Changes of Heart Page 3

  “I have excellent training in the care and feeding of drunks,” Zach answered with a half-smile, then added quickly, “Actually, I step over most of the professional ones. Your husband was so clearly a rank amateur I felt compelled to step in.”

  “Well, thank you,” Anne replied. “And, despite what Michael said to you before—which he’ll probably never remember—he thanks you, too. I don’t know, I have a tendency to see the bright side of things … but I think this Sanders business might be the best thing for Michael.”

  “In what way?” Zach asked, not believing her. She was the kind of woman who obviously had a knack for making people feel better about themselves.

  “Now maybe he’ll be forced to do the thing he really wants to,” Anne replied.

  “And that is?”

  “Start his own agency,” she said. “A small one. Good, creative, well run. Christ, he talks about it all the time. You know, how he would do it if…”

  “Funny,” Zach replied, “that’s what I talk about all the time, too.”

  Half an hour later when Michael appeared groggily in the doorway, Anne insisted they all talk about it together. By three that morning, after two more pots of coffee, the concept of Dorn & Delaney was born. Six months later they had opened for business, and business—most importantly, two midsized clients disenchanted with the new megadimensions of Sanders & Trent—quickly followed.

  Zach and Michael were both excellent at what they did, and their talents tended to complement each other. At the first meetings with the two principals, most people immediately assumed that Michael—cautious, detail-minded, polite—ran the business end of the company, and Zach—brash, opinionated, impatient—handled creative. But when clients discovered the reverse was actually the case, when they came to see how well both men worked against type, they came to appreciate the fact that Dorn and Delaney weren’t just the newest kids on the block. They were the oddest—and the best.

  “You will not introduce your new line of natural makeup,” Zachary announced at the beginning of a presentation to Ramona Cosmetics, “with just another beautifully made-up face. It’s trite. It’s hackneyed. I told Michael I wouldn’t allow it.”

  “But, Zachary,” Madame Ramona replied coldly, “the entire world knows only beautifully made-up faces work in a situation like this.” Madame Ramona, the sixty-eight-year-old doyen of the cosmetics industry, was notoriously rapacious when it came to advertising agencies. She went through them as quickly as she went through her young, handsome lovers. She’d worked briefly with Michael at Trent and had liked his quiet, untemperamental style. So when she heard Michael had started his own shop, she simply waved good-bye to a dumbstruck Sanders & Trent and walked Ramona Cosmetics down the street to Dorn & Delaney, as if the ten-million-dollar account were one of her naughty little French poodles.

  Once a striking beauty herself, Madame Ramona made a point of handpicking the “Ramona Girl” in her own former image. She had founded an empire, amassed a billion-plus-dollar fortune, on this meticulously chosen line of beautifully sculpted young faces.

  “Of course, everyone knows it works,” Zach replied impatiently. “That’s just the problem with it. Why bother to stop at a print ad of just another pretty face? Why read the copy? Why believe—enough to cough up the $24.95 before tax dollars it’s going to cost to buy this stuff—that Ramona Naturelle Baseline Satin is going to transform the average porous working girl into a Botticellian beauty?”

  “Why indeed?” Madame Ramona snapped. She was staring through, not at, Zachary now, her mind already running down the list of suitable agencies, already thumbing through her mental Rolodex of modeling firms. Michael glanced nervously from Zach to Madame Ramona and her marketing crew and then quickly at the new Dorn & Delaney employees—two bright, eager, and now thoroughly terrified young women who were beginning to think they’d just made the wrong career move.

  “Show her, Michael,” Zach replied, flapping his hand at the easel where Michael’s print campaign waited behind double-weight bond paper. Obviously unaware of Madame Ramona’s hostile mood, seemingly unconcerned that they’d staffed up and laid out considerable sums to put the presentation together, Zach smiled lazily across the table at Michael.

