Bogus Blurbs

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Ladies Home Journal is not known for its investigative journalism. In 1906, though, it published a story titled, The Inside Story of a Sham, about phony testimonials in patent medicine ads, exposing the inside workings of a highly fraudulent business.

The article started with the fact that the medicine sellers brazenly used real peoples’ names without their permission. For example, a Senator whose signature appeared in ads wrote that he had not endorsed the product, and that he had never even received the sample that supposedly was sent to him. Another notable threatened legal action if the medicine sellers didn’t stop quoting him by name. Author Mark Sullivan wanted to know: How did the medicine sellers get these peoples’ signatures? Here’s what he uncovered. (Note: we’ve maintained his spelling).

I found that there are three men, rivals in trade, who make a business of securing these indorsements for “patent medicines” from prominent men. They are known as “testimonial-brokers.” The best-known and most successful of the three was approached one day last spring by a man who represented a well-known “patent medicine.” The medicine man states his case: he was about to extend the advertising of his “medicine” and he wanted testimonials. In short, he put it to the testimonial-getter concretely by saying that he wanted signed testimonials from, say, one hundred Members of Congress, Governors, and men high in the Army and Navy. The testimonial-getter was perfectly at home in this situation. He figured on the contract as an architect would estimate on a house.

Confirming my talk with Mr. _________, I will undertake to obtain testimonials from Senators at seventy-five dollars each, and from Congressman at forty dollars on a prearranged contract. A contract for not less than $5,000 would meet my requirements in the testimonial line.

I can put your matter in good shape shortly after Congress meets if we come to an agreement. We can’t get Roosevelt, but we can get men and women of national reputation, and we can get their statements in convincing form and language.

 Here it was then—an actual business!

 The next point I wanted to find out was: Who gets the seventy-five dollars or the forty dollars? Not the Senator or Congressman, I found. It is true that there are a few public men who have a financial interest in “patent medicines”; but none sells his name outright for seventy-five or forty dollars. The testimonial-getter explained this:

 “The knowing how to approach each individual is my stock in trade. Only a man of wide acquaintance of men and things could carry it out. Often I employ women. Women know how to get around public men. For example, I know that Senator A.________has a poverty-stricken cousin who works as a seamstress. I go to her and offer her twenty-five dollars to get the Senator’s signature to a testimonial.
But most of it I do through newspaper correspondents here in Washington. Take the Senator from some Southern State. That Senator is very dependent on the Washington correspondent of the leading newspaper in his State. By the dispatches which that correspondent sends back the Senator’s career is made or marred. So I go to that correspondent. I offer him fifty dollars to get the Senator’s testimonial. The Senator may squirm , but he’ll sign all right. Then there are a number of easy-going Congressmen who needn’t be seen at all. I can sign their names in anything and they’ll stand for it. And there are always a lot of poverty-stricken, broken-down Army veterans hanging around Washington. For a few dollars they’ll go to their old Army officers on a basis of an old acquaintance’ sake, and get testimonials.”

Assuming that was true, it doesn’t say much for the journalistic ethics of those home-town correspondents.

Just as bad, in Sullivan’s view, were the unauthorized testimonials from ordinary people. In one case, a woman said that she “had never used the ‘medicine’ she was advertised to indorse., but that a man had called on her, offered to have a dozen photographs of her taken at the best gallery in her city, and she could have them all free of charge if she would sign the letter and let her photograph be printed. She did, and she got the photographs, but she had never had the ailment spoken of in the advertisement, and had never tasted a drop of the “medicine.”

Well, at least she got the photos. Many people got nothing. And some victims had their names used because they were actually taking the medicines, and were so zonked that they didn’t care if their names were used. Sullivan explains:

 Where the “testimonials” seemed genuine, I found that either the cocaine or the morphine in the “medicine” soothed the pain of the victim, or the strychnine or alcohol exhilarated the taker. But as to a genuine case of actual good gone or help received, except fancied, I could not find a single one of all those I investigated.

Well, so much for honesty in that supposedly golden time, but it didn’t go on for long: The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed that same year, and put most of the patent medicine sellers out of business (along with some testimonial brokers, no doubt). Still, online scam artists post fraudulent testimonials even now. Ladies’ Home Journal should look into it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Spanish Dance

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

On Thursday, my wife Andrea and I had one of those rare experiences at Carnegie Hall: A piano recital by the young Spanish pianist Jose Menor. The concert was devoted to Enrique Grenados’ Goyescas, a suite of piano pieces inspired by Goya’s sketches of everyday life in Spain. And in transporting the audience on this hundredth anniversary of the composer’s death, Menor showed that he may be a worthy replacement for the late Alicia de Larrocha as the leading interpreter of Grenados in our time.

But my purpose here isn’t to write a piece of musical criticism. It’s to tell you a very personal story.

The time was Labor Day Weekend in 2001. Idly browsing in Barnes & Noble, we bought a Pablo Cassals CD titled Legendary Casals Performances, Early Recordings 1925-1928. It featured pieces by Chopin, Saint-Saens, Popper, Bach and Debussy, all played in that rich, warm, golden tone that only Cassals achieved on the cello, with piano accompaniment.

We played it once or twice, then forgot about it. Who had the time? A week later, planes flew into the World Trade Center, and the buildings came crashing down. Notwithstanding that a neighbor was killed in the event (Glenn Winuk, a lawyer and volunteer fireman who tried to save others and had, in fact, done the same thing during the 1993 Trade Center attack), we were a mile or two away, and could make no claim of suffering. But we were depressed and anxious, as were most people in New York (and, we suspect, the rest of the country).

Drawn back to dead European men, as they say, we returned to the Cassals CD. And the seventh piece on the CD reduced both of us: On the CD cover, it was titled, simply, Spanish Dance, although it’s really Spanish Dance No. 5. Written by Granados, the selection starts in a minor key. Then, switching from cello to piano, it ascends to a sixth major chord, and then up to the seventh, before eventually returning to the minor.

Neither of us is well-educated in music. But when the piece swooped upwards and hit those major chords, we felt that life, however fragile, would go on for a time, and that we had to enjoy these moments. I often think of that epiphany when spreading cream cheese on a bagel on Sunday morning.

Yeah, I know, a cynic shouldn’t indulge in this kind of sappiness. But we tend to forget what it was like in the aftermath of 9/11. Wusses that we are, we got emotional over very little. And Grenados helped bring us around. Maybe it was the tinny sound of the almost 80 year-old Cassals recording. How could you not think of your grandparents and the world they lived in?

