HOW TO SELL A SOW'S EAR .. AND THROW A GREAT PARTY

           




     Okay, after months of sloth, I’m back to speculate about bad ideas.
     It’s often said that good ideas are a dime a dozen. But if that’s so, wouldn’t bad ideas be even cheaper?
      Nope.
      In 1958 the Ford Motor Company decided to name a new automobile after Henry Ford’s oldest son. It flopped big-time; and the name ‘Edsel’ became a synonym for failure. Bad idea.
     Decades later, the Coca-Cola Company inexplicably decided to re-name the world‘s most famous product. They called their regular Coca-Cola ‘Coke Classic‘, and replaced it with a different product called (can you believe it?) Coca-Cola. It went flat instantly and the company quickly retreated back to Square One. Another bad and very costly idea.
      And remember recently when Hewlett-Packard brought out a Touch Pad to compete with the iPad? If you don’t, it’s okay. The poor little thing was euthanized after only forty-eight days on the market:  very much like the Blackberry Playbook, another ballyhooed baby barely born when it was flushed with the bathwater.
      And how about the Netflix debacle in 2010? After announcing that it was unbundling its service, its customers rose up en masse and smote the company a mighty blow. Red-faced to match its packaging, Netflix re-thought, rescinded and retreated. And finally, just the other day mighty Microsoft wrote off $6.2 billion for an online ad company it bought in 2007. That’s over a billion bucks a year down the toilet!
    So no matter how technologically advanced you are, or how deep your corporate pockets, bad ideas too frequently take on a life of their own. I’ll explain why later on.
   
     But first let’s cut to a phone call I received many years ago from a small Michigan company with very big ambitions. The company was called University Microfilms and the caller was its founder and president, Eugene Power.
      Mr. Power believed that microfilm was the wave of the future for information storage and retrieval. Nothing could touch it for convenience, flexibility, easy storage and quick accessibility. If anyone thought otherwise, Mr. Power told me, his head was in the cloud (my present pun, not his). And to prove his point -- and to draw national attention to his company -- he had microfilmed and then reproduced in facsimile form every issue of a magazine I’d never heard of, bound them in ten fancy hardcover volumes and was selling them in a limited edition of 1000 sets for the astronomical price of $1000.
        Now that was my idea of a bad idea; breathtakingly bad.
       The magazine was called Vanity Fair and, as I subsequently learned, it had once been a cultural icon with regular contributors like Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe, and P.G. Wodehouse. It was also the first magazine to reproduce the fine art of icons like Monet and Picasso. All in all, it molded the tastes of an era and became a cultural star of the first magnitude.
      In its day, that is.
      And its day -- begun as a fashion magazine in 1914 -- ended in 1935!
      No wonder I’d never heard of it. It had been dead for three and a half decades.
      And dead too was Mr. Power’s idea. He and his staff had canvassed  bookstores everywhere -- even in his hometown of Ann Arbor -- and nobody but NOBODY wanted to carry a $1000 facsimile set of old magazines.
      So he was calling in the hope that I could breath life into what he should already have known -- and into what I was sure --was a corpse.
      Sorry, I said, what you’ve got is a sow’s ear. And although I’m good at some things, I don’t have the faintest idea how to make a silk purse.
      But he wouldn‘t take no for an answer and begged me to take a look.
      Since he sounded like a pleasantly sincere, if slightly desperate man, I agreed. In part to placate him and also, I suppose, to confirm my own judgment.
       The set of books arrived a week later and I found myself skimming with delight every eight-pound, silver-bound volume. It was a captivating history lesson, a nostalgic odyssey, a graphic bible, an arrogant, funny and thoroughly wonderful chronicle of values found and values lost. As presented, however, it was nonetheless a dinosaur; a fossil in silver bindings. Nothing, in my opinion, could resurrect it.
       But on a whim, I showed it to my partner, Phil Bloom, an ex-Broadway press agent who was at least twenty-five years my senior. We’d recently formed an odd-couple partnership because I knew the business of corporate writing but knew nothing about publicity while he knew nothing about corporations but a lot about press coverage. The theoretical buzzword in those days was synergy.
       In any case, I figured he might remember Vanity Fair and be amused by Eugene Power’s naïve effort to attract attention to his company.
       
       Several weeks later, after I’d almost forgotten about it, Phil burst into my office beaming like a troll that had just eaten Hans Christian Andersen.
        I sold it! he shouted.
        Sold what? I asked.
        The Vanity Fair books! Can you believe it? I sold ‘em!!!
         Whaddaya’ mean you sold them? I asked.
        Bergdorf Goodman! BERGDORF … GOODMAN! They took it.
        He was literally sputtering with excitement. So I waited him out.
        They’re gonna’ sell the books! Get it? Berdorfs is gonna’ sell the books!
         Phil, calm down. I said. Bergdorfs doesn’t sell books.
         No, no, listen to me. They looked at them and loved them. And they’ve decided to do a huge Twenties thing for Christmas this year. They’re not only gonna’ offer the books for sale, they’re gonna’ feature them in their windows. It’s huge .. I mean, HUGE. They’re giving us all eleven windows for the whole Christmas season!!!
      It was a major coup; and to this day I’m not exactly sure how Phil did it. But I’m nearly certain it was through what I came to call the Society of Tasteful Men (STM):  an unofficial and almost subterranean community of well-educated and talented men drawn to New York for obvious and not so obvious reasons. It had established itself in the arts, music, fashion, theatre and related fields and its members tried to help each other whenever they could. My partner was a member and -- as it turned out -- so was Bergdorf’s chief window designer.
      In those days --unlike today -- successful gay men stayed in the closet. Being homosexual was not only criminal in many states, but was considered -- even in liberal circles --  to be an illness or an unfortunate aberration. Moreover, it was rarely if ever discussed publicly. So the Society of Tasteful Men was discreet, careful and almost invisible except to its members.
      But, of course, that’s how almost all systems work. Gay or straight, it’s who you know.
     

