The Presidential Crapshoot

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

The 2016 election year is off to a roaring start. Will we end up with Clinton, Sanders, Trump, Cruz, Bush, or maybe Michael Bloomberg?

Take heart, doubters, the republic will survive. Consider another turbulent election year: 1952, when the U.S. was bogged down in Korea. Who could best deal with that problem and others?

Here’s what Time magazine said in a direct mail letter sent at exactly this time of year. It’s identified in a handwritten note as “White House ’52.” The top of the piece is adorned with a line drawing of the White House, and cameo shots of several contenders.

Dear American:

As a landlord, you have a pretty big decision to make!

Between now and November, you have to award that longterm lease on one of your most important pieces of property: The place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

You have to decide “who gets the key to the place”—and you’d better start thinking about it now.

For the prospective tenants are lining up already. Right now, they’re all on their best behavior – but you’re going to learn a lot more about them from now on.

When the Conventions are over in July the list will be down to the two main contenders – and the rest will be up to you!

For the next seven months will see the hottest political battles ever fought! The issues will cover the full fabric of domestic and foreign affairs – the air will be filled with claim and counter-claim, rumor and propaganda. You’ll have to weigh the facts yourself – judge the issues and put your vote (and American’s hopes) on the winner. S

And it’s not going to be easy to see the real facts in perspective – about the political jockeying going on here at home…about the dangerous derby being run on the international scene…about taxes and inflation, scandal and security, war and peace – all issues that are important to you, your family and your future.

So I’d like to suggest that you take TIME, The Weekly Newsmagazine – a proven source of such news information. More people are reading TIME now than ever before in TIME’s history. And I think you, too, will find that TIME will bring you more of the news you want to know faster and more accurately and more interestingly than you can get it anywhere else.

TIME will gather and wave this news into one clear, coherent story – not only of the dramatic events on our own political scene – but all the other aspects of the world news that you will want to have at your mental fingertips. TIME will bring you news of Foreign Affairs, of the War in Asia, of Business, Science, Medicine, and of Art, Religion, Sports and Education…

…organized into 25 departments for your convenience and understanding – a bright, vivid, hard-to-forget weekly presentation of the whole world’s news and the U.S. attitude toward that news.

So I hope you will let TIME clarify and verify the news for you –

For the next 27 weeks for only $1.97!

–a special trial rate which brings you TIME for just about one cent a day.

No need to send any money now – we’ll gladly bill you later. But, this special saving is available for a limited time only. So please sign the enclosed card and mail it back to me at our expense today.

Cordially, Bernhard M. Auer

Circulation Manager

TIME – to get it Straight!

Who were the contenders? Time described them, although not by name, in another letter, sent on Feb. 23. This one uses a horse race analogy, and the copy is overlaid on a photo of a milling crowd. It was identified as “TIME Election Letter keyed BMA/DN.”

Dear American:

The big race is on!

The purse is the Presidency; the course is forty-eight states long: the track is fast, but slippery.

Watch them closely as they found the first turn. Watch for signs of unexpected speed or early fatigue. By summer, the race will narrow down to two – can you pick them?

Will one of them be the Ohio Senator who seldom loses?

Or the crime-bustin’ Tennessean with the coonskin cap?…the likable liberal from the West Coast…the genial General who may outdistance them all in the “stretch?”…or the affable Galahad who’s now Governor of Illinois?…the wandering prexy from Pennsylvania…or some dark horse coming up fast on the outside?

And let’s not scratch that controversial man from Missouri!

The rest of the copy mirrors that of the White House letter. And the offer is the same.

Come to think of it, this might also be a good year for subscribing to Time.

 

 

 

 

The Shameful Sham

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

I shouldn’t admit this, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the scam artists of the 1980s. Even the worst of them were fun to cover as a reporter.

Well, not to worry. The old rogues may be gone. But the free market provides.

Say hello to E.M. Systems & Services, LLC, and its web of “entities and fictitious business names.”

This outfit cold-called consumers and promised to reduce their credit card interest rates, according to an amended complaint announced last week by the Federal Trade Commission and the Florida Attorney General.

But the victims, who paid from $695 to $1,495 apiece, got bupkis for their money, the lawsuit alleges.

Most did not “achieve any debt relief at all, but instead found themselves saddled with even more debt than before because of the fees the (defendants) charged to their credit cards,” the plaintiffs charge.

And, of course, many never got the refunds they were promised if they failed to realize big savings (typically, $5,000 in 90 days), the court papers state.

As I live and breathe, it sounds like an old-fashioned credit repair scheme. And it was conducted in the time-honored way—not online, but by phone, according to the FTC and the Florida AG.

With E.M. Systems directing them, callers working for One Easy and other telemarketing firms “identified themselves as being with ‘card services,’ ‘credit services,’ ‘card member services,’ or one of the unregistered fictitious …businesses,” the complaint charges.

Then they “took steps to win consumers’ trust and create an air of legitimacy to their sales pitch.” it adds.

The callers told prospects that they already had “the names of some of their credit cards and/or the amount of their credit card debt,” the complaint continues.

Despite this purported knowledge, they then asked consumers for their credit card numbers, and billed them while they were still on the phone before any services could be rendered, the papers state.

And once the fees were paid, many consumers “never heard from the Debt Relief Defendants again,” and their “attempts at further communication were ignored,” the complaint continues.