  “Uh, Madame Ramona,” Michael began, his voice cracking slightly, “if you’ll just, for a moment, glance this way.” With damp fingers, Michael drew back the overleaf to reveal a close-up of a young, stunningly beautiful woman. Her skin was golden, glowing; her hair auburn, thick, silky straight, cut simply just to her shoulders. She was smiling, perhaps—it was hard to tell—in any case, she looked at the camera lovingly, as if she were on the verge of sharing a secret. Michael had spotted her on the street in the Village, playing a violin for spare change. She was seventeen, a runaway from an abusive father in Georgia, living with a second cousin in a one-room walk-up on Christopher Street. The amazing thing about her, though, besides her luminous beauty, was the fact that she looked almost exactly like the formal picture taken fifty years ago of one Olivia Piedmont on her graduation from Livingston Preparatory School in Alabama. Zach had dug it out of the dusty archives of the Livingston Public Library during his whirlwind fact-finding tour. It had taken just a few days of discreet research to discover that “Madame” Ramona, whose French accent Zach had found suspect, was actually born and raised Olivia Piedmont in the dirt-poor rural Southern town of Livingston. Though it was clear that Madame Ramona, who claimed unspecified ties to various families of the French Ancienne Regime, would be horrified to learn Dorn & Delaney had uncovered the truth, neither Zach nor Michael intended to tell another soul.

  The other amazing thing about the face was that it was bare, absolutely free, of makeup. The full-color photo took up nearly seven-eighths of the ad.

  The copy line running beneath it in small sans serif type read, “If all of us were this beautiful, we wouldn’t need Madame Ramona’s Naturelle Baseline Satin makeup either.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Madame Ramona breathed. “She’s … she’s…”

  “We think she’s just right for the image Ramona’s Naturelle needs to project,” Michael answered smoothly. “And, as Zach promised, we have done something a bit different, you see. At last, a makeup ad … with no makeup.”

  “Different?” Madame Ramona cried, not taking her eyes off the young woman’s face. Madame Ramona’s poppy-red mouth drooped in a wistful, almost kindly smile, an expression that suddenly made her look her years. “It’s revolutionary! It’s marvelous! You both are absolute geniuses. This girl is … perfection!”

  Zach and Michael had a hard time talking Madame Ramona out of spending her entire annual budget on the launch campaign for Naturelle, a fact that was noted—and deeply appreciated—by her marketing staff. Within the first year of Ramona’s relationship with Dorn & Delaney, work done on the account picked up an Effie, a Clio and two other major marketing awards, as well as the rumor that the infamously unfaithful Madame Ramona had finally settled down to a long-term marriage on Madison Avenue.

  And that unheard of loyalty, the most treasured and least available commodity in the business, was the definitive message to the advertising world that Dorn & Delaney had arrived—and were there to stay.

  Chapter 4

  Janie woke up terrified every morning, went to bed afraid each night, because she was so happy. She’d never felt these things before—challenged, energized, fulfilled, but most of all appreciated. She was good, she was hot, she was the best they had, and both Michael and Zach knew it from the first week she started.

  “Where’d you get this idea from?” Michael asked casually, tossing a sketch of Janie’s across the table to her. It was Janie’s first weekly creative meeting, and she’d had no idea what to expect. The entire staff, except for the switchboard operator, was crammed into Michael’s office—two art directors, a paste-up artist, the three-woman media department, the two writers, Zach, Michael, and the long-suffering, overburdened secretary, Lou
ella Muldrich, whom they shared. Louella had taken Janie under her ample wing, inviting her for dinner at her five-floor walk-up in Astoria, showing her where to shop in midtown (“Lane Bryant is great for us generously proportioned types”), and giving her the lowdown on Dorn & Delaney (“Michael’s sweet and crazy, Zach’s funny and crazy, and the rest of us are just plain crazy”).

  “Well…” Janie hesitated, looking down at her sketch of gold earrings, washed up by the sea, half-covered with sand and aglow in a late afternoon light. It was a concept for a print-ad campaign for an account the agency was pitching, Magic Moments, a moderately priced line of costume jewelry. “From my head, I guess. I mean, I thought of what magic moments mean … and I guess just sort of took off from there.”

  “Magic moments, for most people,” Michael answered, “uh, generally mean shared times between people. Most jewelry ads show a couple together, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Janie replied, blushing deeply. “I’m afraid I didn’t know.”

