trib. That was just the beginning. Nearly every important paper in the country gave us rave reviews, and two weeks later America’s Common Man by Jefferson Clarke had begun its steady climb on the Herald Tribune’s list of best-sellers.

Up in Buffalo a smart city editor started a campaign to find the local common man based on MacLain’s picture. The idea caught on, and within a month contests to find the local average citizen were under way in a hundred cities from Bangor to Spokane. Then committees were formed to find our common man on a state-wide basis. Everybody wanted to get in the act and for free. By this time things were really popping.

TP 216

COMMON MAN CAMPAIGNS

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE CITIES THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES HAVE FOUND THEIR COMMON MAN AND HAVE SUBMITTED DATA AND PHOTOGRAPHS TO JEFFERSON CLARKE, AUTHOR OF THE BEST SELLING “AMERICA’S COMMON MAN.”

MR. CLARKE SAID THAT THIS SPONTANEOUS MOVEMENT WILL RESULT IN THE SELECTION OF A NATIONAL COMMON MAN, AN IDEA THAT WAS NOT IN HIS MIND WHEN HE WROTE THE BOOK. HE SAID THAT SENATOR MARSHLANDS WOULD JOIN HIM AS ONE OF A BOARD OF NATIONAL JUDGES.

VR135P

TP 311

COMMON MAN CAMPAIGNS, INDIANAPOLIS

GOVERNOR FELIX S. DALTON, GOVERNOR OF INDIANA, SAID TODAY THAT IF AMERICA’S COMMON MAN is FAIRLY SELECTED HE WILL BE CHOSEN FROM A SMALL CITY IN INDIANA, “THE CROSSROADS OF AMERICA.”

MORE RC315P

TP 419

ADD FIRST LEAD COMMON MAN CAMPAIGNS, CHICAGO

“BROWN AMERICA,” LEADING UNITED STATES NEGRO WEEKLY, TODAY INITIATED A CAMPAIGN FOR THE CHOICE OF A NEGRO COMMON MAN.

“WE HOPE THAT SENATOR MARSHLANDS, WHO HAS LONG BEEN A FRIEND OF THE NEGRO PEOPLE, WILL NOT FAIL TO CONSIDER A MEMBER OF OUR RACE IN MAKING HIS FINAL CHOICE,” EDITORS OF THE MAGAZINE SAID.

END COMMON MAN

EH535P

The pace in our office was now stepped up but instead of being in high spirits, I slipped into a mood of dejection. When the newspaper campaign was at its height, I went home one night and finding it difficult to sleep, took a couple of seconals. I awoke just before dawn, coming out of a dream in which Jeff and I had been chased by a mob which had us backed up against a wall in a cul-de-sac. The people in the mob had the faces of those on our corridor mural, but now the faces, instead of being slack and weak-mouthed, were vicious and criminal. As they closed in, a man pointed to Jeff and shouted, “He’s all right,” and then pointing to me, yelled at the top of his voice, “There’s the son-of-a-bitch we want.” I awoke in a terrified sweat, took another seconal, and went back to sleep.

At noon the next day, Jeff was scheduled to leave for San Francisco where we had a small wine account which Jeff felt could be parlayed into something worth while. It was one of the least of our accounts, but for some reason Jeff loved playing around with it and insisted on servicing it himself, where any of our account executives might have done just as well. We had just completed another of our industry analyses, gotten up on special stock and bound in the usual red calf, as a first move to block the influx of foreign wines that were coming in quantity into the country. Our report suggested an advertising and public relations campaign based upon sheer snob appeal, a device that never fails in a democracy. We were to stage a spotlighted dinner of free-loading gourmets in New York at which the menu would feature Cordon Bleu, red and white. And in all the newspaper and magazine advertising there was to be a Hollywood butler carefully pouring wine into a glass and saying: “Of course, I know the difference,” and all the schmoes who didn’t know the difference would rush out and buy Cordon Bleu—red and white; at least that was the general idea. Following the gourmet dinner in New York, according to our report, there was to be a series of interviews with chefs and maîtres d’hôtel, an article for a digest magazine to be called “America Can Make Vintage Wines” by a connoisseur who could be had at bargain rates, a series of releases for the trade publications, recipes for the food pages which called for the use of Cordon Bleu, red and white.

On the way out to the airport, I expressed some of the fears about the common-man project which I had developed overnight and while shaving in the morning. Maybe it would be best for us to go through with the phony choosing of the common man, give him a week in New York at our expense, furnish his house, or buy him a home, something like that. All that morning before it was time for me to accompany Jeff to the airport, I found myself staring out of the window looking down at Rockefeller Plaza and going off on a series of fantasies which seemed to be common to our profession. To get away from it all. The ulcers, the perpetual heartburn, a dangerously rising alcoholic tolerance. Daydreams: (a) an editor of a small-town paper living with simple folk to whom the election of a town selectman was front-page news or (b) a house in the country, a screened-in porch, a pipe, since in fantasy all novelists are pipe smokers, and a sheet of paper rolled into the platen, headed Chapter Two. Or else it was fantasy (c): a house, a simple house away up high in the hills, somewhere on the Delaware Water Gap, maybe, overlooking green and brown checkered fields in the valley below, and silver lakes and winding streams and the lane near the house bright with trillium, yellow violets, and splotched Canadian lilies. No newspaper shop here, no job-printing done on the premises, no half-completed novel that would never get done, but simply a lonely house high on a hill. The Public Relations Blues! And then turning from the window, I once more experienced a tense, throbbing sensation at the point where, but for the grace of God, my duodenal ulcer might have been.

“You mustn’t let success get you down,” Jeff said, as the limousine shot along the parkway leading to the LaGuardia airport. “Don’t forget our original understanding. My job is to plan the operations, and your job is to worry. That’s why we make a good team. Keep worrying!”

The car swung off the parkway and we moved slowly toward one of the entrances to the airport. Beyond the barrier a huge Constellation was taking on mail and air express pay load. The motor roared so that further conversation was impossible. Jeff and I shook hands and then he turned abruptly and walked toward the waiting ship. I rode back to town only partially reassured.

This constant vacillation, doubt, and skepticism would have been embarrassing enough in any walk of life; in a public relations man it was sheer idiocy and masochism. However, by the time I got back to the office I had freed myself of the damaging mood completely. The jet-propelled feel of the fortieth floor gave me a bang and I worked well and continuously until midnight.

Jeff’s business trips were dramatic, exciting affairs. There were innumerable long-distance telephone calls and our two-way teletype was continually in operation, tapping out detailed instructions to various members of our staff, imperiously calling for texts and other confidential material required in conferences and negotiations wherever he happened to be. Like most wielders of power, he could not for long be separated from the sustaining symbols of his strength.

Early the following week, Jeff called to say that he had wound up the Cordon Bleu account in San Francisco. His next stop, on the way back to New York, he said, was to be St. Louis, where he was to confer with George Singleton, president of the Missouri, Indiana and Eastern Railroad, and to help plan the initial run of the Diesel-engined, double-decker Silver Streak. The run from Kansas City to Chicago was to be something of a junket with loads of newspapermen aboard, lots of liquor and everything it takes to make a newspaperman happy.

For an entire day there were no long-distance calls and the teletype was silent. The following day he called and said he was all through with his business in St. Louis and would be leaving for New York by plane the next day, which was Saturday. Early Saturday morning he phoned again saying that he was going to Kansas City and would travel from Kansas City to Chicago on the Silver Streak together with Singleton. That put the week to bed.

Late the next day, I had some of the people from the office over for drinks and a buffet supper: Diana, Roger, Sturt, Schiff, and one or two of the others. After we had eaten, we tuned in on Winchell. It was a kind of professional ritual with us. He came on the air to the clatter of a sound-effects telegraph receiver, breathless, throwing open the doors to chancellories, smoke-filled hotel rooms and, above all, boudoirs, to the delight of his incredibly large audience. In the order of their importance he announced the five-week pregnancy of a Hollywood star, the dissolution of a notorious Broadway liaison; he denounced a notoriously bigoted Southern congressman and revealed the details of an international political scandal.

Roger pulled a face which registered mock disgust and placed a long blue-veined hand over his tortured diaphragm.

“His Hooper rating tells him he has what just about twenty-five million people want,” Schiff said. “Most astounding personality in the history of modern communications and propaganda.”

“Then his audience are morons,” Roger said, “twenty-five million morons. Or maybe cretins is the correct word. I’m impartial.”

“And this, if you please, from the author of America’s Common Man,” I said.

The studio telegraph key clattered as the broadcaster continued to turn over rocks in bedrooms and chancellories. One could imagine the scurrying.

In the studio, the telegraph receiver started tapping again and then there was a pause of a few seconds.

“She isn’t pregnant, after all,” Roger said, “it was a miscarriage. Flash! Here it comes.”

The sound of clicking started and Winchell was at it again, hot off the wires, tense: “Ladies and gentlemen—a bulletin has just been handed to me. The Silver Streak, new crack train of the Missouri, Indiana and Eastern Railroad, on its initial run, was derailed less than an hour ago one mile from Jackson City, Missouri. Aboard the train were George Singleton, president of the line, Jefferson Clarke, New York public relations man for the railroad, and a flock of newspapermen. First report from the scene of the disaster . . .” A few more laconic words about the dead and the injured and the studio telegraph was off again and Walter was in Belgrade.

We sat slugged for a while. Then Diana got up, went to my study and returned with a copy of Ayer’s Newspaper Directory and started thumbing through its pages.

“Jackson City, Missouri,” she said, reading aloud, “population, ten thousand two hundred forty, one daily newspaper, Edward Cannon, managing editor. Shall we get him on the phone, Jack?”

The line to Jackson City was jammed and it was more than an hour before we got through. We sat around, meanwhile, not talking, waiting for the phone to ring; finally it did. I grabbed the instrument. A voice, marked by an accent which was part Southern and part mid-Western, pleasant and easygoing, asked was there anything he could do for me? I identified myself and asked did he know anything about Jeff’s safety.

“Both Mr. Singleton and Mr. Clarke are all right, not a scratch on ’em,” he said.

The Silver Streak was spread out over the Missouri countryside a mile outside of Jackson City. It must have been the biggest local story in the history of the town but Cannon’s voice had the quality of softness and subdued amusement. “They’re both still at the scene of the wreck. One of my men interviewed them a little while ago. They’re helping the local disaster crews—”

“Will you please ask Mr. Clarke to call me at my home? My name is Sherrod,” I said for the second time.

I thanked Cannon and hung up and then recounted the conversation to Diana and the boys.

“I can almost hear Jeff telling Singleton to get the hell out of there and help the rescue crews in time for the photographers,” Roger said, half filling a small tumbler with scotch.

“You wouldn’t have to tell a real railroad man to do that. He’d do it instinctively,” I said.

“Not only a railroad man, but anyone,” Diana said. “Doesn’t your cynicism ever let up, Roger?”

We sat up until nearly three o’clock and no call came through. Most of my visitors left, leaving only Roger and myself to stand guard. At six there was still no call and we turned in for a few hours’ sleep.

The morning papers were full of the news of the wreck: The Silver Streak, new crack train of the Missouri, Indiana and Eastern Railroad, was derailed at a poorly adjusted crossover switch last night and left the new Diesel locomotive and six new double-deck cars in a staggered pile-up. Six persons were killed and twenty suffered serious injuries. The victims were taken to a local hospital at Jackson City. George Singleton, president of the line, and Jefferson Clarke, New York public relations man, took an active part in the rescue work all through the night. Two pictures accompanied the story, one of the wreck and the other of Singleton and Jeff, their faces stained and sleeves rolled up, carrying out an injured man from under the wreckage. Whatever the motivation, I felt good about it. There was also a quote in which Singleton refused to allow a charge of manslaughter to be made against the engineer, saying that his road had the finest men in the country, that the wreck was purely accidental, that during the war government priorities had resulted in the deterioration of railroad equipment, and so on. It was an effective statement and showed Jeff’s fine Italian hand.

Shortly before noon, Jeff called. He was still in Jackson City. He was all right except that he had been up all night and was exhausted. Singleton planned to stay in Jackson City until the wreck was completely cleared up and the injured cared for. Jeff thought it was a good idea to stick around.

“Yes, it was all right. The picture of Singleton working with a rescue crew was fine.”

“Swell. I’m all in. I’m going to try and get a couple of hours’ sleep.” He paused for a moment. “Jack, this is a great little town. Characters and types right out of Roger’s report. You ought to see the streets. Trees, even on the main streets.”

“No, don’t be silly. But this is wonderful country. It’s America. You ought to get out and see it sometime.”

“No, thanks. I grew up in a small town and I know all about the tree-lined streets. I also know all about small-town malice and manners and morals. And I know about the boredom, too.”

He laughed at the other end of the line. “You sound like Roger. I don’t mean to get out and live in it, I meant to get out once in a while and take a good look at the grass roots. Well, I’m going back to sleep.”

The following day Jeff called again. This time he was brisk, keen, and full of ideas.

“It’s a typical American small town, white clapboard houses, green shutters, stuff like that. And Cannon, he’s the managing editor of the local sheet, tells me it’s within fifty miles of the geographical center of the United States. Check and see if that’s accurate. The people here are all Americans; all kinds, Protestants, Catholics, whites and Negroes, Republicans and Democrats. The place is lousy with common men. I’ve been talking to Cannon and I told him about our project, the works. He knows all about it. He had read Roger’s book. He says if we pick a man from any other spot in the country, he’ll call for a recount.” Jeff’s softness of the day before had vanished; he was now a public relations man planting a story, shrewd and tough. And I liked him better that way. “What do you say, Jack?”

“What difference does it make where we pick him? You had the mid-West in mind right along. Remember the routine at your map?”

“And don’t get the notion that these Missourians”—he had been there only two days but he was calling them Miz-sour-ans—“are slow and dull-witted. They’re not.”

“I never thought it for a moment,” I said, “and be sure you get your man all tied up in a tight contract.”

Jeff was back in New York two days later full of stories of the train wreck, instructions for the Cordon Bleu campaign, and plans for the build-up for our common man. There was a Plans Board meeting late in the afternoon, then some fairly heavy drinking and then suddenly, as always, he was deep into the business at hand.

“Yes, he had read your report. It was on his desk, the trade edition, when I dropped in on him. He said it was a great job. Our boys who want to get away from it all to run a small-town sheet are crazy if they think it’s a cinch. A small-town paper is big stuff these days and the managing editor is an important executive, one of the most important and best paid men in town. This guy Cannon is the big local politician, he throws a lot of weight in Rotary, he’s a member of the Republican State Committee and active in the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association. He’s a damned good newspaperman, to boot; as keen as any of our editors here in New York. He had his whole city staff, both of them, out at the scene of the wreck fifteen minutes after it happened. The first bulletin was on the AP wires before the hour was out.”

I could see the old reporter’s police card in his hat. He went on: “He liked the report a lot, and I told him what the pitch was, that we were thinking of getting an actual specimen and how we expected it to work out. He got it in a flash. Think of what he could do with the national advertisers. Can you see his copy in Tide and Printers’ Ink? America’s Number One Test Market—the Home of the Common Man. He saw everything there was in it for him before I was halfway through.”

“For the love of God, Jeff, I can’t stand the suspense any longer. Tell us about our common man before I pass out.”

Jeff grinned and said: “A custom-built job. I’m coming to him. ‘Walk out on the streets of this town,’ Cannon said to me, ‘and you’ll find your man on almost every square. You’ll never find him in New York or Boston or Chicago or in any of the big cities,’ he said, ‘where people are beaten down into a state of nervous exhaustion by noise, glare, and rush. The only place where people have time to be themselves is in a town like Jackson City.’ Oh, yes, that’s the way he said it. For a minute I thought he was quoting from his masthead.”

Jeff paused, pleased with the way things were working out. He leaned back into one of those silences, wanting us to talk this thing out with him.

“Neurotics,” Roger said. “Does he think there are fewer neurotics in small towns than in the large cities? All that small-town bitterness, the rape of little girls, bodies found in the swamps. Is the time ripe for a new Spoon River Anthology?”

“Oh, you know what he meant,” Jeff said, with a small touch of irritation. “Don’t be so technical about it.”

I knew, too. I knew the strong, driving mid-western amiability. It was free, democratic, and kindly to its own. Yet it was suspicious and hostile to outsiders, to Negroes and Jews. In fact, to all minorities. It was so puffed up about its own wealth and abundance that in its eyes, poverty was the greatest sin. I suppose I had known hundreds of mid-Westerners in my time: businessmen, professionals, editors, politicians. As a rule they were friendly and neighborly, but beneath the too-ready smile there was always the lurking suspicion of the stranger, of the newcomer, the outsider, the guy who stood low on the social ladder. They loved people. Sure, they did. They were the greatest joiners in the world, but in spite of their constant progress, they stood in absolute terror of an abstract idea. It was this fear of uncommercial thought which drove them to displays of prodigious energy and which left them exhausted at forty-five, spent, depleted, candidates for coronary attacks, and in many cases, unsexed. They were, for the most part—and there was no use saying it at this kind of a meeting—they were typically American.

Jeff, in search of our common man, couldn’t have had a more convenient and profitable train wreck anywhere in America. We talked about the mid-West, and about Missouri in particular, for some time.

“I was sitting in Cannon’s office the next day after the wreck,” Jeff continued after a while. “ ‘I’ll get your man for you,’ he said, ‘no use holding popularity contests or anything like that. If you like the man I have in mind I’ll have the News-Record back your choice and get all the papers in the state to stand right behind us.’ He must have had his man in mind right along and no doubt was on the verge of starting a common-man contest in Jackson City any day. I don’t know. But his choice was perfect.”

“Here he is,” he said, passing them around for us to see. There were several shots of the candidate: some of himself alone, some with an elderly couple obviously his parents; one with a little girl of about five, but in all of them I saw an amiable, average guy, typically American, grinning out of the glossy prints. He looked in his late twenties or early thirties. The expression that the camera caught was the kind of open-faced frankness you see in the crowds at baseball parks, or wherever large numbers of young men gather. It was definitely not one of the faces you saw in our corridor mural. In one of the photographs he smiled out at the cameraman; it was an infectious sort of smile, and looking at it I had the feeling that I, too, wanted to be in on the joke. Then, feeling like a square, I realized I was being taken in by one of our own stunts, an occupational weakness. I looked at Jeff and nodded: “He’ll do, judging by the pictures.”

“He’s a linotyper, a cross between a manual worker and white collar worker,” Jeff said.

“Now that’s what I call a stroke of genius,” Roger said. “A cross-section occupation. And, thank God, he’s not completely alien to the printed word.”

Jeff ignored the crack and went on: “As you see, he’s photogenic. He talks well, and he’s something of a wit. In all other respects he measures up to our specifications. He lives with his parents in a white clapboard house with green shutters and does a little gardening. The mortgage on his house is a little less than fifteen hundred dollars. He is five feet, eight-and-a-half; wears a fifteen-and-a-half shirt, eight-and-a-half shoe. He reads The Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Reader’s Digest; I saw them in the wooden magazine rack in his living room. He was married, but his wife died in childbirth while he was overseas. As a young widower, he will appeal to married people and yet be attractive to the gals. A nice, average guy, as I’ve said, not too smart, but by no means a dope, as I soon found out when I got down to discussing terms. ‘All this sounds fine,’ he said to me after Cannon and I had explained the idea, ‘but suppose I’m gone from Jackson City for a year or so and don’t pan out the way you expect me to? What happens then?’ He insisted that we give him a contract for two years, ten thousand dollars the first year and fifteen thousand the next. I think that Cannon had wised him up, but on top of it he wanted his mortgage cleaned up by us before he got started. How do you like that?”

“Which side of the street are you working, anyhow?” Jeff asked with some irritation. There was no humor in his voice now, and Roger didn’t reply.

“Alan Barbour,” Jeff said. “It’s spelled with an a in Alan and a u in Barbour.”

But Roger wasn’t through. With self-destructive determination he continued to bait Jeff.

“Alan Barbour and the forty thieves,” he said, smiling coldly. I think Diana suppressed a smile with difficulty.

“Look, MacLain,” Jeff snapped, “I’m Goddamned tired of your sophomoric, cynical sniping. There’s no need for you to be in public relations if you feel you’re superior to it. From here on out it will be Alan Barbour and the thirty-nine thieves. How do you like that?”

“Let him go, let him go,” Jeff said. His face was white. “He’s been asking for it for a long time. I’m through.”

“I’ve had enough of this platinum thievery. I’m too tired of it even to think up a new word for it. I don’t mind ordinary conniving; everyone does it, one way or another. But must I go through with this like a broad pretending she’s in love with every cash customer? God, that isn’t even expected of a two-dollar whore—”

Jeff’s face was still white and there was a strange expression around his eyes and mouth now, almost soft and indulgent. He was really through with Roger now, and I knew it.

“Nobody expects much from a two-dollar bitch on the streets,” Jeff said, “but a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year courtesan is supposed to simulate affection. Or haven’t you been around?”

“If that’s how you want it, it’s perfectly all right with me. Make any settlement you like with Jack. I give it my approval in advance.”

Roger nodded without hostility. I even suspect I saw a trace of relief in his eyes. And then, nodding to Diana and me, he walked out of the room.

In silence, Jeff rose, and, as though nothing had happened, he poured another round of drinks. He sat there afterwards fingering the stem of his glass staring at the pale amber of his manzanilla.

“Talk to him in the morning, Jack, will you? I’m willing for him to stay on, but if he’s determined to ruin himself, then don’t argue with him. Give him six months’ pay as a severance bonus and his cut on the trade edition of the report, anything you like, it’ll be all right with me.”

After Roger had gone, Jeff turned with relief to the details of our campaign to build up Alan Barbour as our hand-tooled common man. Sitting there, jotting down notes, listening to suggestions from Diana, suddenly the entire business seemed fantastic to me—fantastic and yet feasible. About fifteen hundred miles away, Barbour was now having his dinner, or supper as they called it in Missouri. Before me lay one of his photographs and if it were possible to judge from the face which stared out from the glossy print, I should have said that above all it was a sincere and honest face and the feeling it gave me was a vague, sad, and off-key hostility. This man owned his own home, worked steadily at his Mergenthaler linotype machine, and had an adequate income. He was the average American we had been looking for. His physical measurements, his economic status, his preferences and tastes, matched the composite picture which had emerged from Roger’s study. And here was I, for no reason at all, in a state of vacillation again.

We would take this young man from his small-town environment and transplant him in New York as an instrument in a fantastic but phony propaganda enterprise. We would give him more money than he had ever seen in his life and his salary would in the future be the least of his earnings. We would give him, for a moment, a prominence greater than that of a member of the President’s cabinet or a movie star. And if all went well, he would end up with wealth and a kind of notoriety that he might come to regret and hate in his later years, since once the show was over he would never be able to be himself again. That was the price he would have to pay, and it was a consideration that neither Jeff nor Cannon mentioned during the preliminary negotiations in Jackson City.

I lit a cigarette, shrugged my shoulders, and brushed off this old mood of introspection and indecision.

“All right, let’s start from the beginning,” Jeff said. “First a big center-spread in Graphic Review. Alan Barbour, America’s Common Man, shown with his hair down and in stockinged feet, settin’ on the porch with his parents, playing with his little girl, a bull session with his friends, the interior of his home, a photograph of the mortgage, his mother cooking some Boone County ham steaks and green beans in fat pork. We take ten million readers into the Barbour home and say to them, this is the average American, just like you. He eats in the kitchen except when company comes. He doesn’t read the New Republic or the Partisan Review, he isn’t a scared intellectual searching for a new and infallible cause, he recoils from modern art, he’s a human being, genus Americanus; habitat, Jackson City, Missouri, in the heart of the United States, not in a beat-down slum in Boston, New York, Chicago, or Kansas City, but in a small American town where strangers say good morning to each other. That’s what the pictures would say.

“Then, a week later, we have another spread in Deadline, the story of the life of Alan Barbour, how he measures up to the report and why Marshlands and his committee chose him. I’ve spoken to Cassidy about it and it’s all right. Then America’s average guy comes to New York and the reporters grab him at the station. Tell Sturt not to coach him too much, just let him talk. Later on, when we start selling, we’ll have to write his script, but in the beginning just let him ad lib. He’s good at it, which is more than you can say about most of our clients. After that—”

The following day, Roger MacLain called and said it would be embarrassing for him to come up to the office and would I meet him somewhere for a drink. We decided, of all places, on the French café facing the Rockefeller Plaza skating rink. He showed up on time, unshaven, tired looking, but, strangely enough, cheerful. I ordered scotch and soda for him and a Gibson for myself.

“God, it’s wonderful to be free,” he said, taking his drink without drawing breath. “Freedom, a hard-bought thing.” He laughed. “I read the Times this morning without having to wonder how any of our accounts made out. I didn’t have to check on whether the Department of Agriculture had refused the use of grain for the making of beer, or whether Wylie had contributed one hundred thousand dollars to some worthy outfit, so that he could make a socially-conscious speech, the old crook, and take the handout off his income tax. Do you know what it means to read a newspaper in a completely disinterested way? Not giving a damn what they print or why? One day soon I hope to go without reading them altogether. Think of it, Jack!” Then, clowning like an English pansy: “Free! d’ya’heah? Free!”

“Roger, you’re being a bloody fool,” I said, “and that’s something of an understatement. If you want to be free why don’t you take a month or so off, go down somewhere in the British West Indies, get some sun, swim, work off some of that public relations spleen in tennis, and then come back. You know you’re welcome.”

“Don’t give me any of that travel-folder stuff. I want to get out of public relations altogether, for good. I’m tired. I don’t give a good hoot in hell whether people drink California wine or not. Personally, I prefer a good Margaux or a Richebourg, 1937. I don’t care if Singleton’s trains are air-conditioned or not. As for your common man, frankly, I think it’s a stupid and possibly dangerous stunt. If this guy Jeff has picked himself in Missouri is really an average Joe, he’s very likely decent, honest, and unsophisticated, but mostly honest. And that’s where the signal starts flashing red. And I don’t want any part of it. I’m guilty enough as it is.”

I ordered another round of drinks, wondering why Roger, despite his beat-up look, seemed so happy about it all.

“You saw those pictures of the guy yesterday. Christ, that smile! The kind of smile that you see on the faces of kids when they can’t quite figure out what their parents are up to, which is usually some kind of a dirty deal. And now you—I almost said ‘we’—are going to put this honest guy through your public relations paces. First, you’re going to beguile him with that slick Jefferson Clarke & Associates smoothness. Then you’re going to tie him up, and before he knows it he’ll be a stammering but damned effective salesman for all the Clarke commodities: transportation, steel, ulcer juice, strut-mince and stink-brag, as the poet calls them. After that, God knows what else Jeff has in mind. He’s playing his hand as close to his vest as if his life depended on it. I’ve never seen him this way before. He’s always cool and pleasant whenever he’s after money. But it’s more than money he wants now, that’s why he’s tense and explosive. He wants power, the kind of power that money can’t buy in this disorganized, chaotic world. And he may well get it. But not with my help.”

All this sent the effects of two Gibsons down the drain. It was too close to the truth.

“But you virtually called him a thief,” I said, pulling an absolute non sequitur.

“I’m not going to act as judge in your quarrel with Jeff. Take a month off and then come back as though nothing happened.”

“Well,” I said, “if you’re determined to commit economic suicide, I suppose there’s nothing I can do except to make it as pleasant as possible. We’ve decided to give you six months’ severance pay in addition to your cut of the trade edition of the report, and that ought to be a handy sum to tide you over.”

He grinned for a moment and then suddenly became serious. He was deeply touched. His eyes became moist. If Jeff were here he would have seized upon this opportunity to have him come back with us—but I let it lay.

“That’s big of you, Jack, no kidding, very generous.” He almost slopped over into his scotch. At this point Jeff would have rammed it down his throat.

“I think you ought to know that all this was Jeff’s suggestion and that I merely approved,” I said, turning the knife. “What with your share of the royalties, you’ll very likely be the richest serious poet in America.”

“I think you’re right. Maybe I’ll go down to Jamaica, or Nassau, or better still, Haiti. I’ve got a long, narrative poem that’s been brewing in the back of my mind for the last couple of years. Unless I get it written, I’ll really go to pieces.”

Then he went into a detailed description of his proposed book. But in spite of his enthusiasm and elation, I knew he was talking to himself more than to me, pleading with himself, spurring himself on.

The late Radio City crowd was beginning to fill the café. Well-tailored young geniuses with crew haircuts lined the bar—I told him the idea wasn’t worth a cent unless we could get a name band. And then from a table close to ours—So he says, me, I’m like the guy who said, “For ten thousand dollars I’d even endorse an opium pipe.” Advertising and publicity gals; bright, keen, and good-looking, and most of them probably frigid, spoke a knowing professional lingo in the fashionably composite accent. The cocktail talk swelled, drowning out the Muzak. Waiters scurried on fallen arches, setting drinks up for parched throats, bowing deferentially for parched egos. It was time to go.

