Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(30)
I took classes at the San Francisco Art Institute after Duke, mostly in their New Genres Department, and there I entered the world of video, installation, and performance. I began to think in terms of narrative and space, context and concept, signs and signifiers. Later I joined the MFA program at Art Center in Pasadena but found that the making of art there was essentially peripheral to the reading and discussion of French critical theory.
As for my loft in downtown Los Angeles, with packs of wild dogs in the streets and Interstate 10 practically grazing my windows, it was a lot like a scene out of J. G. Ballard’s Crash. When the L.A. riots broke out after the Rodney King verdict, I could see seven different buildings burning within a mile, not to mention machine-gun armed militia roaming the streets of my neighborhood. L.A. felt like the end of the earth; and I missed San Francisco.
I dropped out after my first year at Art Center. The program felt soulless and the art derivative—my own in particular. As a farewell, I did a site-specific piece in the school’s Bauhaus-style building by silk-screening over the words fire extinguisher with soul extinguisher on the rectangular black extinguisher boxes lining the hallways. My boyfriend Marko—also an artist—pulled the squeegee while I’d held the screen.
Now I was back in San Francisco and single, with a well-paying job at an interior design firm and several shows of my installations scheduled over the next year, the family piece being the first. So far, my family members were cooperating. In fact, the combination of lights, a camera, and a list of open-ended questions seemed to open a Pandora’s box of responses that I never could have anticipated; everyone seemed to have a pent-up need to talk about the family.
As practice, I’d been experimenting with friends in San Francisco, filming their answers to questions, then editing together only the responses, one cut after another. The stream-of-consciousness, solipsistic effect was powerful, rather like the way it felt to be privy to interior thoughts of one of Tolstoy’s characters.
How’s Charlie doing?” my father asked. Seated in his leather armchair watching a Western, he pointed a Colt 45 revolver at the TV screen every time John Wayne pulled his six-shooter from his holster. My mother had once told me of a similar scene when Charlie’s baby nurse came downstairs to the library. “Mr. Stroh,” the poor woman announced, standing at the entrance. “Charles has taken his bottle.” Sitting there in full Western regalia, replete with a cowboy hat, chaps, boots with spurs, leather holsters, and a revolver in each hand, my father kept his eyes on the TV. “Thank you, Ivy,” he said.
I attached my video camera to the tripod, aiming the lens at my father. “Charlie wants to come home for Christmas,” I told him.
My father frowned. “He drinking during the day, or only at night?”
“Both,” I said. I moved the tripod and adjusted the height so that the viewfinder framed the bottom half of his face. “I’m worried about him.”
“Is he working?”
“Not right now.”
My father switched off the movie with a remote and set the gun down on a table. “You’ll have to talk with your mother about Christmas,” he said. “That’s her department.”
I scanned my father’s library for additional lights with which to better illuminate his face, but none were quite the right height. I walked through his entryway and down two steps into the sunken living room. The lushness of the garden flooded in through the picture windows. Out on the terrace, large ceramic ashtrays shaped like fish had been placed on glass-surfaced tables. Remembering these brightly painted ashtrays from the garden parties where, as a child, I often finished the cocktails left behind, I marveled that they had lasted all these years, through so many parties, so many moves.
My father had settled into this six-bedroom house five years before this. Looking around at his immaculately decorated rooms, a visitor could have been forgiven for assuming that our beer brands were thriving. But Uncle Peter’s late entry into the exploding light-beer market in the eighties had kept us from competing effectively. In 1989, after a deal to sell our business to Coors had fallen through, dividends had been withheld, and the family had started attending annual shareholder meetings—something we’d never done—to be told how poorly the company was performing. Angered by our advertising cuts, wholesalers gave up on our brands, switching to rival labels, causing sales to drop precipitously. A sudden, panicked repackaging of the iconic Stroh’s brand—to block letter blue, contributing to a 40 percent sales decline within a single year—was the last nail in that brand’s coffin. The new packaging might have worked, had we not tried to market the very same beer formula as a higher-priced premium beer. As it turned out, my father hadn’t saved a thing, and my mother had to lend him his mortgage money until dividends were resumed a year later.
In 1990, in the aftermath of the failed Coors deal, management rallied to revive Old Milwaukee, our strongest brand, by committing an unprecedented $9 million to a new marketing blitz: the Swedish Bikini Team ad campaign. The celebrated Hal Riney Agency in San Francisco came up with the concept of svelte blond-wigged babes with cases of beer dropping out of the sky in parachutes, or coming downriver in a boat, to update the already popular “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” Old Milwaukee ads. For the sake of variety, viewers saw a different Swedish Bikini Team commercial on TV every night. Many considered it the best beer campaign ever made. Ratings were off the charts.