Others were sent packets of information and papers to fill out. But they “rarely, if ever,” got the promised interest rate reductions, the FTC and AG maintain.

Another defendant, CardReady, arranged for at least 26 shell merchant accounts to “be used to process credit card payments,” the government plaintiffs charge. And this led to illegal credit card laundering and factoring of credit card transactions, they add.

CardReady, a so-called Independent Sales Organization, “maintained an agreement with a credit card processor named First Pay Solutions,” the complaint says.

This part of the scheme unraveled when “11 of the 26 shell LLCs were placed on the MasterCard Alert to Control High- risk (“MATCH”) list for excessive chargebacks,” according to the complaint.

Here’s a link to the complaint if you want to read it yourself.

But let’s not prejudge. This is a civil action, and it is yet to be litigated. The alleged villains may end up signing a consent decree with no admission of guilt, or they could get off entirely.

What a throwback, though—it’s enough to make you feel young again. Assuming there’s an ounce of truth in the charges, though, I doubt that the people who were snookered are amused.

DEAR FRIEND: The Rascals, Rogues and Roues Who Made American Junk Mail Chapter 15: Sacredly Confidential

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

At what point, as William Dean Howells put it, does a businessman start “his evolution from grub to beetle?” It began for many on September 14, 1901, when William McKinley died of a gunshot wound and Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as President.

There was no immediate impact on Guild, a failed Boston advertising agent who now brokered mailing lists in the form of used letters.  He worked mostly for patent medicine sellers and other commercial riffraff.

But Roosevelt expanded federal regulatory power, and went after the meat-packing industry; it was only a matter of time before he took on the medicine business. Ladies’ Home Journal had been denouncing it for a decade, and in 1905 Colliers magazine started a multi-part series on the evil by writer Samuel Hopkins Adams.

Americans, Adams wrote, would that year spend $75 million on patent medicines, and “swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.”

Woe to the innocents who wrote to patent medicine firms, Adams continued in the fifth article in the series in 1906. “The reply will be marked, in conspicuous letters, ‘Strictly confidential,’ even in some cases, ‘Sacredly confidential.’” But these letters were sold through brokers, and packaged by disease.

“One of the largest of these letter-brokers is the Guild Company of 132 Nassau street, New York. Guild’s brochure, the ‘printable part,’ offered Dyspepsia Letters, Narcotic Letters, Heart Letters, Kidney Letters and Obesity Letters and Stomach Trouble and Deaf Letters,” Adams went on.

One can only imagine the alarm at 132 Nassau St, where Guild and his man-Friday Edward W. Proctor worked at this trade. Anthony Comstock’s office was down the block at 23 Nassau. Would the old vice crusader raid them?

He didn’t—the real danger was economic. Roosevelt had that year signed the Pure Food and Drug Act, requiring, among other things, that medicine sellers label their ingredients. Guild’s client Swamp Root now stated its potion contained “NINE PER CENT PURE GRAIN ALCOHOL” (a revelation for people who wondered why they felt better after drinking it) and that this was “Guaranteed by Dr. Kilmer & Co. under the Food and Drug Act, June 30th, 1906.”

Weaker patent medicine firms closed their doors, and others saw their mailing lists eviscerated. Another Guild client, the D.A. Williams Company, went from having 62,366 letters to rent between 1901 and 1906 to a mere 8,655 for the two-year period ending in 1909.

The Roosevelt administration then struck out at Guild’s other client base —the mail order newspapers. The post office ruled that they would be mailed at the publishing rate only to bona fide subscribers. But there were few of those. And now the papers had to stop sending free sample copies and listing the recipients as…subscribers. The Guild Co. took a hit: Revenue fell to $6,537 in 1906, and the loss was almost double that amount, thanks to the $10,000 bonus Guild paid himself.

***

The tree-lined town of Haworth, New Jersey consists of a church, a row of stores, and a gas station. Just west of this small town center stands a two-story house that in 1995 was home the Guild Co. Ed Proctor Jr., a thin-faced man of 89 who had just undergone open heart surgery, sat there one snowy afternoon and discussed his father.

“My father was the smartest guy who only got through 8th grade,” Proctor said. “He never finished high school, but he read incessantly, and he always went to the YMCA and other places for courses. He was a very religious man, very straight. He wouldn’t put with anything,”

If that were so, how could he work for the medicine pushers and mail order paper barons?

“You could advertise anything you wanted in those days—the FDA wasn’t there,” Proctor Jr. answered. “It was the same thing with publications. You could advertise any sort of circulation, go out and rent lists and send the papers for free.”

Proctor pointed to the only visible remnant of the founder: a photo standing on a cabinet. Guild is wearing a dark suit, a vest and a straw hat, and holding a cigar. A white dog stands between him and an air-cooled Franklin automobile. “That would have been in 1920,” said Ed Proctor Jr. “Mr. Guild must have been about 70 at that point.”

“Mr. Guild was a great salesman,” Proctor continued. “He’d go into someone’s office and say, ‘Break out your checkbook, I’ve got a million names for you.’ He’d bluster his way through., whereas my father was shy and retiring.” On the other hand, “Mr. Guild was a wild guy—my father was a settling influence. He would calm him down. Guild respected my father.”