Alan Barbour came to New York the following week to negotiate the final details of his contract with us.

His photograph had told only part of the story. For months, while the project was being hatched, I had thought of our prospective Common Man, if we were lucky, as something of a youthful version of Will Rogers when he was with Ziegfeld, a big-time editorial writer’s idea of a grass-roots mid-Westerner, a Hollywood version of a modern small-town Daniel Boone in Technicolor. Or else one of those arty radio characters on a sustaining program where the script opens: “Music, quiet introductory theme, sustaining behind. Narrator: ‘I’m a little man, the average guy, you might say. An unimportant American with a few mighty important things to say. Doakes is the name. Joe Doakes.’ Music up and out.”

Barbour’s physical appearance was everything that might be described as pleasantly ordinary—ordinary in the way a fine tool with a work-worn handle is ordinary. He was average in height and build; he wore a good, store-bought gray suit that fitted his average body everywhere except at the back of the neck where it gaped a little, until he adjusted it with not a nervous but an unconscious tug at his lapels. His voice had a full, easy quality and his inflection had neither the clipped, rapid precision of the North, nor the easygoing tailgate drawl of the far West, nor all of the soft, flowing quality of the deep South. Yet somehow it combined all of these characteristics.

Barbour had come with Cannon, whose baby he was, and a character who called himself a lawyer, with beady eyes and a too-friendly smile. But Barbour himself acted as if he were not greatly concerned with the details of his contract. Of course, he wanted to be sure that the contract would run for a minimum of two years, that he would get so much a year and a cut in the new business and that the mortgage on his home would be paid off before he came to New York to start working.

There was a quality about him which made me cotton to him immediately. It was his smile, a natural, free-wheeling smile, nothing sticky about it, which left you undecided as to whether he was secretly amused about something or naïvely pleased with himself and the world. And when the smile disappeared it left a trace of sadness, so that somehow you remained with the feeling that you were indebted to him for something that you couldn’t for the moment possibly recall.

For two whole days, while Cannon, the small-town lawyer, Jeff, and I wrangled over the details of the contract, the office was all in a stew of suppressed excitement as Barbour was shepherded from department to department. The staff generally had no precise idea of what was going on, but it was obvious that we were about to launch a big-time operation. We sat around at lunch and after dinner the first day, as Jeff outlined the pattern of the campaign for Alan Barbour, told him precisely what it was we expected from him; well, as precisely as was practicable. During these sessions, of course, we didn’t go to the Colony or the Voisin. Instead, we chose simple, substantial but good restaurants which specialized in thick steaks, grilled chops, and ample desserts. Our Common Man was no gourmet.

“Well, suppose I give you my opinion on something—on anything you might ask me—that might not be what your customers would like to hear?” Barbour asked, scratching the back of his ear.

I liked his description of our clients as customers. It was a good, unconscious touch.

“I can’t think of anything right off,” Barbour said, looking like a boy confronted by a problem beyond his intellectual capacity. “I never thought that my opinions on anything except linotypin’ were worth a damn. I read the News-Record and sometimes the Chicago Tribune but I’m not sure that everything I read is true. I’ve heard some of the reporters on our paper talkin’ and it seems that all the truth never gets published. I’m not backing out, Mr. Clarke, but how can I know that any opinion I give you on anything will be correct?”

“No, it doesn’t have to be correct. All I want is what you yourself honestly feel and believe.”

“But suppose I feel pretty strong about a certain thing that you don’t want me to feel pretty strong about? I ain’t thinkin’ of anything special now—”

“Well, let’s say a reporter comes up to me and asks me about all this misery in Europe?—” He paused for a moment, fearful that perhaps he had gone too far. “Or about the housing shortage, or about how there are people in this country who are no better off than some of the people in Europe or Asia, something like that, and then I shoot my mouth off?”

“Don’t call it shooting your mouth off,” Jeff said. “Any time you feel like expressing yourself, blowing your top, even at the expense of our customers”—I liked that in Jeff—“we’ll give you space in the newspapers to say it. I’ll tell you what,” Jeff said as he spread his hands palms up, all the cards on the table, nothing to hide, “we’ll get you a short, daily syndicated column in hundreds of newspapers clear across the country and we’ll give you all the help you need to get it out. You can have your say every day.”

“Yes, why not?” Jeff asked. “You’re as good as Mrs. Roosevelt or Ickes or what’s-her-name Fatso. And I’m damned sure you’ll be a hell of a lot more cogent.”

Back at the office he was processed and briefed by our staff. He was photographed shaking hands with Jeff, conferring with Diana, reading a book (America’s Common Man), talking to Cannon, pointing to a map of the United States, a finger at Jackson City, Missouri; lighting a cigarette, laughing, frowning, and so on, for nearly two full hours.

Later in the day we got him into the publicity department’s conference room which was wired for sound with stubby table microphones scattered around, and outside in another room a girl with earphones took down the conversation verbatim. Sturt and the others sat around amiably firing questions at him.

“Nothing I ever did was important,” he said in reply to a question, “except when I was in the Army, but now things seem to be worse than they were before the war.”

He said this with some difficulty, as if it were painful and treasonable. Sturt flashed me a glance of smart awareness. The remark could be used in one of two ways, and I knew how Sturt planned to use it. Doubtless he saw the subsequent headlines if Jeff ever wanted a release on this to the press: “Common Man Says War Fought in Vain.” As Sturt and his two assistants took notes, Barbour got down to details. He was born in Jackson City, Missouri, and attended elementary and high school there. His grandfather had been a farmer about ten miles from the city and during a land boom sold his farm and retired to Jackson City on the proceeds.

“ ‘Twice in the life of every farmer, usually after a depression,’ my grandfather used to say, ‘certain people get fed up with working in offices and factories and paying rent. So they begin hankering after what they think is the simple life on the farm. A year or two on the farm after they’ve made a sizable down-payment and they’re cured. They default on the mortgage and the farmer gets his property back, and by this time farming is profitable again. When that happens twice, he’s made a little money and is ready to retire. You can never make money by small-time farming.’ That’s how my grandfather came to Jackson City.”

His father had been a linotyper and had gotten him into the Linotypers’ Union as an apprentice.

He was sitting at Sturt’s desk and we all sat around, stood about, asking questions or listening. Sturt and his assistants sat facing him, Diana to one side and Jeff and I in the background, looking on.

They grew up young in Missouri, Barbour said, and he was married, settled down in his trade by the time he was twenty-four. Just before the war he was doing well and had bought his own home, so much down, so much on an FHA loan. His father and mother came to live with him, sharing expenses. Then, after Pearl Harbor, there was more than a year until he was called up for active service, and shortly before he went overseas, a baby girl was born to them. But his wife had died in childbirth, which was “a hell of a way to go overseas.”

He was shipped first to England and ultimately to the Anzio beachhead where he saw real war for the first time. All during this recital he faltered, smiled, frowned, and got lost in the thread of his narrative, but now, as he came to the end of his long, rambling story, he looked up and said: “Guess that’s all.”

Our photographer was now using a Leica for close-ups of him, squinting, crouching, getting up on a chair, waiting with his camera poised, setting off a flashbulb each time Alan’s facial expression changed. Then the publicity staff shot more questions at him, leading questions to throw him off center, to draw him out, probing for answers designed to make more than a dozen news stories when we got around to releasing them, fake interviews, captions for photographs and the reams and tons of publicity material that would eventually flood the newspapers once the campaign got under way.

He was questioned, given the works on almost every conceivable subject: babies, movies, actresses, the atom bomb, Negroes, labor, veterans, divorce, women, World War III. He took it all in his stride, the slow smile breaking as the answer came to him.

His answers were better than I had expected. Jeff stood in one corner of the room, leaning against the wall grinning like a producer at a successful dress rehearsal. I sat in the rear of the room, watchful and listening.

As I write, I have before me the typescript of that first interview. Dehydrating it of all the surplus verbiage that is typical of the spoken, in contrast to the written, word, Alan’s views still remain quotable. Here are a few:

Veterans: “A veteran is a civilian who was once a soldier and a civilian is a man who, judging by the way things are going, is likely to be a soldier pretty soon, if we don’t watch out.”

Baseball: “Out in Jackson City we ain’t baseball fans, we don’t have to be. We don’t watch the game, we play it, most of us.”

Religion: “Seems to me that there’s only one religion but there’s many sects.”

The Atom Bomb: “Read in the paper the other day that an English writer said only common sense can save the world from blowing itself to hell. If that’s what’s going to do the trick, I guess things look pretty black. There ain’t that much horse sense around.”

Communists: “Don’t know much about it, but from where I sit, it seems to me that when a country goes Communist, it’s because it had it coming to it. . . . A Russian movie came to Jackson City once in which the government, instead of the hero, got the girl. All the hero got was a tractor.”

Divorce: “Life is tough enough without divorce. Out in Jackson City I knew only about a half a dozen couples that had busted it up, and they were all so miserable they might have just as well stayed married.”

Politicians: “There never was a war that the politicians of one country or another didn’t help start. They’re always making mistakes for which ordinary folk have to pay. To my way of thinking the first mistake the politician makes is when he becomes one.”

Science: “We spent two billion dollars on the research and experiments to make the first atom bomb and I hear tell that the war cost the American people somewhere around three hundred billion dollars. But folks still go around coughing, sneezing, and sniffling with the common cold. How about a few millions for research there?”

Semantics: “I never heard a man call himself a common man no matter how average he may have been. Seems to me that calling the other fellow a common man is a way of talking down about people. I don’t like the word ‘tolerant’ either and for the same reason. I think only a man who feels he’s kind of up in the world will think of himself as tolerant, when he’s tryin’ to be decent and kindly towards other people.”

He sat there for more than an hour, looking like nobody at all in his store suit, interrupting himself now and then with an acute observation or a flash of homespun wit. And since he was a natural conversationalist, a good actor, his best, improvised lines were thrown away, so that we had to follow him attentively so as not to miss a thing.

Jeff was now seated at my side. “It’s in the bag,” he whispered. “He was not only born for this, he loves it. Wait until the spotlight hits him.”

The interview came to an end, chairs scraped, and the conversation now became general and casual. Jeff took Alan by the arm like a prize-fight promoter with a new sensational find—my boy, Battling Barbour, from Jackson City, Mo.—and triumphantly led him away. Diana came over to me almost in a state of ecstasy, like a middle-aged radical who had embraced a new faith, Yoga maybe. She started to speak, but something in my eyes must have deterred her, and we lapsed into our old way of speaking, smart, off the cuff, oblique.

No doubt about it, Jefferson Clarke had picked himself a common man, maybe more of a common man than he had bargained for.

Shortly after my return from Chicago, after I had clinched the Iroquois Metals deal, I had given Louise Bailey an unusual assignment. I had asked her to get the telephone book of every town over ten thousand within a radius of five hundred miles of Chicago. The idea was to see if she could find a Cornell family that harbored a gal called Margaret. She had found hundreds of Cornells and several Margaret Cornells, none of whom was the right one. The search was now at an end and she reported the results with poorly concealed, almost gleeful malice. Now she would be able to get on with her own “creative” writing.

“I got a story back from the Ladies’ Home Journal,” she said. “They liked it a lot and made a few suggestions for rewriting. I suppose I’m as good as in.”

I agreed and walked toward my room with a feeling of probing dejection. Margaret Cornell knew where to find me. It was about a month now and the least she might have done was to have sent me one of those smart little notes hinting at everything and brushing it all off. Good-by, please. Rejection Number 1473.

Mid-October found us waiting expectantly and with assurance, like a group of pre-SEC Wall Street operators waiting for a rigged stock to rise. It was in the bag; the stage was set; the sucker list had been circularized; the fix was in. All we had to do was sit back and take it easy.

Alan Barbour, after several intense sessions of indoctrination and briefing, had returned to Jackson City to await further instructions. With him had gone photographers, feature writers from the Graphic Review and Deadline, together with Sturt and Diana, to gather the final material and to take the art work necessary for the first publicity break. After the first national stories had broken he would come to New York as the second step toward national prominence.

Diana returned from Jackson City with a brief case filled with notes and photographs, and with a touch of the Missouri inflection in her voice. She was completely sold on the project. Senator Marshlands, the liberal, loved it, it was an exciting operation and Alan Barbour wasn’t hard to look at. She loved Jackson City and its tree-arched streets and there was a sticky quality in her voice when she spoke of Alan’s parents and Elaine, his six-year-old daughter. And then, of course, there was a long session on the joys of small-town journalism.

We were sitting in Jeff’s living room after dinner one evening. His man had just served the coffee. The talk ran on, as it always did in those days, to the preliminary tactics in the campaign to launch Alan. Like good chess players, we had decided on the over-all strategy and were now stewing over the most effective next immediate move.

“A good public relations man must be able to see only one move ahead,” Jeff was fond of saying, “but it must be the best move.”

In a country where statesmen, worried politicians, smart operators, and reputable businessmen are all pragmatists, where all thought is directed toward the manipulation of things, this was a rule of conduct that nearly always paid off. One move at a time and to hell with the future. Personally, I liked to feel that my way of thinking was more thorough and complex. I preferred the slow development, the hidden maneuver, and then the final flash out in the open. But this ability, which was valuable in long-range planning, was fatal in a dramatized, move-by-move campaign where, more often than not, it reduced me to doubt and vacillation.

“When the stories break in the Review and Deadline, and after we let him loose in New York for a while,” Jeff said, “we haven’t a thing to worry about. There’s no use planning too far ahead now. The whole campaign will snowball on its own momentum. All we’ll have to do will be to stay smart and not miss a trick or a contract.”

This disappointed Diana. The trip to Jackson City had done something to her. She had returned in a spirit of liberal, grass-roots, do-good optimism, as if our plans were those of a millennial political action committee in which there were to be no smart deals, no horse trading.

Jeff got her mood in a split second and went on: “Of course, there’ll be contracts, lots of them, more than we suspect at this time and all of them top drawer. The more successful we make Alan, the greater will be our opportunity to do some good with him for the country as a whole. A failure is no good to himself or to anyone else, so the important thing is to build him up big.”

Diana rose for the bait like a famished trout and in a flash she was off on some of the possible reformist by-products of the campaign: denunciation of imperialism (oh, those big generalizations!); a bill subsidizing nation-wide low-rental housing (we had no real estate clients); an exposé of the government’s treatment of the Hopi and Navajo Indians; an attack in his column and on the lecture platform against sharecropping. Jeff, the smart cookie, nodded and encouraged her. Millennium, Inc. Sure, sure . . .

We had two weeks to wait until the national publicity broke and three weeks until Alan Barbour’s debut in New York. Meantime, there was nothing to do but keep our eyes on the bread-and-butter accounts and wait for the kickoff. It was like the interval between the last dress rehearsal and opening night. Still, no matter how often we told ourselves that patience was the thing, Jeff and I were restless. We had long, extravagant lunches, we drank together, and at night occasionally went on the town.

One evening, after a fine dinner we walked down Madison Avenue full of good food, an excellent Bordeaux, and a brace of forty-year-old brandies. We were in the state that clamored for something to put the fire out. Somewhere, about Fifty-third Street, we dropped into a high-class clip joint for a fire-quenching glass of beer. We had been talking about Roger MacLain and we both felt a sense of guilt about having let him go. We had seen neither hair nor hide of him since the day he came in for his severance pay check and his share of the Common Man royalties. I pictured him as being somewhere down in the West Indies, tanned and lean, with a growing pile of manuscript on a screened-in porch. But as we entered the bar we saw Roger seated at the far end talking to a girl.

“Just a minute,” I said to Jeff in the moment it took to recover from the shock, “I want to go over to say hello to him.”

“Say hello to him for me, too,” Jeff said. “Christ, he looks terrible. Tell the bastard he’s welcome back anytime he wants to come. I’ll stand here smiling while you tell it to him.”

I started to move toward Roger, but he had seen us and looked away quickly, faking great interest in the girl. I hesitated, and Jeff came to my side and put his hand on my arm.

“Look, Jack, perhaps you’d do better if I weren’t here. See you in the morning or, better still, call me later at home.”

He walked out of the bar. I took the seat at the bar next to Roger and greeted him as if nothing had ever happened between us, saying something offhand which escapes me now. It must have been sufficiently casual and effective because his response was all right. But in a moment his manner changed abruptly. He was loaded to the gills.

It was two days before Roger returned to us. His three weeks’ bender and shackup had cost him weight, which he could ill afford, but his eyes were clear and his hands were steady. However, his knuckles showed white when his hand was clenched. His meeting with Jeff in my office that morning was a classic example of face-saving on both sides; there were no explanations or apologies. It was all friendly office talk, as if nothing had happened. There was only an indirect reference to Roger’s long absence.

“Too bad you weren’t here when Barbour came in for his first briefing,” Jeff said. He said it as though Roger had been sick or away on a vacation.

“It was as though we’d gotten him through a smart casting agency,” Jeff said. “He’s born for the role that you wrote for him, except that he doesn’t act the role, he is it. He’s the McCoy, the real thing, an honest-to-God, no-doubt Common Man.”

I felt that all this called for was a smile on Roger’s part, but he disappointed me by laughing outright.

“Now that you’ve written the paper on him,” I said to Roger, “you ought to see how he stacks up to your specifications.”

I handed him the typescript of the Barbour publicity interview, the questions and answers. He sat there a few minutes reading rapidly, his eyes fixed on the center of the page, like most rapid readers, flicking page after page, getting it all efficiently and quickly.

Roger finally put the typescript down. The expression on his face was that of a writer who realized that he had, in an unconscious creative moment, written something beyond his normal talent.

“It’s almost too good to be true,” Roger said. “He’s all natural copy, the kind of thing that defeats the typewriter. Can you see the feature writers and columnists when they spot this baby? This is real common-man stuff, if I ever read any. It sounds as if it were spoken by someone in contact with reality and not by a do-gooder in a Park Avenue apartment, or by a socially-conscious dame at the Sherry-Netherland loaded down with ice and saying, ‘Never mind about the iron curtain, how about the dispossessed in our own country?’, and her flabby escort slapping down two dollars for a pony of Remy Martin. Christ, I don’t know how to put it, but it’s honest, it smells clean. How did you ever find him, Jeff?”

Diana entered my office, gave with a few appropriate, bright remarks, and joined the informal conference. Jeff took over at once.

“Barbour has convinced me that we can make this a tremendous thing, not only for our clients and ourselves, but for the country as a whole. We wanted a stooge, but instead we found the real thing. Our common man is so Goddamned average that he’s no longer a common man. For my money, he’s the Common Man. Through him we can dramatize every worth-while cause in the country. We can be for or against the new state in Palestine—and we will be for it. We can be for or against more help for Western Europe—and we will be for it. We’ve always told our clients that the smart thing these days is to be liberal, or at least to make a show of liberalism. Now we can ram this down their throats and make them like it. I’ve never been a bleeding heart in all my life, but if the President won’t act against lynchings in the South, our boy can sound off, and since he won’t be a political figure, people will believe him. It can be the same with housing. We can advance the idea of a national research institute for cancer, we can be against religious bigotry—a dozen things like that. When politicians, professors, or clergymen deplore anything in our national life, nobody gives a damn except a few intellectuals. The public dismisses it as politics or pie in the sky. But when our man speaks, they’ll listen. Because it will be the voice of one of their own, magnified a million times.”

“How about the air brakes people or Tri-City, do you think they’ll go for this?” Diana asked.

“If we have to lose a client or two, it’ll be worth while. But don’t worry, industry knows it’s headed for the skids unless it finds a new formula.”

We waited for him to continue but he didn’t. Instead he said: “On this sublime note I think we should adjourn for lunch.”

I served the drinks. I took a shot of gin and bitters, Diana took some scotch with water, and Roger joined Jeff in a manzanilla, which I thought was carrying the reconciliation too far.

At lunch, Jeff outlined the details for the early stages of the operation. Roger was to do all the ghosting: the statements, the speeches, the syndicated columns, with whatever assistance he required from the publicity and radio departments. Diana was to wet-nurse Alan. Her job was to see that no reporters got to him on their own, to make the practical arrangements for his appearances, conferences, meetings with public figures, to keep him away from the opposition, to plan his social life so that, God forbid, he would never become spoiled, sophisticated, and uncommon. Diana grinned; she liked the assignment.

“Don’t kid yourself, Diana,” Jeff said. “You’ve got a twenty-four-hour-a-day job on your hands.”

My job, as I expected, was to supervise the entire operation, consulting with Jeff and the members of our Plans Board on policy and procedure.

“The Graphic Review layout breaks next week and the Deadline story follows the week after that,” Jeff said. “About a week after, I should say, we ought to bring him back to New York.”

“How about having him arrive at Thirty-fourth Street by bus?” Diana said. “The common touch.”

“Sorry, Diana, that’d be a little on the corny side,” Jeff said. “Nothing’s going to be too good for this common man of ours. If refugees, G.I. heinie wives, and Seeing-Eye dogs can travel by plane, I don’t see why America’s Common Man can’t arrive in New York on the Twentieth Century. Hell, he’s going to be a damned sight more important than a movie star or a prize fighter. Besides, the public doesn’t like humble public figures. He’s got to be a celebrity from the start.”

Diana weakly gagged her way out of that one. “Don’t mind me,” she said, laughing, “I’m Scotch on my mother’s side; always trying to save a buck.”

Jeff signed the luncheon check and looked up and said: “Think of it, kiddies: fun, money, and public service, the greatest combination in the world. Let’s have a drink at the bar on the way out.”

Back at the office I settled down to my correspondence. I thumbed through the pile of stuff on my desk and there, at the bottom of the stack, Louise Bailey, with a sense of the dramatic acquired in the school of slick fiction, had placed an opened letter from Margaret Cornell. It read:

Dear Jack:

I’ve changed my mind. Back here in Madison, I have been reliving our evening in Chicago in my imagination so many times that it’s become monotonous. And I’ve come to the conclusion that Walt Whitman was all wrong about that business of passing through a populous city, falling in love with the girl and then doing nothing about it except writing a poem years afterwards—when it didn’t matter. Why didn’t he see her again? Why did he impose all that painful self-denial on himself?

As a result of my Whitmanesque romanticism, we know virtually nothing of each other. If you hadn’t forced your card on me, this letter would have been impossible—and I shudder when I think of it. Who are Jefferson Clarke & Associates? I tried to puzzle out what your profession or business is, but I’ve given up. Once, during our evening together, you referred to your clients. A doctor, a lawyer, or an advertising man?

And now, briefly, about myself. When I met you I was on my way back from Reno. It was one of those war marriages that didn’t pan out. I’ll tell you all about it some day. On my way back home to Madison, I stopped off in Chicago to draw breath and brace myself against the return home. I stayed over longer than I had planned, becoming more despondent each day and without sufficient courage to make the last few miles home.

Do you want to know more about me? I majored in American literature, as I told you. At the moment I don’t know precisely what my plans are. Maybe I’ll do some postgraduate work here at the U. of Wisconsin, or maybe come on to New York and put in a postgraduate year or two at Columbia. It would be easier for me out here in Wisconsin, since my father is a county judge, the youngest man of fifty you ever saw, and whatever love of music and books I have, I owe to him.

This is more than enough for a beginning. Now it’s your turn.

Do you plan to be in Chicago again soon? I could come in for a day or so if you gave me enough notice. And need I tell you that it will be necessary for us to retrace a few steps?

Cordially,

Margaret Cornell

P.S. After that wonderful night in Chicago, it seems a little silly to sign off saying “cordially,” doesn’t it? M.C.

During the few weeks after my evening with Margaret Cornell in Chicago, I thought of her frequently, then, as the months went by, out of masculine pride—let’s say—or out of some special need to reassure myself that I had not been rejected again, I compromised by chalking it up as one more transient affair. I said all the male things to myself: all right, another woman, another lay, it isn’t every time you can pick up a damned good-looking gal who can quote Whitman from memory and still have it as a one night stand. So what? So, if all the women I had slept with were to march four abreast past a given point . . .

But now Margaret’s letter called for a real evaluation of how I really felt about her. Slowly, I reread the letter, not so much for its contents but for the mood it summoned up. What the cup of tea and the plump little cakes called petites madeleines did for the narrator in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, this letter did for me. It was true that the process was less profound and the time span involved here was only a matter of months, but the principle was the same. It evoked not only intellectual and visual memory, but a stream of consciousness, not of words or ideas, but one which involved odors, the tactile sense, images—a partly unconscious act of recollection which brought all my physical senses into play.

All this made for a bad, restless day at the office, but after dinner, I sat at my table for a long while thinking, feeling, remembering. Then all the thoughts, the images, the sensual feeling passed, and words took over. Not the kind of words I ordinarily used, but words which would have delighted the heart of a popular song writer. I realized I was in love. How I felt was good enough for a beginning but the more subtle emotions, the long pull, these were only possible out of a continuing affection, which would come later.

Jubilant and yet fearful, the classic, sophomoric moods of love—I sat down to draft a telegram to Margaret. My first impulse had been to call her on the telephone, but this I felt would require some preparation; a telegram would be more appropriate. As I sat drafting the wire, another idea occurred to me. I would send a series of telegrams to be dispatched the next day every two hours. In this way I would create a kind of dramatic suspense preparatory to a long-distance call in the evening. Next morning I attended to this matter personally, not wishing Louise Bailey to lay her hands on what might be interesting copy to her. I went down to the Western Union office in our building with the texts of the telegrams and gave the girl in attendance explicit instructions, carefully repeated, that they must be sent seriatim, one hundred and twenty minutes apart. They read:

No. 2: “Don’t you read books, magazines, or the newspapers? Jefferson Clarke & Associates are to American public relations what old man Bob LaFollette was to Wisconsin politics.”

No. 3: “Thank all the fathers and mothers of all the beautiful girls in Wisconsin for me but especially Judge Cornell and his wife. I presume there is a wife although you failed to mention her.”

No. 4: “Beauty has no place in any university taking postgraduate courses. Can you think of no other future for yourself?”

No. 5: “Plan to be in or near Chicago in about two weeks. Will talk to you before then. Don’t dare to go out on a date until you hear from me.”

At five o’clock I mixed myself some martinis and at six o’clock I called Madison. I held the line as the call was being put through and I heard the operators in the distance routing the call.

“Hello,” Margaret said. “The telegrams were wonderful, you had the entire Cornell household in an uproar and of course you know you’re quite insane?”

“And how about retracing a few steps, as I suggested? This mood of yours is all hyped up, I suppose you know.”

“To hell with retracing steps, that’s what’s wrong with the world, one step forward, two steps retraced.”

And so on for nearly an hour, after which I mixed a fresh shaker of martinis and began seriously to think about dinner.

The following week our first feature broke in the Cassidy publications. The Graphic Review gave us its double truck and the two pages following: pictures of Alan at work, at home playing with Elaine, talking seriously with some townfolk, attending a Legion meeting, going to church, shaking hands with Marshlands and Jeff. The caption was perfect: Author of America’s Common Man Finds Typical U. S. Citizen in Small Missouri Town.

The week after that, Deadline plastered Alan’s abashed smile in color all over its cover and a three-page story with pictures. There were generous quotes from Roger’s book, some of the tables and charts, and an earthy, simple description of Jackson City written in the style that Radio City journalists affect when writing about the hinterland. There were a few samples of how Alan thought, based on our office interview, and the story of Jeff’s “long search” for the typical American common man by the Clarke-Marshlands nonexistent committee. Then a few well chosen quotes by Jeff.

The day before the stories broke I called Cannon and insisted on no interviews with Alan in Jackson City unless he were present, no mention, under any circumstances, of Alan’s contract with us. Sturt was on the job in Jackson City the day the Graphic Review came through with the kickoff and then, in the same day, all three major wire services had a man in Jackson City. The next day every paper of any importance in the country ran the story of how Senator Marshlands and Jeff had found Alan Barbour. At our office, Jeff was interviewed by feature writers and columnists, and in Washington, Marshlands was sounding off in great style. For a few days, nearly all our routine work was swamped.

“Let it ride,” Jeff said at the next Plans Board meeting. “We won’t bring him to town until the first excitement has died down.”

Proctor called me on the phone and said: “I hate to admit it, Jack, but this is the biggest thing since Barnum plugged Jenny Lind.”

I understood how he felt about losing the Iroquois Metals account and forgave him the comparison, although there was some truth in it.

Bob Wheelwright called: “You smooth scoundrel,” he said, “I see it all now. And what’s Marshlands doing in the picture?” Before I could reply he went on: “Listen, fella, don’t say I didn’t warn you, you’ve got a hell of a lot more on your hands than you think.”

“Listen, Jack, if you don’t do right by this guy Barbour the American people will lynch you. I want to talk to you about this. This is the biggest thing since—since—”

“Proctor’s an idiot. Barnum was a stumblebum compared to you guys. Whose idea was it?”

“There are no by-lines at Jefferson Clarke & Associates. We all work in happy anonymity.”

“Almost any time you say after this lunatic week is over. Let me call you when the hysteria abates.”