The months passed. And as we returned to shopping (as commanded by our president), we decided to delve into Enrique Grenados. We learned that he was born in 1867 in Spain, and was a piano virtuoso and a varied composer, bringing a touch of modernism to his particular Spanish music.

Born in 1923, the renowned pianist Alicia de Larrocha grew up hearing about him, although she didn’t play the “real Grenados” until after the Spanish Revolution. “He was a very sensitive, very romantic man, with big eyes and…well, you know that kind of man in that period of history,” she said in an interview with David Dubal for his classic book Reflections from the Keyboard. “Very romantic, very sensitive, and poetic—yes, and a very good-looking man. Very good-looking. Beautiful eyes. So he had many, many romances and many, many women fell in love with him. And, I wouldn’t say my mother was really in love with him, but she had some admiration and something for him that was very strong.”

Dubal asked de Larrocha to compare playing Goyescas and Issac Albeniz’s Iberia.

“They are so different,” she answered. “Goyescas is very difficult but it requires a different technique. You have to adapt your technique for Goyescas and forget Goyescas when you go to Iberia. But in a way, perhaps Goyescas is more pianistic. Grenados was a great, great pianist and it was easy for him to play. Albeniz, at the time he was writing Iberia, was not playing, so it was more intellectual.”

Thus inspired, we bought several more Grenados CDs, most by de Larrocha, went to concerts, and achieved at least a passing understanding of Grenados’ catalogue. And we mourned de Larrocha’a passing in 2009.

But we learned something about a year after 9/11. And there’s no way to make sense of it. It was that Enrique Grenados died in 1916 when a ferry boat he was on in the English Channel was torpedoed by a German U boat. He drowned trying to save his wife.

How very strange that Grenados perished in a military attack on civilians, an act of terrorism by a state, if you will. And here we were, cluelessly using him to comfort us after a terrorist attack in New York.

What does this coincidence mean? Most likely, as R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural says to Flakey Foont, it “don’t mean sheeitt.” But it has strengthened what will be a lifetime devotion to Enrique Grenados.

And we wonder: Did Grenados have any kind of premonition when he wrote those chords in Spanish Dance No. 5 in 1890? What would have he have made of the Spanish Civil War, which he could have well lived to see? We’ll never know. But Spanish Dance No. 5, and the rest of Grenados’ body of work, has sustained us through good and bad times ever since. Is it any mystery that we feel what can only be described as gratitude?

Note: The particular recording we cherish doesn’t seem to be available on YouTube. But here’s a 1916 version by Cassals—and an identical arrangement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Body Armor

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

This week’s historical piece addresses a delicate subject: corsets. Or, rather, corsets and content.

In 1929, Charis of St. Paul sent a brochure for its “superior foundation garment.” The fold-out piece featured spot color, and photos of women wearing the patented corset (although it never used that term).

The only response mechanism is a St. Paul address and phone number, so this was obviously a local effort. The garment couldn’t be bought in a store, or ordered by mail—instead, it was delivered in person by a Charis representative.

Here’s how content was done 87 years ago. The cover asks the question, “What has become of the middle-aged woman?” And the copy on the flip page answers the question:

What has become of the Middle-aged” Woman?

The pathetic, “middle-aged” woman of yesterday is the mature, young woman of today. Instead of a drab, monotonous existence, she leads a useful, interesting life.

For the active, smartly dressed, modern woman, whose figure has matured with her years, CHARIS is a superior foundation garment from every point of view.

To begin with , CHARIS is adjustable, so that the wearer as she puts it on, can improve her figure wherever desired. Ungraceful development of waist, hips or thighs can be corrected, the abdomen flattened—creating smart youthful lines from bust to knees. This re-proportioning of the figure is accomplished without any restriction of movement. The garment can be worn continuously with perfect comfort.

CHARIS is light in weight and contains a minimum of boning, yet it provides exactly the physical support most mature women need. An important feature is the Inner Belt, which supports the abdomen in correct position, affording protection against strain and depleted vitality.

CHARIS is a patented garment. The advantages of its adjustable feature cannot be secured elsewhere.

You can examine CHARIS in the private of your home whenever convenient. This superior garment is not sold in stores but will be brought directly to you by a representative of this company. To secure further information, including free demonstration if desired, please communicate with the address on the back of this leaflet.

The following pages contain full-page photos of variations, with descriptions:

Observe how CHARIS controls and reproportions the well developed figure, without restriction of movement. In addition to producing attractive, youthful lines CHARIS permits perfect physical relaxation with comfort in any position. Continued use of CHARIS will usually effect a permanent reduction in bust and hip measurements.

For the women of average figure, the garment illustrated below is a particularly desirable model. It is made with the convenient Midway Opening (midway between center front and underarm). Notice the smooth, youthful contour and this garment creates. This and other models can be had with cool net or rayon top for summer.

The unique adjustability and complete superior of CHARIS make it a desirable garment for every woman—slender or stout. There are odd and even sizes, 32 to 56 bust. Detachable shoulder straps are a great convenience. The garment launders beautifully and gives long services. A wide selection of models and materials is provided.

The rear cover shows a fully dressed woman (presumably Mrs. Charis, if there was one), and asks the question: “Will you let her help YOU, too?”

At the risk of seeming lurid, there was one curious historical detail: The garments featured clips for holding up stockings, which were worn in each of the photos.

 

The Girl With the Guys

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Of all the writers I’ve known in direct marketing, none was more talented and charming than Joan Throckmorton.

Joan, who died in 2003, was a brilliant direct mail copywriter, and a prolific author and speaker. But she was also a gracious woman, with a certain wry reserve.

She was born in Evanston Hospital, something she had in common with the DM legend Bob Stone, and grew up in Florida. She arrived in New York in the early 1950s, and was hired by Doubleday, because friends and former classmates worked there. Her first assignment was in the art department.

“My job was literally to do character counts on new books, and all the scut work, and also to work with some of our illustrators and artists,” she said in an interview in her home in Pound Ridge, NY in 1997.

She particularly recalled one young artist who would hand her a drawing and say, “Joan, I drew you this butterfly.” After she had thanked him and he’d left, she’d promptly discard it.

He was Andy Warhol. “If I had kept some of those butterflies, I would be in a lot better financial position today,” Joan laughed. Another artist was Ted Gorey, whose ghoulish Victorian drawings later made him famous.

Eventually, Joan moved on. “Because I was a writer and an English major who wanted to write, I was allowed to go downstairs to what they called Sherman’s Alley. Charley Book Club Sherman ran the Doubleday Book Club promotions. He was known throughout the company as a vociferous, harsh, cookie-scary boss, but maybe he had a heart of gold, and I rather thought he did.”