Of course, Proctor knew (as did Guild) that legitimate firms were already mailing to niche audiences. In 1895, Horlicks’s Food Co., of Racine Wis., offered clergymen a sample pack of its new malted milk mix. The powder contained nutritive extracts of malted cereals, combined with rich Wisconsin dairy milk—Hence its value to you as a preventive of exhaustion incident to close application to study, or a long discourse, (so trying to clergymen, both physically and mentally), said the letter printed in green ink, in a facsimile of typewriting.

Then there were the giant mail order firms, like Sears, Roebuck. Could the Guild Co. win a better class of client?

It apparently did, and Proctor credited his father. “My father was the financial wizard or brains for that group,” he said. “That’s why Mr. Guild went broke in Boston—he had no grasp at all of finance. My father was the one who had to learn the business and make the contacts.”

In 1907, sales jumped to $21,826, and in 1909 they topped $41,000. Proctor was now making a very comfortable living, possibly as much as $5,000 a year. He married a secretary in the office, moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, and in 1909 Edward Jr. was born.

Eventually, the Guild Co. offered letters from farmers, and from people had purchased dry goods and novelties. “Millions of original letters of every description we have for rent—all of which are recent,” it proclaimed in a 1916 trade ad. “They are letters received from advertising in leading publications by mail order houses. They can be rented at a nominal price.”

Just what did the company offer? Letters in some old business categories—and some new ones.

“They are letters received from advertising in leading publications by mail order houses,” the ad said. “They represent MEDICAL—DRY GOODS—AGENTS—NOVELTY—FARMING—INCUBATOR—TRUST—FOREIGN LANGUAGE—LETTERS, etc.

“Increase your business by direct advertising,” it urged.

Meanwhile, the balance in the office had shifted. Guild was spending more time at his home in Maine. He hunted and enjoyed his breakfasts of steak and fried potatoes. Proctor ran the office, although Guild’s wife Addie was listed as president.

“He was a jolly old fellow,” said Ed Proctor Jr., who accompanied his family to visit the Guilds in Maine. “He sure was rotund—he ate regularly.”

Maybe he ate too regularly. In 1920, Proctor Sr. came home one night and announced, “Mr. Guild died.” Several months later, Proctor bought the company for $100,000 that he borrowed from a bank. And he took over just as the junk mail business was entering its most prosperous decade.

Chapter 16: Paper Bullets

 

Catholic, Misanthrope or Both?

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

I’m usually wary when I open books by religious converts. Will they be sentimental or dogmatic, or worse, will they attempt to proselytize me? This is especially trying in the case of Evelyn Waugh. It’s clear from ferocious novels like Scoop, Black Mischief and Decline and Fall. that he did not like the human race.

Waugh became a Roman Catholic as a young man, but there was little sign of it in his work until he reached middle age, and started writing Catholic-themed novels like Brideshead Revisited and Helena. They are fine books, but the Catholic angle is most vivid for me in Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, which follows a middle-aged man named Guy Grouchback through World War II.

Crouchback is a born Catholic, not a convert. Yet Waugh does not portray a joyous religion. Mostly, it seems to consist of obligations that outsiders might find hard to understand. He throws in some history of Catholicism in England (not a happy story). Then there’s this theme, which comes right out of the great Rabbinic teachings: That a single deed or mitzvah can redeem even the worst of us.

Guy’s wife Virginia has cuckolded and divorced him. This divorce, of course, is not recognized by the church, so Crouchback is unable to remarry. It’s a heavy burden, but he obeys. Years later, as the war draws to a close, the ex-wife returns, pregnant with another man’s child. Guy has lost all feeling for her. But he agrees to remarry her, and to say that the child is his. He names the boy Gervase, after his father. The boy will inherit the Crouchback estate. And he will be a Catholic.

A mutual friend who has soured on Virginia confronts Guy when he is recovering from an injury. “Oh, come off it, Guy. You’re forty years old. Can’t you see how ridiculous you will look playing the knight-errant? Ian thinks you are insane, literally. Can you tell me any sane reason for doing this thing?

Guy regarded Kerstie from his bed. The question she asked was not new to him. He had posed it and answered it some days ago. “Knights-errant,” he said, “used to go out looking for noble deeds. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life done a single positively unselfish action. I certainly haven’t gone out of my way to find opportunities. Here was something most unwelcome, put into my hands; something which I believe the Americans describe as ‘beyond the call of duty’; not the normal behavior of an officer and a gentleman; something they’ll laugh about in Bellamy’s.  

“Of course Virginia is tough. She would have survived somehow. I shant’t be changing her by what I’m doing. I know all that. But you see there’s another”—and he was going to say “soul”; then realized that this word would mean little to Kerstie for all her granite propriety – “there’s another life to consider. What sort of life do you think her child would have, born unwanted in 1944?”

“It’s no business of yours.”

“It was made my business by being offered.”  

“My dear Guy, the world is full of unwanted children. Half the population of Europe are homeless—refugees and prisoners. What is one child more or less in all the misery?”

“I can’t do anything about all these others. This is just one case where I can help. And only I, really. I was Virginia’s last resort. So I couldn’t do anything else. Don’t you see?”

She doesn’t. Nor might she understand his effort to help the Jews of Yugoslavia as the war winds down. The man has a sense of responsibility.

Don’t think that these matters take up all of the trilogy. There are tales of heroism, cowardice, bureaucracy and madness in war theaters like Crete, that are perhaps not so familiar to American readers.