I was on the phone nearly all that day and so was Jeff. Late in the afternoon, Marshlands called from Washington. It turned out that the Senator was to be the principal speaker at a mass meeting at Madison Square Garden the following month, sponsored by the American Committee for the Hopi and Navajo Indians.

“You know, it’s a Goddamned outrage what we’ve done to the Indians of this country and, incidentally, I don’t mind telling you that my great-grandmother was half Indian herself. Do you know that the Navajo Indians are United States citizens and that they can’t vote or receive social security?”

I was about to reply that I knew all about that, but the Senator had gotten himself a mahogany soapbox and was making a speech. I leaned back patiently to listen.

“Their infant mortality is seven times greater than the rest of the population of the country, more than half of them die before they are five years old, eighty per cent are illiterate. There’s fourteen times more tuberculosis on the reservations than the national average.”

“Yes, I know all about that,” I said. “I get the Committee’s literature, too. But I think there’s one thing I should caution you on, Senator. The Committee is a Commie front. It’s no more interested in the Hopi and Navajo Indians than it is in the sex habits of the alleged inhabitants of Mars. Half the members of the executive board are out-and-out Commies or feeble-minded fellow-travelers. They don’t give a damn about the Indians. What they want to prove is that before we send any more funds to Europe for relief, we ought to clean up our own back yard. Which we certainly should. But if anyone had mentioned the Navajo Indians when we were all tied up with Stalin they would have called it sabotage of the war effort. And now they’re dramatizing the plight of the Indians to keep us diverted from what’s going on in Europe.”

“I don’t care a damn what their reasons are,” the Senator said. “I’m a politician and I’ll take help wherever I can get it. Besides, I have a personal score to settle here. Ickes, the big humanitarian, had the Indian Bureau under his thumb for more than ten years and look at the state they’re in now. Don’t you worry, I’ll take care of the Commies at this meeting, and having Barbour with me on the platform will do the trick. Don’t you see that it’ll dramatize the Common Man’s desire for social justice here at home? And don’t worry about your clients. Very likely quite a few of them or their wives or daughters are members of the Committee.”

“The Common Man is for social justice, even for Indians,” Jeff said. “Especially for Indians. What difference does it make? I’d sooner see our money going for lo, the noble redskin, than down the European rathole.” I demurred. But it was no go. The Common Man was for the Indians.

Nearly all of our top brass deployed on Jackson City the day before Alan’s send-off. Everything was in order: the speeches had been prepared, including Governor Drucker’s. I went on a day ahead to see Ashley Bennett about a few details in the campaign, which was coming along according to schedule and also to spend a few hours with Margaret Cornell, who had agreed to come in from Madison.

I was scheduled to leave Chicago for Jackson City the same evening, so pub-crawling or anything like that was out. Instead, after an embarrassed greeting, we went to the lakefront hotel where we had first met. The murals in the bar had remained unchanged, the untufted glamour-girl dryads were still playing oops-a-daisy, but they no longer offended my sensibilities; they were now merely in ordinary bad taste, the customary things you expect in places like that, nothing about which to split a shirt sleeve. We sat there drinking, but not much, and we talked as couples do who are trying to overcome that second-call embarrassment.

She wanted to talk about Alan Barbour and our campaign; she had read all about it in Deadline and was greatly impressed. But there were other things on my mind at the moment.

“The man is in a different mood now,” I said, lapsing into that evasive third-person way of talking. Look, look, it isn’t me, it’s two other guys. “He’s desperately serious and begs you to forget all about the first evening last August. The man is really a responsible citizen, a heavy taxpayer. Just forget it.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” Margaret said, bravely standing her ground in the first person singular.

“Because the man has different plans now and he refers you for bank references to the Chase National Bank in New York, a very reputable, solvent outfit.”

“If the man, as you call him, thinks I’m being impressed, he’s greatly mistaken. I liked the casual, romantic idiot I met here last summer, and I detest the current stuffed shirt. Scratch an intellectual who’s made money—and I suppose that’s what you are—and you’ll find a nineteenth-century fuddy-duddy. Look, mister, if there’s ever going to be anything serious between us—and God help us, I’m beginning to think that it looks that way—you’ll have to remember that I’ve got a touch of the floosie in me, even if I do come from Madison. Not a whole-hog floosie, mind you, but enough to make it interesting and I’ll expect my companion to be properly appreciative.”

“All right, I’m getting more than I bargained for and I suppose I ought to be thankful, but I merely thought that Judge Cornell’s daughter might want to retrace a few steps, as she said. Now tell me when you’re coming to New York.”

“In a month or so, but strictly on my own, so don’t start laying elaborate, lecherous plans.”

I arrived at Jackson City early the next morning and checked into the town’s one and only decent hotel, where our people were all quartered. I ran into Diana coming out of the coffee shop and she came and sat with me while I had breakfast.

“Wait until you see this town, Jack,” she said. She was at it again, pure ecstasy. “The air is fresh and clean and the gait is easy and slow.” She puffed at her cigarette, took a sip of coffee and closed her eyes in happy recollection, the upper-bracket career girl dreaming of the simple life. “But best of all there are no noisy intellectuals busting blood vessels if you don’t agree with them at once. I visited the county jail with Cannon. Not a single inmate, no juvenile delinquency, no rent ceilings, and one of the best houses in town, a mansion, goes for sixty dollars a month. They leave their front doors unlocked and when they double-park on the main street during shopping hours, they leave their keys in their cars so that the guy at the curb can get out. Yesterday I had broiled bass for breakfast and it was caught that very morning. What a place to write a book!”

It had been a bad overnight trip with the train stopping and jerking at every milk station and I was hardly in the mood for this sort of thing.

“People seem to write a few books in New York,” I remarked, “despite the tension and the noise, and if you want broiled bass you can get it at that sea-food joint at Sutton Place. Diana, let me tell you something, one month out here and you’d be willing to crawl back to New York over broken glass, if that was the only way you could get there. Listen, sister, I know all about it; the hatchet faces and the straight-laces and the back fences and the four best families. You can have it, sweetheart. I come from a small town, too!”

The big shindig started early in the afternoon and I know it’s going to be hard to describe, because you can’t compete with the newspapers, newsreels, and the radio. It was really something to see. Trying to get into the town hall, our crowd was nearly mobbed. Sturt and Cannon had certainly put on a show. There were delegates with placards from the local Legion, Kiwanis, Rotary, Elks, and the Lions. Everyone was in on the act. The local radio station ran a mike to the platform and there were speeches by the Governor of the State, the Mayor, and a succession of lesser dignitaries, down to Alan’s elementary schoolteacher who made one of those I-knew-he-would-make-good speeches and almost sniveled into the mike. Everyone was moved and no doubt the News-Record the following day said that there was “hardly a dry eye in the throng.”

The place was jam-packed to the rafters (and they were real rafters). Cannon was the first to speak. He said nothing about the train wreck and the subsequent deal, but played up the fact that the News-Record had run a Common-Man contest and that Alan had been chosen as the local and state winner and that now a committee, headed by the great, liberal Senator Marshlands, had chosen him as the national top man. The Mayor, a stubby little character, with an eye on the main chance, sounded off on the glories of Jackson City and how proud all of its citizens would be to remember that Mr. America was born and raised there. Then the Legion band did a short routine, followed by the main event, the Governor of the State. This went on for more than two hours. . . .

TP196

ADD FIRST LEAD COMMON MAN, JACKSON CITY, MO.

GOVERNOR DRUCKER, WHO ATTENDED THE FAREWELL CEREMONIES, SAID: “IT IS QUITE FITTING THAT MISSOURI, THE GEOGRAPHICAL HEART OF THE UNITED STATES, SHOULD BE THE HOME OF THE TYPICAL AMERICAN CITIZEN. MISSOURI SENDS AN UNCOMMON MAN AS AN AMBASSADOR OF GOODWILL TO ALL THE COMMON MEN AND WOMEN OF AMERICA, ALL ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY MILLION OF US. WE WISH HIM GREAT SUCCESS ON HIS IMPORTANT MISSION.”

THE DAY HAD BEEN DECLARED A HOLIDAY HERE AND VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE POPULATION WAS ON HAND TO SEE BARBOUR OFF ON THE TRAIN ON HIS WAY TO NEW YORK.

MORE.

DD430P

We had reserved a string of compartments on the Twentieth Century. As the train pulled out of Chicago and as the rusty metal scrap heaps outside of Gary moved past us, Diana dropped into my compartment to drink and smoke. It seemed that Alan Barbour was worried.

“The first unhealthy symptom to develop in a celebrity in the making,” I said. “He’s worried and keeps wondering if all this is true and if he can make the grade. It’s as true of opera singers as it is of winners of national competitions. What are the specific symptoms in this case?”

“He’s nervous and jittery and I can’t get much out of him. Besides, how can there be any real communication with a man who keeps calling you ‘ma’am’?”

“Not this baby. Wait until you have a real heart-to-heart talk with him. He nearly weeps every time he hears the Missouri Waltz. It came over the radio a little while ago.”

A few minutes later I knocked at the door of Alan’s compartment. Diana was correct. He seemed preoccupied and worried. I ordered a scotch for myself and a bottle of beer for our nervous celebrity.

“We all liked Jackson City a lot,” I said by way of a feeble gambit, “but Miss Forbes seems to have gone overboard about it.”

“Yes, she was quite warmhearted about it,” he said. “You see, she was born in a small town herself and she knows how it is. When I was over in Italy I used to get awful homesick about Jackson City, and when I came back I used to just walk the streets, especially at night, because that’s the way I used to see it in my mind, the houses all lit up, people sitting around after supper. I’d just walk and look at the houses. Have you ever noticed that a room at night looks better from the outside looking in? But when I came back I wasn’t as happy as I thought I’d be. ’Course, I like the place, it’s where I was born and raised, and my father before me. I know everybody in town, almost. The place is easy on your nerves, the fishin’s good and you can take some fine pheasant in the fall. But I’ll be quite honest with you, Mr. Sherrod. I can’t say that bein’ picked as the country’s average guy has done me much good in my own home town. Some of my friends are pretty proud that I got chosen, others are just suspicious and with still a lot of other people, well, a kind of coldness seems to have gotten into them. And I don’t like it.”

“The price of fame,” I said, but I regretted it before the crack was out of my mouth.

But he took it straight. “I’m not famous, Mr. Sherrod. The way I look at it is a man is famous for something he’s done, but I’m famous the way a girl who wins a beauty contest is famous. Before the war there was a Jackson City girl who went over to Kansas City to work in a restaurant. One of the theaters there ran a beauty contest and finally she got picked as Miss Missouri. For a time her pictures were in the papers and we heard that she went out to Hollywood, hoping to get a job in the movies. Now she’s back in Jackson City slingin’ hash. You get all the build-up and then the comin’ home is twice as humiliatin’.”

I noticed that sometimes he sounded his final “g’s” as he spoke and sometimes he dropped them, depending on how he wanted to play it. It wasn’t an affectation but simply his way of emphasizing a grass-roots point.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “nothing like that will happen to you. Your contract takes care of that.”

“It’s—it’s just that I don’t ever want to come back to Jackson City looking foolish.”

“Never in all my life did I ever expect to be on a platform and hear the things that Governor Drucker said about me. But I’m worried because I’m beginning to take all this very seriously. I’ve been thinkin’ a lot about it. Part of the contract says that I’m to say well for your customers. I don’t mind doin’ that as long as it doesn’t go against my principles.”

“I know Mr. Clarke said I could speak up on anything I wanted, but I’m not so sure. I’ll tell you what I mean. Couple of nights ago, I went over to the Legion post to say good-by to some of my friends. We had a few beers and then the talk got around to the mess over in Europe. Some of the things they got to saying threw a scare into me.”

“Oh, like saying that it seems we fought on the wrong side in the war, and that when you got right down to it, you had to give the Germans credit. Jim Lowell, he’s our post commander, got off a crack that rubbed me the wrong way. He said: ‘Sure we ought to give the atomic bomb to Russia, two at a time.’ Things like that have got me worried. If what he said was true, a hell of a lot of good guys died for nothing. You see, Mr. Sherrod, I’m the same guy I was a month ago, but even before I left Jackson City some people were asking me questions as if I knew all the answers. I don’t—far from it.”

He sat there for a while and then slowly smiled, that wonderful self-effacing smile of his.

“Tell you the truth, I don’t think I’m smart enough to be what you boys are toutin’ me to be—the average common man.”

“Do you think that the people who are supposed to be smarter than you are know all the answers?”

“I was thinkin’ that maybe I ought to do a little readin’ about what’s goin’ on in the world. Maybe you can recommend some books—”

“See here, Alan—and suppose you start calling me Jack from here out—I know many people who do nothing but write on politics and international affairs, and I’d say that as a rule they’re the most confused people you’re ever likely to meet.”

The idea of boning up to be America’s Common Man struck me as amusing. I smothered a smile and went on:

“You go on just as you are now,” I said, “and everything will be all right. When people ask you questions, answer them simply and honestly out of whatever experience, knowledge, and feeling you have on the subject. But, for God’s sake, don’t start reading books and articles written by people who are as much in the dark as the next man. If you think that the use of atom bombs on undefended cities is a terrible thing—as I do—say so. If you think we traded one kind of an injustice for another by the war, or anything like that, say so. And if you say it out of your heart and out of a feeling for justice and decency, you’ll be living up to every clause in your contract.”

I got the feeling that I was pontificating more than was good for me and I changed the subject.

“In any case,” I said, “you’re going to be so busy for the next few months doing things and meeting people that you won’t have time for reading or worrying. And mark my words, you’ll make some of our heavy thinkers sick with envy.”

We had a bite in my compartment and afterwards stayed out of the club car since we didn’t want any of the Hollywood characters on the train to get hold of Alan. At half-past ten that night we had him safely tucked in bed.

I awoke the next morning about half an hour from Harmon. After shaving and dressing I dropped in to see Alan, who had been up since six. Diana joined us.

“We’ll soon be there,” she said. “Can you hold out for breakfast for an hour or so and then we’ll all eat at the hotel?”

“Sure,” said Alan, who looked tired although he said he had slept right through the night.

Soon we were overhead in Harlem, racing toward Grand Central Terminal. As we left 125th Street, I hoped that Alan would not look at the slums on either side of the railroad. They were filthy and rotten, and everything that was mean and narrow and hateful about New York was here shamelessly exposed. But, of course, he must have seen them on his first trip to town. In a few minutes we were underground and shortly afterwards the train came to a stop.

Ahead of us, waiting to make her exit, was a reasonably prominent Hollywood actress. She had been damned good in her day, but in the last five years had slipped from starring roles to small feature parts. She was just good enough still to make this trip to New York, to pose for a fistful of fashion stills for Harper’s Bazaar and Town and Country and other profitable little jobs. Of course there was nothing she could have done about her decline; that was the way the studio handled things, and yet, standing there, she had one of those bright, eager smiles that only a slow, niggling fear can inspire. She adjusted her mink stole nervously as she waited to step out onto the platform.

Alan stood directly behind her and she turned to him with a lucite smile, largess for the commoner, and said: “It’s a great nuisance having to face all those cameramen so early in the morning, especially when a girl isn’t at her best.”

Johnston, out of our publicity department, came running up to us. He had a platoon of reporters and cameramen in tow. He pointed to us and the boys went into action.

And then another cameraman: “Don’t smile, Mr. Barbour, you’re supposed to be bewildered by the big city.”

“But I’m not,” Alan said, slipping into that off-center smile of his. Then he grinned broadly. A salvo of flashbulbs went off. He blinked. That was the beginning.

Slowly we started to move along the concrete platform toward the ramp. The actress and her press agent stood aside for a moment, crestfallen. A few reporters fell in alongside Alan as we walked, firing questions at him.

I remembered the scores of times when I had covered this kind of story when I was a reporter, getting up at seven after a tough night, listening to the words of wisdom of celebrities, comment woven of the purest cliché. Glamour girls from Hollywood who, in person, made the grubbiest gal in Greenwich Village seem desirable in comparison. It was good now to be on the other side of the fence.

One of the reporters was asking a question: “Some of the newspapers, Mr. Barbour, are calling you Mr. America. What do you think of that?”

“Sounds as if I was a male winner in a beauty contest,” Alan said, “and I ain’t exactly a beauty.”

This snagged a few smiles. “Personally, I don’t think any one man can rightly be called Mr. America, not even the President. There are one hundred and forty million of us, and no two of us are really alike.”

This was beginning to be serious, and as usual when he was earnest, that half-defensive grin of his went into action. A photographer walking half-backwards in front of us set off his flashbulb and caught the grin. Alan blinked again. It was beginning to get him.

Diana, Sturt, and I were ready to get him out of any trap into which he might fall, but he was doing nicely, thank you, all by himself. Nevertheless, there was no telling when the inevitable, embarrassing question might be shot at him. And sure enough the reporter for an afternoon quote liberal unquote paper, an earnest young man with very black horn-rimmed glasses, let him have it.

“When you were selected by the Marshlands Committee as the Average American Citizen, you were placed in a position of prominence—”

This was part of a long-winded preamble to a question and Alan stopped walking to listen.

He scratched the back of his neck and grinned and the other reporters smiled sympathetically.

“Just a moment,” the quote-unquote liberal reporter said sharply, “I haven’t finished asking my question. Why do you think you were chosen for this lucrative position of prominence?”

This got a laugh and we started walking up the ramp. His first encounter with the press was over. Diana, Sturt, and I exchanged triumphant glances.

“Don’t forget,” Sturt said to a few of the reporters on the morning papers, “four o’clock this afternoon at his hotel. Drinks and a full-dress mass interview.”

On the way to the hotel, I said to Sturt: “I thought that sheet was all for us and the Common Man?”

“So it is,” he replied. “That was Taylor, a little gremlin from the Kremlin, or at least that’s what the boys in the Guild say. Must have been giving himself a personal workout, or maybe he’s doubling in brass for the Daily Worker. Don’t worry, his desk will see to it that we get a fair shake.” He took a wad of clippings from his pocket, the publicity man’s currency. “Look at these,” he said, handing some to Alan. There were pictures and stories of Alan’s send-off from Jackson City which had appeared in the a.m.’s. A two-column head in one of the tabloids, circulation nearly two million, read: “Missouri Governor Hails Common Man as Envoy of Goodwill.” The story was dressed with a one-column cut of Alan and over it the caption, “Mr. America.” The other mornings gave the story a decent, cautious break. Half-columns, somewhere in about page seven, waiting to see.

“We’ll get the mornings all right with a mass interview this afternoon,” Sturt said with justifiable confidence.

Alan’s suite at the Sherry-Netherland consisted of a large living room, bedroom, and foyer. The management and our office had done a good job on the décor. The appointments were attractive without being pretentious. There were a few cigarette boxes here and there in the living room, each accompanied by a table lighter; there was a decanter of twelve-year-old scotch, and another of excellent sherry surrounded by a brood of fine crystal glasses.

Diana and I had breakfast in Alan’s suite, at which Jeff, Roger, and Malcolm Sturt joined us.

The emotions upon which public relations people operate are greed, the lust for power, cupidity, and a kind of swilling gullibility—an eagerness on the part of millions to be intellectually raped—all of which produces in the practitioner a feeling of misanthropy, an occupational disease carrying a high mortality-rate of integrity. But that morning, as Jeff scanned the clips and announced minor changes in the immediate program, he was as eager, amused, flexible, and buoyant as if this were the launching of his first campaign. To Alan he was as considerate and gentle as an aging ballet manager with a newly discovered, young and talented ballerina. As the waiter poured the coffee, Jeff placed his hand on Alan’s arm.

“You keep telling me that you’re nervous,” Jeff said, as the coffee was poured, “but everything you do and say is as if you were born for the job, or had been rehearsing for it all your life.”

I could see the ballerina standing nervously in the wings, waiting for her cue, and the old entrepreneur whispering to her out of his great experience and wisdom.

“We had planned to brief you on what to say and do when you came to New York,” Jeff went on, “but from what I’ve seen in Jackson City and from the way you handled yourself with the press at the station, I see that you really don’t need any indoctrination. You’re an honest guy and anything you say will be all right with me. You’ll give us your candid and honest opinion for the benefit of our clients, as we had originally planned; but from here out nobody in this organization is going to write or even coach you in any of your spoken lines. Of course, Mr. MacLain will write your daily column, not because you couldn’t do it yourself, but because you’re going to be too busy. You’re to ad lib to your heart’s content. Do you know what ‘ad lib’ means?”

After breakfast at the hotel, I sat in Jeff’s office and gabbed for a while, talking of the next pragmatic step, the next safe and sure tactical move. There was to be the mass interview at Alan’s hotel in the afternoon and then a meeting with the Mayor the next day. It was all in the bag. One step at a time.

“We’ve got to keep him hot from here out,” Jeff said. “After we’ve done everything we can with him locally, we’ll have him meet the President himself, and then we’ll cut him loose. Christ, can you see it?”

Jeff’s secretary stuck her head inside the door. “Mr. Schiff would like to see you, if you’re free,” she said.

For some time I had been certain that Jeff was worrying about our Iroquois Metals deal with Marshlands. I knew he was worrying, that something was working away somewhere in the back of his head, because he hadn’t said a word about it for nearly a month. That’s the way he was, but somehow I knew that Mordecai and the Marshlands deal were linked in his mind and it had him uneasy.

Mordecai Schiff, the brilliant Princeton kid, the anonymous brain behind the War Production Board, the bright youngster who pulled the strings for the succession of stumble-bums on top, the mind that never made a mistake, the man with a spotless record, the author of Propaganda and Opinion, stood in the doorway.

“Come on in and sit down,” Jeff said to Mordecai as he entered the room. “We were doing nothing important, just having a bull session.”

“I’ve got some bad news for you,” Mordecai said, rubbing a cold pipe against the side of his nose to bring out the grain. “Or maybe it’s good news, I don’t know.”

Schiff sat there for a while, looking tweedy and unkempt, not at all like a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year public relations man. He seemed out of place, or at least his tempo seemed incongruous, after the shindig in Jackson City and the popping flashbulbs at Grand Central Station. The ten-second silence as he sat there saying nothing, had size, weight, and dimension.

I put my mind into high, trying to figure out what it might be. The only conclusion I arrived at was that he had something on the Iroquois Metals deal and was pulling out, but I was only partly right.

“I’d like to quit about the first of the month,” Schiff said quietly and bluntly.

“Quit?” Jeff said, astonished. “Don’t be silly. Look, Mordecai, if it’s a matter of money, you can write your own ticket.”

“No, it’s not money, I’m making more now than I need. But I’ve had an offer of a damned good job. They want me to teach at one of our better universities. A chair in sociology, the pint-sized science, but it suits me. I’ve got the feeling that I just don’t belong here any longer. I mean all this wonderful razzle-dazzle. It’s exciting, all right, but I feel that I need something else and this offer to teach is just what I’ve been waiting for.”

“I’m sure Jeff and I don’t want to dissuade you, if your heart’s set on it,” I said, “but somehow I can’t see you in a small college town getting mixed up in faculty politics and taking tea with the dull wives of your colleagues.”

I was lying and I knew it, but I said it anyway and cursed myself in the next moment.

“That’s exactly what I want,” Mordecai said. “I’ve got a lot of writing to do and the dullness of the academic life will drive me to the typewriter. Of course, I’ll stay on here long enough to turn my accounts over to my successor, and if you want me from time to time in the future as a consultant, I’ll be glad to come.”

Jeff leaned back on his couch. “If I ask you two simple questions, will you promise to give me two deep-down, honest answers?”

“Has your resignation anything to do with the way we’re handling the Iroquois Metals account? Do you think we ought to drop Bennett?”

“Hell, no. I did business with them when I was in Washington and I found them no better or worse than hundreds of other war contractors. I’ve told you that before.”

“What difference does it make whether your clients are members of the Gary Chamber of Commerce or the Racquet Club?” Mordecai asked. “In the last analysis, they’re all out for the same thing.”

When Jeff and I arrived at Alan’s hotel later that afternoon, the reception for the press was just about getting under way. We had a small banquet room rigged up for the occasion. All the metropolitan papers and wire services were represented, including the foreign-language press. A large table had been set up for the serving of refreshments and waiters stood behind it serving drinks and canapés. There was a sprinkling of celebrities present: a liberal publisher, an important labor leader, a popular if not distinguished novelist, a left-wing actress, and half-a-dozen columnists. Sturt had set his stage well and with more than ordinary skill. Alan and Diana were nowhere in sight.

“I had Diana take him for a walk so that no one could get to him until the show got under way. He ought to be here any minute,” Sturt said.

Jeff stood inconspicuously at one side of the room talking to a reporter. The place was filled with the quiet buzz of party conversation. Then, about five minutes later, Diana and Alan came through the double doors leading to the banquet room. Someone, it was Johnston of our own publicity staff, said: “Here he is.”

A photographer near the door leveled his camera, and the flashbulb exploded about six feet from Alan’s face. He stopped short, taken aback, and stood there for a few moments as the other cameraman went into action, setting off a succession of blinding flashes. Alan looked surprised and, I thought, worried, like an amiable old man set upon by a crowd of noisy brats and not quite sure of their intentions. Then he ran a finger along the inside of his collar and smiled stiffly. It was as if he realized in that instant that for a long time to come, these sudden flashes of light, harsh and startling, would be an inevitable part of his life; that at no time would he ever enjoy any privacy and that every descent from a train or a plane, every entrance into a public room, each gesture and changing expression would be greeted by the bright, silent explosions of flashbulbs. He made a conscious effort to snap out of it, and then, making a restrained, welcoming gesture with his hand, he said, “Hello, everybody,” and walked into the room. “Just a minute, fellas,” he said. “After that barrage, I think I rate a drink first.”

There was some laughter among those who stood nearby. He, Diana, and some of the newspapermen walked up to the bar.

Behind me I heard someone say: “A perfect entrance.” I turned; it was Bob Wheelwright.

“Are you certain you haven’t been rehearsing him?” Bob whispered, leaning forward.

“Watch him handle himself during the interview,” I said. “And remember, Bob, you’re a friend of the house, no embarrassing questions and no cynical wisecracks, no monkey wrenches.”

“Who? Me?” Bob said. “I’ll have you understand that even though I work damned hard for my money and haven’t the slightest intention of ever running for public office, I’m all for the common man.”

On each occasion that I had had a few drinks with Alan, he had always taken beer, but now I noticed that he asked for scotch and took it neat without a chaser.

Sturt had a few of the waiters set a semicircle of chairs facing one of the smaller tables at a far end of the room.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, raising his voice like an m.c., “we’ll start now for the sake of the boys with an early deadline.”

He seated Alan at the table with Diana on one side and himself at the other. The working press took seats while the celebrities and Jeff and I stood about looking on.

Malcolm Sturt had done a good job. But we had expected it; he was tops in his field. He was casual almost to the point of sloppiness and his success and popularity with the newspapermen were due to the fact that he never wore pin-stripe or double-breasted suits. Once, in explaining the technique of mass interviews to a new assistant, he said: “Always see that there are plenty of telephones available for the boys to get their stories to the desk in the shortest possible time. Good food and a little whisky help, but don’t overdo it and never hand out those long, dollar cigars. It makes a hard-working reporter suspicious as all hell. And always answer the inevitable embarrassing question promptly and honestly and never off the record.”

The first question came from an AP man: “How does it feel, Mr. Barbour, to be chosen as the nation’s average man?”

The answer came as a reflex. Then, hesitating for a moment: “But isn’t that the way most average people feel these days?”

“It’s all right for a visit,” Alan replied, “but if anyone gives it to me, I’ll take it.”

This got a studio laugh. Alan’s sense of timing was perfect. The boys were with him now with perhaps one or two exceptions; it was obvious in almost every face. Bob Wheelwright, standing close by, whispered: “My God, an unrehearsed switch! Did you get him from a casting agency and have you got him under contract?”

“I like New York fine,” Alan went on, “it’s big and important and if I were a New Yorker, I’d be mighty proud to be part of it.”

“How about the people here?” the Daily News man asked. “Do you like them?”

“I haven’t met many so far, but I expect that people are just about the same everywhere.”

“Do you plan to attend a session of the United Nations conference while you’re in town?” the Herald Tribune man asked.

Another laugh. I found myself counting the laughs, the boffs, like a radio comedy script writer, except there was no script. He was doing beautifully, much better than any of us had hoped. I had seen hardened, shrewd politicians, tough big-business executives and diplomats stammer, trip, go pale, and wet their lips nervously during an ad libbed New York press conference. But Alan took it all in his stride, answering the questions in a friendly, offhand way, sometimes smiling self-deprecatingly, sometimes slipping into effective ungrammatical locutions, but always without a trace of observable tension and always, except for the few moments when he stood in the doorway, completely at ease.

“How do you feel about the latest United Nations decision on Palestine?” the reporter for the Jewish Daily Forward asked. “And how do you feel about the fighting now going on in the Holy Land?”