Joan worked on club mailings. “I was Mystery Guild and Catholic Book Club. I did a few Literary Guilds here and there. Literary Guild was, as always, a high-end club. We worked with the editors, and that’s how I started to write, mostly with the thrillers., where you do sort of a film trailer or preview, the monthly club announcement. That was my introduction to direct mail.”

Most book club prospecting was done in space ads at that time. But there were also monthly selection mailings. “The package consisted of pretty much what it consists of now: a plain white out envelope identifying the club,” Joan said. “Sometimes it may have had copy lines, very simple lines, club announcements and not a series of flyers. We had a small list of many fewer books, alternate selections, that we changed and updated. Today we have many more.”

She continued that the prevailing wisdom then was that the information age was on its way, “the information age when people would be given more to read about, more data input than they could handle, due to new electronic methodologies, one of which was the photo facsimile of newspapers, not to mention the purple-inked Xerox machine.”

Making Your Own Clothes

Work aside, Joan’s early life in New York was right out of My Sister Eileen.

“I started at Doubleday at $55 a week, and we got an extra bonus at Christmas of about $20, with taxes taken out,” Joan said. “That was it. Now how did you live in those days? You lived like they’re living today—two and three people in an apartment. No real privacy. Once a week, you would go out to dinner with a friend when you didn’t have a date, and you’d have a nice meal at a modestly priced restaurant. If you had a date (the women never paid in those days0 you might go to a modestly priced little French restaurant, or to a Third Ave. bar and hang out with your mixed groups of friends. And we had lots of parties. But nobody had any money.”

In contrast to women with their $55 salaries, men started at $65 to $70 a week—not bad money at the time, Joan said. “We’re talking in weekly terms,” she added. “Nobody could understand anything more than that.”

On those tight budgets, young working women usually made their own clothes. “We sewed—we either rented or one of us had a sewing machine,” Joan remembered. “We made clothes so we’d look decent in the office.”

But Joan was a talented writer, and she jumped around, even though she was advised against it. “They’d say, ‘Why would you want to leave? You’re doing well.’”

Joan noted, though, that “we had quite a hard time for women to get promoted, so I went over to Time Inc. and applied for a job to Life Promotions. And there I worked with Bill Herringbone, and the publisher, a young guy named Andy Heiskell. Wendell Forbes was down the hall, and Bob Fisler was over in Time, and we all knew each other. Later, I became Andy Heiskell’s assistant. And I moved to being promotion director for Sports Illustrated when Bob Fisler left that book.”

Sports Illustrated was a daring start-up for the time. “In those days, they said sports was tennis and golf. It wasn’t. Tex Maule was there early, and we were doing a lot more cogent advertising. But there was no professional basketball. Pro football was just getting started, and I was dating one of the guys on CBS, so I got to know all of the New York Giants football team, which was nice for a young gal working for Sports Illustrated. It was really wild and crazy—Frank Gifford, Kyle Rote, the whole bunch.

As copywriter, Joan also worked on the first Life book—The Life Cookbook. “By today’s standards, it was a pretty antiquated-looking book, but it was a life-sized book and I did the promotions for it,” Joan said.

Time Inc was a fun place to work. “Two weeks wouldn’t go by without some floor party—a big birthday party,” she went on. “Ad salesmen met at the 3G’s across the street at 5:30, and drink, drink, drink. There were people falling down elevator shafts, being caught in embarrassing positions,” she laughed.

It was easy to party: The work day went from 9 to 5, and maybe they’d stay until 5:30 or 6 when busy. There was no weekend work.

Joan’s next stop was American Heritage, where her sometime boss at Time was now in residence: Frank Johnson.

“Frank was quite a character, not a ladies’ man, a wonderful guy,” she said. “A perfectionist, a tough guy, and Bill Jayme was writing for us, too. Jayme and Frank were very close. And Frank was a good red pencilier, on anybody’s copy. Tough, tough guy to work with.”

Later, Joan worked for Time Life Books and later on Look magazine at Cowles. “That’s where I got to know Pat Carbine and that group—the Ms. Magazine group,” she said.

Finally, Joan went out on her own and had an illustrious freelance career, writing thousands of effective packages, columns for DM News and Direct and books.

I richly enjoyed our interview in ’97. We sat in her home office, a small room with a desk and computer, a zebra painting on the wall, and large stacks of catalogs. Joan’s husband Sheldon Satin, a customer service consultant, was at work in the office next door. You could see the autumn foliage outside the window.

In the end, Joan had mixed feelings about some of her experiences–for example, Andy Heiskell’s birthday dinner at age 80, thrown by the Time Life Alumni Society. Heiskell had been chairman of Time for 30 years.

Joan felt a certain loyalty, but “they were all tall men in Navy blue blazers,” she recalled. “Just wasps—no blacks, no Jews. All the women had lovely little dresses on, and they were all wives. I thought: All the good and bad things rolled up into one.”

Blowing Smoke

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

The liquor peddlers we covered last week may seem like the ultimate marketing lowlifes. But there is an even worse group.

The tobacco pushers. They’ve used promotion, advertising, direct mail and every known discipline to hook smokers. And while we’re all responsible for our own vices, they helped kill many people.

Prior to 1900, most tobacco was either chewed or rolled at home in cigarette papers, like marijuana today. The rare person who smoked consumed an average of 16 cigarettes per year, and most women did not smoke at all.

Then mass production came into play, enabling tobacco companies to produce thousands of cigarettes in the time it previously took a smoker to roll one.

Smokes were now available by the pack in every town in the country. And, thanks to lobbyists, tobacco was exempted from the Pure Food an Drug Act of 1906. The result? The tobacco kings avoided the regulations that plagued the manufacturers of patent medicines and many other products.

But the biggest boost to the prosperity of the cancer merchants came with the development of mass advertising. By the mid-1920s, brand names like Lucky Strike and Camel were plastered on billboards and on the pages of magazines. They depicted smoking as an attractive pastime, and linked it to sporting activities and romance. An early Chesterfield ad showed a pretty young girl telling her boyfriend, “Blow some my way.”

The tobacco lords were not merely competing with each other to sell cigarettes, they were creating a market that never before existed. In a few years, thanks to subliminal advertising and popularization of smoking by movie and sports idols, millions of men, women and children picked up the habit. Then the coffin nail sellers received an unexpected bonus: mass addiction. As we now know, the physical habit is equaled by a psychological dependence so powerful that people light up cigarettes without even thinking about it.