It has fantastic Characters like Jumbo Trotter, a retired Colonel who simply returns to barracks when war is declared and tries to make himself useful, when not sleeping or eating, the crazed Brigadier Richie-Hook,  and Gervase, Guy’s noble father. And, as in the Waugh novels of old, there are savage portraits of characters like the Scottish Laird who owns the Isle of Mugg.

The books are not likely to convert anyone to Catholicism or anything else. But Waugh, a great artist, found a way to explain some challenging ideas, and to integrate them into the story of a man’s daily life—probably the greatest service he could have performed for the reader or the church to which he belonged.

The Grace of Gay Talese

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Corry. John Corry. A name easily remembered, easily forgotten.

Forgive me if I’ve gotten a single word of that wrong, but I read it decades ago. It’s the opening of a profile of John Corry, a New York Times reporter who covered the Kennedy-William Manchester book affair in 1967, by America’s nonfiction master: Gay Talese.

At that time, I could quote many such leads by Gay Talese, and I suspect I wasn’t the only one who could. He developed a flowing narrative style that resembled fiction but wasn’t, and left a permanent imprint on journalism.

Take his 1964 book, The Bridge, about the building of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge in New York. It was reissued last year. Far from being an engineering treatise, The Bridge is a classic about the men who built the structure: Courageous, hard-drinking itinerants known as boomers.

Talese follows them everywhere. In one chapter, Danny Montour races up the New York State Thruway at 90 miles an hour on a Friday night, on his way to a Native American reservation near Montreal. He’s sipping gin, and has already had several drinks in a bar. Talese presents this in a style similar to cinema verite. If he has any fear in the car, he does not reveal it, for he is there as an observer, not as a character in the story.

In another chapter, Talese gives a heart-rending account of Gerald McKee’s fall into the Narrows. My family distantly knew the McKees, and was horrified as I read this passage aloud. As Talese writes of the boomers, “All have seen death.” Yet he also captures the poetry and romance of the boomer’s life:

The boomer’s child might live in forty states and attend a dozen high schools before he graduates, if he graduates, and though the father swears he wants no boomer for a son, he usually gets one. He gets one, possibly, because he really wanted one, and maybe that is why boomers brag so much at home on weekends, creating a wondrous world with whiskey words, a world no son can resist because this world seems to have everything: adventure, big cars, big money and gambling on rainy days when the bridge is slippery, and booming around the country with Indians who are sure-footed as spiders, with Newfoundlanders as shifty as the sea they come from, with roaming Rebel riveters escaping the poverty of their small Southern towns, all of them building something big and permanent, something that can be revisited years later and pointed to and said of: “See that bridge over, there, son—well one day, when I was younger, I drove twelve hundred rivets into that goddamned thing. “

Talese wrote that while still a reporter at The New York Times, but he soon left to write profiles for Esquire, like his famous 1966 piece: Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.

Talese never interviewed Sinatra, but he managed to reconstruct the period in the singer’s life when he was turning 50. He observed Sinatra filming, recording, taping a TV show with a cold, cavorting in Vegas with the Rat Pack and confronting the writer Harlan Ellison over his attire in a private club.

But Talese also witnessed the effect of Sinatra’s work on people, as in this scene in which Sinatra’s record, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, is playing on the stereo in the club:

It is a lovely ballad that he first recorded ten years ago, and it now inspired many young couples who had been sitting, tired of twisting, to get up and move slowly around the dance floor, holding one another very close. Sinatra’s intonation, precisely clipped, yet full and flowing, gave a deeper meaning to the simple lyrics – “In the wee small hours of the morning/while the whole wide world is fast asleep/you lie awake, and think about the girl….” — it was like so many of his classics, a song that evoked loneliness and sensuality, and when blended with the dim light and the alcohol and nicotine and late-night needs, it became a kind of airy aphrodisiac.

That is justly ranked as one of the best magazine articles ever written. But it wasn’t easy getting so much on a reluctant subject like Sinatra. To do it, Talese had to hang out, spend time with people and conduct saturation reporting, habits that are in short supply these days, he complained in an interview with Dan Rather:

“When you go into a newspaper now, everybody’s behind a screen,” he said.“ And too much of their reporting is obtained through the communications, they can Google their way through the day almost, these people. And they’re not getting outdoors enough. They’re relying too much on the vantage point of the world that is the parameters of the laptop screen.”

Rather observed that Talese was of the school that depended on the telephone and shoe leather.

“… The phone? In the early 1950s when I came out of college and got a job [at the Times], the phone was the new technology, and those old timers said, ‘Never use the phone. You have to go there, you have to be there, you have see these people, you have to look at their faces, study their expression, their gestures, it’ll tell you more than just what comes out of their mouth.’ I believe there’s truth in that to this day, and I have adhered to that.”

Yes, he has, especially for books like The Kingdom and the Power, Honor Thy Father, and Thy Neighbor’s Wife. But he broadened his approach with his 1992 masterpiece, Unto the Sons, adding scholarship and family memory to his literary skill set. To call this work a memoir is to trivialize it. It’s a history of Italy, from ancient times through the Risorgimento and the two world wars, and in it we encounter figures from Garibaldi to Mussolini, and a raft of Taleses who live in the Calabrian town of Maida.

Some of these family members escape their lives in Southern Italy. Talese’s father Joseph joins a cousin in Paris, works with him as a tailor, then relocates to America and takes over a tailor’s shop in Ocean City, New Jersey. where he starts a family.