This was a tough one and I hoped he would say, like any cagey politician, that he didn’t have all the facts and that, therefore, he couldn’t pass judgment on this highly controversial question. But he didn’t. He tried to puzzle it out. Finally he said: “I always felt that was settled a long time ago.”

“When and by whom?” the Forward’s reporter asked. There was a touch of acerbity in his voice, as if he had expected an unsatisfactory or hostile reply.

“Oh, about thirty-five hundred years ago, I should say,” Alan said. “There was kind of a jurisdictional dispute in those days and God himself stepped in and settled it. Let me see if I can remember how it goes.” He paused, his brow wrinkled in thought, and finally came up with the decision, word for word: “ ‘Moses, my servant, is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel.’ ” He came to the end of the quote and smiled triumphantly. “Gosh, I remembered it after all.”

“I used to do a lot of scripture readin’ overseas,” he said. “Had lots of time.”

“Sure, there are Dodger fans wherever a heart beats for the underdog, but let me tell you that the Jackson City Black Sox can lose more games than the Dodgers and we love ’em just the same.”

“Do you find the New York girls more attractive than the girls in Jackson City?” asked the dame from the Post, out on her first assignment.

“Now, wait a minute, ma’am, go easy,” Alan said. He looked at Diana for a second as if searching for moral support. “I’d rather not answer that one. You see, I’ve got to go back to Jackson City some day soon, and I don’t want to commit myself.”

Everyone smiled tolerantly—ah, the Common Man is in love in the old-fashioned way with a girl back home. Flash! Stop the presses, break open the page, Hennessy, the world is faced with extinction and the man believes in love.

“Well”—it sounded almost like “waal”—“I’ll tell you, I’m not much of a gambler but when I am out to lose money, I prefer a nice, clean game of crap.”

The questions continued to come. What did he think of the atom bomb, war with Russia, trade unions, the Negro question, Missouri cooking, and who was his favorite movie star? His replies were laconic and to the point, every word excellent copy. The interview had been a smash and the New York papers were in the bag.

Then the special photographers went into action: Acme, Black Star, the commercial outfits, and the house-organ men. The liberal publisher was photographed talking with Alan, Bob Wheelwright and the labor leader; then the left-wing actress was photographed with Alan and one of the columnists, and so on until every possible combination had been exhausted. Everybody was trying to get into the act, and succeeding, which was perfectly all right with us.

The reporter for the Daily Worker, a young, good-looking gal whose principled objection to makeup exposed an oily skin, came up to speak to Malcolm Sturt and me.

“How come that your Common Man happens to be staying at this particular hotel? It’s supposed to be one of the best in town.”

“I don’t know, to tell the truth,” I said, “I didn’t arrange it. You’ll have to ask Mr. Sturt here.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Malcolm said. “You know how bad the hotel situation is. The Mills Hotels were all full up. Why, we couldn’t even find him a bed in a Bowery flophouse. His suite here was the only thing available. Anyhow, Florence, don’t you Communists keep repeating that nothing’s too good for the proletariat? You know that he’s a member of the Linotypers’ Union and that makes him a proletarian, doesn’t it? Or has the party line changed again? Come on, honey, let’s have a drink.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve got time for a quick bite with me,” Bob Wheelwright asked. “See if you can get hold of Barbour to come along.”

“I think I can fix it,” I said, “but on one condition. No turning him against the hand that’s feeding him. Remember he’s just a simple guy from the sticks.”

On the way down to Bob Wheelwright’s place, he said that he had a surprise for us. He had, all right; a rare and valuable specimen of a Virginia country ham, a Smithfield razorback, hickory and sassafras cured, and there it was on his table, glazed with honey, studded with cloves and garnished with orange and lime. He told me how he had caught the scent of smoldering hickory logs on an automobile trip, and how he had followed it until he came to a smokehouse up in the hills. The ham was blackened from months of smoking and had to be scrubbed with yellow soap, and some of the mold had to be cut away from the underside.

“They don’t make them this way any more,” Bob said. “They do it with chemicals out in Chicago. Tenderized, they call it, may God forgive them, with all the taste gone out. And all that packaged, canned, pre-digested meat. From smokehouse, Smithfield ham to Spam. That’s it. We’re now living in a Spam, NAM, take-it-on-the-lam—and to continue the rhyme—sham civilization, and you can have it, brother.”

I had Alan back at his hotel before nine and turned him over to Diana and Sturt, who had minor plans for the evening for him. At eleven o’clock, on my way home, I bought the bulldog editions of the morning papers. The story of how the Common Man had met the New York press had broken beautifully; pictures in every paper, signed stories in both tabloids, ample space in all of them, well up in front. Tomorrow, in all sections of the city, in all its hundreds of square miles, in East Side tenements, in congested, littered Harlem blocks, in the vast, dirty, midtown slum west of Eighth Avenue that newspapermen used to call Hell’s Kitchen—substandard areas, the reformers euphemistically called them—in comfortable Flatbush two-family houses and in crowded Bronx apartments, people would read these stories. At first, they would be brushed off as another one of those things. But I knew what would ultimately happen. Incredulity would give way to wavering disbelief, and then it would be taken with a grain of salt, after that it would be half believed. And all the time, the brains and resources of Jefferson Clarke & Associates, mine included, would be at work creating the myth—myth, mythos—grinding out the stuff. In the end, most of the doubters would give way and the cynical minority would remain tight-lipped and silent. I read the papers carefully, and, after midnight, took two seconals and went to bed, but they were a long time in coming through. I took a third and that did the trick.

The next day Alan went through the usual second-day routine expected of a grass-roots celebrity on his first visit to New York. Accompanied by photographers and reporters, he went to the tower of the Empire State Building and pointed in the direction of Queens; he was shown through one of the largest department stores in the city (incidentally, one of our clients), and, after a trip to Bedloe’s Island in an official launch, he gazed reverently up at the Statue of Liberty, hat in hand. I could have dreamed up a better day and I did make a few suggestions, but Malcolm overruled me.

“Never monkey around with the popular stereotypes. The public expects corn, and I don’t mean succotash. It’s fatal to disappoint them.”

Later in the afternoon, accompanied by Diana, Jeff, Malcolm, and myself, Alan was officially welcomed by the Mayor at City Hall. Behind His Honor, as he made his stilted speech of welcome (the smart operator had discarded our prepared script), stood some of the members of his unofficial cabinet, men with sun-lamp complexions the color of canned salmon, twenty-five dollar hand-painted ties, knotted tight, almost to the point of strangulation. They were “the boys.” Looking at them, I thought that no matter how distasteful some of our clients seemed to be at times, they were immeasurably superior to this handful of characters who helped govern and run the largest city in the world.

First, there were the ceremonies in the Mayor’s office, where the talk was the kind you heard at Tammany clubhouses and expensive steak joints in midtown Manhattan. Then we all went outside on the historic broad steps where microphones had been set up and newsreel trucks were in attendance. The Mayor was up for re-election the following year and he had a little speech of his own to make. He spoke of the distress in Europe and the pressing need for American aid. “There isn’t a man or woman in New York who isn’t an immigrant or a descendant of an immigrant, even if his heritage goes all the way back to 1620. New York offers to the world a shining example”—(these were his very words)—“of how people of divergent national stocks can live together in peace and amity.” New York, he said, was not Park Avenue or the Stork Club—(he would be there that same night)—it was a city of workers and small-home owners in Queens (where the Mayor was in a tight spot), Brooklyn, Bronx, and Staten Island. He then declared Alan an official guest of the people of the City of New York (a dubious honor since it involved absolutely nothing), and he hoped that his stay in town would be pleasant. If there was anything that he, the Mayor, could do. . . .

Then there was the official handshake with the Mayor’s official face turned towards the cameramen, the popping of flashbulbs and the cries of “Hold it, Mr. Mayor! Just one more, Mr. Barbour!” Held back by police, there was a crowd of people, hangers-on, idlers, newsboys, bobbysoxers and passersby watching the ceremonies, the usual crowd you see at these City Hall shindigs. Apart from the bobbysoxers, whom Malcolm had hired through an agency, they were a typical New York downtown crowd; downtown, that is, north of Wall Street.

They were the sort of people who cheered everyone, the eternal cheerers, the people who lined the streets of Czechoslovakia and cheered Hitler’s troops as they entered Prague and then cheered the armies of liberation, and later cheered the men who forced the suicide of Jan Masaryk. Here on these same steps, they had cheered Queen Marie of Rumania, the Italian fascist, General Balbo, the communist, Litvinov, the boy, Lindbergh, and the man, Eisenhower. They were the people whose cheers are cheap and ready, regardless of political affiliation. They were the worshipers, the gray anonymous mass who love color and fame, no matter what color, no matter how attained, who utter their feeble cheers and then go back to their own uneventful lives. They now cheered Alan.

The ceremonies were over and the Mayor, an arm on Alan’s, accompanied him to our waiting limousine. The hired bobbysoxers shrieked. The cheerers cheered and the photographers let go for still another shot. We moved slowly down a lane cut open by the cops through the mass.

The past forty-eight hours had been tough for all of us and only Jeff showed no signs of tension or fatigue. Alan slumped into his seat as the car moved through City Hall Park, closed his eyes, and stroked his lids with his thumb and first finger. We still had a rugged schedule ahead of us that evening and I didn’t envy him. There was no Missourian smile now, off-center or otherwise.

At dinner, Jed Carney, our best radio script writer, joined us. A few hours later, Alan was to appear on the “Meet the Celebrities” program over a national hookup: music by a top-name band, a smooth and clever master of ceremonies and three celebrities who happened to be in the news at the moment. That week the celebrities were a Hollywood child actress, an abominable brat; a nuclear scientist who had belatedly turned religious after the bombing of Hiroshima; and Alan.

Alan’s part in the script read well. It was down-to-earth, casual, and amusing in spots. There was a bright opening line, a touch of folksy humor and a declamatory ending: it was all tailor-made. After dinner, in the hour or so before we had to appear at the studio, we rehearsed the script. The lines were good, but somehow Alan couldn’t make the grade. We had him rehearse the lines over and over again and still there was a kind of starched quality about his delivery. Jed Carney, Jeff, and I were in the control room at the studio during the final rehearsal just before going on the air, and this time Alan’s delivery seemed stiffer than ever. He spoke his lines like a high school boy in a debate on “Is Modern Youth Irresponsible?” Or like an upstate congressman reading a ghosted speech on taxation. He was worse, if that were possible, when he finally went on the air.

“It’s the first time he’s ever been on the air,” I said, “and it’s scared all the spontaneity out of him.”

“It isn’t that,” Jeff said, “he just can’t read script, because he’s a born ad libber. No more radio programs for him. We’ll have to confine him to off-the-cuff interviews and the printed word from here out. No radio.”

After the broadcast, Diana and Roger joined us and we dropped over to one of the best nightspots in New York where through Jeff’s influence Malcolm had been able to make excellent and skillful arrangements. Our table was choice, far from Siberia, and we were shown to it with the deference ordinarily accorded to top-level Washington politicians, the playboy sons of outstanding industrialists, and the princes of a great political dynasty. As we approached our table, the orchestra stopped abruptly and started in on the Missouri Waltz. It was all as carefully staged and timed as an important “take” in a five-million-dollar movie. Alan simply stood there listening to the music, deeply moved, his eyes moist with sudden emotion.

“How did they know?” he asked Malcolm. Malcolm played it straight: “I suppose they read the papers,” he said, “Missouri, Mark Twain, Truman, and Alan Barbour. They must have put two and two together.” Diana overheard all this, and without changing her expression, moved on towards the waiting maître d’hôtel.

I detest nightspots, although sometimes, for a variety of reasons, I get caught. A nightspot anywhere else in the world—Paris, Buenos Aires, or Rio—is a place where a lonely man may meet an available gal, ready, willing and able. The other universals are stale air, tinsel, and high-jacked prices. The entertainment is intended to excite you, but in New York or anywhere in America, if you make one pass at a girl, however innocuous, you have the bouncer, in tuxedo, on your hands. This one was no different from any other spot in New York, except that its customers were more distinguished—you can put quotes around that if you like—and a fairly good slug of scotch set you back a dollar and a half. It was the place to go and so we went, taking Alan along for him to see café society with his own eyes. And for other reasons as well.

Lionel Cashmore, the syndicated society columnist, came over to our table, after Jeff had ordered the drinks, and asked to be introduced to Alan.

“Tell you what I’m going to do, Jeff,” Cashmore said, after he had shaken hands with Alan. “I’m going to do a column on the idea that real society in this country is the common people like our friend here and not the hopheads, the dipsomaniacs, and the cretins that call themselves Society. My readers will love it. It seems the more you insult them, the more they like you. I’ll use Alan here as a peg on which to hang my moral. Yes?”

We drank and ate for a while, then Alan danced with Diana, not very skillfully but with an untutored and natural sense of rhythm, and finally the party broke up at half-past two.

As we were getting our things from the hat-check girl, I heard Alan say to Diana, “I still can’t get over how they remembered to play my state song.” Diana said nothing.

I wondered how a man as natively shrewd as Alan had been during the press conference could fall for Malcolm’s hokum. Perhaps it was this contradiction of folk common sense and naïveté that made him the ideal, the typical common man. Anyhow, there it was.

The feature stories the following day in the Sunday papers broke like the dream of a publicity man whose Super-ego had taken a night off. There were no snide remarks about the unseen hands of the puppeteers, no reportorial wisecracks, no balled-up quotes, not a single line of pied type. Without exception, the feature writers and the columnists were either sympathetic or slick. They made Alan seem to be more appealing than he really was. The picture desks, too, were kindly, almost to the point of lavishness. One editorial writer surpassed himself in a thousand-word panegyric on the soundness of America’s small-town population. He cautioned America’s Common Man (a) not to judge all New Yorkers by Park Avenue, Fifty-second Street, or Union Square and (b) to bear in mind that the Democratic Party and Tammany Hall did not necessarily have the exclusive franchise to act as spokesmen for the millions of other common men in this republic. He then concluded with nostalgic references to (1) the folk songs of the Ozark mountaineers, (2) to distinguished Missourians such as Mark Twain, Jesse James, Boss Pendergast, and (3) the Republican Party.

Jeff and I handled the inquiries that flooded us after the first round of Alan’s publicity. Our job was to screen the solid possibilities from the crackpots or small-timers. They ran in the ratio of one to ten, I should say. Among the former were advertising agencies with clients who wanted to tie in with our campaign, or who had commodities that Alan might endorse. A chargé d’affaires of a Latin-American country, at the moment in disfavor with our State Department, phoned and asked if we would accept his government as a client. He was certain that the common people of America, who had always sympathized with their Pan-American brothers, would be anxious to know the true state of affairs which existed in his country. The matter of the fee, he assured us, would be of small concern to his government. We brushed him off gently. And, of course, there were the usual Hollywood and radio offers which were interesting but, at the moment, not impressive. These would be handled much later when it would be more lucrative.

“Promise them nothing,” Jeff said. “Don’t commit yourself. Simply indicate that we’ll take nothing less than the traffic will bear, and then tell them we’ll call them back in a few weeks, when we’re ready. We’ll get the top fees after the Washington break.”

Alan’s column was well under way. Roger had prepared a half dozen samples which Regal Features had broadcast to possible subscribers. One Regal folder read: “The Daily Opinions of the Common Man—for the Common Men and Women of America. A guaranteed circulation-builder! Winchell for Broadway, Lippmann for international affairs, Earl Wilson for you-know-what, and—Mr. America for the Common Touch.”

The idea was to do tight, small, succinct dispatches which would run into about a hundred and fifty or two hundred words, like the old Will Rogers pieces, to be boxed and prominently displayed. MacLain had done a good job in preparing the samples, full of birdcalls:

“. . . Ever since I got back from the war I’ve stopped thinking of people as Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile, rich or poor, Negro or white. There’s a better way of grading people. They’re either builders or wreckers, creators or destroyers.”

“. . . The difference between ballplayers in the big leagues and the amateurs you see on a small-town sand-lot is the difference between the soldier-of-fortune and a patriotic volunteer.”

“. . . Two of my most favorite hymns are ‘Abide with Me’ and Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata.’ ”

“. . . Miss Blatchford, who was my grade-school teacher back home in Jackson City, always said I’d never learn to speak or write properly unless I paid more attention to my grammar. But I always felt that when I grew up I’d manage to make myself understood if I had anything to say. I think the great trouble with lots of writers and speakers isn’t grammar, but the want of interesting and exciting thoughts.”

“. . . You can elect a man to Congress, but there’s nothing in the Constitution that says he has to have brains. All it says is that he’s got to have votes. Of course, I’m not talking about any of the congressmen or senators from Missouri.”

“Regal has seventy papers lined up for the column already,” Jeff said, beaming. He was the only man I’ve known who could beam deadpan. “Gordon phoned awhile ago and said that the publicity over the week end had flushed fifteen more, and most of them in the East. We’ll have more than two hundred after we hit Washington. Let’s tell the kid about it.”

We had given Alan one of the better offices in the corridor which housed most of the members of the Plans Board. Diana, who had supervised the decorating, had let herself go. The motif was a kind of sparse simplicity that narrowly escaped bleakness, and would have gladdened the palpitating hearts of the eager young men over at the Museum of Modern Art. There was a very modern, functional desk which seemed to defy the law of gravity, a few easy chairs which were anything but easy and a sofa done in off-white foam latex, a deep, neutral rug, and translucent drapes with a box weave. The walls were paneled in natural wood and on one side of the room there was a chromium-bordered photomontage of shots of Jackson City. As soon as I had seen the completed office, I knew it would make Alan profoundly unhappy. It did.

As Jeff and I entered, Alan was seated at his functional desk, doing nothing. Before him there was a pile of newspaper clippings. Diana, who had arrived for the conference ahead of us, was seated at the side of his desk. We were just about to get under way when Roger walked in.

Jeff placed the syndicate material on Alan’s desk, the folders, the telegrams, the broadsides and the sample columns. “As part of our campaign, we thought it would be smart trading to have a daily column appear in the newspapers under your signature. I mentioned it to you at breakfast on Friday. Do you remember?”

“No, I don’t,” Alan said, “so many things were happening to me that day.”

Jeff gave him the pitch: the idea for the tight, short, daily paragraphs, boxed on page one or on the editorial page, in which Alan could say anything he liked, provided, of course, that occasionally he plugged a client. But an honest plug, mind you.

“Mr. Sherrod’s right,” he said. “You don’t have to know how to write to do a column. Do you think that people like Mrs. Roosevelt or Harold Ickes, or half a dozen other less distinguished people, are writers? Their stuff is printed because of the position of public prominence they hold. Some of the stuff is ghosted. Do you know what that means?”

“Yes, I know.” Alan sat there at his functional desk staring down at the syndicate’s material with a puzzled expression.

Alan handed us one of those awkward, painful pauses, such as you sometimes get over the telephone.

“Mind you, I know that this ghostin’ business goes on everywhere,” Alan said, “but I just don’t think it’s honest. It’s not bein’ right with yourself. I always felt that when you had anything to say, you should wait until it damn near came bustin’ out of you and then people would know and feel that it was part of you, and because it was part of you, it’d be honest. I am not sayin’ that havin’ a ghosted column is dishonest. I’m just sayin’ that somehow it’s not right. That’s all.”

“Do you think,” Jeff asked, “that all the bright things attributed to politicians, radio comedians, and other celebrities in the newspapers or on the radio are actually written by them? Of course not. Even if they can do it—which isn’t so—they don’t have the time. It’s the same in your case. Even if you had the ability to write the column, you, too, wouldn’t have the time from here out. And yet, people will want to hear and read what you have to say. You say it and we’ll write it. And the man who’ll write it for you is Mr. MacLain. He’s read every word that was recorded during your first interview here last month and he has the intuition and skill to set your thoughts down in writing better than you could yourself. You won’t deny that, will you?”

“Here, look at these—” Jeff picked up and handed Alan the sample columns. “Read them. Eighty-five important newspapers throughout the country have signed up for them as a daily feature. Before we’re finished, there will be a few hundred and your cut on this alone will be about twenty-five thousand dollars a year, maybe more. Here, read these columns and see if Mr. MacLain hasn’t caught the spirit of the things you might want to say.”

Alan read the columns through, one by one, carefully, and once, towards the end, he smiled. When he had finished he said: “I like them fine and I wish I’d written them myself.” He paused, and if you had wired our hearts for sound, the thumping would have been deafening. Then he said: “I guess I can go along with you on this.”

“I’m damned glad you see it that way,” Jeff said. “You just work close to Mr. MacLain. I think you ought to have a long talk once a week. Get everything off your chest, say it any way you like, and leave the rest to us. No column goes out unless it has your okay. Is that fair?”

In my office, Jeff perched himself on a corner of the desk and said: “Well, what do you think now? Do you think we’re likely to have any more trouble with him?”

“You’re damned right, and I’ll tell you why. It’s true that he’s more fussy than I figured he would be, but when he starts seeing his by-line in print as a big-time columnist, like most people who have their stuff ghosted, he’ll begin to believe he’s writing it himself. That little ego of his will become so damned inflated that all his hillbilly principles will go flying out of the window. And don’t forget his cut on the syndicate money. He’s got a kind of peasant shrewdness that in the end will keep him in line.”

Jeff spoke into the intercom and asked Alan’s newly appointed secretary to come in and see us. The girl came in a few minutes later wearing a brand new secretarial-school smile.

“Fine,” the girl said. “I haven’t had much to do yet, but he’s very pleasant and considerate.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Jeff said. “Of course, you realize that he’s new to the business and until he gets into our way of doing things, he’ll need some help from all of us.”

“Until Mr. Barbour is properly adjusted,” Jeff went on, “I’d like Mr. Sherrod to see all his mail, outgoing and incoming, before it’s sent and before he sees it. Do you understand?”

“And you understand that you must be discreet, we don’t want him to feel that we’re crowding him.”

In a way, Jeff was right. There was no use crowding him; his work for the next few months was all cut out for him and it would be plenty tough. The campaign was only a few days old and it was beginning to pay off in fan mail by the sack. Those illiterate, heartbreaking letters, the scrawled epistles of the lonely, the forgotten, the insulted, the degraded, pleading with each newly announced public figure for a moment of recognition, a moment of identification. They were beginning to pile up every day so that it was necessary to assign two extra file clerks to the job. And out of the thousands of letters that kept pouring in, we took a sampling of those which we thought would not distress him and which would feed his ego.

Senator Marshlands had promised us that he would do the right thing by Ashley Bennett, but it seemed that before he delivered, he wanted his money’s worth.

He called one day and suggested that it would be a smart idea for the Common Man to be the Senator’s guest of honor at a little party he was throwing for a few friends. He hoped we would all be there.

“Nothing elaborate, you understand,” he said, “just a little party in the evening, and I have a little surprise for you boys.”

This fitted in with our plans, because we had made arrangements with one of the White House secretaries for the President to play straight-man for a stunt we had in mind.

“He’ll be down in Washington in a few days, anyhow,” I said to the Senator. “We’ve arranged a little White House story that will be a nice build-up for the Madison Square Garden meeting for the Hopis and Navajos. We can arrange to have him in the visitors’ gallery of the Senate if you like. Perhaps you can say something about him from the floor.”

“That’s a very sound idea,” the Senator said. “When does he arrive here?”

Diana and Malcolm Sturt took him down a day ahead of time to show him the nation’s capital and to brief him on the biggest stunt in the campaign. Jeff and I were to arrive in Washington the day of the act in the White House and in time for Marshlands’ party.

The following week, our news ticker began to tap out the story of Alan’s success in Washington:

TP101

WASHINGTON, NOV. 19—MEMBERS OF THE SENATE THIS AFTERNOON INTERRUPTED DEBATE ON THE NEW EUROPEAN AID PLAN TO PAY TRIBUTE TO AMERICA’S SOCALLED COMMON MAN, ALAN BARBOUR.

DURING A HEATED DENUNCIATION OF THE PLAN, WHICH HE CRITICIZED AS “A CERTAIN GUARANTEE OF FUTURE CONFLICT WITH OUR FORMER ALLY, THE SOVIET UNION,” SENATOR THOMAS MARSHLANDS CALLED ATTENTION TO BARBOUR’S PRESENCE IN THE SENATE’S VISITORS’ GALLERY.

SEN. MARSHLANDS IS THE AUTHOR OF LAST YEAR’S BEST SELLING BOOK “PEACE AND THE COMMON MAN.”

“IT IS FITTING THAT THIS DEBATE SHOULD TAKE PLACE THIS AFTERNOON IN THE PRESENCE OF THE YOUNG VETERAN WHO HAS BEEN SELECTED BY A NATIONAL COMMITTEE AS THE MOST REPRESENTATIVE OF THE MILLIONS OF COMMON MEN AND WOMEN IN OUR DEMOCRACY,” THE SENATOR SAID.

“I’M CERTAIN THAT IF THIS FINE UPSTANDING AMERICAN COULD MEET WITH HIS OPPOSITE NUMBERS IN ENGLAND, YUGOSLAVIA, POLAND, AND RUSSIA, THAT IS TO SAY, WITH REPRESENTATIVE COMMON MEN OF THESE COUNTRIES, THEY WOULD SOON FIND A COMMONSENSE BASIS FOR A LASTING WORLD PEACE.”

A DELEGATION OF VETERANS IN THE GALLERY LOUDLY APPLAUDED THESE REMARKS. THE PRESIDING OFFICER WARNED THAT IF THERE WERE FURTHER DEMONSTRATIONS HE WOULD HAVE THE GALLERIES CLEARED.

MORE PS215P

TP116

ADD FIRST LEAD COMMON MAN (PICK UP “THE PRESIDING OFFICER WARNED”)

SEN. WM. J. MATSON (REP., MO.) ASKED IF SEN. MARSHLANDS WOULD YIELD.

“I YIELD WITH PLEASURE TO THE SENATOR OF THE GREAT STATE WHOSE SON WAS CHOSEN AS BEING TYPICAL OF THE AVERAGE MALE CITIZEN OF THIS COUNTRY,” SEN. MARSHLANDS SAID.

“I TRUST THAT THE PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE WILL TAKE COGNIZANCE OF THE FACT THAT THE COMMON MAN COMES FROM A STATE WHICH IS TRADITIONALLY REPUBLICAN,” SEN. MATSON SAID.

“I SEEM TO RECALL THAT IT WENT DEMOCRATIC IN THE LAST FOUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS,” SEN. MARSHLANDS REPLIED.

“THAT WAS DURING A MOMENTARY ABERRATION,” SEN. MATSON SAID.

“A MOMENTARY ABERRATION WHICH LASTED SIXTEEN YEARS,” SEN. MARSHLANDS SAID AS HIS COLLEAGUES LAUGHED. “I MIGHT ALSO POINT OUT TO THE HONORABLE SENATOR FROM MISSOURI THAT THE ABERRATION DURING THESE YEARS WAS NATIONWIDE IN SCOPE.”

MORE PS235P

TP123

COMMON MAN.

WASHINGTON, NOV. 19—GEORGE QUINLAN, WHITE HOUSE PRESS AIDE, ANNOUNCED TODAY THAT THE PRESIDENT WILL DECORATE ALAN BARBOUR WITH THE LEGION OF MERIT TOMORROW.

(PICK UP “EARLIER IN THE DAY”)

MORE PS305P

TP137

ADD SECOND LEAD COMMON MAN, WASHINGTON (PICK UP “NATIONWIDE IN SCOPE”)

DURING THE DEBATE, SENATOR MARSHLANDS IN AN UNPRECEDENTED MOVE MADE A FORMAL MOTION FOR THE SENATE TO RECESS FOR ONE HOUR FOR MEMBERS TO MEET MR. BARBOUR.

IN OPPOSING THE MOTION, SEN. ROBT. F. HARDIN (REP., OHIO) CHARGED THAT SEN. MARSHLANDS “AS A SELF-APPOINTED SPOKESMAN FOR THE COMMON MAN, WAS TRADING THE DIGNITY OF THE SENATE FOR CHEAP POLITICAL PUBLICITY.”

SEN. LEWIS FORSTER (DEM., MISS.) WHO ALSO OPPOSED THE MOTION, SAID THAT HE HOPED THAT SEN. MARSHLANDS’ MOTION WOULD NOT PAVE THE WAY FOR “WINNERS OF COMMERCIALLY MOTIVATED BEAUTY CONTESTS AND OTHER STUNTS TO USE THE SENATE AS A MEANS OF SECURING FURTHER NOTORIETY.”

SEN. MARSHLANDS REPLIED THAT THE SENATE “WOULD BE IMPROVED CONSIDERABLY BY A TRANSFUSION OF YOUTH AND PULCHRITUDE.”

THE MOTION WAS CARRIED 63-7.

MORE PS416P

Jeff and I took the ten o’clock plane to Washington the following morning. At the Shoreham, Malcolm and Diana had set up the usual public relations suite, complete with an improvised bar and such other attractions that might keep newspapermen contented. When we arrived, Alan was sitting in the drawing room being interviewed by a Washington correspondent for a chain of Missouri newspapers. I observed that he looked tired and when he replied to questions his voice was almost without inflection.