       Unfortunately, just as I’d never heard of Vanity Fair, Eugene Power out in Ann Arbor had never heard of Bergdorf Goodman. So it took a while to light the fire of enthusiasm under him. Once lit, however, he was, as they say, all in; and enthusiastically backed our idea to hold a launch party at the store to unveil the windows and the books.
       Fine. he told us. You know what they say: In for a penny … right?
       I was tempted to tell him New York doesn’t do pennies. And although Phil was thrilled, I was still skeptical about the whole thing. How could an upscale department store that had never sold a book possibly sell a set of books that were really a bunch of magazines that hadn’t been published since the Jurassic age … and hawk them at Christmas time for a price that nobody ever heard of?
     
       Then, much to my surprise, Andrew Goodman -- the owner and king of the Bergdorf empire -- got into the act. How and why I’ll never know. But instead of launching the windows in the usual manner, he decided to hold a big black tie dinner in his private penthouse on the top floor of the store. Phil was ecstatic and I was beginning to think we might at least achieve half of Eugene Power’s objective: namely, some national press coverage.
       And that’s where we hit a snag.
       Who could be invited to the party who was rich enough to actually buy a set of the books? That’s what Eugene Power -- suddenly cautious -- was asking. He sensed that Bergdorf’s traditional client list, while certainly affluent, were not quite what we were looking for. And although he was happily in for a penny, the pounds were starting to mount up. And press exposure, of course, has no calories.
         Being totally unqualified to address the question, I pondered it for several weeks until the Society of Tasteful Men again rode to the rescue. George Trescher -- another of Phil’s  acquaintances -- was Director of Development at the Metropolitan Museum, a right-hand man to Thomas Hoving -- the museum’s adventurous director -- and a frequent escort of Brooke Astor, one of the Met’s great benefactors. In other words, he was as ‘connected’ as anyone could be and was willing to develop an ‘A List’ for us of New York’s  high and mighty
        There was only one problem, he said. We needed a lure to attract them. He loved the idea of the Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties windows, but where was the exclusivity? Everybody walking by could see the windows .. and the people we wanted weren’t just anybody. We needed a ‘hook’ on which to hang the invitation.
      So a meeting was set up with all involved, except of course Andrew Goodman who was above such concerns. A number of ideas were thrown around, none of them inspiring, until facetiously and impulsively I said:
       Why don’t we hire Benny Goodman for the night? Then we could call the party ‘Goodman at Bergdorf’s’.
        The room went dead silent.

         ‘Goodman at Bergdorf’s’ was one of the most memorable nights of my life even though, paradoxically, I don’t remember that much of it. What I do remember vividly -- as I mingled (not very comfortably) with all the wealth and power in that spectacular penthouse apartment -- is sitting on the carpeted living room floor after dinner. I’d taken off my rented patent leather shoes, my black tie was hanging loosely around my neck, and I was literally resting at the feet of the most famous musician in the world; the man called the King of Swing. He and his quartet floated from room to room and the lilt of his clarinet meandered like a musical stream, creating ponds and eddies of warmth and excitement everywhere. To this day, I’ve never seen an audience so rapt; so thoroughly hypnotized. It was magic.
       
        Two days later, Bergdorf Goodman called to say they’d sold the last set of Eugene Power’s limited facsimile edition of Vanity Fair. All forty tons of it were gone.

          The lesson of this story is not that a silk purse can be made out of a sow’s ear.
After all, Mr. Power‘s company, when all was said and done, undoubtedly lost a good penny or two on the deal. It did receive some good press coverage, however, which I suppose is still pasted in somebody’s scrapbook in a dusty Michigan attic or, more probably, preserved somewhere on microfilm.
           No, the real lesson here is that a bad idea takes on a life of its own when the big boss likes it. It’s that simple and that sad.
           So … how soon do you think Microsoft will write off its $5.3 billion investment in Skype?
   
     
                                           AFTER DINNER MINTS


         
Vanity Fair was folded into Vogue in 1936, but was born again in 1983 as a celebrity/public affairs magazine. Its editors have included Leo Lerman, who was an editor at Vogue; Tiny Brown, ex-editor of everything except her own life; and now Graydon Carter who owns The Waverly Inn and The Monkey Bar in Manhattan while journalistically exploring the private lives of celebrities.

My partnership with Phil Bloom lasted only three years. It was oil and water all the way, with the generational difference too great to overcome. And although he taught me a great deal, he was in the end disinterested in my knowledge and skills. So much for synergy.

I eventually repaid George Trescher’s help by introducing him to the CEO of Xerox. The introduction led in turn to the company’s sponsorship of ‘New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970’; the first contemporary art exhibit ever mounted by the Met.

With the analog and digital ages infringing on its hopes, University Microfilms must have taken cover in some small recess of the information warehouse. I can find no record , no evidence, that it ever existed. But at least on one night, in one bright place, its star shone more brightly than a meteor in the firmament.
             I’m glad one person still remembers.




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