Talese, whose humor has always been subtle at best, pokes fun at himself here to great comedic effect. In one scene, he describes his clumsiness as an altar boy, in another his botching of a test in school. And there are more laughs when his father tries to get him to wind spaghetti on a fork without using a spoon (and Gay gets validation in his own mind from an unexpected source).

But this is a serious book, written with a rare depth and grace. We end up caring very much about the Talese family, and understanding things that could not have been easy for Talese to express—for example, his father’s complex feelings toward Mussolini. While not a Fascist, Joseph takes Il Duce’s side in late-night arguments with a cousin in Brooklyn, when the children are drowsing and the younger wives are washing dishes.

What could Joseph possibly see in Mussolini, a Northern Italian who was reviled in the south of Italy?

 …Pride and defensiveness about his Italian origins made him resentful of those who debunked Italy—which, at long last, was now trying to rise above its reputation as an unmilitaristic nation of bad soldiers, retreaters, and imboscati shirkers. What a relief to have an Italian leader who invaded other nations for a change, as opposed to remaining at home and hiding in the hills waiting to surrender to yet another conqueror of Italian soil.

Young Gay Talese was more Americanized, and there is a shocking scene between father and son after the Allied bombing of Monte Cassino in Southern Italy. It’s the climax of this powerful book.

How is Gay Talese holding up in his 80s? Pretty well, judging by his articles in the New Yorker. He captures Tony Bennett recording with Lady Gaga, and describes how faith helped fuel the baseball career of New York Yankee manager Joe Girardi.

In his Sinatra profile, Talese observed, “Many Italo-American boys of his generation were then shooting for the same star — they were strong with song, weak with words, not a big novelist among them: no O’Hara, no Bellow, no Cheever, nor Shaw; yet they could communicate bel canto.”

That’s the only thing on which I’ve ever disagreed with Gay Talese. What about Mario Puzo, whose pre-Godfather novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, has been compared to Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep? What about John Fante?

For that matter, what about Gay Talese? True, he’s of a younger generation, and has specialized in nonfiction, but for me, he’s in the same rarefied class as Cheever and O’Hara. How fitting that he found his way to The New Yorker.

 

The Man From Mars

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Scientists believe that life may exist on some of the ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and many say that it may have once been present on Mars.

Here’s a hint that could help prove their case. In the 1950s, Time magazine wrote that a Martian visited Earth.

Wait—let me qualify that. It wasn’t the magazine that said it, but a direct mail piece sent to prospective subscribers. Either way, this may have important consequences for the human race, so I here reproduce the letter:

This is His Excellency, the Ambassador from Mars.

You’ve probably never heard of his unexpected visit to America, for it was a very hushed-up affair. (But just don’t be surprised anymore when you see, or hear of, flying saucers. Don’t even be surprised if you should bump into a Martian on the street.)

His Excellency arrived in Washington one evening recently, in a shiny flying saucer that put down on the Mall near the Lincoln Memorial. His mission was to find out as much as possible about the Earth people: whether they were friendly or unfriendly, barbaric or reasonable civilized, and so forth. And since the atmospheric pressure here wasn’t really suitable for a Martian, he had to get all this important information in just a few hours.

But he didn’t have much luck, right from the start!

He rushed over to the Pentagon to learn about carrier jets and atomic subs, tanks and super bombers and grand strategies (and also to invite a few of the officers for a ride in his saucer), but the sentry thought he was a newspaperman playing a joke, and wouldn’t pay any attention to him – or even let him talk to a general on the phone.

He ran to the State Department to ask about treaties and tariffs and the United Nations, but a brusque young charge-d’affairs told him to come back after Easter … and the guards wouldn’t even let him near the White House.

So he walked into the National Art Gallery looking for the paintings and statues and frescoes and tapestries that have delighted art lovers for centuries, but the doorman said he wasn’t properly dressed and wouldn’t let him in.

And so it went, everywhere he turned. On the Hill everyone was too busy to be bothered . . . the British Ambassador was out of town … the Russian representative simply said, “Nyet” … and even one of the city’s most famous scientists was reluctant to have him pay a visit without a clearance.

Soon, his Excellence became discouraged. He wasn’t angry at the situation; he just realized that he had come down a century too soon. For cabinet members, protocol experts, admirals and even science-fiction writers were simply too startled for words.

Reluctantly, the Ambassador trudged his way back to his waiting flying saucer – his mission unaccomplished. Suddenly, something happened that made all the difference in the … ah … universe! He picked up a battered, thumbed-through copy of a weekly news-magazine called TIME that was lying in the grass just in front of his saucer. And, glancing quickly through its pages, he became so excited that he shouted “Eureka” – and roared off into the sky. And all the way up to Mars he had one of the most thrilling rides he’d ever taken, reading about …

… the ups and downs of the President’s program on its way through Congress … about great industrial plant that built cars and planes and things called refrigerators and washing machines …

… about the problems in Europe, and the restlessness in the Middle East, trouble from a vast nation called Russia, and battles going on in a small country called Indo-China, a boom going on in a large country called Canada …

… and about books and plays and wide-eyed movies and color television, and about all the strange and wonderful, generous and greedy, good and bad people who were doing and saying the things that other people wanted to know about.

He learned so much about the people and governments and problems and opportunities on the Earth that by the time his saucer had reached Mars, he was able to turn in a full and revealing report on the things that were going on in our world.

