Only once or twice before had anyone ever said this to me and each time that it happened I had vowed grimly that the next time, no matter where or with whom, I should answer with perfect candor, with merciless accuracy: “No, I don’t.” But since I am neither quick nor courageous, I murmured a pale denial.
“It’s all right, Gene. I know how you probably feel.” And the monster was magnanimous; he treated me with pity. “We’ve got two different points of view. That’s all. I have to make my way in this rat-race and you don’t. You don’t have to do anything, so you can afford to patronize us poor hustlers.”
“Patronize isn’t quite the word.” I was beginning to recover from the first shock. A crushing phrase or two occurred to me but the publicist knew his business and he changed course before I could begin my work of demolition.
“Well, I just wanted you to know that there are no hard feelings. In my business you get used to this sort of thing: occupational hazard, you might say. I’ve had to fight my way every inch and I know that a lot of people are going to be jostled in the process, which is just too bad for them.” He smiled suddenly, drawing the sting. “But I have a hunch we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other so we ought to start on a perfectly plain basis of understanding. You’re on to me and I’m on to you.” The man was diabolic in the way he could enrage yet not allow his adversary sufficient grounds for even a perfunctory defense. He moved rapidly, with a show of spurious reason which quite dazzled me. His was what, presently, he called “the common-sense view.”
I told him I had no objection to working with him; that everything I had heard about him impressed me; that he was wrong to suspect me of disdaining methods whose efficacy was so well-known. I perjured myself for several impassioned minutes and, on a rising note of coziness, we passed on to the problem in hand, congenial enemies for all time: the first round clearly his.
“Clarissa got you into this?” He looked at me over his glass.
“More or less. Clarissa to Iris to Cave was the precise play.”
“She got me to Cave last summer, or rather to Hastings first. I was sold right off. I think I told you that yesterday. This guy’s got everything. Even aside from the message, he’s the most remarkable salesman I’ve ever seen and believe me when I tell you there isn’t anything I don’t know about salesmen.”
I agreed that he was doubtless expert in these matters.
“I went to about a dozen of those early meetings and I could see he was having the same effect on everyone, even on Catholics, people like that. Of course I don’t know what happens when they get home but while they’re there they’re sold and that’s all that matters because, in the next year, we’re going to have him there, everywhere, and all the time.”