“He’s been wonderful, Jack,” she said. “You should have seen him with Marshlands and the other senators yesterday. The wire services didn’t carry half the story. But don’t you think we’re crowding him a bit? I find that he can take just so much and then needs a few days’ rest.”

“This is only the beginning,” I said. “He’ll get used to it as he goes along.”

“What’s the matter with our boy friend?” he asked Diana. “He looks down in the mouth.”

“I was just telling Jack that maybe his schedule is a bit too heavy. He’s getting so that he actually flinches every time a flashbulb goes off. He was fine with the senators, but immediately afterwards he began to sag.”

“There are millions of people,” Jeff said, “who wouldn’t mind flinching at these prices. Anyway, after the shindig tonight, the pressure will be off a bit.”

“I’ve been telling him that myself,” Diana said, “but somehow the prospect of meeting the President this afternoon has him scared stiff.”

“I can well understand it,” Jeff said. “Come on, let’s try and buck him up.”

It was twelve-thirty before the Missouri correspondent had left, and Malcolm phoned down for a lunch to be served in the drawing room.

“You should have seen the show at the Senate yesterday,” Malcolm said as the food was being served. “The debate on the motion to recess was a riot. The boys didn’t send half of the boffs.”

“What’s this I hear about your being nervous about meeting the President this afternoon?” Jeff asked with well-simulated heartiness.

“It’s not only about meetin’ the President. I hope you won’t think I’m bein’ yellow, Mr. Clarke, but I’ve got to tell you that I’m worried about the whole business. Everyone’s been very kind to me, but to tell you the real truth, I’m beginnin’ to feel like a phony. I’m nobody and I know it. I said that to Mr. Sherrod comin’ in from Chicago. Last month, I was a linotyper in Jackson City, and a damned good linotyper, as Mr. Cannon will tell you. But nobody outside of my family, the people I work for, my friends and some of the boys over at the Legion post, ever heard of me and nobody except for my family and a few friends gave a damn about my opinions, one way or another. Now everything, no matter how foolish it sounds to me, is puffed up, changed and reported in the papers as if it was the most important thing in the world.

“But I know, deep down in my heart, that I’m nobody. That senator yesterday—I forget his name—was right. Who the hell am I to rate all this attention? What right did I have to be sitting there in the gallery, and because I was there, have the Senate adjourn a debate on an important bill? It seems to me that you people have written a movie about the common man and you picked me to star in it. For the first few days I had a lot of fun, but now I’m beginning to see that people are taking it seriously. They don’t know it’s a movie and some of them are beginning to believe that I am the common man. But I’m only Al Barbour from Jackson City, Missouri, and all this commotion and publicity and those flashlights goin’ off in my face make me out to be somethin’ I’m not. I don’t know how to say all this without hurtin’ anybody’s feelings, but it isn’t honest. No, I don’t mean that. I mean there’s too much make-believe about it. It isn’t real. Mr. Clarke, I want to talk straight to you. I want to be myself and not somebody you people dreamed up. That’s what I mean when I say I feel like a phony.”

We had all slowed down or stopped eating altogether as Alan spoke. Malcolm Sturt’s face was a blank. For him there would always be a new client and a new stunt; one story essentially was like another. I thought I saw a treasonable expression of approval in Diana’s eyes, but she said nothing.

It was a tough spot and Jeff handled it well. “This will need a lot of discussion,” he said, “and in the meantime I don’t propose to spoil a perfectly good lunch. Let’s take a recess until after lunch.” And I knew he wasn’t stalling.

“No, I think we should talk about it now, Mr. Clarke,” Alan said with a head-down stubbornness. “I don’t want to meet the President and I don’t want to have any medals pinned on me. I did nothing to deserve it, nothing more than anyone else did in our outfit. I don’t want that column ghosted for me because I’m not a writer. There’s nothing I can tell you about the way people are thinking or how they’re likely to act; you know all about that much better than I do.”

And then, as the provincial reporters say, came the bombshell: “I want to call it quits and go back home to Jackson City.”

“I still think that this luncheon shouldn’t be spoiled by this kind of talk,” he said evenly, “and I still think it can wait until we’ve finished eating.” And with that he attacked his veal.

There was nothing in Alan’s griping which surprised me. I knew he would bellyache all through the campaign. But I hadn’t expected his latest blunt declaration. My hands became damp as I got all the implications. What a story this would be if some enterprising reporter got hold of it; I almost saw the headlines: “Common Man Quits As Stooge for Public Relations Operation.”

For the first time since I had met him, he rubbed me the wrong way. Who the hell did he think he was? Well, I knew. I knew he was only one of the uncountable victims of the disillusionment, self-interest, and slick operation in this new civilization of ours. Everyone seemed to be playing a role, major or minor, in some kind of cosmic script and all of us in that sense were puppets and phonies. In Christ’s sweet name, who was Alan Barbour to permit himself the luxury of honesty? No one acted ideally, not now or ever. It’s a fix when the industrialist’s son, fresh out of college, starts at the bottom. You know damn well that within two years he’ll be vice-president of something or other, and ultimately the head of the outfit. Did Truman, the little county commissioner, ever dream that he’d be President of the United States? And no wonder he turned pale when they told him of the death of Roosevelt. And Lincoln, playing it smart, starting from nothing, first opposing abolitionism in the Douglas debates and then making the great switcheroo. Every Hollywood star knew there were thousands of others with as great talent who would never make the grade. There were great musicians, practicing six hours a day in cold-water tenement flats who would never make the concert stage. It was all a crazy script, written by a lunatic scenarist, and the casting agents had given this guy the best part in the production and here he was, sounding off like a come-to-Jesus evangelist.

We finished the meal in an atmosphere that would have been appropriate to the cheapest Greasy Spoon. And after the things were cleared away, Jeff let him have it.

“If you feel that your sense of honesty has been compromised by what you’ve been doing, then by all means let’s call it quits and go back to Jackson City, if you want to. It’s true we have a two-year contract with you, in which your duties and responsibilities are clearly set forth. We’ve paid off the balance of the mortgage on your home, as you asked, and in addition, we’ve advanced you several thousand dollars. But if you’re unhappy, if you feel that you’re being played for some kind of sucker, I’m quite prepared to write it off as an unavoidable loss and forget all about it.”

This was a smart beginning, the technique of a daring trial lawyer I had known once who, in his summations to the jury, sometimes took the ground out from under his opponent by granting the most damaging premises in the beginning, and then proceeded to build and strengthen his appeal along another tack. Jeff sat there, smoking leisurely, like a man who had suffered a small business loss and was now in the process of shrugging it off. Alan looked unhappy. He had forgotten the paid-off mortgage, the cash advance, and the contract that held him to fixed duties under clearly set forth circumstances.

Jefferson Clarke, the shrewdest operator in the business, was going mellow. You have moral scruples, Mr. Common Man? You begin to talk like a character called Joe in a socially-conscious radio script? Fine, go ahead, be a heel, if you want to.

I knew from the beginning how Jeff would play this move. And so did Diana; you don’t earn yourself twenty-five thousand dollars a year for not knowing the next move, and fast. She listened to what Jeff was saying but I knew that her heart was with Alan. Well-off, secure, and luxury-loving, like so many of her kind, in the new script that had been written for all of us since 1939, she was a fancier of the underdog; and if the underdog was an attractive guy who might make good in the hay, so much the better.

When Alan spoke, it was pitiable: “Don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Clarke, it isn’t that I want to back out on my agreement with you—”

“Whether you do or not is entirely up to you,” Jeff said, and he was still mellow, even somewhat amused, “and if you do, I can tell you right now that there won’t be any hard feelings.” There was a slight change of tone and pace at this point. “But there’s a consideration involved here that’s more important than money and a signed contract, and we’d better get it cleaned up once and for all.”

He paused. I knew this was going to be the last session of this kind and the speech would be long.

“You ask us who the hell you are to rate all this attention. Well, I’ll tell you. You’re right, when you say you’re nobody. You are nobody. Or at least you were nobody until the day Cannon had you selected as the average man of Missouri and until you signed your contract with us. After that you became something else. Yes, we wrote the scenario for you. In the short time since you left Jackson City, you’ve become a symbol of something that millions of Americans want to believe in because they have nothing else on which to pin their faith. Have you ever thought of that? Not you as a person—anyone else could have done the trick—but you as a symbol.

“We realized from the very beginning that no one man could ever have the characteristics of the average American. We’re not idiots. To get a real average American we would have to get a man who was part white, part black, part Anglo-Saxon, part Protestant, part Catholic, and part Jew. He’d have to be half rich and half poor, half Northerner and half Southerner. We understood all that. But you’re as close as we would get to the real thing, and now that I’ve seen you in action, I’m convinced that you’re the Common Man that we’ve all been talking about, whether you like it or not. Of course, any honest, normal, hard-working American would find it tough going to be yanked out of his accustomed privacy and shoved into a position of prominence, with all this publicity and commotion, as you call it. It’s normal to flinch when a battery of flashbulbs go off in your face. It’s normal to be jittery when the spotlight is on you, when everything you do or say is reported in the newspapers or over the radio. We’ve been in this business a long time, Alan, and we know that the lust for publicity is neurotic and unhealthy. No normal person wants to be in the limelight. Normal people want to do a good job at their work, unmolested. They want to raise families and they want to find happiness in a small intimate circle. And when you say you want to pull out of this campaign, it’s perfectly normal. I admit it.”

I looked at Jeff in astonishment. He had worked himself up into a state where he had actually convinced himself. He went on:

“But you can’t go back. You can’t go back because you’re not Alan Barbour of Jackson City any longer. You’re the Common Man, whether you yourself believe it or not. Have you read the newspaper clippings from the Missouri newspapers? They believe it. The governor of your state believes it. They believe it, not because it’s true, but because they all want to believe it. Cannon believes it because it’s good for his paper. Governor Drucker, because it’s good personal publicity. Senator Marshlands believes it because for years he’s been talking about the common man as a political come-on, and now he’s glad that we’ve taken his abstraction and brought it to life. But why do you think the people believe it?”

Overawed by Jeff’s eloquence, Alan summoned up enough courage to say: “Yes, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. It’s been worrying me.”

“Don’t interrupt me and I’ll tell you,” Jeff snapped. “Look at our country today, look at the large cities and the small towns. You see cynicism and hopelessness everywhere. You see it in the faces of tired people in the buses and in the subways, in the unusual talk you hear around small-town courthouses, in the bored voices of men who can afford to drop a hundred dollars for a meal and a couple of bottles of wine at an airless nightspot. You hear it in the frightened voices of our politicians. You see it in the disappointed faces of the voters. You know that as well as I do. You’ve seen it. You’ve seen it in Jackson City, you’ve seen it in New York, you see it here in Washington. And to read the newspapers these days is enough to make you break out in a cold sweat.

“For years our politicians and statesmen, God help us, have spoken of one world, a new world, the four freedoms, the century of the common man. Well, brother, this is the new world; hungry, more terrified, and booted around than ever. People feel insecure, shaken, and the old symbols that once gave them strength have lost nearly all of their meaning. Before and during the war, we were fed on political doubletalk and now it’s all paying off in people refusing to believe in anything.

“We didn’t write the script for you at Jackson City when you replied to Governor Drucker’s speech. We didn’t write your script when you were ad libbing at the press conference in New York. You’re fresh, you’re new, and you talk the way people talk, only a little better, a little bouncier. And since you’re not running for office, or peddling some ideology, they believe you. Yesterday, you said something about the need for world-wide peace to Senator Marshlands. It wasn’t original, but because you said it, two New York newspapers boxed it and ran it on page one, as though it had never been said before. I’ll bet you that at least a thousand papers throughout the country ran it the same way. If Lippmann or any of the other pundits had written that, it would have passed unnoticed. But coming from you, it’s news, whether you like it or not. Brother, you’re the voice of the people, vox pop himself, in person!”

“Just a minute, mister. Allow me to finish. If you think that we have some sinister, hidden motive in mind, forget it. We haven’t. We’re not interested in politics and none of our clients are, either. We’re interested in helping to shape public opinion and we want our clients, the people who advertise in the Jackson City News-Record and so helped pay your salary, to benefit from your prestige. That’s all I have to say. Now, if you want to call it quits, say so here and now.”

During most of his oration, and that’s exactly what it was, Jeff had been pacing the room, but now that he had finished, he sat down on the couch and waited for Alan’s reply, if any. “Take your time,” he said. “Don’t make up your mind all at once.”

It had been a long speech, as I’ve said, and I thought Jeff had overworked some of his points, but all that talk now had Alan tied in knots. He looked at me like a punch-drunk fighter. Then he looked inquiringly at Diana, who smiled and nodded but said nothing.

“I’ll have to do a lot of thinking about this,” Alan finally said, “and I’ll have to do it alone.”

He got to his feet abruptly and walked to the door. Diana followed him. They must have walked around the block once or twice because they were back in no time and the expression on Mr. Integrity’s face was now completely changed.

“You know,” he said to us, “I think I must have been suffering from battle fatigue. It must have been those damned flashbulbs.”

“You’ve only got two more shindigs to get through today, the Presidential thing this afternoon and the Marshlands party tonight. After that, we’ll all take time out,” Jeff said.

Later, when Jeff and I were alone in our suite, he said: “We’ve got a prima donna on our hands.”

“There are only two ways of handling a prima donna with an overdeveloped conscience,” Jeff said. “You either fire him or else you compromise him with money and still more prominence. After that, it becomes a chain reaction. In three months this boy of ours will be acting as if he had been unanimously chosen Common Man in a national election, or as if he had passed a tough civil service exam for the job.”

We went back to join the others, who were now ready for the trip over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The phone rang. It was the White House press secretary calling.

TP214

BULLETIN COMMON MAN.

WASHINGTON, NOV. 20—THE PRESIDENT TODAY HONORED ALL AMERICAN FORMER SERVICEMEN AND WOMEN BY AWARDING THE LEGION OF MERIT TO ALAN BARBOUR. THE CEREMONIES WERE HELD ON THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN AS NEWSREELS AND CAMERAMEN RECORDED THE HISTORIC EVENT.

“AS ONE WHO HAS BEEN CHOSEN AS THE REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN, THE COMMON MAN AS MANY REGARD YOU, I CONFER THIS HONOR UPON YOU SPECIFICALLY FOR YOUR SERVICES IN THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN,” THE PRESIDENT SAID.

“BUT IN A LARGER SENSE, BY THIS AWARD, I HONOR ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO SERVED IN THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES, BOTH AT HOME AND ABROAD.”

THE PRESIDENT PINNED THE MEDAL ON MR. BARBOUR’S LAPEL AS MEMBERS OF THE CABINET AND OTHER DISTINGUISHED ONLOOKERS APPLAUDED.

PS325P

When our car pulled up before the Marshlands residence, not far from Embassy Row, it was quite obvious that the Senator’s “little party” had taken on the proportions of a full-fledged Washington reception. The windows of the mansion—it could hardly be called a house—were all lighted up, and the sound of an orchestra, a live orchestra, not a record player, could be clearly heard. Several guests, evidently top-drawer politicians, VIP’s, and their wives and/or mistresses, arrived at the same time we did.

Inside, in the spacious hall, there hung the celebrated Marshlands chandelier, alive with subtly moving light. From the head of the semicircular staircase, equally celebrated, that led to the reception room, Marshlands spotted us and came down to greet us. There were photographers present, and as Marshlands put his arm around Alan’s shoulder, there was the usual series of blinding flashes. In the reception room, the Senator, now in full possession of Alan, moved from group to group, amiably introducing him. In one corner of the room there was a small but fashionable orchestra, and they immediately stopped short and went into the Missouri Waltz as Alan entered the room.

We knew nearly everyone present, since all top public relations lead inevitably to Washington. We knew most of the politicians in the room, the three cabinet members, a former White House aide, the President’s official jester—“He’s very important, Alan, since a man who makes the President laugh is more important than the Secretary of the Treasury, who merely gives him a headache”—one judge of the United States Supreme Court, Governor Drucker, and a fistful of other governors who happened to be in town; about a dozen congressmen and senators; two members of the great political dynasty anxious for a clutch at this symbol of the fallen mantle, two sets of clenched, smiling teeth like those in an Alajálov cartoon; some of the younger men from the embassies, and virtually every newspaperman of consequence from the National Press Building. It was definitely what the Washington society columnists tomorrow would call a colorful and brilliant affair.

Jeff and I moved from group to group, going through the motions of institutional handshaking, careering down the room. Near an enormous refreshment table which had been set up in a room off the ballroom, or whatever it was, I ran into Bob Wheelwright.

“A little gumshoe work on a story with a federal angle. Brother, you’ve done a great job on your common man. But I can’t figure it out, and I might as well warn you that you’re now talking on record.”

“I’ve been following this operation ever since your common-man book came out, I’ve heard some of your explanations and I still don’t get it. Come on, what’s the pitch?”

“Sheer public service, my boy, sheer public service. An institutional operation, that’s all. Everybody was talking about the common man and we stuck him together with scotch tape on the charts, and then we went out and found him. You don’t think this is going to hurt Jefferson Clarke & Associates any, do you? That’s all there is to it. You know, Bob, one of these days you’re going to trip over your own subtlety and do the cutest pratfall.”

We crowded up to the bar. There was plenty of whisky and brandy, but nearly everyone seemed to be drinking champagne. The refreshment table was as lavish as the ones over at the Soviet Embassy when we were playing footie with Stalin. There were Virginia hams, roast turkeys, bowls of Astrakhan caviar, and umpteen different kinds of salad.

“Champagne and caviar,” Bob said. “I’m always suspicious whenever I see them handed out for free. I know damned well that there’s something cooking, and it ain’t rabbit stew.”

No matter how I felt about Bob Wheelwright as a person and a novelist—and I felt plenty and it was all good—he was tops as a journalist, by which I mean that he was a good working newspaperman with a weekly stint. It couldn’t be said of him, as it could of so many correspondents, that he saw everything and understood nothing. Bob Wheelwright saw, understood, and wrote with a shrewd, incisive pen. He had a towering contempt for all politicians of all kinds; and although he hated Communists most, probably because they were better at their trade than the bumbling Democrats and Republicans, yet it seemed he couldn’t escape them, since they kept cropping up in his articles and even in his novels. His weekly pieces for Deadline were brilliant things and had kept more politicians awake than benzedrine. But his restless, inquisitive mind was just what we didn’t want at this time.

The room was warm, the music was pleasantly schmaltzy, and the wine was excellent, brut and ice-cold. Through the wide entrance leading to the refreshment room, I could see that the Senator had Alan well in tow with Diana tailing along, never letting him out of her sight. Malcolm’s job was over and he was now hoisting a load aboard together with one of the British attachés.

“If it’s merely money you want,” Bob said, “then it’s quite harmless.”

“This common-man thing of yours,” he said. “I had a few drinks the other day with Roger MacLain, the poor lush, but plastered as he was, he got off a few homely truths about money and power.” A passing waiter paused to fill our glasses. “You know, Jack, in moderate amounts, money is simply useful, in larger amounts, it may be dirty; but it’s not dangerous. Look at all these people, I don’t mean the hangers-on, but the others. They’re all rich, Marshlands, Inwood, Montgomery—why, there must be about a quarter of a billion dollars in this room right now. Take our shaggy friend over there,”—he nodded in the direction of a national labor leader—“he has more actual power than a bagful of millionaires and he knows it, and so do they. But as Roger said, and for once he was right, money by itself isn’t power any longer. All these people need the support of the common man, not your bench-tooled boy but the millions of common men and women throughout the country, for whom the leaders have nothing but secret contempt. Do you know why so many of these people used to admire Stalin?”

“No, I’m serious. Because they envy the beautiful, professional job he has done in hog-tying the common people of Russia.”

“You’re damned right I’m a cynic, but I hope you don’t infer, like most people, that cynics are unhappy?”

“Au bloody contraire, I’ve rarely found a genuine cynic in good standing who, in his personal life, wasn’t a comfortable, amused, and eupeptic guy. It’s your men of great faith, the perpetual believers, that usually look dyspeptic and crucified. We cynics have gotten a reputation for unhappiness because we make other men unhappy, which is our function in life. You’re not amused, eh?”

Senator Marshlands poked his head through the door and beckoned to me. I excused myself and stepped outside. “I’d like to see you and Jeff in my study in about ten minutes. It’s on the floor above,” he said.

I got hold of Jeff, who was ribbing the shaggy labor leader on his inability to get a good press. Unobtrusively, we left the room and went upstairs to the Marshlands library. The Senator came in about five minutes later and poured three ponies of brandy from a magnificent decanter. We smoked and drank for a few minutes, talking about the success of the reception.

“This settles it for me,” the Senator said, “you’ve done a good job. You’ve lived up to your end of the deal and now I’m going to live up to mine.”

He reached into his desk and pulled out a bulky package. “This is all the documentary evidence in the Iroquois Metals case. If my committee were to prosecute cases like this, we’d be busy for the next twenty years.” He handed the package to Jeff, who thanked him for it. “Use your discretion as to how and when you turn it over to Bennett. I’ll give you boys a tip. Iroquois Metals stock has been way down for the last six months. If I were you, I’d buy a little of it. I think it’s due for a rise.”

That was all there was to it. We had another drink and talked about future public appearances of Alan with the Senator, then we separated and went downstairs.

The party was in full swing. Near the staircase, as I came down from the library, I saw Diana dancing with Alan, and there was no doubt about it. She was a gal with a three-ply mission in life: money, love, and idealism, a nice combination, if you can make it. That’s the way it always was with Diana. It could never be one thing, just a man, for example, or just money, or just idealism. But she was in love, all right, in love with another victim; it always had to be a victim. I tapped Alan on the shoulder and took his gal away from him.

“You mustn’t overdo this with Alan,” I said, as we danced a few steps. “We want this to break in the political and society columns, not in the gossip columns.”

“You’re right,” she said. “Let’s all go over to the bar and have a drink.”

Mrs. Marshlands came sailing into the bar and took Alan by the arm to show him off to some late arrivals. He smiled good-naturedly and submitted, like the good St. Bernard he was.

“Come on,” I said to Diana, “let’s make the rounds, the party’s warming up.”

The orchestra—piano, trumpet, clarinet, and drums—was beginning to blow its collective top. The boys had been fed Marshlands’ good bourbon all evening and were now playing good, danceable Dixieland, just for the kicks. The Marshlands joint was not jumping, precisely, but it was coming alive. Couples were spread out all over the place and the celebrated staircase was filled with people who rarely, if ever, sat on staircases. Diana and I danced, drank, wisecracked, and horsed around until nearly two in the morning. Then the party began to break up. Alan, Malcolm, and Diana left shortly after two, and Jeff and I left about half an hour later.

It wasn’t far to the hotel and Jeff and I decided to walk. We hit the pavements for about a block in silence and then Jeff said:

It all had the quality of dream, the kind of dream in which the part of you that gets booted around during the day, the part that leads with its chin, no matter who you are, comes into its own. But running through the dream there’s always a vague, undefinable mood of apprehension. It isn’t something quite clear but you know it’s there, an invisible backdrop against which the dream fantasy cavorts. It’s your dream, all right; nobody else is dreaming it for you. And since it’s yours, it lies within your power to be as rich as Henry Ford, the most brilliant conversationalist in the world, the most satisfying swordsman since Casanova. But that isn’t what you dream. You dream something else, something of which you’re ashamed, and you come back into the waking world thoroughly depressed.

Alan’s syndicated column was a smash, the Iroquois Metals newspaper campaign was in full swing, there were endless conferences with VIP’s in business and government. We took on a dozen new accounts. Yet always there was the feeling that it was somehow unreal. And the secret voice which continually said that it was all screwy, that this wasn’t how it ought to be done.

There was also about our activity in those exciting days the rivet-gun, dramatic quality of a skillful montage in a modern documentary film. Things seemed to happen in an explosive way, in short, sharp bursts. There were no shadows, no halftones, no subtleties, no nuances. Everything we did in those terrible, intense weeks seemed to be done in a blinding light and under enormous pressure. I got up tired in those days, came to the office early, plowed through piles of mail, sat half-asleep through Plans Board meetings, went to lunch with Jeff where there was nothing but shop talk, and then back to the office for more punishment. It got so that unless I took a few benzedrine tablets during the day, I’d start dozing at my desk along about mid-afternoon. I had always disliked the effects of benzedrine: it played hell with my memory at times, made me as garrulous as a filibusterer, decreased my appetite, and slowed up my co-ordination. But at least it masked my fatigue and created the illusion of wakefulness, so that somehow I managed to get through the day. I ate little and at odd hours, drank a lot, and started to lose weight. After I got to bed, I would lie in the dark and daydream like one of our thwarted writers in his cubbyhole down the dark corridor, and that was bad.

I had enough socked away to be independent for the rest of my life, and I would lie there listening to the sound of the clock on my night table and think how wonderful it would be if you could live in such a way that you didn’t have to plead with some dumb bastard of an industrialist to accept a policy that would save his neck or his business, so that you wouldn’t have to build up a double-dealing politician whose guts you hated. I wanted no more of that empty, frustrated feeling you got when you worked with nothing but smart angles and slick lingo. I wanted no more butterflies in my stomach, no more Plans Board conferences, and above all, I didn’t want to have to go through another scene like the one at the Shoreham when Jeff smacked Alan back into line. Yes, especially that, the look on Alan’s face—I suppose it must have been the flashbulbs.

—Build a home up in Connecticut with a custom-made, built-in record player and a study with cork-lined walls, like Proust’s, to kill all the noise, where it will be quiet, where you can read and write in absolute silence.

Then the seconal would sneak up on me. First, I would no longer hear the faint ticking of the clock, then my breathing would become more relaxed and even, then I wouldn’t be fighting it any longer, just waiting, my eyes heavy, my body inert, not tense . . .

But with Jeff it was different. He thrived on the blinding spurts of activity, the behind-the-scenes manipulation, the glare and the tenseness. He always seemed rested, well-barbered, in complete control of things, as alert and ready to go at ten at night as he was first thing in the morning. The difference between us, I imagined, lay in the fact that with Jeff this was a culmination, the fullest expression of some inner need. It was as if he had always lived for this spread of power, perhaps from his very infancy. He needed it in a special, desperate way, as if his life depended on it. He was not a financier or a politician or a labor leader, so that the normal avenues to power were closed to him. But by means of our Common Man, God forgive me, who was no longer Alan Barbour but a trademarked symbol, he could borrow and marshal the strength of others for his own use. The prestige of important industrialists, governors, and even the President of the United States himself; the demagogy of Marshlands; the mass weight of millions of dumb drudges and the thousands of neurotic intellectuals who can live without faith but never without a savior; the money that poured into our treasury—all these were at his disposal when he chose to use them, not commercially but as instruments of power. That was as far as I dared to think at that time. It was enough.

I suspected that Diana knew more about this than I did at the time. I was dead on my feet, worried, and my brain was filled with unwritten copy about power vs. money and the fear that Jeff might turn out to be some kind of public relations Huey Long, or an American Hitler with an enormous, well-greased machine for the working of his will, and me as a kind of reluctant Goering. It wasn’t as clear as that at the time, but this is how I remember it, looking back now, out of my greater knowledge and understanding.

But Diana’s problem was less complex and far more fundamental than mine. She tackled it directly and without any masculine illusions. She knew, in a way that I didn’t, that Jeff was pyramiding his operations like an old-fashioned holding company. She also suspected that when Jeff got through with him, Alan would be a conceited ham or a washed-up, forgotten celebrity, no man for any woman. And she wanted Alan in a way that was admirable to watch in its singleminded drive. Every time she laid her eyes on him, something seemed to happen inside her, as if the mainspring of a watch were being wound just one twist too tightly. But whatever it was, and no matter how she stood, she had it bad.

As for Roger MacLain, there was no telling how he was taking it. He played it deadpan, no wisecracks, no bitterness, no cynicism, except that he got to smelling of whisky along about ten in the morning, but he was doing a beautiful job.

Alan’s column got off to a honey of a start. It was regarded as news even by the papers that weren’t running it. The first week it broke, it was quoted twice on the floor of the House of Representatives. At first there were weekly conferences with Alan on the column, but gradually these were dispensed with until finally all the material was handled by Roger, Jeff, and myself, with Alan’s approval taken for granted. He was too busy elsewhere.

American Chronicle, Inc., the documentary film people, were working on a film of the Common Man, his hometown, family, etc., how he was chosen and then the wind-up with the President on the White House lawn. We had reached the peak of our campaign. It was time now to weed out some of the less profitable accounts and build us a stable of pure and more lucrative thoroughbreds.

Alan’s appearance with Senator Marshlands at the mass meeting in Madison Square Garden for the Hopi and Navajo Indians was a four-star job. On the platform, there was a glittering array of distinguished citizens which included:

Item: One member of the great political dynasty, who made his ghosted speech and then hotfooted over to Fifty-second Street to keep an appointment with a celebrated blues singer, thus proving something about racial tolerance.