Once they realized it, the ciggie manufacturers wasted no time in exploiting this fact. For starters, they aimed their advertising at young non-smokers instead of at people who were already hooked. They targeted women. And they sent thousands of free cartons to veterans’ hospitals and servicemen stationed overseas. Not only did they receive good publicity for these charitable ventures, they gained new lifetime customers among the soldiers who received the handouts.

As for health, their attitude seemed to be symbolized by the copy in one of their ads: “Not a Cough in a Carload.”

Even in the ‘20s, there were indications that smoking was harmful, but the tobacco men worked hard to suppress such information. In 1936, a medical researcher exhibiting a cancerous lung remarked that such a case was so rare it might never be seen again. It wasn’t until the early ‘50s, when the first generation of heavy smokers started dying off en masse, that scientists were able to show a definite relationship between smoking and respiratory disease, especially lung cancer.

The tobacco industry sold its composite of poisons for over 50 years with only the slightest interference from regulators. But eventually, as 77 million workdays were lost and 360,000 deaths were reported due to smoking-related illnesses each year, the problem became too big for any government to ignore. In 1964, after painstaking research, the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health released a historic report linking smoking with the spiraling death rate from cancer and heart disease. Unlike previous efforts, this one spelled it all out, for anybody who wanted to see it—it was also excerpted in almost every newspaper and magazine in the country.

Don’t think the tobacco firms rolled over. Almost out of nowhere, two “scientific” articles appeared, one in True magazine and another in the National Enquirer, purporting to show that cigarette smoking wasn’t bad for you at all—that it was much safer, in fact, than walking across the street or trying to fix a faulty electrical appliance The articles were widely reprinted, and copies were mailed, under True magazine’s letterhead, to 500,000 consumers.

Who mailed them? An FTC investigation revealed that it was the Tobacco Institute. The author of the article, Stanley Frank, was no scientist: This prehistoric content writer had previously done some articles on sports and other lightweight topics.

Meanwhile, the nicotine cartel carried on a backchannel fight to prevent the FTC from banning cigarette advertising on television. This went on for a few years until a New York attorney named John F. Banzhaf III petitioned the Federal Communications Commission, claiming that if cigarette companies were going to be allowed to advertise on the air then anti-smoking groups should be given equal time to refute them, under the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine.

The industry deployed its biggest legal guns, but lost, right up to the Supreme Court. The airwaves were deluged with anti-smoking commercials. And sales plummeted.

At this point, the tobacco trust decided that it should take its advertising off the air, because then the prime tine anti-smoking spots would also cease. So it sent its lobbyists out to support such a ban. And it promised to not target the young.

The ban went into effect on January 2, 1971, in accord with the Public Health Smoking Act of 1970. Some anti-smoking people saw it as a victory.

But they were deluding themselves. The networks stopped showing the antismoking commercials in prime time, and cigarette sales shot up almost as quickly as they had gone down.

What’s more, the smoke purveyors saved hundreds of millions of dollars by not running TV advertising. And they diverted these funds into other types of marketing. For example, they came up with the Virginia Slims Tennis Tournament, which won the endorsement of some of the biggest names in sports, while also gaining prime-time TV coverage (with the name Virginia Slims prominently displayed in color around the court). They also started mailing out free samples, just as they had done years before, but the FTC put a halt to it.

We’ll stop there. People of a certain age will recall that restaurants, bars and theaters were so full of smoke that the eyes burned. Things are better now in that way thanks to smoking restrictions, but you can still see young people puffing away on the street, especially women.

It’s impossible to scare them. But I’ve seen enough friends and colleagues die of lung cancer and emphysema, usually wearing inhalers for their last several years.

In the end, the cigarette marketers are worse than their liquor counterparts. An adult can enjoy an occasional glass of alcohol or enhance a meal with a good wine; why, it’s said that a daily glass of wine can improve your coronary health.

I can’t remember seeing any such reports about cigarettes (at least not credible ones). So no credit is due the swine who market the evil weed.

 

Drunken Youth

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Oh, our poor young people. Parents who worry about them often ask if liquor advertisers target youth.

Of course they do, you fools. Where else are they going to get new customers? The Boomers may drink more as they sink into dementia, but there’s a certain churn.

Rolling Stone magazine put it best in an ad in the Liquor Handbook some 30 years ago:

“Meet over 2 ½ million young adults who read Rolling Stone…They’re affluent, they’re thirsty, they’re deciding right now what they’ll be drinking for the next 20 years. Who needs ‘em?? You do: they’re your future.”

By the way, this was around the time the magazine ran a lurid article on teenage alcoholism. Talk about having it both ways.

Has anything changed?

When Prohibition was repealed in 1932, alcohol was less of a problem for both young and old. Fewer than a third of the American people drank at all and statistics on the damage from steady boozing were only a fraction of what they later became (perhaps because there was less research being done).

This changed in the 1950’s, when now-prosperous ex-G.I..’s created the home entertainment revolution. Booze was now more acceptable in the home, and millions of people set up bars in their houses to serve it.

Alcohol was also seen as more chic. And why wouldn’t it be? Liquor flowed once every eight minutes on television, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

Then as now, the most common kind of liquor advertising showed sexy young people enjoying a drink. They could have been playing with toy boats, as in a Smirnoff’s ad, or sitting around a fireplace. The message was that a person who drank the beverage being advertised would enjoy wealth, sex and social status like the people in the ad.

Which was pure rot. A person who made a career out of swilling what the people in the ad were drinking would not only get further away from wealth, sex and social status, but could end up with no wife, no house, no worldly possessions whatsoever.

Naturally, liquor companies soft-peddled that sad fact. But they hinted at it in occasional ads that seemed to appeal directly to alcoholism. For example, Smirnoff’s showed a bottle of vodka lying smashed on the ground, with a caption reading, “Did you ever see a grown man cry?”

That wasn’t the worst of it. As we now know, liquor advertising was (and still is) full of subliminal messages, which the industry pretended to only dimly understand. One person who understood them was Professor Wilson Byron Key, a former advertising executive, who wrote the book Subliminal Seduction.

In Senate hearings, Key showed slides of several full-color ads in national magazines. To the astonishment of the Senatorial audience, he pointed out various nightmare images such as death’s heads and devils masks, plus assorted sexual imagery, and the letters S-E-X, all superimposed on the ice cubes in the glasses.