* * *

Now, just because I am enclosing with this little story a return card which entitles you to receive TIME at a special introductory rate it does not mean that I think you don’t know much about the news – or that reading TIME will assure you of becoming an Ambassador Extraordinary the way his Excellency eventually did.

But it does mean – that you’ll find TIME as valuable and interesting as do the more than 1,000,000 American families who wouldn’t miss their copy of TIME for the … ah … world.

And that after a few issues you will understand what actor Charles Laughton meant when he said:

“When I open TIME and read about anything whatever, I know that you have certainly been into the subject and found out all about it inside out, upside down, back, front and sideways.”

So because TIME can be especially helpful to you in the news-filled days ahead, won’t you give TIME a trial and accept this special invitation to try TiME for:

27 weeks for only $1.97

–eight cents for a world of information and enlightenment every week.

No need to send money now – we’ll gladly bill you later. But this is the only time I can offer you this reduced Introductory Rate, so please sign the enclosed card and mail it back to me at our expense today.

 Cordially,

Bernard M. Auer

Circulation Director

It’s not clear who wrote this direct mail piece, or what the exact date was. I suspect it was 1954 or 1955, since that $1.97 offer then dominated in prospecting pieces.

But the Time team tried to update it later, and penciled in changes on the copy I Xeroxed. Atomic subs were changed to nuclear, tanks to missiles and super bombers to rockets. At the end of that paragraph, in which the Ambassador is spurned by everyone, someone wrote, “And NASA wouldn’t give him any lunar trips.”

Further down, the British Ambassador who was out of town was changed to the Chinese Ambassador who wouldn’t speak to a non-Marxist, famous scientists became newscasters and a clearance became a press pass. Admirals were changed to Congressmen. Wide-eyed movies became professional football. And the 1,000,000 American families was increased to 4,450,000 families.

I’m not sure if these copy changes hit the mails, or if the Martian Ambassador ever returned to Earth.

More on Hiroshima Mon Amour

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

I was afraid this would happen. A few weeks ago, I did an item about Time Inc sending a small strip of film from the movie Hiroshima Mon Amour in a mailing. A friend in the circ business asked for the actual letter.

I couldn’t find it at first–I wrote the original piece from memory–but I have since located a Xerox in a cardboard box. So here’s the original 1960 copy from Time. The envelope had a light green panel featuring many small Time logos, and a line saying, “Film Enclosed.” Handwriting on the envelope identifies the piece as “Hiroshima Mon Amour 1960.”

* * *

Dear Reader:

These six frames of film are from the much-discussed French film, “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, directed by Alain Resnais and described by TIME as “the acknowledged masterpiece of the New Wave of Gallic moviemakers.”

After you have held the strip up to the light and caught the spirit of this “intense original and ambitious piece of cinema”, you may or may not decide to see the film. (The locale shifts between France and Japan; the sub-titles are in English). We think you’d find it an interesting experience.

But the real reason for this letter is to tell you how to get more out of every new movie you see, every new book you read, every new place you visit, and just about every conversation you find yourself taking part in —

— by giving yourself the extra advantage of becoming a regular reader of TIME.

For people who read TIME can’t help but bring to every activity the background and insight they’ve gained from following the wonderfully varied story of the news and the people who make it.

In the case of this film, for example – you would start out several laps ahead – with a firm grasp of the new goals and the new techniques that imaginative movie directors are exploring now…with a sharp awareness of the current unrest in Japan, the spoken and unspoken attitudes that underlie the actions of the characters you watch. And the same point applies to almost every else you do. Just think about it…

Are you planning a trip? Going to the theater? Following the election campaign? Helping a youngster to choose the right school?

As a TIME reader, you’ll have bases for comparison…facts to bolster your private judgments…and easy familiarity with the whole broad subject, whether it’s music or books or business, science or sport or the arts.

Just because of what it is, TIME enhances, enriches and adds meaning to almost all your experience. It truly equips the Twentieth Century citizen to get more out of all the ways of life that are open to him in this infinitely complex world.

So if you are not now reading TIME as a subscriber with the continuity and flow that can only come from reading it every week, I hope you’d like to start now.

The enclosed card will bring you TIME for 27 weeks (a full six months) for only $1.97 – a saving of $1.66 under the regular subscription price and $4.78 under the newsstand price. If you will simply sign it and mail it, we will start your subscription promptly and bill you later, after your first copies arrive.

Cordially,

Rhett Austell

Circulation Manager

 

 

Privacy in the 19th Century

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

There’s one small error in the white paper, Privacy and Advertising Mail, by the UC Berkeley School of Law.

The paper quotes a 1917 editorial: “Mail solicitation of business by printed circular has become an intolerable annoyance, to which all are subjected whose addresses appear in the directory or the telephone books.”* And it states that this was “an unusually early instance of stated concerns about advertising mail.”

That’s not quite true. Critics were complaining about junk mail long before 1917. And they sometimes referred to what we now call the privacy issue.

In 1875, in a article titled, “Fancy Advertising,” The New York Times reported on a man whose letter and Post Office boxes were “daily ‘made the recipients’… of a lot of envelopes, which he is put to the trouble of opening, and which he finds contain only advertisements of articles that he does not want to buy, or of companies or professional persons that he does not wish to employ.”