  “Don’t apologize!” Zach cried, standing up. He was always pacing, Janie noticed, or stretching. There was something caged about Zach, she sensed, something ready to spring. “This is good,” he added, pointing at Janie’s sketch. “It’s different. It’s fresh. What Michael and I don’t want is what everybody knows and expects. People don’t read ads they think they’ve read before.”

  “Any headline ideas to go with this, Freddie? Chris?” Michael asked, turning to the writers.

  “Well, sure, let’s see,” Freddie answered, flipping through his notepad. “How about: ‘Magic moments are made from precious memories.’ ”

  “Sugary, but good with this visual, I think,” Michael replied, jotting down the line with a thick, felt-tipped marker beneath Janie’s sketch. He glanced toward Zach, nodded, and smiled. “Strong visuals have a way of strengthening copy lines. I like this, Janie … Fred. Good work.”

  She got to the office early, stayed late. On the weekends she decorated her new co-op (the one thing she’d purchased with Penrod money) and shopped with Louella on the Lower East Side for “antique” furniture, linens, cutlery. Despite the checks that arrived monthly from the Penrod Trust Fund, Janie had been paying her own way since her first week at RISD. She had entered the checks “for deposit only” in her savings account, and put in enough work-study hours at college to buy the few clothes and supplies her scholarship didn’t cover. Living in Manhattan was a lot tougher, but, except for the apartment, she was determined to make it on the slender starting salary Dorn & Delaney gave her. She had never been a real Penrod, she had long ago reasoned, so she wasn’t going to take any more Penrod money. She dressed in a slightly revised version of her RISD uniform. The flowered overalls were replaced with flowered “vintage” dresses from the thirties, decorated with large anthracite buttons and floppy silk bow ties. She found a straw hat with a wide black ribbon, which she wore that first summer, and flat, comfortable Mary Jane shoes. No one at the agency, in fact no one outside her immediate family, would ever guess that she could buy and sell Dorn & Delaney a few times over if she wanted to.

  In the beginning she worried endlessly that Zach or Michael would discover she didn’t really need the job, and chuck her out. But as the weeks went on, as clients began to ask for her to be put on their accounts (“whoever designed that last ad—you know, the one with that beautiful lunar landscape”), as Michael turned to her more and more, her fears ebbed—until the only one left was that she’d wake up one day and find her new life nothing but a dream.

  By the beginning of Janie’s first September, Michael had moved her out of the bull pen and installed her in her own office. It was a sliver of a room—a former storage closet, actually—but it had its own tiny window, and it was in the short line of offices that ran the length of the agency, about equidistant between Michael’s corner suite at one end, and Zach’s at the other. The rest of the agency was a big, white, high-ceilinged space—a clutter of desks and file cabinets and phones that everyone called the bull pen. Dorn & Delaney’s offices were not the sleek chrome and black leather variety indigenous to Madison Avenue. They were no-nonsense and functional, composed of standard issue metal desks, black eagle-necked lamps, and a hodgepodge of overstuffed swivel chairs. The agency’s best work was framed and hung in a row on the walls along the corridor that ran between Michael’s office and Zach’s.

  “Clients pay us to do good work,” Janie had heard Zach explain more than once, “not for hiring interior decorators. I don’t trust agencies that invest their profits in furniture. Probably means they’re stinting on bonuses.”

  And that was the one place where Michael and Zach never held back. Whenever they got a new account, or a current client added a new project or division, everyone found a little something extra in their pay envelopes that week.

  “Remember to let Fido in before you go to bed,” Zach told Janie one night as he was leaving. They were often the last two there, and a bantering camaraderie had sprung up between them.

  “You forgot to last night,” Janie retorted, not turning around from her drawing board. She was deep in a layout for Chanson Wines, a Christmas promotion to the retailers that was quickly turning into a rush project. The marketing director of Chanson was flying over from Paris at the end of the week to review the concept, and if he didn’t approve it Janie knew they would have a tough time meeting the printing deadline. She had never designed such an elaborate piece before—it had two die-cut gatefolds and was to be printed with a special foil ink—and she was beginning to wish she hadn’t gotten so carried away with the production details. “Neighbors said he howled all night, knocked over half the garbage cans.”

