The Father of Spin by Larry Tye

Author:Larry Tye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

7

At the OFFICE

To his clients Eddie seemed the epitome of propriety. His uniform was a three-piece suit, a soft-collared white shirt, and black shoes. The style may have been a decade out of date, the sleeves a bit longer than a tailor would have tolerated, the waist too tight, and the necktie skewed a few degrees to the right. But the image was always one of decorum, just what one expected from a proper public relations man.

If they had walked into his office unannounced, however, they would have seen a decidedly different Eddie—sitting behind a cluttered desk with his tie loosened, his jacket out of sight, and his shoes off. Four or five young staff members, their chairs pulled close, would have been listening to him spew forth a stream of thoughts about peddling Ivory or keeping Luckies number one. With each new idea he’d scratch out a note, wad it up, and toss it on the floor.

This image wasn’t one of propriety, but it was every bit as calculated as the one he presented to clients. “By the end there was so much paper it looked like the floor had snow on it,” recalls one of those young employees, James Parton. “It was a trick to demonstrate all the ideas he was generating.”1

Eddie was also demonstrating that he was the idea man, the star. Staff members were limited to supporting roles, listening but seldom responding, all chairs, eyes, and ears zeroed in on Eddie. After all, he was the one who’d landed the clients, and he was responsible for keeping them satisfied. He’d concocted the strategies and mapped out tactics. He alone knew what it took to get things done and to pay the bills. As in many offices that revolve around a charismatic personality, he gave the orders and surrounded himself with people who were willing to carry them out. And like others who had launched their own empires, he ruled with an imperial air that sometimes crossed over into meanness.

There was a time, in 1921, when Eddie tried taking on a partner, a former magazine advertising man named J. Mitchel Thorsen. He got equal billing on the masthead, and Eddie assumed his contacts and drive would draw clients to the upstart agency. But Thorsen lasted only about three years, and their parting wasn’t especially amicable. Only two references to Thorsen appear in Eddie’s autobiography. One is a line calling him “the prototype of the manic, euphoric salesman,” and the other is a kinder word in the Acknowledgments referring to Thorsen as one of “the many gifted men and women who have worked with us.”

After Thorsen, Eddie hired mainly young staff people, often fresh from college. There could be as many as thirty when several campaigns were gearing up at once, but the number would drop to ten or twelve when the big campaigns ended. Most were bright enough to handle any task he tossed their way, even if it was beyond their expertise, and hungry enough not

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