That piece didn’t mention mailing lists, but the vice crusader Anthony Comstock touched on the subject in 1880, in his book Frauds Exposted, when writing about lotteries and other types of frauds. “Any person who ever wrote a letter to a lottery, or other advertised scheme, is liable to have a large circle of correspondents,” he wrote. “The name once obtained must go the round of the fraternity, and, when thus used, is either kept for a new scheme by the same fraud or else sold to another one of the brotherhood.”

Case in point: The use of boarding school catalogues. “At last the child reaches the school, and his or her name appears upon the roll and is printed in the catalogue,” Comstock wrote. “These catalogues are sought for by those who send circulars through the mails advertising obscene and unlawful wares.”

Comstock added that names could also be had by “buying old letters from other dealers for the sake of the names, or by sending circulars to postal clerks and others through the country, offering prizes for a list of the names of youth of both sexes twenty-one years of age, or by purchasing addressed envelopes of those who make a business of collecting names, and then addressing envelopes to supply parties doing business through the mails.”

Granted, Comstock was more upset over what people were being offered by mail than how: privacy was a secondary issue. And legislators failed to mention privacy when they banned lotteries from the mail in 1890. But the subject came up again in a whole new context.

Medical Privacy

In 1904, Ladies Home Journal reported on the letters sent by women to patent medicine advertisers.

“Not one in a thousand of these letters ever reaches the eye of the ‘doctor’ to whom they are addressed,” the article said. “There wouldn’t be hours enough in the day to read them even if he had the desire. On the contrary, these letters from women of a private and delicate nature are opened and read by young men and girls; they go through not fewer than eight different hands before they reach a reply; each in turn reads them, and if there is anything ‘spicy’, you will see the heads of two or three girls get together and enjoy (!) the ‘spice.’ Very often these ‘spicy bits’ are taken home and shown to the friends and families of these girls and men! Time and again have I seen this done: time and again have I been handed over a letter by one of the young fellows with the remark; “Read this: isn’t that rich/” only to read of the recital of some trouble into which a young girl has fallen, or some mother’s sacred story of her daughter’s fall!”

Worse, these “sacredly confidential” letters were offered through letter brokers—“clearing-houses where patent-medicine frauds and quack doctors exchange, sell, and rent letters,” wrote Samuel Hopkins Adams in Collier’s magazine in 1906. (In effect, he was describing the early mailing list business).

This came to an end, too, but not because anyone objected to the misuse of personal information. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, requiring that patent medicine advertisers list their ingredients and not make exaggerated claims. Many firms went out of business.

But the sale and trading of names survived, and it was duly noted—before 1917. In 1913, The Kansas City Star wrote, “It probably does not occur to (the average man) that by buying something by mail he has made his name a commodity in itself and become a target for commercial correspondents as long as he lives and probably long after a tombstone has been erected to him on some grassy hillside.”

 *Richard B. Kielbowicz, Origins of the Junk-Mail Controversy: A
Media Battle over Advertising and Postal Policy, 5(2) JOURNAL OF
POLICY HISTORY 248, 253 (1993).

Click here for a related article.

Sex, Lies and Edward Albee

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

In 1967, I bought a hardcover copy of Edward Albee’s play, A Delicate Balance in Boston, and with great anticipation started reading it on a train to Rhode Island. Unfortunately, my copy was misprinted and several pages transposed. I had to jump from page 4 to 48, double back to 16 and then move forward to page 28. But I did, and formed a lifelong admiration for the prose and humor. So what if it took a little work?

I mention this because A Delicate Balance is enjoying a revival on Broadway, featuring Glenn Close in the role of the matriarch Agnes. The play itself has gotten mostly good reviews, despite some misgivings about the production.

In 1966, critic Walter Kerr panned the play, complaining that hollowness is “offered to us on an elegantly lacquered empty platter the moment the curtain goes up.” Harry and Edna, best friends of the Agnes and Tobias, show up on their doorstep, suffering from an undefined terror: Kerr found it an unconvincing device. He was also put off by the ornate language.

But Kerr missed the comedy in the situation. Agnes’ and Tobias’ 36 year-old daughter also returns from her fourth marital debacle. People are crowding like they do in the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera. How will the seemingly dominant Agnes and the ineffectual Tobias maintain their control (or balance, if you will)?

Yes, it’s talky, but the talk is bathed in acid. At one point, Tobias asks Agnes if she should apologize to her alcoholic sister Claire (who also lives there) for something she said to her.

AGNES:

 I have spent my adult life apologizing for her; I will not double my humiliation by apologizing to her.

Moments later, it’s Claire who seems contrite.

CLAIRE:

 I must apologize, Agnes; I’m…very sorry.

 AGNES:

 But what are you sorry for, Claire?

 CLAIRE:

 I apologize that my nature is such to bring out in you the full force of your brutality.

In the end, the play examines the rights and obligations of friends and family. And it is truly moving as the wealthy but clueless Wasp couple grapples with these issues and others.

Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1967, A Delicate Balance never got its critical due until it was revived on Broadway in 1996 with Rosemary Harris, George Grizzard and Elaine Stritch, and ran longer than it had in 1966-67. And this was all too typical for Albee.