If the reader looked carefully enough at the ice cubes floating in almost any liquor ad, he, too, would see macabre and sexually provocative images winking at him. “The subliminal content appears to be about two things—sex and death,” Professor Key said. He then explained that most people will never even realize that they are seeing such a thing, but that it will register in their subconscious, so that at a later time, when they are shopping in a liquor store, they will find themselves looking for a certain brand without knowing why. “These are subliminal stimuli, not perceived at any conscious level,” he added. “They are perceived at the unconscious level.”

The liquor industry claimed that these masterpieces of hallucinogenic art were just that—hallucinations. “They’re ordinary ice cubes,” one ad writer said. But Key debunked that. “If you have ever been around commercial photography, you would know that this is an impossibility. You can’t photograph ice. The stuff melts under hot lights.” As far as the professor was concerned, these images were most skillfully air-brushed in.

Granted, these ads weren’t all directed at the young. But many new products were. For example, vintners learned that young people were drinking wine to supplement their marijuana. In response, Ernest and Julio Gallo, introduced pop wines like Ripple and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, and the Heublein Corporation brought out Annie Green Springs wine. When wine faded, and the love generation turned to harder booze, the wineries switched their focus to the teenage audience. Heublein introduced Hereford Cows, an alcoholic milkshake available in flavors like chocolate, strawberry and banana.

Think about that the next time you want to criticize Millennials for their drinking habits.

What’s more, people barely old enough to drink and vote were not the only prime market. The Gallos created a libation called Thunderbird after reading marketing reports that said black consumers were fond of mixing white port wine with lemon juice. Thunderbird sold 2.5 million cases during its first year. It’s not clear who bought them, but the product later became a staple on interracial skid rows across the country.

Is it true that the industry had nobody in mind for these ads and products? If you believe that, you shouldn’t work in marketing.

“An industry that spends over $500 million a year on advertising certainly has a good idea of who buys its products and why,” said Dr. Eugene Noble, director of the National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, back in those halcyon days.

It still does.

When Yussel Went Nazi

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Sure, life imitates art—in grim ways, at times.

In 1933, the Marx Brothers came out with the movie Duck Soup. In an early scene, the President of Freedonia (Groucho), arrives late for his own reception, and inadvertently lines up with the honor guard (“Expecting someone?”) When they extend their swords, he lifts his cigar.

Funny, no? But that scene was replicated in Nazi Germany in 1935, and I’ll leave it to you to decide if it was amusing.

Joe Jacobs, a Jewish-American boxing manager who worked in the corner of the ex-heavyweight champ Max Schmeling, was in the ring when the German audience rose and gave the Nazi salute. What was he to do? He lifted his cigar.

The Nazis saw this action by a Jew as an insult to Hitler. And American Jews were horrified. One New York tabloid summed it up with the headline: “When Yussel went Nazi” (Joe’s nickname was Yussel the Muscle).

This is not some apocryphal tale—there are photos of Jacobs holding the cigar aloft.

So who was Joe Jacobs? Unrelated to the promoter Mike Jacobs, he was a Runyonesque character who typically emerged for breakfast at dusk (except when training a fighter), and was perpetually short of money.

He grew up in the largely Irish neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen in New York, where his father had a tailor shop. In that setting, he learned the rudiments of the fight game at an early age, as A.J. Liebling put it in in a small, unsigned profile of Jacobs that he co-authored with Russell Maloney for the New Yorker in 1936.

Liebling, himself Jewish, used standard stereotypical language to describe Jacobs (“a pointy faced little man”). Or maybe Maloney added that touch. But they went on to explain Joe’s odd relationship with Schmeling.

“The Joe-and-Max combination has intrigued lots of people, because Max is a Reich sports idol and fights frequently in Germany, while Joe is spectacularly non-Aryan,” Liebling and Maloney wrote. “The two get along fine, though; Schmeling has admired the Jacobs brains ever since Joe won the heavyweight championship title for him by keeping him flat on his back. That was in 1930, when he was fighting Jack Sharkey. Sharkey had dropped Schmeling with a low blow. The German, although outpointed in the earlier, and legitimate, boxing, was about to rise when Joe yelled at him to stay down. He was awarded the championship on a foul, whereas if he had got up, technicalities would probably have been forgotten and the slaughter would have gone on. Max thinks Joe is a genius, and so does Joe.”

Schmeling defended the title once, against Young Stribling, and lost it by a disputed decision to Sharkey in 1932.

Then the Nazis came in. Goebbels demanded that Max dump Jacobs, but that would have been a commercial disaster in the U.S., where Jewish fans made up a large portion of the boxing audience. So Schmeling, who brought back vast amounts of currency to Germany, walked a fine line.

But back to the infamous episode.

“Another example of Jacobs diplomacy is the fact that Schmeling is now in training at the Naponich Country Club, a Jewish summer hotel offsets any possible anti-Nazi sentiment among the customers,” Liebling and Maloney continued. “The Nazi question doesn’t bother Joe much. He’s in and out of Germany all the time and says he even gets a special rate at the Hotel Bristol, in Berlin. Last year, when Schmeling fought and defeated Steve Hamas, at Hamburg, the band broke into the Horst Wessel song while Joe was in the ring with the fighters and officials. Everybody raised his hand in the Nazi salute, and so did Joe. ‘What the hell would you do?’ he asked us. “

Six days after that profile came out, the supposedly washed-up Schmeling knocked out Joe Louis in the greatest victory of his career, with Jacobs in his corner. Having beaten the African-American prodigy, feeding Nazi claims of racial superiority, he returned a hero of the Reich, and was feted by Hitler. But his status in Germany plummeted when Louis kayoed him in a single round in the 1938 rematch.

Schmeling was drafted into the German Army and served as a paratrooper during World War II. Joe Jacobs died in 1940.

Was Schmeling a Nazi? That’s unclear even now. Third-party testimony revealed that he shielded the children of a Jewish friend in his hotel room during Kristallnacht in 1938 (a claim he never made for himself), and he seemed ambivalent about the regime, and never joined the Nazi party. But he was an opportunist who enjoyed vast popularity in Germany and was not afraid to ask Hitler for favors. And he did favors in return, assuring the Olympic committee in 1936 that Germany could responsibly manage that year’s games. Strapped for cash after the war, he fought a few bouts, then became a wealthy Coca-Cola magnate.

Liebling had yet to attain his full stylistic maturity when he co-wrote the Jacobs profile. As for Jacobs, one can see his bizarre salute as a piece of Groucho-style impertinence (there’s no evidence he ever saw Duck Soup). or as an irrelevant sideshow to the horror that was about to occur.