  “Oh yeah?” Zach replied, and Janie could hear laughter in his voice. She sighed, stretched, and turned around. Zachary, one of the most casual dressers in Manhattan, leaned against her door frame, resplendent in a custom-tailored black tuxedo, complete with cummerbund and gold cuff links.

  “Good Lord, Zach!” Janie cried, taking him in. “Where’d you get the monkey suit? You either look wonderful or ridiculous—I can’t decide which.”

  “I look wonderful,” Zach instructed her. “I feel ridiculous. Only a woman can force a man to dress like a Barbie doll.”

  “Well, we all know that you think putting on socks is really togging up,” Janie answered. “But in civilized society, your current garb is considered fairly tame stuff. Who’s the girl? She must be something—you’re wearing French cuffs.” Though Zach continued to treat Janie with professional dispatch during working hours, he set a tone of friendly sarcasm when they were alone at night. Lately Zach had been regaling Janie with his endless, failed attempts to find true love—and keep it alive for more than a week or two.

  “Oh, she’s a socialite or something,” Zach answered, yawning. “An opera buff, apparently. Ergo, my attire. We have ringside seats for La Traviata tonight.”

  “Beautiful?” Janie demanded, turning back to the board.

  “Of course.”

  “Wealthy?” Janie continued. Zach had developed a list of the five things he required in a wife, and Janie was working her way down it.

  “Drips with jewels, scatters pearls before swine,” Zach replied. “Yes, definitely loaded.”

  “Intelligent?”

  “Fluent in three foreign languages. Doodles calculus equations.”

  “Loving.”

  “Hmmm … and hungry, too,” Zach replied. “Recently divorced. The ones on the rebound are something else.”

  “Fun?”

  There was a long silence and a sigh.

  “Duller than dishwater,” Zach said. “No, that’s unfair. Dishwater positively glistens when compared to Felicity’s wit and humor. I keep making jokes she doesn’t get.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not hard to do, Zach,” Janie retorted. “It takes a special kind of warped mind to fully appreciate your levity.”

  “That’s what I’m looking for then,
” Zach declared. She could hear him come up behind her, feel him stare over her shoulder at the layout. “Beautiful, rich, smart, sexy, and … warped. Nice work, Janie. Very classy stuff.”

  “Thanks,” she said, sighing and stretching again. She’d been at the board most of the afternoon, and her back and neck muscles ached. “But will Monsieur Chanson like it? It’s always easier to work for a client you know—see how they dress, how they talk. Gives me a sense of their taste level.”

  Though she’d not yet met him, Janie had heard and read a great deal about Alain Chanson, heir to the world-famous Chanson Wine Fortune, and now their international marketing director. A tough and opinionated businessman, he had been one of the original two clients to leave Sanders and Trent and join Zach and Michael’s fledgling operation. A darling of the jet set, he was as well known for his series of high-profile and often volatile romances, as for his string of frequently award-winning polo ponies. He was striking, in a slim, elegantly dressed European way, with the finely honed body of a natural sportsman. And he was purported to be difficult and moody; his gaze was haunted, weary-looking. Janie frequently came across his name in the gossip columns, where she looked for occasional references to her older brothers and sisters. But Louella Muldrich followed his comings and goings as avidly as an amateur astronomer tracking the path of a brilliant asteroid.

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry about Alain’s taste level,” Zach told her. “He gives new meaning to the word civilized. He’ll love this, Janie, I know it.”

  “He better.” Janie sighed. “What worries me, you see, is that so many of the retail promotions Chanson put out in the past were … well, hokey. Look at this one from last year, Zach,” she said, rummaging through a stand-up file next to her drawing board. She pulled out a four-color printed piece. On its cover was a badly lit set-up shot of a stiffly laid dining room table with five or six bottles of Chanson wine distributed amid a clutter of linen and cutlery.