Item: One senior partner of a top Wall Street banking house who once, on his return from the Soviet Union, made a revealing and succinct statement to the ship reporters: “Joseph Stalin is the most outstanding statesman in the world today. He is a man after my own heart. There are no strikes in Russia, no labor trouble.”

Item: A varied assortment, male and female, of stage, screen, and radio stars. Of these crypto-Communist Hollywood celebrities, Bob Wheelwright had once written: “Ashamed of the belittling and meaningless roles in which they are cast, overwhelmed by a sense of conscious guilt because of their inflated incomes, made to feel inferior because of the sneers and the taunts of superior but non-Hollywood, non-Broadway, and non-Radio City intellectuals, these mimes in mink, these world-savers in grease paint, feel that support of Communist fronts will result in telegrams from Garrick, Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt, and Duse, reading: ‘All is forgiven.’ Somehow, playing at revolution in white tie and tails seems to justify the possession of a Beverly Hills home and a swimming pool. It also seems to improve the taste of delicacies flown from the East and the feel of sables imported from the fatherland of the proletariat.”

Item: One brigadier-general (ret.), substantiating everything that has been said about the military mind.

Item: A job-lot of scrambled left-wing politicians, labor leaders, and all the members of the executive board of the Committee.

The meeting was colorful and exciting. After the preliminaries, to use the language of the Garden, the Hollywood stars got up and read their spot commercials. They were now reading a different kind of script. Before the footlights, in the studios, on location, at the mikes, they said, giving it everything: “Betty, of course you realize that when I walk out of this house, it’s forever.” Or: “Listen, kid, no cheap Broadway tart can twotime me.” Or: “Ya can’t get away with this, Muggsy, see?” Or: “For you, darling, I’d tear down the stars.”

An actor, whose entire personality can only be described as porcine, now faced the microphones. He had started as a boy wonder and would still be one when the bitter middle years touched his empty face, a perpetual boy wonder. He could do extraordinary things with his features, and he did them now, as a battery of spotlights converged on him.

He was the pleader for the downtrodden of the earth, an advocate for the Hopi and Navajo Indians, of whom he had known nothing before he saw this script. You could hear the director briefing him before the scene. (“Give it everything you’ve got, Raymond. Think of the disintegration that faces the world, think of Soviet Russia where movie actors are decorated and honored as People’s Actors, think of Culture, Progress. Forget that you’re a man who lives by putting makeup on his face. We’re trying to show the American people that while we spend billions of dollars for political relief abroad, native Indians are starving to death, getting eight dollars a month as a subsistence allowance from the richest government in the world.”)

Raymond Page stood before the microphones, frowning, waiting for the applause to die down. He deliberately stooped his shoulders and made with the face as if he were playing the lead in a scene where he stands before the World Tribunal, pleading, gesturing, declaiming, mugging, pounding the table, with a three-year contract in his pocket at four thousand a week and a cut of the gross, no cancellation clause. (“All right, that’s fine, Raymond, but with more humility, more compassion. Think of the starving Navajo Indians. Think of the common men and women of this great country, of the girls behind in their rent, of the masses—those pushed-around extras of History. Fine, that’s fine, Raymond. All right, let’s shoot this scene again.”)

Mugging like a stern advocate, giving with the compassion, Raymond Page read the lines which had been written for him down there on Thirteenth Street. He said:

“At a time when the first inhabitants of this country are destitute and starving, our imperialist government sends billions of dollars of food and munitions to the reactionary enemies of the Soviet Union. In the name of all who suffer from hunger and privation, no matter where, I appear here tonight—”

When he had finished, the jam-packed auditorium cut loose with wild applause. Up in the galleries, the little unattractive stenographers (not the good-looking ones with fancy hairdos who came to work at ten), the little bookkeepers, filing clerks, shipping clerks, furriers, painters, the rank-and-file members of the left-wing CIO unions all stamped and whistled and yelled. They applauded and cheered the actor who, in his last picture, had come home shattered by the war only to find his beautiful, young wife had been unfaithful to him and that now there would never be a unanimous, peace-loving world. It was wonderful to have this glamorous Hollywood star, this shattered veteran who was bitter about infidelity and the postwar world, this disillusioned millionaire who finds happiness in sacrificing himself for others, this earnest young attorney who runs on a good-government ticket against a corrupt political gang, this tender, if overweight, lover. It was wonderful to have him on your side saying things like: “The mighty peoples of the Soviet Union, the common people of our great land, progressives of all peace-loving countries” and then reading about it in the paper the next day, forgetting the fleabag in which you lived, and remembering only that you are identified with the great of the earth.

Then there was a people’s ballet depicting “in form and rhythm, America’s harsh treatment of her Indian wards and the need for a greater understanding with our allies, the mighty Russian people.” There was a Negro baritone, who sang “Old Man River.” There was a cute, short speech by a Broadway playwright. Then, after the semifinal, came the main event:

Alan Barbour, popularly known as America’s Common Man, weight 154 pounds, national champion, not wearing purple trunks, but that store suit he wore when he first came to New York from Jackson City, Missouri. Folks, Senator Marshlands has just stepped to the microphones, having been introduced by the chairman. Not that he needs any introducing, no, sir. The Senator receives a tremendous ovation, as you can hear, folks, and with him—this is the surprise of the evening—is Alan Barbour. Now listen to what the Senator has to say as the applause dies down. “Before I address myself to the problem which has brought us all together tonight, my friends, I want to introduce to this fine American gathering a young man who is the symbol of our country’s deep desire for social justice and peace. He is not going to speak to you at this time, but he is here as an unofficial but very real representative of the common men and women of the United States. Ladies and gentlemen, here he is—Alan Barbour.” That was Senator Marshlands speaking and now the twenty thousand people in the Garden have gone wild. You can’t hear it, but the band is playing the Missouri Waltz and everyone has risen to his feet to honor this fine young man, typical of his generation. All the distinguished people on the platform have also risen. Mr. Barbour is now shaking hands with Senator Marshlands. Now he is shaking hands with the chairman of the Committee. Just listen to this reception for this veteran from Jackson City, Missouri. And now the lights are growing dim in this vast auditorium. It’s pitch black, with only the spotlights centered on Barbour as he stands at the edge of the platform waving to the men and women in the audience. The chairman is looking at his watch, nervously, precious radio time, you know, but the crowd wants Barbour. Up in the galleries, above the cheering and whistling, they are setting up a chant, “Speech, speech, speech.” He shakes his head. Mr. Barbour isn’t going to speak at this time. This ovation has been going on for nearly three minutes, but now it’s beginning to die down. The chairman raps for order. Senator Marshlands approaches the battery of microphones and prepares to speak. Here he is:

The Iroquois Metals campaign had been under way for more than a month. Half-page advertisements had appeared in newspapers in more than a score of cities, twenty-three to be exact. The advertorials went all out for Senator Marshlands and the Common Man, on the need for greater production, on the necessity for wise labor leadership, on our responsibility to the Hopi and Navajo Indians. Ashley Bennett was a one-man liberal committee, fighting the Good Fight. The series of ads, the spot announcements on the radio over a national hookup five times a week, the newspaper publicity, and canned editorials, had set Bennett back a young fortune and he now wanted results. We would give them to him, all right, but in good time.

During all this time, Alan was moving along at a great clip. The worried, screwed-up look he sometimes had in the beginning was gone and I regretted it. It belonged to him, like his tousled hair and his slow-breaking grin. Alan’s column “Mr. America Says—” was being used by more than three hundred papers. He was a celebrity in his own right. Grinning and taking it all in his stride, he stood before meetings, conventions, and public dinners, and ad libbed his grass-roots wisecracks, got quoted in the news columns, and flushed an occasional editorial. At the annual gourmets’ and wine-tasters’ dinner, for example, he spoke up for Missouri cooking and said: “This has all been very fine, gentlemen, but personally I like meat and potatoes.” And then a plug for our wine account: “Speaking only for myself, I must say that wine makes me sleepy, but I suppose that’s because I hail from Missouri and ain’t used to fancy eatin’ and drinkin’, but I say if people want to get sleepy after supper they may as well do it with American rather than foreign wine.” The assembled gourmets laughed and loved it and a small bale of clippings came in on that one alone. And about twenty editors used it as a peg on which to hang one of those pieces in praise of simple eating and an important, growing American industry, all in the same editorial. There were others, almost every other day.

It was now time to get down to cases on the Iroquois Metals showdown. Jeff sat on my couch and announced the new line:

“Jack, I think we’ve been too generous with Bennett. He’s out in the clear, his reputation has taken on a new fragrance and we have all the documentary evidence against him in a nice, neat package. I think the job we’ve done is worth more than two hundred and fifty thousand.”

“That was the price we agreed upon and I think we ought to stick by it,” I said.

“When we took on this account again,” he said, “we thought it was going to be a straight public relations operation that would only involve cleaning him up in the press and getting the son-of-a-bitch to change his spots, but we promised nothing. But now it’s something different. We’ve got the documents in the case and we got them because of the Marshlands tie-in with our common-man campaign. That makes it entirely different.”

I offered some resistance. It was feeble enough, to be sure, and finally it was decided to hike the Bennett fee to half a million dollars.

We called Chicago and the next day Bennett and Laswell were up in a suite at the Waldorf. Jack and I went over for one of those long conferences.

First thing I noticed about Bennett was a change in his appearance. He had put on weight and all that nervous twitching had disappeared. He had the same two-tone freckles, the same close-set eyes, and he still had that obscene way of hitching up his trousers, but his clothes were more casual and he was wearing a hairy tweed suit and a loosely knotted woven tie. The scotch was the best that money could buy. We did and said the customary preliminary things. Then we got down to business and Jeff was blunt about it. He reached into his pocket and handed Bennett one of the several incriminating letters to Congressman Post which had found its way into the Marshlands committee’s files. Bennett was bug-eyed when he saw it.

“We can get the rest, all of it,” Jeff said, “the canceled checks and everything. But I’m afraid it’s going to cost you another two hundred and fifty thousand.”

We batted the thing back and forth and finally the deal boiled down to ways and means. And then when it was nearly dark and the bottle of scotch had been knocked off, we found the formula.

“We can’t have this showing on our books,” Laswell said. “A half-a-million dollars for public relations, why, that’s a scandal in itself.”

“Why not handle it as a stock transaction? You’re standing at about ninety now. Why don’t you sell us enough shares at eighty to make the difference and then buy it back a month later at the market price? Something like that. I’ll have our legal and tax people work it out.”

And that’s how it was. We called in a public stenographer and the necessary letters were dictated, and then Jeff phoned over to the office for the package containing the IM evidence. There was more drinking and then, just before we left, Jeff and I stepped into Bennett’s dressing room to freshen up a bit.

“Look at this,” I said, pointing to a couple of well-known liberal magazines on Bennett’s table. Jeff smiled, it was a cold, contemptuous smile. “The poor bastard,” he said. “It isn’t enough for him that we’ve killed the investigation. He’s got to believe.”

It was a cold, windy night when I hit the street. All this occupational drinking had stupefied me and I decided to walk home. Jeff was right, but he didn’t know why. I didn’t know why, either, at the time, but I had a vague suspicion. These people had to believe out of a blind but unanswerable impulse, growing out of an overpowering sense of guilt, not the guilt about war contracts and the millions of casualties that solved nothing, or the mail-order profits running into tens of millions of dollars, or the inherited wealth, or social injustice, of which, God knows, there was more than enough. Later, much later, I was to discover that this guilt went far deeper than social guilt, but that night I knew that whatever it was, it was responsible for Marshlands, Bennett, Roger, Jeff, and me, all of us, all of us dreaming one thing and acting out something quite different in our daily lives. Whatever it was, it was something that made the dream impossible and there was an emptiness, an inner ache that made belief, any belief, imperative. Belief in numerology, Christian Science, in a liberalism that gagged at a solitary lynching in Mississippi but condoned the lynching of entire populations in Eastern Europe. In work that afforded no inner satisfaction, in the spreading of ideas in which none of us had faith and which resulted finally in a vulgar kind of hedonism where pleasure equated drunken parties and expensive whores. . . .

The next day, in the afternoon, Diana called me on the intercom. She was feeling lousy and would I please get her out of the office and take her to some nice, warm bar where we could drink and talk. My desk was piled high with stuff, and Louise Bailey was furious at the long hours she was putting in with no time for her creative efforts, but I said yes. So we found a nice, warm, luxurious, glittering bar not far from Radio City and, stuck away in a corner, we had our drinks and we talked. She sat there, as smartly gotten up as any woman in the place, and although I knew that nearly ten years had passed since the days down on Bank Street, and that she surely was an entirely different person now, yet what I saw was the kid who came down from Vassar full of bounce and Lit. 4, who wanted desperately to break into the newspaper business and did, the gal who had gone over to Joel Simon, taking a part of me with her, the gal who had come to see me a year or so later because Joel Simon had been plugged between the eyes and was dead somewhere on the Ebro and she wanted to forget all about it.

And now she wanted to talk to me. Sure, she could talk to me; go ahead. But the things we talked about in the beginning were unimportant, the kind of things you say when you’re stalling for time, scared stiff. And so, sitting in the fancy, glittering bar, she gave me one of those brave, Madison Avenue, public-relations smiles, stiff upper lip and all that sort of thing, the sort of thing that was supposed to have made the British Empire what it was—and look at it now. I knew what it meant in our case and I also knew it was no go. I knew she had had enough. But I also knew that she didn’t have what it takes to get out, and, to be completely honest, neither did I.

Arise, ye prisoners of glut, you have nothing to lose but your Cartier chains. Back in the days down in Greenwich Village, we never thought that the good things of life, the fruits of enlightened self-interest, would some day drive us to an empty kind of despair. You have nothing to lose, Miss Forbes, but your stocks, fancy income, John Frederics hats, swank apartment, and a well-stocked liquor cabinet. All of which is fine as long as your taste buds are at least partially anesthetized, or as long as you can somehow trim, compromise, and set up a variety of tricky defenses against whatever it is inside that plays hell with you. I could have told her that it was no use, that there was no going back to Bank Street, to being broke on Thursdays, to sharing our last dollar in some Ginso restaurant the day before payday. I could have told her, but didn’t, that this business of trying to blot out the present by going back in time to one’s own past was a mug’s game, all you got out of it was a sudden, cold feeling of depression.

Sitting there, talking in that special, bright, evasive way that we had, I knew that she realized that all of her plans for using Alan as a come-on for Worthy Causes was just so much gab. It was part of the act of trying to appear something which you really weren’t; this routine of being one of the highest-paid public relations gals in New York from nine to five and a world-saver from five to nine, this routine of dreaming up noble motives for clients during the day and pretending to be concerned with sharecroppers and Negroes and Navajo Indians after hours, a part-time humanitarian. All this was not said, but felt, during the first two drinks, the bright talk masking the despair, smiling.

“Look, Jack, I say all this to you in confidence.” And once again she was the gal I knew down on Bank Street and there was no need for me to assure her of my discretion. “I want to get Alan out of all this. He’s doing a great job, but it isn’t good for him.” I started to speak, but she cut in, short, going ahead at a fast clip. “Jeff’s original idea hasn’t worked out as we planned it. You remember, Alan was supposed to be the office guinea pig, to help us anticipate public opinion. Looking back, I don’t think Jeff ever believed that himself. And now it’s the other way around. Alan’s the gimmick that helps shape public opinion, he’s just another smart publicity gadget to help us sell wine, Iroquois Metals, air-conditioning, air brakes, and whatever else we happen to be peddling at the moment. It’s all very important and it’s all very profitable, but I think it’s a waste of time and energy, I mean for Alan. If I had wanted to—”

“In about six months, Alan and I will have enough money not to worry for a long time to come. When I think of it, I say to myself, ‘We’ll be free.’ ” She emphasized the word and then smiled. Now she was talking, not like a dame in a radio script but like a woman in love, sweaty and breathless. “Yes, I always italicize it when I say it myself. Free.” She leaned forward and took hold of one of my hands.

“Maybe this is more than I should ask of you. I want Alan to write that column himself. Roger is doing a fine job, but it isn’t Alan. I want him to talk it out with himself every day, to dictate it and I’ll take it down and polish it for him if he needs it. You should hear him when he’s out of this phony role in which we’ve cast him. He’s simply unbelievable, real, and it goes clear through.”

She stopped dead in that breathless run of hers and smiled the way she used to down on Bank Street.

“You think I’m silly, don’t you? I want him to speak for all the things that are close to his heart and that are close to mine. Do you remember the first day he came to New York and set us all back on our heels? Well, he doesn’t talk that way in public any more, not after the showdown in Washington. He’s smart, all right, and he knows how to handle himself, but all the freshness has gone out of him. It isn’t that he’s depressed or that he suspects anything, and I’m not so sure that there’s anything to suspect. There isn’t a public relations outfit in the country that wouldn’t like to lay hands on some of our accounts. But there are so many things that are beyond him, the smooth operations, the smart angles, the slick pay-offs. It isn’t that he’s ignorant. He isn’t. He’s nobody’s fool. You’ll think I’ve gone out of my mind but I honestly think that he’s got the makings of a great man, not the way they come these days—available, unscrupulous, completely amoral, carrying a mental price list of everything and everybody—but the way they used to come. Or maybe I’m just being romantic and maybe great men in the past were like our great men today and even in history we are the victims of propaganda. Don’t smile, I’m terribly serious. He could be great, or at any rate he could serve a great purpose, if he weren’t tied up with us. It’s not that we aren’t honest, and it’s not that we don’t tell the truth. Sure, we tell the truth, a propagandist’s truth, a truth with an ulterior and hidden purpose, which makes it a half-truth at best—”

She slowed down and gave me an embarrassed smile: the first time I’d seen that smile since she came in to ask me for the job. I ordered another round of drinks. When they came, I said:

“It seems to me, Miss Forbes, that you’re in the wrong business. You know the old gag, you haven’t got the courage of your convictions about the things in which you don’t believe.”

“No, I haven’t. And neither have you,” she said. “What the hell do you care about Iroquois Metals? As a matter of fact, you hate Bennett’s guts and you feel the same way about the beer people, the Tri-City stuffed shirts, all of them. Isn’t that the truth?”

“All right, let me get this off my chest and I’m finished. As public relations people, I think we made a great mistake about Alan. We thought we picked a soft-spoken, colorful hick as a front for a very smart operation, but—” She stopped short, biting it off again.

“Look, Diana,” I said, “if there’s anything you want to get off your chest, you can spill it to me and be sure that it won’t go any further. What is it?”

“There’s nothing except what I’ve already told you, but I don’t think Alan will want to renew the contract when it’s up. I’m pretty sure of that.”

“Hell, that’s nearly two years off. He’ll be squeezed dry by that time. You know what happens to these nine-day wonders.”

This kind of talk could have gone on all night, but there was the work waiting for me back at the office and we called it an afternoon. She walked me back to Rockefeller Plaza where the wind did handsprings between the bank on the corner of Forty-ninth Street and the AP building further along, and we stood and talked for maybe a minute.

“I mean—the way I feel about Alan, that I hope to marry him soon—all of it.”

She squeezed my arm affectionately, good old Jack standing at the curb, the guy who goes to all the weddings and christenings and funerals, even the funerals in Spain, steady and reliable. Then she turned and hailed a passing cab.

Back at the office, I turned the top lights off, leaving only my desk light on and sat there thinking, letting the piled-up work wait, to hell with it. I thought of Diana, unhappy, with her chin up, about to launch herself into a new, fresh, emotional adventure.

Somehow Diana had never learned her lesson. Sure, she was smart and capable, but at heart, deep down, she was an amateur, and maybe that was the way she wanted it, a steady sucker for a Left hook. But now it turned out that she was shrewder and had more weight than I’d imagined. She knew that, despite the surface glamour and excitement of our common-man campaign, it was a shoddy piece of commercialism and Alan was permitted an occasional iconoclastic wisecrack or gag only because it didn’t make any difference. She had come to us to forget Joel Simon and his screwy kind of idealism, to forget him in the cynicism and glitter of a top-flight public-relations outfit. And, brother, she had come to the right place. We had given her all the substitutes for the real thing. But peace with one’s conscience, that was something else again. We weren’t in that business.

We had chosen Alan as the personification of the common man who had emerged from Roger’s report, Exhibit A. And now there was a danger that this nice, bright, amiable, simple guy from Missouri might turn out to be not Exhibit A, but a real common man. Not the social worker’s idea of the common man, pliant, grateful, always queued-up for one thing or another, a unit in a case load. Not the politician’s concept, either, a sucker for campaign promises and glib ghosted speeches, a stooge in the conspiracy of power, patronage and other less obvious forms of legal bribery. Not the Communists’ concept: a parader in “spontaneous” demonstrations ordered from above, a disciplined, political robot faithfully repeating slogans which changed from week to week. Not Wallace’s nor Ickes’ concept, nor Marshall Field’s, nor the other millionaires who believe in a kind of social schizophrenia, two worlds: their own world of wealth, comfort, and power, and the other where the massed commonalty swarms. But suppose that Alan Barbour, because of our campaign, turned out to have all the things that the dreamers and the poets and the writers attributed to the common man as an abstraction? That was a man-sized hunk of something to chew on.

The intercom buzzed and it was Jeff who wanted to know if I was still there, and could he drop in for a drink.

“What the hell are you doing here at this hour?” he asked as he sat down. I knew he’d had a tough day’s work, steady and grueling, the tail end of a long session with some smart operators from the Argentine who had a little story they had to tell the American people, and we were the boys who were to tell it for them. Yet, despite all the hard work, he seemed alive and refreshed, ready to go. I pointed to the stack of work on my desk. He laughed and got up and started getting drinks out of my liquor cabinet.

“I called you about an hour ago, but Louise told me you were out. Marshlands was here and we talked for quite a while and we wanted you in on it, but he had a train to make and couldn’t wait.”

“A new twist in our campaign. What do you see after a junket across the country visiting the plants of our clients? What do you see after that?”

“I haven’t thought far ahead,” I said. “Maybe we could get the State Department to clear us on a trip to Europe with Alan meeting the common men of the few countries outside of the Iron Curtain. Maybe something like that. We might flush one of the smaller powers with a bill of goods to sell, a loan maybe or more free dough. I can’t see anything beyond that. That would give us just about everything we wanted.”

“Well,” Jeff said, “it seems that our friend Marshlands has much more ambitious plans. You’ll never guess what’s on his mind now.”

“It’s a little plan of his to be called the Common Men of America, Inc. Wait till you hear this. He says there are about fifty million people in this country, suckers with peanut savings accounts, the small businessmen scraping along from month to month, the holders of life-insurance policies, professional people, farmers, clergymen, the little guys who hold ten or twenty shares of AT&T or some other good stock. And he feels that these average men and women of America—I’m using his words—these average men and women are being discriminated against by big business, big labor, and big government, and that the right of collective bargaining belongs to the common people of the United States quite as much as it does to the labor boys and the top industrialists. Hang on to your hat, here it comes. The Senator feels that if these fifty million Americans, or a sizable fraction thereof, as he put it, were to organize for the purpose of reasserting their constitutional rights to enjoy the benefit of their skills and their years of sacrifice, you’d have the most potent political force in the country. Briefly, that’s his idea. Do you get it?”

Jeff sipped his manzanilla, rolling it over on his tongue, enjoying it perhaps as much as he did this latest proposed twist in our campaign. I put about ten drops of bitters in my glass, swirled it around and then filled it with gin.

“It would be nice work if you could get it and God knows it’s a smart operation. But I don’t like it.”

“Because it was tried in Germany and Italy and we had to fight a war to knock it cold, that’s why.”

“It may and it may not,” I said. “You can never tell, but it’s certainly a smart idea for the Senator to build himself an auxiliary outfit in case he ever needs some brass-knuckled pressure. You can build a national organization around any crackpot program in this country. Huey Long did it with Every Man a King, Townsend got ’em with Thirty Dollars Every Thursday, the Klan still gets ’em with White Supremacy, and I suppose Marshlands can do it with his fifty million Americans and Alan as the common-man stooge out in front. Every little frightened stockholder and policyholder, all the frustrated little people will get a shot in the arm when they hear of this. For my money, it looks like some kind of fascist bid for power, American style, and I don’t think it will do us any good.”

“Well, think about it,” Jeff said. “There’s no rush. There’s a hell of a lot we have to do before Marshlands’ plan comes up for heavy consideration, but think about it.”

But I didn’t have to think about it; I’d been thinking about it all my life.

I was dead on my feet when I got home along about eleven that night and found a telegram from Margaret saying she would arrive at Grand Central Station the following afternoon and would I meet her. She dared me not to. It was a longish message and among other things it said I needn’t bother about trying to arrange for hotel accommodations, that she had reserved a room for herself for an indefinite stay at one of the hotels around Gramercy Park. All of which meant that the work would keep piling up on my desk and that sleep for the next week or ten days would become impossible. I poured myself four fingers of gin and bitters and sat down to figure how it could be managed.

Why had she chosen one of those genteel places around Gramercy Park? Maybe it was one of the hotels at which Judge Cornell stopped when he came to New York. I didn’t know. Gramercy Park, an appealing kind of mellowness, the forgotten celebrities coming out of the mildewed Players’ Club, the charm of old New York, as the neighborhood realtors used to say back in the dear, quaint days when there was no such thing as a renters’ market; the high, spiked iron fence around the private park to which only fortunate tenants with keys were admitted. All that lovely old-world charm and two blocks east there were the rotting tenements of what was left of the Gashouse district—

Of course, if those few inevitable steps were to be retraced, the quiet of the Park and the restful simplicity of some of its side streets were to be preferred to the benzedrine atmosphere of midtown Manhattan. But the last time I saw her in Chicago, she said that she had a nice, clean, respectable touch of floosie about her and I supposed that in the end we would be spending most of the time up in the East Fifties and Sixties, where you can get it any way the customer asks for it.

We had been corresponding right along, after I got back from Jackson City, and through her letters, I had gotten the feeling of Madison: the altogether remarkable lakes not far from the city, the off-in-the-distance countryside and the serenity of the town itself.

“But it would be wonderful to get away for a while,” she had written. “It’s a fairly large city for this part of the country, but it’s a small town after all. There’s no way of being lost with yourself here. My father lectures at the University, there’s the LaFollette crowd, who, as you may know, are no longer important, which is a shame, and everyone is kind to me because I am Judge Cornell’s daughter, the poor kid who couldn’t make a go of her marriage with her hero husband. And because I loathe pity I want to come to New York. But you mustn’t get the idea that Madison, in its way, isn’t sophisticated. Once every year the Theatre Guild comes, and some of the best concert artists, not the flashy ones but the really great ones. But now I want one whole winter in New York, maybe longer, theaters, art galleries, some expensive shopping, all the things you read about and seen in the movies. I want to see a few Broadway plays and hear Myra Hess at Carnegie Hall and I want to take Douglas Burnside’s course at the New School on the younger English poets.”

She answered, saying that while she liked Cummings better than the young gentlemen from England, nevertheless she wanted to take the Burnside lectures.

And now here she was coming up the concrete ramp at Grand Central Station. She was dressed in a tailored suit over which she wore a gray broadtail coat, and one of those flat, fur toques on the side of her head that the girls were wearing that year. She spotted me at once out of all the people standing behind the restraining ropes at the exit and came running toward me. And I liked the way her coat was flattened out in whirling sweeps and the gray of it matching the color of her eyes.

It’s easy to be fooled at a railroad station. The girl may be in love with you, or it may be the contagious excitement all around; you can’t tell for sure. So we embraced and kissed each other hesitantly, almost awkwardly, both of us retracing not a few but thousands of steps, standing there looking silly for a moment. And we talked the way people talk in railroad stations, smiling almost stiffly, trying too hard, and estranged from each other by the vastness of the station, by all the noise and the scurrying crowds and the too-eager, too-hearty shouts of greeting on all sides of us. We turned and walked to the point where her baggage was to be picked up. The sun came through the enormous arched windows of the station, sending its familiar, slanting beams of hazy light down and across the great hall. We passed the celebrated clock at the information desk and then moved on over toward the wide marble steps leading to the taxi run on Vanderbilt Avenue. At the head of the stairs, Margaret paused and turned to look back at the station, then she turned again and handed me a slow, confident smile and squeezed my arm, hanging on tightly.

Everything went off with entire smoothness, everything that happened had the quality of one of those rare dreams in which you triumph over every obstacle, not the kind where you’re booted out of a nightspot for not having enough dough to pay the check. There was no long wait for the baggage and the first taxi that came along was ours. The driver was straight out of a theatrical agency and delivered a homily in Brooklynese on how much better the world would be if only there were less distrust in it—“Everybody tryin’ to slip sumpin’ over on de next guy. Everybody suspicious, worried, butterflies in your stummick. That ain’t livin’. That’s slow death. Am I right, mister?” And neither the room clerk nor the bellhop were suspicious as I accompanied Margaret to her room at the simple hotel overlooking Gramercy Park. The flowers I had ordered at noon now seemed to fill the room as she said: “Give me a little time to unpack and change. I’ll meet you in the bar downstairs, and stop looking impatient.” So I kissed her with all the restraint I could summon, forgetting Chicago, and retraced the necessary steps and sat in the bar until she walked in, ready for cocktails and dinner.