Goodbye to Gutenberg

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By Ray Schultz

Sometimes we take progress for granted, without knowing its history. A half century ago, Newsweek published an article titled Goodbye to Gutenberg that all but predicted our own information age.

“At MIT, a research team grapples with the problems of developing a nation-wide computer network that will make every bit of knowledge—whether stored in old books or just obtained in a laboratory—instantly available,” Newsweek reported on Jan. 24, 1966.

It continued: “And an IBM scientific-literature device now serving NASA presages the day when a living-room photocopier linked to a computer instantly produces an individually selected group of stories and editorials from any publication the armchair reader wants to see.”

All this was highly unbelievable to many people. But Newsweek devoted several pages to the phenomenon.

“Pipe Dream: As the enthusiasts see it, the answer to (the information explosion) is a vast information network capable of storing, retrieving and moving all kinds of data at high speeds all over the country or even the world. Instead of having books, newspapers and magazines printed, publishers may some day pipe their materials into the system, which would then produce it on demand at high speed—or so the pipe dream goes.”

That wasn’t all. “Progress toward this dial-a-thought world has already been made at MIT by the INTREX (for information transfer experiments) staff. Under the direction of physicist Carl. F.J. Overhage, INTREX is setting up an experimental laboratory to test ways of giving a student instant access to information. Some of the possible tools contemplated include xerography, film projection and even telephone communication between computer and user.

Does anyone remember what the world was like 50 years ago, when LBJ was president and the Beatles were in their glory? If you needed to communicate with a colleague overseas, you sent an air-mail letter. Or, if it was urgent, you paid to send a telex. Computers existed, but few companies could afford them; those that dared to use them had to book off-site timeshares.

On most newspapers, reporters wrote their stories on typewriters, or called them in from a phone booth while a rewrite person typed them. Then an editor marked them up, and they were typeset by an expensive unionized linotype operator, sitting at a hot type machine, as I recall. Finally, they were proofed off a newsprint sheet, and the corrections were painstakingly (but not always accurately) made. All this took hours, and it was expensive. The pressure turned reporters, editors and makeup artists into dipsomaniacs.

But Newsweek reported that copy and manuscript editing could be turned into “an efficient, rapid procedure.” Indeed, copy typed into second-generation computers “will be hyphenated, justified and fit to a layout,” it went on. “Then each complete page will be presented to the editor in the form of a high-quality TV image of 500 or more lines to the inch. Using a light pencil (an electronic pointer capable of directing an image from one part of the screen to another) and keyboard, the editor rewrites and changes the order of paragraphs and the arrangement of stories on the page that will be stored in the computer memory. Such a system would eventually permit him to make up a page with any type, and set whole stories at the flick of a switch.”

This was no pipe dream, the magazine continued: “The first sale of such a computer system has already been made by IBM. The purchaser, Time Inc. (employing a high-speed printer instead of TV), will use it in its book division and three magazines. To be delivered late this year, the system will consist of two $350,000 IBM 360 computers each served by three 512,000-word auxiliary memories.

I’m sure that the people on Newsweek’s business side read this article very carefully. That said, I never saw even a weak version of this system in a publishing office until the 1980s. And it was a long slog from there to where we are today.

Still, visionaries saw it coming at some point. To return to Newsweek:

“Books and newspapers will no longer exist,” predicts Marshall McLuhan, the new savant of the new technology. Publishing will become an active serving of the human mind. Instead of a book, people will get a research package done to suit their own needs.”

Well, we’re not quite there yet. And do we want to be? The only way to read Anna Karenina is in print. But Newsweek got one thing right.

“It publishing and journalism do not buy automation, it seems, automation will buy them.”

Boy, did that turn out to be true.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ink Blots

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Long ago, 100 years ago to be exact, direct mailers used geographic blooters to engage prospects. They thus provided a service while getting their commercial message across, according to an ad in Postage magazine.

Here’s the ad copy from the April 1916 issue:

POATES GEOGRAPHICAL SERIES OF BLOTTERS

Here are two samples of the Poates Geographical Blotters, the series of which covers over 60 subjects as per the list below. There is a blotter for each week of the year, and a few for good measure.

Maps on blotters is on our own original idea, the first subjects having been put on the market in 1914.

In connection with Direct-Advertising By Mail, you won’t find a better business solicitor. Advertising experts tell us that $240,000,000 is wasted every year by putting out matter that nobody reads; or if read, it is soon thrown away and forgotten.

Persistent Direct by Mail Advertising wins out in the end. When the first blotter is used up, a new one is sent out, with a new map and a new “ad,” and by and by results are obtained.

Our experience has shown that geographical blotters are seventy-five percent efficient as advertising media, instead of thirty per cent efficient as is the case with the ordinary printed circular. No matter what message you wish to send or what goods you have to sell, our blotters will tell the story in an interesting manner, and tell it over and over again.

Besides being seventy-five percent efficient, our geographical blotters are inexpensive, considering that maps are printed in three and four colors, and that we act as the advertising agent in arranging the material so that it shall be typographically attractive and convincing.

All this service, the blotters, the map and the printing we furnish for $6.50 per thousand. It pays to try this method of making announcements to customers A map always pleases and interests and has educational value, and it is known that a man’s mail will reach him where no mortal can.

We will be glad to send samples of these blotters to all readers of Postage, on request.

Yours for efficiency and success,

P.L. DIVER, Treasurer for

L.L. POATES PUBLISHING COMPANY

NEW YORK

Note: Maps were offered of all 48 states (at that time), along with “Porto Rico (2 styles)”, Mexico (2 styles), Panama Canal (2 styles), and San Francisco and New York City with two styles apiece. You could also get Europe and the European War Zone.

And here’s one thing you should know about the ad. The editor of Postage, Louis Victor Eytinge, was a convicted murderer, then serving time in Arizona. P.L. Diver was the woman he married upon his release. The marriage unraveled in about five years.

The Capote Papers

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By  Ray Schultz

It’s hard to believe that a half century has passed since the appearance of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But today is the 50th anniversary of Newsweek magazine’s cover story on Capote and his “non-fiction novel.”

That article revealed that Capote had already taken in $500,000 for the paperback rights, $500,000 for the movie rights and another million in royalties. Newsweek, which was published by Katherine Graham (the honoree at Capote’s Black and White Ball that autumn), called it “an extraordinary book by an extraordinary man.”

Given this milestone, it seems like a good time to revisit Truman Capote. Was he an overrated fraud whose main genius was for self-promotion, or a truly innovative author?

