Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(67)
“Thank you, C. J.,” I say, taking one parcel in each hand. “I hope you do make it to L.A. eventually.”
The little bell on the door rings as I step through it, out into the last hour of 1984.
21
Solvitur Ambulando
Among the many unsurprising facts of life that, when taken in aggregate, ultimately spell out the doom of our species is this: People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention.
For a time I commanded both. I attracted attention and held it. I wasn’t famous, exactly—Henry Luce never threatened to put me on the cover of Time—but those who knew my work kept tabs on me, watched to see what I’d do next. After R.H. Macy’s sent pregnant me packing, my devotees somehow grew even more passionate, distilling into a cult of hermetists eerily adept at spotting my freelance copy—to which, of course, my name was never attached. With my association with my longtime employer dissolved and my poetry collections on their way out of print, my following became oddly similar to those of the pseudonymous criminals from the outer boroughs who cover subway cars with bright, hyperelaborate, all-but-illegible graffiti: fans keen-eyed enough to recognize not only art but authorship. The Lillian Boxfish Society! Connoisseurs of the cast-aside! Taxonomists of trash! Secret agents of an aimless, harmless, bottomless conspiracy no one can unlock—me least of all. I once received a beautiful handwritten seven-page letter from a twelve-year-old girl on an Indian reservation in Idaho that made the observation—supported by a dozen examples drawn from twenty-odd years of poems and prose, ads and verses—that tropical birds appear with great frequency in my work. They often have funny names, I replied by way of explanation.
But I never garnered enough of either—enough respect, enough attention—to be invited to appear on, say, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Even when it was still based in New York.
And this is a shame, because I can say without undue pride that I would have been so good as a guest on those national programs: What’s My Line?, Hollywood Squares, all the rest. At a certain point in my career, at my quickest and cleverest, I even would have been great—but that point was long past when I appeared on TV for the very last time.
Although I never hit the television jackpot, over the years I did make several well-received appearances on local affiliates of the major networks: news programs, talk shows, the occasional bit of occasional verse during a Yankees or Dodgers broadcast. From the outset, though, that final appearance was different: a one-off for a public television program called Where They’ve Been and Where They’re Going, which took as its underwriter-seducing ambit the discussion of particular industries and the most eminent achievers within them.
When the show’s producer, Mindy, first called me, she pitched the appearance as an opportunity to talk about my storied background, as well as a chance for some of the notable advertising women who’d succeeded me to honor the trail I had blazed.
Her invitation came in the spring of 1980, an anxious season when seemingly every flat surface in Manhattan was adorned with a “New Yorkers for Kennedy” sign. I had, by that time, finally stopped writing copy. For years I’d worked on campaigns for Arrow shirts, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Martex fiber, Clairol, DuPont, Seagram’s, Simmons Beautyrest, and Chef Boyardee—a lot of decent freelance clients in the 1960s and ’70s—but I didn’t need the money anymore: I’d saved a lot, invested wisely. And lately copywriting hadn’t been bringing me joy. So I’d let it go. I didn’t quit, per se; I just started saying no until eventually no one was asking.
Poetry still flowed out of me—an unstoppable effluence—so I continued to write greeting cards, which I’d taken up not long after I got out of Silver Hill, but even that felt more rote than satisfying. The neighborhood of verbal felicity in which I still resided had gone down, down, down. I kept living there—trimming the hedges, freshening up the paint—but everyone else had died or moved away.
So Mindy’s proposition caught me at a moment of uncharacteristic vulnerability. I let my guard down, allowed myself to be swayed. Solicitousness and flattery are, of course, the classic methods for preying on the aged. This, I’m unhappy to report, is because they work.
Though I’d have preferred to walk—it was only two miles—I didn’t want to get windblown on the way, so I took a cab to the studio on the Upper West Side.
When I showed up, Mindy greeted me with compliments. She had a feathered and blow-dried haircut and a propensity to exclaim.
“Miss Boxfish, right on time! Don’t you look sharp in that scarlet suit!” she said. “Thank you for not wearing black, or navy blue, or white. You’d be amazed how many people ignore our directions!”
“They think they know best what will make them look good, I imagine,” I said. “But I assume you know your business, and I’ve done this often enough not to second-guess you. In fact I think I was in this very same studio once before, almost thirty years ago, to be a guest on Betty Furness’s Success Story.”
“Is that so!” said Mindy, who clearly had no idea what I was talking about, no clue as to whether Betty Furness was a person or a manufacturer of home heating units. “I hope we’ll get a chance to talk about some of that fascinating history today! Now the show, as you know, is telecast from seven to eight—which means this morning we’ll be shooting for an hour or so! We’ll probably go a little longer, so if we need to edit or cut anything, we can! We’ll have the material!”