Then followed a full week during which I rarely showed up at the office. “Take all the time you want,” Jeff had said, “Christ knows you need it.” But he himself looked spruce as he said it and even his boutonnière was spruce.

We lunched and dined all over town, from the smart places on the east side in the Fifties and Sixties, down to Sweet’s, at the foot of Fulton Street near the wholesale fish markets. One day, coming back from a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, we had clams at that street-stand down in Hanover Square. We drank at the Stork, in Third Avenue bars, in a string of dim airless joints on Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Sixth. We listened to bebop and then went out feeling that it was the tail end of something, and went across the street to listen to the inspired clowning Dixieland of George Brunies, and we drank and danced down at the cave that calls itself the Vanguard in the Village, one of the least pretentious and best joints in town. We made the rounds of the art galleries, we heard Myra Hess one evening at Carnegie Hall. We went to see the Monte Carlo Ballet, absolutely the original one, patronize none other on this block, and we enjoyed the odd audience more than we did the performance. We did all this and more for about ten days and finally all the steps had been retraced.

On the eleventh day—I’d counted them—we were having cocktails at my apartment. We had had large, four-ounce Gibsons, and had danced to the music of my record player, dancing on a dime and we could give you nine cents change. We had planned to dine out that evening, but it was late when we got around to it. Three Gibsons and a stack of old Goodman quartets had shot all our plans to hell. So I asked Mrs. Ferguson to prepare anything she had on hand. Later we sat around in the living room, smoking and listening to the radio for a while.

For ten days we had been doing the town like visiting firemen with unlimited expense accounts. For ten days, we had been either too occupied, too happy, too tight, or too tired to talk with any degree of seriousness. Our conversation had been gay, flip and pointless, as if by an unspoken agreement. But now it was different. I had switched the radio off and had killed a few of the table lamps and we sat in silence for a while. I don’t remember exactly how the conversation started; all of it comes back to me now except the beginning. The dress she wore, her crossed legs, the expression of her face, suddenly remembering that the perfume was familiar, all this touched off a chain reaction of memory leading back to that first night in Chicago. I remembered all this, but her first few remarks escape me now as I write. Perhaps I wasn’t listening.

“Ralph,” she said. “We had grown up together. He was a junior at Wisconsin when I was a freshman, school of journalism. And of course, like most people in the mid-West at that time, we were against war. At college we talked of pacifism, the Oxford oath, and the futility of war; but Pearl Harbor put an end to all that. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but it did. We both took it for granted that we wanted to be married as soon as he was graduated and got himself a job. In his last year he had been doing some part-time work for the Capitol Times, so it was pretty certain that he would be working full-time when he graduated. Wisconsin is an incredible place when you’re twenty and making plans; but it seems that other people were making plans and they didn’t jibe with ours, people in Moscow, Berlin, Tokyo, and later in Washington—”

She sat there telling that bitterly familiar story, whose theme was the blasting of a generation which wasn’t even given the chance to get lost, a generation that was hurried out of the classroom directly into the cataclysm. It was a story since made hackneyed by the popular writers and scenarists who had gummed it up and given it all the twisteroos, and so had robbed it of dignity and tragedy, so that in her telling of it I saw the ham-acting and heard the corny overtones of stilted dialogue. She spoke quietly but with great intensity, out of some deep urgency, as if her version of this story had to be told completely, then and there, once and for all, and never again.

It was a story that could almost have been told in its entirety with stock shots out of a good film library: the umbrella of Japanese planes over Oahu, the smoking, tangled wreckage of Pearl Harbor; the short flashes of scurrying officials in Washington looking at the camera with that caught-with-my-pants-down expression, families huddled around their radios (“as a nation grimly listened”), the crowds in the streets, the President’s “shall-live-in-infamy” speech, the cheering congressmen, the boys lined up at the recruiting stations, Ralph among them.

“He was a fine, impressionable, good-looking kid at the time,” Margaret said. “He was in the Army Air Force, and when he came home on his first pass he seemed more handsome than ever. You know the smart, bashed-in way they wore their caps. We were married before he went overseas. It seems absurd now, but it made lots of sense at the time, a kind of emotional sense. You know, the heart has its reasons— Do you remember how things were at the beginning of the war? Everything was uncertain and all that tomorrow meant was the next day, the very next day, so that out of all that uncertainty, we wanted to realize at least one of the things we had planned before the war, and so we were married. Of course, as you know, it didn’t work out. He came back from the war with a brilliant record, sixty missions, but he was all shot to pieces. We tried hard, terribly hard, to make a go of it, but it was no use; he drank and ran around with other women and in the end we had to separate. Finally, I went to Reno and on my way back I met you in Chicago.”

“I thought that was the reason when Ralph and I separated,” Margaret said. “It’s a very easy and consoling thing to think, but in most cases it simply isn’t true. I now realize that war really doesn’t change people. All that it does is to bring the best and the worst in people to the surface, more quickly and more dramatically. Sooner or later, even if there had been no war, the same thing would have happened to Ralph. Instead of after sixty missions over enemy territory, the breaking point might have come after a few years as a reporter on an understaffed newspaper, or for any number of other reasons. Because, whatever it was that caused his crack-up was there all the time. War marriages only break up or turn out well for the same reasons that peace-time marriages do. A girl is a chippy, or promiscuous, or a man is a lush and a skirt-chaser, a man and a woman are a real couple, war or no war. I found that out talking to women in Reno during those terrible six weeks when I was waiting for my divorce.”

Listening to her, I found myself thinking not of Ralph or Margaret’s tragic first marriage, but of my own difficulties, the hopped-up existence I was leading at the office, the new twist that Jeff and Marshlands intended to use in our common-man campaign, things like that. Of course, she was sound, and had thought her way through to a solid conclusion, which should have made me feel that I was damned lucky to have found her. Instead, for some unaccountable reason, I went into a nose dive, ending up in a fit of deep depression.

“No, there’s no way of telling, you have to find out for yourself, that’s the chance we all have to take.”

And now I felt still more depressed. I got to my feet and walked over to the record player; this kind of talk required music. Sibelius’ fiddle concerto lay within easy reach and I stacked the records on the player. As the first few bars of this great music filled the room, I suspected that somehow my selection was not quite appropriate. She sat there stiffly, unmoved; listening beyond it, so to speak. When the first side had been played, I asked:

“No, it’s gay enough in its own way, but perhaps we ought to have something different. Like—”

“Like the stuff we heard on the South Side in Chicago the night we met. I want to forget nearly everything that happened before then.”

So I stacked up some of Jimmy Noone’s stuff, the music he played at the Apex Club in Chicago back in 1928, the last care-free year in American history, when the boys were riding high, wide and handsome, the shuffling Apex Blues and the slow drag, Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me. Then I poured a couple of drinks and we listened to the music and talked aimlessly until well past midnight. Then she said something about a stirrup-cup and having to get back to her hotel. But her words lacked conviction, as I expected they would, when she got around to saying them.

“Darling,” I said, “you may as well get used to the idea of spending your nights here instead of in that genteel place down on Gramercy Park. After all, you’re going to do it for a very long time, for the rest of your life.”

That was the only way I could say it. Anything more formal, stuffier, was beyond me. In the first few seconds, as the phrasing occurred to me, it seemed the sophisticated, casual, right way of putting it, nothing flabby or sentimental. Yet, as the words came, my throat seemed to tighten and go parched, so that the utterance seemed false and hollow. And she, too, was casual, clowning around a bit and accepting this proposal in a burlesqued, school-of-elocution way of speaking. But it was no go for both of us, because a minute later we were both sitting on one of the sofas, hanging on to each other, silent, as it always happens, no matter how casual you try to be, like a couple of teen-agers scared and yet transported when they come face to face with this miraculous thing for the first time.

Like our first night together in Chicago, or rather our first morning, we spent this one in felicitous, eager wakefulness. And now, as then, the dawn discovered us, as it always discovers spent couples, relaxed and heavy for want of sleep. Cold-bloodedly, I had set a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the refrigerator before going to bed. I slipped into my dressing gown and brought the wine and glasses to our bedside. As the light moved up the wall, we talked. We talked of our wedding; of course, it would be terribly private, just we two with perhaps Diana and Jeff as witnesses. Then after the second glass of wine, she wanted to know if it would be in the newspapers. Did she want it in the papers? Yes. Then it would be in the papers. We talked of why we weren’t going to have a honeymoon: we would have no part in a custom which arbitrarily limited a feeling that ought to be free and boundless to a prescribed few weeks. Our honeymoon, we said with the illogic of those who lie in bed planning lives, would go on forever; well, nearly forever. We talked of how we would refurnish and redecorate some of the rooms of the apartment, where we would spend our summer months, of dogs and moppets.

“All right, children and one dog, a small one. New York is no place for a self-respecting large dog.”

More wine, more talk, and then I asked: “Don’t you think that people who refuse to have children on principle are unprincipled?”

“There are people, like ourselves,” I said, “who believe that if couples didn’t have children, the race, among other things, would die out. And I suppose it follows that if the race dies out, the other things won’t matter.” This was a lot of talk for a man heavy for sleep. “But, of course, we won’t let the race die out, will we?”

I reached over to fill our glasses again, and when I turned, she was asleep. It was now broad daylight and I got up, adjusted the blinds, and went back to bed.

Nevertheless, we did have a honeymoon, or at least a vacation together, and it was nearly three weeks before I finally got back to the office and settled down to the grind again. In my absence, Jeff and the Plans Board had worked out the details of a national air tour for Alan. One of our clients, an aircraft manufacturer, had donated a twin-motor job to the cause. The itinerary, subject to change by our office, was to include Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and, of course, the big stopover at Jackson City. We had christened the plane, naturally, The Common Man, and had equipped it as a flying public relations office complete with desks, typewriters, a mimeograph machine, and a darkroom, to carry Alan, Diana, Roger, Malcolm Sturt, a photographer, and a secretary on this transcontinental junket. It was to be one of those operations so dear to the public relations and publicity heart, one that worked in all directions, in which one account tied in with another and everybody was satisfied. In short, a multiple-way, ten-ply stunt guaranteed to bring in the press clippings by the ton. It would continue to keep the spotlight fixed on Alan, it would help build the syndicate column, it would help everything and everybody.

For the next several weeks my time, apart from the evenings and week ends at home with Margaret, was devoted almost solely to working out the final details of Alan’s coast-to-coast air tour. There were conferences with our account executives, the slow-on-the-uptake talk of our clients, the underplayed, cynical humor of our boys in the radio department; the angled chatter of our publicity people. Finally, everything was set to go and Margaret drove out with me to the airport to watch the launching of this new phase of the campaign.

At the airport, Alan was in great form. He talked and joked with the reporters and once or twice, without any prompting, lightly sidestepped an embarrassing question. He was still the same guy we’d brought on from Jackson City, the same dark cowlick, the same smile, the same ability to laugh at himself sometimes.

I noticed, with a sense of small regret, that he was no longer wearing his Jackson City store clothes, the badly fitted jacket which gaped at the back of the neck, the shoddy, stiff material that held a razor-edge crease for days; the trousers that were a trifle too short. Malcolm Sturt had tried to keep some of these hick characteristics in Alan’s newly tailored clothes, but Diana had thwarted him. Instead, he was now dressed like hundreds of smart young men around Radio City and Madison Avenue, in a style that compromised between the flash of Broadway and the studied conservatism of Wall Street. His overcoat and the gray herringbone suit underneath were well and smartly tailored.

He struck me like an actor without makeup, in street clothes, and standing there, as the pilot began to warm up his motors drowning out all conversation, I wondered if this new sartorial elegance didn’t reflect an inner change of some significance. Was it possible that the Sears-Roebuck boy from Jackson City was now on the way to becoming a public relations man, a public relations man with a special angle? And next summer, would he come breezing into the office in expensively tailored gabardine, wearing a hand-painted tie?

The photographers were taking the last few shots, then Alan, Diana, Malcolm, Roger, and the staff got aboard, the door was slammed shut and the plane taxied over to the runway. We waited around until she took off and then Jeff piled some newspapermen into his car, while Margaret and I drove back to town in the office Cadillac.

I hadn’t said very much about my work to Margaret since we’d been married. Of course, she knew all about Jefferson Clarke & Associates and our common-man operation. But, like most people, she confused public relations with press-agentry, publicity, and advertising, and, somehow, I hadn’t had the opportunity of giving her one of those long sessions of indoctrination. But on the way back to Manhattan, she began to ask some pointed questions.

What, precisely, was our interest in Alan Barbour? Where and how did he pay off? Why were we sending him on this transcontinental tour? Why did powerful corporations and influential individuals need public relations, anyhow? She wanted to know and I told her.

Whipping down the parkway past the flat, soggy Long Island fields, I told her of industrialists who were wizards at production but who were often none too bright and sometimes downright stupid in their dealings with the public and the press. I told her of old man Vanderbilt’s crack to a newspaperman aboard his special train back in 1882: “The public be damned,” and that wasn’t how you did business now. I told her of the Ludlow strike massacre, of the Rockefellers and Ivy Lee, and how an evil thing may sometimes become an instrument of good.

“Like the Rockefeller Foundation and medical research all over the world and the gift of the site for the United Nations.”

She listened carefully, but I could see that she wasn’t greatly impressed. When we were on the Fifty-ninth Street bridge, crossing the East River, I pointed to the Queensboro low-rental housing project, staggered squares of dwelling units, over to the right and down below.

“You see that?” I said, pointing. “Public relations made that development possible. First, it was necessary to make people aware of the problem of the slums. After that, it was not too hard to get Congress to vote the funds for the subsidies.”

“No, a sixty-dollar-a-week publicity man happened to do that. I was merely trying to show how necessary public relations of one kind or another are in all fields.”

The lecture went on and on. I continued it at lunch and finally when I had finished, she was polite enough about it and said something about what a pity it was to have to live in a civilization where all this shoving, shouting, and showmanship were necessary.

Alan’s air tour came off beautifully, according to plan and on schedule, with nearly all our clients picking themselves nice, juicy public-relations plums. It was all carefully plotted, neatly packaged, expertly merchandised and delivered on time with the compliments of Jefferson Clarke & Associates, bills to be rendered on the first of the month. One stunt and hundreds of stories and thousands of clippings; one stunt with virtually all our clients in on the deal; one stunt and fifteen new subscribers to the syndicated column. Telegraph reports from Diana, small bales of clippings, and our own news ticker told the story of the triumphant junket. Louise Bailey kept bringing me the takes from the machine. In Buffalo, the Mayor had met the plane at the airport. Next day, the president of our steel account in nearby Lackawanna showed Alan and his party through the mills; at noon, reading from a script we had prepared, our upstate industrialist, flanked by Alan and a local CIO official, spoke of the need for increased production, “so that all the common men and women of America may enjoy the abundance which—” etc., etc. It was the same in Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, but instead of steel it was glass, automobiles, and a packing outfit. Our clients hailed, or pointed with pride, to their production records, their low margin of profit, while our Common Man stood by and nodded. The local politicians horned in and a good and profitable time was had by all.

At Jackson City, the Boy Who Made Good got a terrific ovation with Governor Drucker on hand to meet him at the small local airport. The teletype and news ticker in our office rapped away and a few days later more clippings piled up. At San Francisco, our wine clients staged a banquet-luncheon in honor of Alan and two days later hundreds of newspapers throughout the country ran telephotos of the Common Man flanked by Hollywood producers and stars.

The day before, Louise Bailey came into the room and put a news-ticker take on my desk:

TP264

BULLETIN

SAN FRANCISCO, FEB. 14—ALAN BARBOUR, AMERICA’S SOCALLED COMMON MAN, AND DIANA FORBES, A NEW YORK PUBLIC RELATIONS EXECUTIVE, WERE MARRIED HERE TODAY.

FD235P

“Well, how the hell do you like that?” he said. An expression of disapproval flicked across his face and was instantly gone. Then he smiled: “Well, he’s still in the family.” A moment later he called his secretary on the intercom. “Phone Donovan in San Francisco and have him send a dozen of his best orchids to Mr. and Mrs. Alan Barbour at their hotel.”

Five days later our flying quartet was back in New York. The tour had been an enormous success and we immediately packed the couple off to Sea Island for a delayed honeymoon.

During the time that Diana and Alan were away, we took stock of where we stood precisely on the campaign. Apart from the Iroquois Metals fee, a very special matter, our income in the past six months had more than doubled. Alan’s salary, together with other income, totaled more than fifty thousand dollars and next year it would be more still. Our clients were satisfied, we’d killed the Iroquois Metals investigation, there were salary increases all around, and the end was not yet.

One morning, about a couple of weeks after Alan and Diana had left town, I was about to leave my apartment for the office when Senator Marshlands called on the telephone. Could I see him at once? He was at the Biltmore, very important. I knew, from long experience, that when people call and say that a matter is terribly important, they mean that it’s important to themselves. But what the Senator wanted to see me about, it developed, was important to both of us.

At his suite at the hotel, I found Marshlands nervous and worried. He was having a late breakfast in his drawing room as I entered, and he gulped a final mouthful of coffee when he saw me and got down to cases fast.

“How well do you know Bob Wheelwright?” he asked as he wiped his mouth with the stiff hotel napkin.

My heart skipped a beat, or whatever it is that happens when you get that first flash of impending disaster, and I reached across the table for the coffee pot, playing for time. Whatever it was, we were in it together.

I had visualized the possibilities. They were all bad, but not as disastrous for Jefferson Clarke & Associates as they might turn out to be for Senator Marshlands.

“Oh, I’ve known Bob for about ten or twelve years, on and off. We used to work on the same paper together when I was a kid, so I’d say we were pretty friendly. Been on parties with him, things like that.”

“That isn’t what I mean,” the Senator said. “Have you got anything on him?”

Apparently I wasn’t doing so well with that unreliable poker face of mine, because the Senator handed me a tight-lipped smile and said: “This will throw you, Sherrod. Your friend Wheelwright has got the Iroquois Metals case on us.”

“Everything. The size of your fee from Bennett, the stock transfer—you boys did pretty well by yourselves, didn’t you?—the list of war contractors that you’ve taken on recently, and he knows that the Bennett documents are missing from the committee’s files.”

It was enough, all right, more than enough. I knew how Bob operated on a big story and I knew how he had gotten his information, but I asked the question anyhow: “How do you think he got it?”

“I don’t have to think, I know. We fired Liston last month, he was our executive secretary, and now he’s gone and spilled his guts. Wheelwright says he simply nosed around and got his information bit by bit and put the whole thing together, but I don’t believe him. No matter how he got it, we’ve got to get something on him.”

“It’s no use, you won’t get anything on Bob Wheelwright. He’s clean and he’s straight. A few years ago we offered him twice what he was making, but he turned us down.”

“Listen, Sherrod, I’ve been in politics for twenty-five years. I’ve played it on all levels, from the county courthouse to Capitol Hill, and I’ve always been a welcome visitor at the White House. But let me tell you that there isn’t a man alive whose past can stand a real going-over. Every son-of-a-bitch living is fallible and has a stomach, ambitions, feelings of doubt and insecurity, and genital organs.” But that wasn’t how he said it. “Where there are stomachs, fear, and sexual organs, you have the inevitable fall from grace. Maybe it isn’t money with Wheelwright, then it’s bound to be something else. Some dirty affair with a broad that he’s ashamed of, maybe. Or else, there’s something about his family that he would sooner keep undiscovered, insanity maybe, or perhaps he’s queer, quite a few writers are—at least that’s what I’ve heard.”

“I should say about the same percentage among writers as among politicians,” I said.

“Now, for Christ’s sake, don’t go prissy on me. We’re in a tough spot and we’re in it together. Getting something on a son-of-a-bitch who’s trying to ruin you is standard procedure. It’s as true in business as it is in politics, you know that, and, in a way, it’s a damned good thing. Fear of exposure has a stabilizing effect on the body politic.”

“There’s no use trying to get anything sexual on Bob,” I said. “If you confronted him with anything like that he’d only boast of it, and if you dug up a looney aunt he’d give a lecture on psychiatry.”

This held the Senator for a while. So this was Senator Marshlands, the white hope of the liberals, spokesman for the common man. Well, he had tipped his hand. He was scared, and with plenty of cause. The operation on our side was smart, but it wasn’t illegal. We had every right to give Marshlands the political rights to Barbour, just as it was our duty to get him to kill the Iroquois Metals investigation. Bob Wheelwright could write about it all he pleased, he could imply and make all the innuendos in the book, it wouldn’t do us any harm. As a matter of fact, it would do us good, not with the public but with our clients. I could hear them—“You sure got to hand it to Clarke and Sherrod. They certainly knew how to get Bennett out of that Senate investigating mess.”

But it was different with Marshlands and he knew it. In the past, I had admired his skill and ingenuity, but it was different now. He was simply another politician caught with the goods, not money bribery, not grain speculation, but it was enough.

“Even if we could get something on Wheelwright,” I said, “there isn’t any time. Personally, I think the smart thing for us to do would be to find out how much he knows and how far he plans to go. Maybe we can get Cassidy on Deadline to kill the story. I don’t know. Anyhow, this calls for some fast, tight thinking, and I’m going back to the office to do it with Jeff.” I got up to leave.

The Senator rose wearily and showed me to the door. Among his colleagues he was known for his poker face in committee, but it was a casino face now and he wasn’t even holding the ten of diamonds. I remembered how I thought that there was a core, a solid, metallic core of hardness in the man, and that it was stronger than the rottenness that goes with a lust for high office. But I had been mistaken. He was like the rest of them, smart, shrewd, tough as long as the going was good, as long as he had all the means at his command. But now, confronted by a genuine threat, all he could summon up for his defense was the corny trick of trying to frame his opponent. And he would have ruined Bob Wheelwright if he could, but Bob just wasn’t ruinable.

At the office, Jeff and I immediately went into a huddle. When I got through describing my conversation with Marshlands, he put his hands behind his head, tilted back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling, trying hard to think it through.

“When you take it all apart, what has Wheelwright got?” he asked. “Certainly nothing he can print without inviting a libel suit. He knows that we killed the Iroquois Metals investigation, and he knows, or suspects, that we traded the political rights in Barbour for the Bennett documents. So what? All that just leaves us smart public relations people.”

He paused, and I said nothing, waiting for him to go ahead. So far, his analysis jibed with mine, except for one significant detail. I knew it would ultimately occur to him, but it was the process, not the result, which interested me.

“All he can do is to start a series of articles beating around the bush, insinuating, sniping at Marshlands,” Jeff said. “He’s always hated his guts and it’ll give him a lot of pleasure.” He came forward in his chair as though he had the significant detail, then leaned back again, squinting at the ceiling in the last effort of concentrated thought. “No, he hasn’t got a Goddamned thing.”

He smiled with self-satisfaction, good old Jeff, and got to his feet and started to pace. Up and down once, twice; up to the window and back, about a half dozen times. I waited for it to hit him. Then he pulled up abruptly, turned, and snapped his fingers. He had it.

“Wait a minute!” He went through that cigarette routine of his and I knew by the way he snapped the cigarette in half, and the speed with which he ripped the match free, that he had it.

“Wait a minute!” he said for the second time. He was pale as he said it. “Alan! For Christ’s sake, get on the phone at once and tell Diana that she isn’t to let Wheelwright within a mile of him.”

I spoke into the intercom and asked Jeff’s secretary to put in a call to Sea Island. In about five minutes back came the report. Mr. and Mrs. Barbour had checked out two days ago and left no forwarding address.

“Two days ago,” Jeff said, puzzled. “That’s just about the time that Wheelwright saw Marshlands.” Then we started a long search over the telephone for Diana and Alan. We tried Alan’s hotel and Diana’s apartment, no soap. It then occurred to me that perhaps Alan might have taken his bride to Jackson City; but that was no go either. His parents hadn’t heard from him since the day he was married. I spoke to Alan’s mother, who said that he had called her from San Francisco the day they were married and that he said he hoped to be home for a visit the following month. I left word that if he called Jackson City, he was to call the office at once.

Jeff was now at his desk, sunk in thought, the kind of desperate concentration you see on the face of a chess player when he realizes that his defense is crippled and that the inevitable mate is but a few moves off. But it was not a defeated face. Perhaps a brilliant move would save everything. And besides, there was always a new game . . .

I flipped the switch of the intercom. “Get me Robert Wheelwright, he’s at the National Press Building in Washington.”

“You hope,” Jeff said, without looking up. “Besides, that isn’t the line of action. You’ll get nowhere with Wheelwright, and there’s no use trying to reach Cassidy. Anything we do in that direction will only make the story bigger in his eyes. Our big worry right now is that the son-of-a-bitch doesn’t get hold of Alan.”

Wheelwright’s secretary in Washington reported that he had been out of town for the past three days and that he might be in New York toward the end of the week. At once, Jeff’s entire manner changed precipitately.

“No, you don’t. There’s no use sitting around sweating it out. It’ll all pan out soon enough. Let’s you and I go out for one of those three-hour lunches and get ourselves somewhat plastered. What do you say? But first, call Marshlands and say we haven’t gotten anywhere so far, and that we’ll call him some time tomorrow, either at the Biltmore, if he’s there, or at his office in Washington.”

We had the lunch and it took nearly three hours, we got tight and instead of going back to the office, I went home. Margaret and I had dinner, we played the record player and I did a reasonably accurate imitation of a man with nothing on his mind. About midnight, just as we were about to retire, the telephone rang. It was Diana.

“Hello, darling, where the hell have you been?” I said. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with you all day. Where are you calling from?”

“Two days. Look, Alan and I want to see you and Jeff. It’s important. Can you make it about ten in the morning?”

“Yes,” I said, “and you don’t have to be formal with me, sweetheart, because long after Jeff, Wheelwright, Marshlands, and Bennett don’t mean a damned thing, you and I will always have to remember how it used to be with us.”

“Yes. Alan was all in and went to bed about an hour ago. He’s terribly upset. Bob Wheelwright—this is how it all happened—came down to Sea Island on Tuesday. He called me the day before and told me that he had something on Marshlands and that he wanted to talk to Alan. He brought a brief case full of stuff on the Iroquois Metals deal. I didn’t know anything about the account, since you and Jeff were handling it. He had everything. A sworn affidavit by Liston and a record of how much you and Jeff had made on the deal and he had it in a way that really stood up. He apologized for barging in on our honeymoon and he talked to Alan and me for nearly the whole afternoon. Well, when he was through Alan said nothing and went for a long walk along the sand dunes. Later that evening it took me a solid hour to convince him that I, myself, didn’t know a damned thing about the Bennett deal—”

I interrupted her. “Now, wait a minute, sister, don’t go social worker on me. You always knew where your fancy salary and those fat bonuses came from. You know our clients, darling, and know them as well as I do. They’re hardheaded businessmen, some good and some not so good, but they pay well. If you want to have an easy, comfortable conscience, get the hell out of commercial public relations and learn to live on sixty dollars a week.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s been a long time coming, but I know it now. That’s exactly what Alan said to me the night after Bob went back to Washington. I’ve been around these last eight or nine years, and I thought I knew all the angles, but I never imagined that even such a wonderful guy as Alan would ever convince me to give up one of the best public relations jobs in the country. But he’s done it. I’m convinced up to here. Maybe this will make you sore, I hope not, maybe we’ll never see each other again after tomorrow, but I’ve got to tell you that we all kidded ourselves about Alan.”

“Do you really mean that? Or are you being a nineteenth-century gentleman doing the right thing in the third act?”

“Sure, I mean it, but I’m being a twentieth-century gentleman doing the best he can in the second act.”

“Do you remember the talk we had about Alan in the bar a few weeks before you were married?” she asked.

“Well, he’s even better than I imagined at that time. I don’t know how to put it, Jack. We tagged him with a cheap label and we touted him as the common man. He’s much more than that. He’s an honest man, and I’m so much in love with him that it scares hell out of me sometimes. Do you think I’m a fool?”

“No, you’re no more a fool than Alan is a stooge. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a very astute young man, astute, human, and decent.”

“Everything’s all right now, hearing you say that. He’s fond of you, Jack. He doesn’t like the outfit and he detests Jeff, but he says the right things about you.”

“Swell,” I said. “Now I’ll be able to come and visit you in Jackson City.”

“All my life I’ve been able to predict future events accurately by saying to myself, ‘Jack Sherrod, what would you do in this situation if you were a government-inspected, Grade A bastard?’ In this case, I simply reversed the formula. And now, would you like to tell me what Alan is going to say and do tomorrow morning?”

“You have the formula, Jack, use it. See you at your office at ten. Right?” And she signed off.