Which is why I’ve long thought that the narrative of Albee’s career should be altered. Conventional wisdom has it that he lost his way after the early success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, that ferocious drama, and that his writing became self-conscious. Flop followed flop, until he couldn’t get arrested on Broadway. Then, as the story goes, he came back in his 60s with Three Tall Women, about his adoptive mother. It opened in Vienna, then snuck into New York for a long run. Honors were heaped on him, including his third Pulitzer.

It’s a nice myth, but based too much on box office success. In his heyday, Albee was dismissed by critics, and savaged by homophobes who argued that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, perhaps his most famous play, was written about four gay men, not two heterosexual couples.

Yet Albee was a protean author, coming out with roughly a play a year, maybe more. He wrote experimental plays like Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, chamber pieces like Counting the Ways, adaptations like The Ballad of the Sad Café (from the novel by Carson McCullers), and major dramas that should have been more celebrated in their time—and later were.

Take All Over, which lasted for only 40 performances in 1971 A powerful man is dying, and the family holds a death watch. The wife and the mistress establish a strange rapport, even as the wife spurns her son and daughter.

WIFE:

 You’ve neither of you had children, thank God, children that I’ve known of.

 I hope you never marry…either of you!

 Let the line end where it is…at its zenith.

Then there’s The Lady from Dubuque, an even more powerful look at the end of life, that ran for 12 performances in 1980. As Jo nears her demise from cancer, we realize what an impossible position her husband Sam is in, especially when Elizabeth, the Lady from Dubuque (the Angel of Death?) arrives to ease Jo’s way out.

SAM:

Do you want this? Hunh?

 Is this what you want!? Yes!?

 …Because if this is what you want, I’m not any part of it; you’ve locked me out. I…don’t exist. I…I don’t exist. Just…just tell me.

As you can see, I’ve long been a member of the Edward Albee fan club. It started at age 17 when I read his first play, The Zoo Story, in The Evergreen Review, and was stunned without really comprehending it.

Adopted when he was 18 days old by a rich but cold Larchmont family (“They bought me. They paid $113.33”), Albee left home at 18 and found his calling in Greenwich Village. He didn’t see his adoptive mother for 17 years.

That indeed led to one of his best and most personal plays: Three Tall Women. Critic Linda Winer called it “a devastating look at a certain kind of woman’s life to the end.”

In the second act, as the 92 year-old woman lays there dying, three versions of her younger self compare the stages of life. The youngest, C, age 26, learns more than she wants about her future. I’ll never become you—either of you. But she will. And she will find that Prince Charming has the morals of a sewer rat, and that their son has quit the family: He packed up his attitudes and he left! At some point, C. and B. discuss what they think are the happiest moments. A., the eldest, brings them up short.

You’re both such children. The happiest moment of all? Really? The happiest moment? Coming to the end of it, I think, when all the waves cause the greatest woes to subside, leaving breathing space, time to concentrate on the greatest woe of all—that blessed one—the end of it.

Yes, that’s the happiest moment: When it’s all done. When we stop. When we can stop.

Not that Edward Albee has: He’s still writing at 86.

 

For Adults Only

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Time Inc. was always known for producing fairly mainstream products. But it occasionally showed its avant garde side in its direct mail.

For example, in 1959 it sent a small film strip with half a dozen frames from the movie Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Of course, the publisher sent many doo-dads and items to drive engagement in those days, including its famous red pencils. But the Hiroshima piece was daring, given the subject matter of the movie directed by Alain Resnais and written by Marguerite Duras.

My vague memory of seeing it decades ago—we walked in late—was that it was about an unnamed Japanese architect trying to seduce an unnamed French actress as they wander the eerie, neon-lit nightscape of Hiroshima 14 years after the atomic bombing.

As I learned recently after seeing it again, it’s not about that at all. Actually, the pair has already commenced a relationship. The question is: Will it go on from there, or will the woman played by Emmanuelle Riva return to France as planned?

At bottom, the film is about attraction, and some say about memory. But it is layered with moral ambiguity, even as it starts. As we view horrific film footage of the aftermath, the women talks about her visits to Hiroshima’s Peace Museum and her knowledge of the devastation.

“You saw nothing in Hiroshima,” the man played by Eiji Okada repeats, almost as a litany.

Of course she hasn’t. Even the man wasn’t there—he was in the army when the bomb was dropped—although his family was.

But the woman has had her own wartime experience in the French town of Nevers. She fell in love with a German soldier. He was killed, and she was shamed after the Germans were driven out by having her hair cut off in public.

By order of her parents, she snuck out of town and arrived in Paris just as the news about Hiroshima was breaking. People were happy: It meant the end of World War II.

Not so well understood at that time were the consequences for the residents of Hiroshima and the rest of the human race.

“Does the night never end in Hiroshima?” she asks.

“It never ends in Hiroshima,” he answers.

Rivas’ performance is especially shattering. At times, she seems to mistake the man in Hiroshima for her German soldier. But both characters are in turmoil.

Assuming they are separated, how will the two lovers, both of whom have spouses, remember each other? Will they at all? And if so, what will they call each other?

Alain Resnais, who also directed classics like Last Year in Marianbad, recently died. Eiji Okada, who starred in other great films like Woman in the Dunes, died in 1995. Rivas, at age 85, gave another stunning performance in Michael Haneke’s 2012 film Amour.

And Time Inc? Around the time of Hiroshima Mon Amour, it also sent several pages from Alan Drury’s novel Advise and Consent. It’s not clear whether these efforts pulled, or which of its great copywriters were involved. The company was not afraid to try.