He certainly remains a famous one. His chronological peers, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, wrote dozens of books apiece. Yet a recent survey of Millennials shows that only a minority can identify these authors, whereas Capote, who had a much thinner output, is known because of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s onscreen portrayal of him.

And that’s part of the problem. The tiny Capote was an outsized celebrity and substance abuser. His work seemed to take a back seat at times.

So just how good was he?

Let’s start at the beginning: in 1948. Capote’s first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms is a dense account of how Joel, a boy like Truman, finds his identity in the Deep South. The prose is elegant, if slightly overdone in spots, but full of merciless insights like this one:

For long periods each day he studied his face in a hand mirror: a disappointing exercise, on the whole, for nothing he saw concretely affirmed his suspicions of emerging manhood, though about his face there were certain changes: baby-fat had given way to a true shape, the softness of his eyes had hardened: it was a face with a look of innocence but none of its charm, an alarming face, really, too shrewd for a child, too beautiful for a boy.

This moving and funny work  was followed by another fine childhood novel: The Grass Harp.  For me, though, Capote’s big leap forward  came in 1958, with his novella: Breakfast at Tiffany’s. From the Hamburg Heaven on Madison, to Joe Bell’s bar on Lexington, to the tiny studio apartment with its sofa and stuffed chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train, Capote captured the Upper East Side of New York, and the people who lived there in 1943.

As others have observed, Holly Golightly, a sort of American geisha, is Capote’s version of Isherwood’s Sally Bowles. In some scenes, she talks candidly about lesbianism and her sex life; in others she dances around the pillars of the Third Ave. El with Australian Army officers. There’s a new sharpness to the prose: One character discovers that he’d feel safer in diapers than he would in a skirt, and another that gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara. Norman Mailer praised the writing. And Edward Albee, who unsuccessfully rewrote the script of a musical stage version, called it a “tough little book.”

Youth Meets Age

Capote also evoked that Upper East Side neighborhood in the sketch he was writing the day before he died in 1984: about an encounter at age 19 with an older woman dressed in a sable coat outside the Society Library on East 79th St.. He offers to escort her home in a snowstorm, and they stop in Longchamps. She orders tea, he requests a double martini.

Whereupon I told her all about myself, he recalled. My age. The fact I was born in New Orleans, and that I was an aspiring writer.

Really? What writers did I admire? (Obviously she was not a New Yorker: she had a Western accent.) ‘Flaubert. Turgenev. Proust. Charles Dickens. E. M. Forster. Conan Doyle. Maupassant—‘

She laughed. ‘Well. You certainly are varied. Except. Aren’t there any American writers you care for?’

 “Like who?”

 She didn’t hesitate. “Sarah Orne Jewett. Edith Wharton—”

“Miss Jewett wrote one good book: The Country of the Pointed Firs. And Edith Wharton wrote one good book: The House of Mirth. But. I like Henry James. Mark Twain. Melville. And I love Willa Cather. My Antonia. Death Comes for the Archbishop. Have you ever read her two marvelous novellas—A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy?”

“Yes.” She sipped her tea, and put the cup down with a slightly nervous gesture. She seemed to be turning something over in her mind. “I ought to tell you—” She paused; then, in a rushing voice, more or less whispered: “I wrote those books.”

It never fails to get me, this meeting between Cather, an American master who powerfully depicted life on the Great Plains, and the young urbanite Capote.

Was it true as written? That’s besides the point. The teenage litterateur may well have known who Cather was on sight. But I prefer this charming version, which ends just as Capote is about to go to a dinner party at Cather’s Park Ave. apartment. Sadly, that’s as far as he got with this piece before he died.

Have I Said Something Wrong?

For me, some of Capote’s best writing was in his vicious unfinished novel Answered Prayers. The narrator and protagonist, P.B. Jones, is a failed writer and “Hershey Bar Whore” who can service both men and women. That book may suffer now because the notables portrayed in it are forgotten. Will a Millennial appreciate the interplay between Dorothy Parker and Tallulah Bankhead about Montgomery Clift, the tortured actor who has passed out at a dinner party?

…Miss Parker did something so curious it attracted everyone’s attention; it even silenced Miss Bankhead. With tears in her eyes, Miss Parker was touching Clift’s hypnotized face, her stubby fingers tenderly brushing his brow, his cheekbones, his lips, chin.

Miss Bankhead said: “Damn it, Dottie. Who do you think you are? Helen Keller?”

“He’s so beautiful,” murmured Miss Parker. “Sensitive. So firmly made. The most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.” She used a crude expression to denote that Clift was off limits to women.

Then, sweetly wide-eyed wide eyed with little girl naiveté, she said: “Oh. Oh dear. Have I said something wrong?”

And while the import seems clear, what will the PC Generations make of this line? Both Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton had, in effect, paid a million dollars to find out if other ladies were lying when they praised that kinky-haired piece of trade His Excellency the Dominican Ambassador Porfirio Rubirosa…

Of course, the most infamous chapter was Le Cote Basque (1965). As they lunch on Cristal champagne and Souffle Furstenberg, a spinach-cheese-poached egg concoction, at the famed restaurant,  a 40ish swan named Lady Ida Coolbirth (Slim Keith, maybe?) tells Jonesy about a gross and mortifying sexual encounter between the magnate Sydney Dillon (William Paley?) and the governor’s wife who is sitting a few tables away (Happy Rockefeller?). “Dill’s in his sixties now; he could have any woman he wants, yet for years he yearned after yonder porco.”

Capote reportedly published these chapters because he believed they proved he could still write. But one thinly disguised character committed suicide after it came out. And his society friends dumped him, including the most beloved one of all: the dying swan Babe Paley, whose husband supposedly was the subject of the central anecdote of Le Cote Basque. This contributed to Capote’s unraveling.

Truman Capote bashers gleefully point to the fact that he never finished the novel, although he took his first advance for it in 1966. All we have are the three sections published in Esquire in 1975 and 1976 (and later collected in book form). Still missing, perhaps never written, is the chapter titled Father Flanagan’s All-Night Nigger Queen Kosher Café. It’s not a café, but a state, “the cool, green, restful as the grave rock bottom,” a character says in Unspoiled Monsters.

But Capote had obviously had written more. The first chapter published in Esquire, Mojave, was later moved out of Answered Prayers and included as a short story in his uneven 1980 collection Music for Chameleons. In effect, he had completed at least four chapters by 1976. And a fifth, less robust section turned up a few years ago: Of Yachts and Things, about a cruise with a woman who resembles Katherine Graham. First, they meet the captain, attired in  a crisply tailored white uniform. He was a handsome man but his wind-weathered face was solemn, for he had solemn news to report. Alas, there had been a sudden death in the family of our host, and the family was in mourning: our host regretted so much his inability to forewarn us in time.