I felt fine after that conversation. I went to bed shortly afterwards and slept peacefully all night, right through, and no seconals, either. When I awoke I had a hazy recollection of having dreamt. It was all very indistinct but I was certain that I hadn’t been teetering on the edge of a precipice, or walking half-naked through crowded streets, or losing all the arguments like an idiot. The recollection was vague, but the feeling was good. I shaved without mutilating myself, breakfast was fine, the toast just right, the coffee neither bitter nor weak, Margaret seemed more beautiful than ever. You would have thought that I stood on the verge of a gratifying victory, instead of what was certain to be a terrific bust-up.

Five minutes ahead of time, Alan and Diana were in my office. Alan was friendly, but he looked like an inexperienced speaker waiting to be introduced by the chairman, a speaker who was fearful that once he got to his feet he would forget all the telling points that he had memorized at home the night before. I wondered, watching him, how he would make out with Jeff, the man who never did things by halves.

“I want you to know, Mr. Sherrod, that I have no hard feelings against anyone except myself,” he said.

There was nothing I could say to this disarming opening. The man comes in full of forgiveness, practicing his come-to-Jesus theme on me, acknowledging his own guilt, but I managed something resembling a smile and said nothing. It seemed that I was always saying nothing at these critical moments and I was getting sick of it, very sick. Then, when the silence was about to pass from embarrassment to sheer comedy, I said: “Shall I tell Jeff that you’re here?”

Alan nodded slowly, still looking like the man who desperately had to remember all the important points in his speech. And Diana gave me a smile that was part smug, part sympathetic and possessive.

In a few minutes Jeff came breezing into my office with Roger in tow, ready to go. In a split second, without wasting time on any preliminaries, Jeff took over. He didn’t bother to shake hands or even say good morning but braced himself near one of the windows and started right in.

“Let’s get this straight right from the beginning, Alan,” he said. “I know that Wheelwright got to you and told you everything he thinks he knows about our relationship with Senator Marshlands, so we can start without any long-winded preambles and explanations. First thing you’ve got to remember is that Wheelwright’s business is political scandal and his favorite dish has always been Marshlands. On the other hand—”

Jeff got away from the corner of the window and, starting to pace, he went into his familiar spiel about public relations and the need of a sense of reality in business. It was warmed-over stuff. There had been a war and there had been war contracts and the heavy-sugar content ran high, and all during the binge Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and Communists yelled their heads off for industry to turn out the stuff. But now the war was over and there was a reshuffling of power. Whenever the new boys take over, they need a few scapegoats. They mustn’t be too big, nor too small, nice medium-sized scapegoats, and Iroquois Metals filled the bill. “I’m not so sure that it wouldn’t be a good idea to have the investigations first and the war afterwards. Maybe that would be one way of preventing war.” Boff. But nobody laughed.

So Jeff went off on another track. This time it was the old story that had been hammered into the Alan Barbours of the world ever since people started to live in cities and the old con game got started. You couldn’t get anything worth while done unless you compromised your principles, not much, just enough to be practical. You lived in a world where you had to pay a price for everything, ideals included. If we hadn’t built Alan up into an effective public relations figure for our clients, his protests against lynchings and discrimination, his appearance on behalf of the Navajo Indians would have gone unnoticed. Sure, we were in the business for what there was in it, but we had done a good job above and beyond the call of duty. We had straightened out our clients on labor, all our clients’ plants were running smoothly, wages were up, everybody was satisfied. Ashley Bennett was making speeches so liberal that they sounded as if they had been written by one of Hank Wallace’s ghosts.

We lived in a world where the ordinary guy couldn’t make up his mind. Too many groups were fighting for his approval. There were thousands of public relations experts, agency people, radio ballyhooers, publicity men, columnists, political parties. The noise was so deafening sometimes that you couldn’t hear yourself think. Everybody was in on the market selling shade-grown coffee, political propaganda, elevator shoes, more relief for Europe and Asia, bebop, High Wages and Low Prices, goo to give you a soft caressing skin, a Third Party, therapeutic cigarettes, and comes the revolution. But in its sum total, that noise was the voice of democracy. In Russia, in any of the totalitarian countries, there was only one propagandist—the government. One voice spoke through the radio, the press, the magazines, in the movies; no commercials, no public relations stunts, no noise, only one authoritative voice. But in the babel of democracy it was different. Every group could have its say and because of this it was sometimes necessary to use striking methods to attract attention. Our common-man campaign was one way of dramatizing what we had to say for our clients. We were proud of our ability to kill the Iroquois Metals investigation. We did it with skill and, of course, we had charged a handsome fee. Why not? That’s how things were done when the stakes were high. . . .

Jeff had started out corny, but he was winding up in fine shape, making plenty of medicine. It was good for what it was, but it was too late in coming; Alan wasn’t buying. He had been through this too many times before when he first came to New York to sign his contract, on the train coming in from Chicago, at the Shoreham in Washington. His mind was now all made up.

I had always known Jeff to be smart, shrewd, decisive, all the way back from the beginning. And decent, too, granting him his premises. But this turning to Roger for support now was dirty and I had never seen him outright dirty before. Christ, Roger of all people! And under these circumstances.

“Why, I don’t know, Jeff,” Roger said, sidestepping. “I think you’ve put the case for our side as well as it can be done—”

Listening to him, I felt a sickening regret for ever having brought him back out of that bar on Madison Avenue.

“I don’t want to get all tangled up in this fancy talk about public relations,” Alan said. He spoke quietly, slowly, and there was almost no inflection in his voice. “I’ve had enough of it to last me the rest of my life. It may well be that all this yammering is the voice of democracy, as you call it. I don’t know for sure, but I think you’re wrong. How can people find out who’s tellin’ the truth when it all depends on who’s got the smartest public relations man, or who can grab the most space in the newspapers or the most radio time, or think up the slickest stunts? Seems to me that the truth can get hollered down pretty fast in a setup like that.”

He didn’t seem angry or bewildered, or even a simple guy at bay. He was merely Alan Barbour, the linotyper we had picked up in Jackson City, sitting there on the sofa with Diana, leaning back, talking as he would among friends. All that, plus. We all sat there quietly, listening, Diana looking up at him, Roger pushing an imaginary coin around the rug with the toe of his shoe, Jeff standing near the window, impatient, waiting for his turn to demolish the poor sap.

“You know as well as I do, Mr. Clarke, that there’s no such thing as the common man, at least not the way you people think about him,” Alan went on. “There are only common men and women. You think of them as stooges, and that blown-up picture in the corridor shows what you think of them. I don’t know where you dug up that picture. You must have looked hard to find it. You’ve talked yourselves into believin’ that those dumb faces are the faces of the American people. But you’re wrong. The people of this country are smarter and bigger than you think. I think that we’ve got to stop thinking of the other fellow as a dumb stooge, or an underdog, or as one of the underprivileged, or even as a common man. Instead, we’ve got to start thinkin’ of him as a brother. . . .”

For the first time that morning Alan smiled. “I started out to tell you why I want to get out of this and here I am soundin’ off like a preacher,” he said. Then the smile vanished. “There’s nothing new in what I’m sayin’. It’s been said by wise men ever since people started to draw away from each other and began to feel that what happened to the other fellow was no business of theirs. I hope that all this won’t make any of you sore, because if I’m sore at anybody, it’s myself. I’m sore because I let myself be chosen as America’s Number One Stooge, the biggest sucker since—”

“Now, wait a minute,” Jeff broke in with anger. His face was the color of the underside of a flounder. “Let’s get this straight—”

Alan cut him short, coming right back without raising his voice. “I didn’t interrupt you when you were talkin’, Mr. Clarke. Let me finish and maybe you’ll come to understand just what I’m tryin’ to say. I don’t know all the answers. I haven’t got the education or the experience. But you people have. You’ve got the brains and the talent. And what are you doing with them? With everything threatening to go to hell, you’re apple-polishin’ people and outfits that could do with some yellow soap and a good scrubbin’. I’ve been around in the last six months, more than I have in all my life. I’ve seen great men—senators, congressmen, important businessmen, scientists, writers, newspapermen—most of them with the power to do good, but all that most of them are doin’ is playing the old Army game in one way or another. No wonder people are confused everywhere and no wonder that when I came along, built up by all your brains and slickness, they turned to me as if I were a savior. If the greatest idea ever came down the pike, a real idea to set people free from the things that worry them near to death, an idea to let people live in peace and plenty, what chance would it have if it fell into the hands of smart operators like yourselves? Why, you’d only use it as a stunt to sell more air brakes or beer, or to get a crooked war contractor out of trouble.

“I’ve allowed myself to be a bellwether for lots of well-meanin’, ordinary people. You’ve seen the heartbreaking letters I got. You tried for me not to see them, but I managed to see them just the same. Would I please help a poor sharecropper down in Arkansas get himself a mule? Would I help a woman and three kids find a house to live in? Would I help a man who got crippled after hours collect his compensation? Letters like that, by the hundreds every week. Those people didn’t know I was a fake, they didn’t know I was only a front-man in a very clever operation. They thought I was real and they thought I could help them, and that’s why I’m sore at myself. I should have had the guts to have stepped out when I was down in Washington. I should have gotten out then and stood up on my hind legs and told the truth. But I didn’t, because I was weak and confused and allowed myself to be talked into something that was terribly wrong.”

“Just one minute, Mr. Clarke, and then I’ll be all through, although I suppose what I’m goin’ to say now isn’t important. I don’t know what I’m goin’ to do after this. Diana wants me to write the column in my own way, but I don’t think I know enough to write a piece every day, six days a week. But I do know that I don’t belong in New York, or in Washington, or in Hollywood, or anywhere with all you smart people who use the wonderful gifts God gave you for things that in the end make for more pain and confusion. Diana and I are goin’ back to Jackson City to think things through. That’ll be enough for a beginning. And just one more thing. I feel that I have a responsibility to all the people that I fooled by the false face that you people put on me. I’ve got to make a public statement that will straighten things out as far as my own conscience is concerned. We’ve got a press conference set up at my hotel for two o’clock. I promise that I won’t be mean or nasty, but it’s the only right thing I can do now.”

That was the end of Alan’s long and final declaration. Somewhat awkwardly, clearly unhappy about the entire business, he rose, and by this very act dismissed anything Jeff had to say.

“Just a minute,” Jeff said. “I know you’re through and there’s nothing I would say to dissuade you, even if I could. But I want to ask you one final question. It’s this: what in hell do you think you’ll accomplish by this grandstand play? Do you think you’ll change anything?”

“Yes,” Alan said. “I’ll change things with myself. I’ll be straight with myself and that’s the first thing I have to do.”

Then, for a moment, I thought that Jeff out of his icy inner fury would cut all of Alan’s arguments to shreds, but he didn’t. He did something far worse. He was stupid.

“Of course, you realize, Barbour, that the copyright for your column is in our name.” Alan and Diana were at the door, on their way out. “If you attempt to infringe, we’ll take legal action.”

“All right,” Alan said. “I don’t know whether I want to write it or not, but don’t worry, if you want it badly enough it’s all yours, Mr. Clarke, all of it.”

“One thing before you go, Barbour,” Jeff said. “You’ve drawn about twenty thousand dollars so far, and offhand I’d say there’s another forty thousand dollars coming to you. You called this a dirty operation. That makes your cut dirty, too. What do you want us to do with the money?”

“Sure, it’s dirty money,” Alan said. “All money is dirty unless you get it the hard, sweaty way. But if you think I’m goin’ to leave my balance here with you, Mr. Clarke, you’re crazy. There are a lot of things I plan to do with that money and they don’t concern you. You just have your accountants figure out what it is, and send it over to my hotel, if you don’t mind. I’ll be around for a week or two.”

You could have hacked out hunks of silence after Diana and Alan had left. Roger was the first to speak. “Well,” he said, “I don’t suppose I can be of any use around here right now. I’ve got a desk piled high with work.” And he excused himself, backing out.

Jeff came to sit at the side of my desk. “First,” he said, “give me a drink, will you?” I poured the drinks. “We’ve got to move fast and beat the son-of-a-bitch to the draw. I’ll take care of it with Malcolm.” He looked at his watch and smiled. “It’s ten after eleven. We’ve got plenty of time.”

Along about noon Roger MacLain was back in my office and I knew by the way his jaw muscles were working that he wouldn’t finish the pile of work on his desk that day, nor for many days to come. He was cold sober and his knuckles showed white as he massaged a half-clenched fist against the palm of his hand.

“Can you imagine what the afternoon papers will be like?” he asked as he sat down.

“Like hell you are. This was an organizational job, one of the few that didn’t pan out.”

He kept fidgeting as he talked. I was about to offer him a drink when Louise Bailey stuck her head into the room and, seeing that Roger was with me, excused herself.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Can I talk with you for a minute, Jack? I’ve got some wonderful news.”

“Come on in,” I said. “It’s about time somebody had some wonderful news around here. What is it?”

“Elinore Kress over at Good Homemaking just called me and said they’ve accepted a story of mine. It’s my first really big acceptance and she wants more. Isn’t that wonderful!”

I got to my feet, took both shoulders in my hands and shook her gently, congratulating her. “You’re a damned lucky gal, Louise. Think of it! You’re now a full-fledged authoress. When are you leaving us?”

“Hey, this calls for a drink,” Roger said, moving towards the liquor cabinet.

He set them up: gin and bitters for me and a whisky glass of scotch for the young authoress, the gal who had made the slicks. For himself, with the useless preliminary caution of the alcoholic about to go on a bender, he poured half a small glassful of whisky. We sat there talking about Louise’s success. Yes. She was all through with Jefferson Clarke & Associates. From here out she would sit in a booklined study (good background for the photographers), tapping out her stories of unfaithful husbands and patient wives for the slicks—he reached for her hungrily. Later, as she began to take on stature as a popular writer, she would address women’s clubs, take part in radio forums on Sex, the new tyranny, juvenile delinquency, and the home, what can we do to preserve peace, motherhood is a full-time career, and she wouldn’t have to do it from five to nine, or in her spare time here at the office. She could do it whenever she liked. There would be terribly important conferences with her agent—if I were you, Louise, I’d have Paul come back unexpectedly from Havana and surprise Eileen with Walter—cocktail parties, receptions, interviews. She would list her ten favorite books and she would tell young authors of the fifty-eight short stories she had had rejected before she finally hit the jackpot. Well, there were various ways of getting out of this racket and the Bailey had found one of them. Good luck to her, and I meant it as I said it. Roger filled the glasses for another round and we drank for the second time to Louise Bailey’s slick success, and may there be many more of them.

She excused herself when the third round was about to be set up. She was meeting with the Kress woman later, sobriety, you know. Some do it drunk and others do it sober, with or without ulcers, duodenal or peptic, but she would go a long way.

After we had sent her on her way, Roger reached for the bottle and poured himself a water glass full of scotch, taking half of it at one gulp.

“Hey, be careful!” I said, and I didn’t exclaim it. “That stuff backfires. Do you want to kill yourself?”

It was a rhetorical question and he laughed. He raised his glass and said: “Open sesame.”

I didn’t get it for a moment. Then I remembered. He finished his drink in one swallow, without shuddering, as if it were milk or a light vintage wine.

There aren’t many of us who can have it as we want it, but Roger MacLain had it, and he had it good. He rose and without another word made for the door, walking a nonexistent chalk line with exaggerated, unsteady erectness. And there but for the grace of whatever it is went Jack Sherrod, who was also a writer manqué. We were all disappointed writers, all of us except Jeff. One novel, a volume of verse, a play, an arty radio script, and sometimes not even that, and we were through, each of us teetering on the brink of his own private abyss. What and how much would it take for me to be in Roger’s shoes? The palms of my hands went moist as the answer came to me. Not much. A few more drinks, another crisis or defeat, another pratfall like this Alan Barbour mess, or the feeling of guilt after a silence when I should have spoken up. It could be almost anything, and then I, too, would find myself standing up against an endless succession of bars, sobbing my alcoholic heart out to some cheap tart. And perhaps the difficulty lay not in the fact that most of us were writers manqué but that we were people manqué, people who, at bottom, were unstable, deeply insecure, defective in character, falling far short of the aspirations we had set for ourselves long ago.

I snapped out of it, wiped my perspiring hands with a handkerchief, and then went out to lunch.

TP178

BULLETIN

NEW YORK, MAR. 11—JEFFERSON CLARKE & ASSOCIATES, SPONSORS OF AMERICA’S SOCALLED COMMON MAN, TODAY ANNOUNCED THE TERMINATION OF THEIR CONTRACT WITH ALAN BARBOUR. REASONS FOR THIS DECISION, MR. CLARKE SAID, WERE THAT BARBOUR INTENDED TO USE HIS NATIONWIDE POPULARITY FOR POLITICAL ENDS.

IT WAS LEARNED, MR. CLARKE SAID, THAT BARBOUR HAD ENTERED INTO NEGOTIATIONS WITH CERTAIN REACTIONARY POLITICAL INTERESTS IN WASHINGTON FOR THE CREATION OF A NATIONAL ORGANIZATION TO ACT AS A PRESSURE GROUP ON CONGRESS.

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TP203

MARSHLANDS COMMITTEE

WASHINGTON, MAR. 11—SENATOR MARSHLANDS TODAY SAID THAT HIS COMMITTEE WOULD SPARE NO EFFORTS TO PUT “CROOKED, PROFITEERING WAR CONTRACTORS THROUGH THE CEMENT MIXER” WHEN HEARINGS ARE RESUMED NEXT WEEK.

“NO CORPORATION, NO MATTER HOW LARGE OR SMALL, WHICH OPERATED ILLEGALLY WHILE OUR BOYS WERE DYING IN FOREIGN LANDS, WILL GO UNPUNISHED,” THE SENATOR SAID.

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TP301

COMMON MAN

NEW YORK, MAR. 11—ALAN BARBOUR TODAY, AT A PRESS CONFERENCE, DECLARED THAT THE SOCALLED COMMON-MAN CAMPAIGN LAUNCHED BY JEFFERSON CLARKE & ASSOCIATES, WAS A “PURE PUBLIC RELATIONS HOAX” INTENDED TO WIN FAVORABLE PUBLICITY FOR CLIENTS OF THE CLARKE ORGANIZATION. IN A LENGTHY PREPARED STATEMENT, MR. BARBOUR SET FORTH HIS POSITION IN DETAIL.

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TP317

COMMON MAN

NEW YORK, MAR. 11—HOW LARGE AMERICAN CORPORATIONS AND LEADING WASHINGTON POLITICIANS RODE THE COMMON-MAN GRAVY TRAIN WILL BE THE SUBJECT OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES BY ROBERT WHEELWRIGHT STARTING IN “DEADLINE,” THE WEEKLY NEWSMAGAZINE, OUT TOMORROW, IT WAS ANNOUNCED TODAY. THE TITLE OF THE SERIES WILL BE “DEMAGOGUES ON HORSEBACK.”

MP437P

The news-ticker takes kept arriving on my desk all that afternoon. Jeff had succeeded in beating Alan, Diana, and Bob Wheelwright to the draw. Some of the afternoon papers published part of Alan’s statement; but as the story grew, his denials and refutations seemed to lack weight, as is always the case when you’re defending yourself against a smear. That’s what smear means, and Alan was being smeared plenty. It was murder and I didn’t like it, but there it was. At six o’clock it was all over and Jeff dropped into my office for a drink; it wasn’t manzanilla now, it was a hooker of scotch.

“I had Marshlands on the phone about an hour ago,” he said. “He likes the way things have broken, and he says to hell with Wheelwright. He says he’s going ahead with his Common Men of America idea but this time without a built-up stooge. We’re handling the public relations. Come on, let’s call it a day.”

On the way down the corridor he stopped in front of the mob blow-up and looked at it for a while. Then he smiled and said: “You and Mordecai were right from the beginning, Jack.”

“Yes, it was a mistake to go out and pick up that dumb cluck in the flesh.” It was refreshing to hear him make this unexpected confession. But that wasn’t all he had to say. “The fatal thing is to cut one of these faces out.” He made a gesture as if he were cutting one man out of the massive still. “Those bastards are only safe in the mass.”

“What you need,” he went on as if he hadn’t heard me, “is an organization and that’s where Marshlands is right. We can go places with his organization and our machine.”

He was at it again: the new pitch, the big operation, the slick maneuver. He had the ram-jet energy that it took. He expended his vitality on the surface of things, using his skill to fight off his competitors as in the case of Proctor and the Iroquois Metals account, to make an alliance with Marshlands, to be smooth and amiable when that was what the score called for, to knock off a stooge like Alan when he refused to conform, to lie and smear and to be hard. . . . Standing there listening to him sounding off on what the new twist with Marshlands would mean to us, I knew that this was the end of our relationship. I knew it, but I didn’t say it. I had yet to learn that Jeff’s drive, which others might or might not admire, was based on a deep unconscious desire to destroy himself. He gambled like a desperado; the stakes had to be continually higher, the risks involved had to be increasingly dangerous. It would be that way forever until one day he’d drop in his tracks or sit up gasping in bed for the last sweet breath of life, and then that cold and compressed look of unappeased power would become glazed and meaningless in death.

I knew what the new pitch with Marshlands involved. The Common Men of America, Inc., would be a mass pressure group led by a ruthless elite and in the end there would be dirty political deals, marches on the state capitols, and on Washington, too; there would be brawls and organized street fighting and maybe in this age of mounting crisis a carefully plotted coup, since nothing is impossible in the times in which we live, even in America. And I wanted none of that. I stood talking to Jeff in front of the blow-up of the mob and said to myself that you can always find a picture to prove anything.

I knew I was through. I was through forever. But even as we walked away from the blow-up, down the corridor toward the elevators, I found myself unable to brace myself and say it. At the moment I didn’t know how or when, or what form my break with Jeff would finally take, but I knew for a certainty that I was through.

Outside on the plaza we stood talking for a while, and then I said good night and headed east toward home.

There comes a point in the telling of every story where you’re under the compulsion to pass from the specific to the general; otherwise you could go on forever, since all endings, like all beginnings, are purely arbitrary.

I could end this story in one of several ways. At Montego Bay, for instance, and the flash of those brightly colored bandannas and the gay printed Jamaican shirts and the handsome, graceful, erect Negro women and no charm-school books on their heads, either. Or in Italy, in Venice, right out of the books, and the ultramarine lagoons with a touch of slate on dull days and the cream-puffy domes and towers of the palazzi and the elegant but unimaginative façade of the San Giorgio and the gondolas scooting along the Canal and everything blue and pink and white and the invincible Yankee blackmarket dollar going as far as a sawbuck back in the States, if you knew how to use your head. And besides, Venice is a natural for Technicolor. But that isn’t how it ended. It ended right here in New York where it started. Or rather it ended within me, deep inside, where it all really began, and I happened to be in New York. Montego Bay, Havana, Paris, Venice, Naples, Casablanca, and the other places were to come later at a time when I was able to look up and away from my own problems and to see the world with clear, disillusioned eyes, which is the only way to look at it.

I have told here the story of Jefferson Clarke & Associates, how we attempted to lay our hands on something that’s supposed to be inviolable and what happened as a result. But this has also been the story of John Sherrod, the youngster who came from a small New England town, who became a newspaperman, making the grade from copy boy to a cub on the street and then on through police reporting and general assignments, which is the best way to become a newspaperman and I don’t mean journalist. This has been the story of the youngster who lived in a fleabag on Fourth Street over near the North River waterfront where the talk was high and the living was low but wonderful. It has been the story, among other things, of how the young reporter with the by-line fell in love with Diana Forbes and then lost her to a crazy, self-destructive Jewish dreamer who went off and got himself a neat NKVD bullet between the eyes. After that the young reporter traded his unpressed, hairy tweed suit for the smarter raiment they wear up around Rockefeller Center and on Madison Avenue and became a specialist in public relations, and one day Jefferson Clarke came breezing into a Plans Board meeting with a scheme to do something about the common man everybody was talking about. We did something about him, all right, and this has been the story of what happened. The last specific moment in the story occurred in front of the blow-up in the corridor, and now, looking back, I see everything that followed in the ensuing months as if it were all viewed through the wrong end of a pair of field glasses, far away but clear, tight, compressed, out of proportion with the rest of the narrative.

I said good night to Jeff on the Plaza and he hailed a cab and I turned reluctantly toward home. The evening with Margaret proved less embarrassing and painful than I imagined it would be. She had read the afternoon papers and she had listened to the radio commentators who had played the story all stops out, and to one in particular who had gone out of his way, and it wasn’t very far, to give us the business. I mixed some martinis and Margaret was very decent about it all, waiting for me to make the first break. It was not until later that she put the question directly to me:

“Is it true that Alan was trying to make some kind of a deal with that reactionary crowd in Washington? It seems impossible—”

“No, it’s not true.” And then I started to explain that it was Jeff and Malcolm Sturt who’d handled the counter-offensive, but I had no stomach for the job and my talk petered out in futility. Margaret looked at me with an expression that I suppose can only be described as well-bred horror. Then the expression quickly changed, and in an instant she was a fine gal from Madison, Wisconsin, and no touch of floosie visible, either; she was the daughter of Judge Cornell who lectured at the University out there, the girl who was married for the second time, sitting here at table with her husband, the junior partner of Jefferson Clarke who had just done a talented smear job on Alan Barbour. And you didn’t need a seismograph to measure the extent of her emotional disturbance, although nothing showed in her eyes.

The dinner went off badly, spinning out into one of those silences that were symptomatic of every crisis in my life, no matter how shattering or how small. By ten o’clock I was restless and wanted to go out and hear some authentic jazz, but Margaret wasn’t in the mood, or maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of that first night in Chicago. So we stayed in and I did a little fake wrestling with my soul and topped off the evening with a couple of seconals.

When all the shouting had died down, and it didn’t take long, Jeff went off for a two-week vacation that stretched into three weeks, a month, five weeks, and no long-distance telephone calls. The excitement in the office abated, the Plans Board meetings were routine and uneventful, there were conferences with our clients and long banquet luncheons. It was like the good old days before all that benzedrine hypertension of the common-man campaign had set in. It was a good business now, if you liked it, and the temptation to stay on was great.

A week after Jeff had left for Santa Barbara, I called Diana and told her that I had Alan’s final check, which wasn’t peanuts, and could I bring it over. They were leaving New York that day and when I arrived there was all that muddle and excitement of moving. Things were piled up all over the place: her furs, the expensive leather luggage, her marvelous custom-built liquor cabinet, cases of books and records, all the loot of her career. They had just finished packing, and moving men were carting the stuff out. They both looked nervous, worn, and haggard, and I guessed that they were at the tail end of a spat from the way they said hello in unison but not jointly. We had a few drinks and later we had lunch in the hotel dining room. Their train was leaving at three and so I hung around being helpful. At the station I kissed Diana good-by and shook hands with Alan and then watched them pass through the gate and start down the ramp. I remembered the morning Alan came in from Chicago and the posse of reporters at his heels and the cameramen walking backwards in front of him and the flashbulbs going off in his face. It was different now. He was carrying a heavy bag and it kept banging against his leg and there were no cameramen. Well, that was how they wanted it. And coming away from the gate the last image that remained with me was of the portable typewriter that Diana carried with jaunty courage.

As I walked through the station and started to climb the marble stairs leading to the taxi run I was ready to give odds against Diana and Alan making a go of their marriage. At the hotel, at lunch, I had sensed the first sign of disaster, that peculiar strangeness that signals a mismating. It was not that everything was now deflated for them, but rather that Diana simply was not the woman for this simple, unaffected guy. For the truth was that Diana always had a need for some kind of victim, and Alan Barbour would be nobody’s victim, just as in the end we discovered that he would be nobody’s fool. I derived a sort of perverse pleasure from this thought, but not for long, because almost immediately the inevitable mocking answer came up. And thinking of victims I thought of Joel Simon and thinking of Joel I thought of myself. I realized, although not with the precision that was to come later, that those of us with the talent for self-destruction somehow always manage to find our own private lost Spanish civil wars in which to get a bullet between our eyes. In a sense that’s what I had been doing all my life, always moving toward a goal labeled success, profitable in a financial way but that might end in some kind of personal disaster, an overdose of sleeping pills, a plunge from a hotel window, jumped or fell, or worse still, the slow disintegration. You could only hold Diana by the prospect of getting a bullet of one kind or another through the eyes, and Alan wasn’t that kind of person. As for myself, I knew that I could only hold Margaret by staying whole and alive. And I was far from whole. I use the word as it’s used in the Book of Common Prayer, wholth, wholeness, health. For it was true; there was no health in me.

Ultimately, I found health or something close enough to it to live with. Which was enough for me. I couldn’t find it in any of the orthodox religions, not even in the religion on whose altar all the Joel Simons of the world have sacrificed themselves. I found it through a patient, skillful and deeply intuitive physician. From him I learned what I had never been able to face squarely before—that it is possible to go back, far, far back, without sentiment and without nostalgia, but only on the condition that you want desperately to go forward.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

ONE

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TRANSCRIBER NOTES