“Oh, dear, sighed Mrs. Williams. “First Adlai. Now this. Perhaps they ought to rechristen this ship The Bewitchedcraft.”

And my heart sank as well, for of course we assumed the cruise had been cancelled. But not at all! The captain’s orders were to continue the cruise as planned.

“Now that,” said Mrs. Williams, “is what I call class.”

It’s enough to go on. The opening chapters, Unspoiled Monsters and Kate McCloud, together add up to 136 pages, more than Breakfast at Tiffany’s in its entirety, as Gerald Clarke has noted. Le Cote Basque (1965) brings the total to 180 pages.

Maybe it isn’t Proust (Capote had originally hoped to write a modern Remembrance of Things Past). And it suffers by being incomplete. For example, what happened to Kate McCloud after all the hints of the disaster that loomed for her and J.B.? But it’s savagely funny, far more vivid than Dominick Dunne’s clunky writings about the same social class (including at least one episode featured by Capote). And it holds up 40 years later.

One thread that runs through these books is how much fun it was being an author. In the apartment described in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the narrator has books and “jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to be the writer I wanted to be.” His perfect evening is sitting up in bed with a glass of bourbon and the new Simenon. In Unspoiled Monsters, P.B. Jones describes living in Europe on his “various swindles and savings.” In Venice, he writes every day until 3 p.m., then goes out to walk in the winter mist. Towards evening, he shows up at Harry’s Bar and spends “$9 or $10 for martinis and shrimp sandwiches and heaping bowls of green noodles with sauce Bolognese.”

True Crime

For all that, Capote’s reputation may rest on his two crime novels: In Cold Blood and Handcarved Coffins.

In Cold Blood, about the murder of an entire Kansas family, contains some of the best prose Capote ever wrote. (“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there,’” it starts). Here is how he describes one of the killers: Perry Smith:

Sitting, he had seemed a more than normal-sized man, a powerful man, with the shoulders, the arms, the thick, crouching torso of a weight lifter. Weight lifting was, in fact, his hobby. But some sections of him were not in proportion to others. His tiny feet, encased in short black boots with steel buckles, would have neatly fitted into a delicate lady’s dancing slippers; when he stood up, he was no taller than a twelve-year-old child, and suddenly looked, strutting on stunted legs that seemed grotesquely inadequate to the grown-up bulk they supported, not like a well-built truck driver but like a retired jockey, overblown and muscle-bound.

Pretty damned good. But critics charge that Capote overplayed the role of detective Alvin Dewey, one of many alleged inaccuracies, and that he withheld the details of the crime until later in the book to drive suspense.

None of that diminishes In Cold Blood, in my view. Sure, Capote focused on Alvin Dewey. He had access to him, and Dewey helped him. I hate to disillusion anyone, but that’s how it’s often done in journalism. Many non-fiction books have that sort of skew. Why should Capote be singled out? Nor was there anything untoward about his friendship and identification with the killer Perry Smith. Capote functions strictly as an anonymous narrator in this book—he never mentions himself. But he did bring his obsessions to the story, producing an idiosyncratic classic.

Maybe Newsweek had it right, when it called the book “super contemporary,” and likened it to the work of the French anti-novelists of that time.

Finally, there’s the charge that Capote made up a scene—the last one at the cemetery. That’s a no-no these days. But it was hardly unknown in journalism at that time. Think of Joe Mitchell’s composite characters, or of A.J. Liebling’s purported embellishment of Colonel John R. Stingo’s personality.

We live in a time when even memoirs are expected to be 100% factual, without the “stretchers” resorted to by Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken. But I believe there’s room for a less stringent standard for some types of material—as long as you call it what it is.

An Open Coffin

That question is especially pertinent when it comes to Capote’s Handcarved Coffins. A mass killer murders several people in unusual ways—in one instance, by placing amphetamine-maddened rattlesnakes in their car. But before he kills them, he sends his victims photos of themselves and miniature hand-carved coffins.

A probe by journalists revealed that there was no such case, although a couple of elements had popped up—in some form—in other investigations. Capote apparently turned the detective Dewey into a fictional character, and inserted himself as a reporter. And if you believe him, he met and played chess with the suspected killer. Again, none of this ever happened.

Author Ron Rosenbaum, whose opinion I respect, says that the only problem with this work was in the labeling: It actually was an important Capote piece of fiction.

Yes. But I’d add that Capote should have published it separately as a novella, instead of burying it in Music for Chameleons. Made up of transcripts, daily updates and fast-moving episodes, it’s a stunning performance by a man who had only a few years left to live. He could have filled out the book with a few of the better pieces from Music for Chameleons—say, Mojave, the title story and Dazzle, in which the young boy Capote tells a fortune teller that he wants to be a girl. Breakfast for Tiffany’s had a similar format.

The prose style in Handcarved Coffins is more minimal than the one usually displayed by Capote. But there was a high polish to all of it. Take his description of the purported murderer, a wealthy ranch owner:

He sported expensive high-heel boots, but even without them the man measured over six feet, and if he had stood straight, instead of assuming a stooped, slope-shouldered posture, he would have presented a full fine figure. He had long simianlike arms, the hands dangled to his knees, and the fingers were long, capable, aristocratic. I recalled a Rachmaninoff concert. Rachmaninoff’s hands were like Quinn’s.

So how do I rate Truman Capote? Like many people, I, too, got tired of him at times. For years, he pontificated on talk shows on crime and capital punishment, and he seemed to support the latter despite having seen two men hanged. (I didn’t agree with that then, and I don’t now). And they were constantly recycling his holiday memories for TV specials and print edition (not that there was anything wrong with the stories themselves).

In the end, I see him as one of our best writers. He educated himself, and will never be mistaken for the more experimental authors of his generation (despite his labeling of In Cold Blood as the world’s first nonfiction novel). But he had his own niche: In various stories and formats, he plumbed the world of “Father Flanagan and his outcast of Thousands, him and all the other yids, nigs, spiks, fags, dykes, dope fiends and commies.”

In that sense, all his books are of a piece, even the Christmas stories. We come away understanding poverty, sex, cruelty and what it’s like to be the Other. And they’re wrapped in an exquisite style.

Indeed, you can enjoy Capote as I sometimes do, late at night, as literary comfort food. In that way, he’s on a par with F. Scott Fitzgerald: you sometimes want to read him only for the tone.

I suspect that Truman Capote would be perfectly happy with that.