How to Write Copy Like Damon Runyon

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

If ever a writer was good at engaging readers, it was Damon Runyon. He held them from the first sentence to the last, in any format, and he would do that online if he were alive today.

Who’re we talking about? Damon Runyon, born in 1880 in Manhattan, Kansas, died in 1946 on Manhattan Island. He was, to start with, a great reporter and columnist, as proven by his coverage—on deadline— from the Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray murder trial in 1927. (The pair murdered Snyder’s husband).

“Right back to old Father Adam, the original, and perhaps the loudest ‘squawker’ among mankind against women, went Henry Judd Gray in telling how and why he lent his hand to the butchery of Albert Snyder.

“She-she-she-she-she-she-she-she. That was the burden of the bloody song of the little corset salesman as read out in the packed court room in Long Island City yesterday.

“She-she-she-she-she-she. ‘Twas an echo from across the ages and old familiar echo, at that. It was the same ‘squawk’ of Brother Man whenever and wherever he is in a jam, that was first framed in the words:

“’She gave me of the tree, and I did eat.’”

Then there was his sportswriting. Many sportswriters wrote poems in those days, but it’s hard to top Runyon’s paean to the jockey Earl Sande:

Say, have they turned the pages
Back to the past once more?
Back to the racin’ ages
An’ a Derby out of the yore?
Say, don’t tell me I’m daffy
Ain’t that the same ol’ grin?
Why, it’s that handy
Guy named Sande,
Bootin’ a winner in!”

But it’s his fiction that has earned Runyon a small but real place in American literature. He wrote maybe 200 short stories, all in the present tense, creating memorable (if not admirable) characters like Big Jule, Nicely Nicely Jones, Harry the Horse and Sam the Gonoph.

The Snatching of Bookie Bob

Take his story, “The Snatching of Bookie Bob.” Bookie Bob is kidnapped by three thugs named  Harry the Horse, Little Isadore and Spanish John. He agrees to book their horse racing bets to pass time, and they end up owing him double the amount of the ransom.

Yes, I know—it’s the same basic plot as O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief.” But “Bookie Bob” is darker—and funnier—in its tale of Depression-era betrayal.

Consider the way Runyon starts the story, and at the same time explains why snatching is in vogue:

“Now it comes on the spring of 1931, after a long hard winter, and times are very tough indeed, what with the stock market going all to pieces, and banks busting right and left, and the law getting very nasty about this and that, and one thing and another, and many citizens of this town are compelled to do the best they can.

“There is very little scratch anywhere and along Broadway many citizens are wearing their last year’s clothes and have practically nothing to bet on the races or anything else, and it is a condition that will touch anybody’s heart.”

So the three wiseguys start nabbing people for ransom, and “much fresh scratch comes into circulation, which is very good for the merchants,” the narrator writes. He notes, however, that “you cannot snatch just anybody”—you need a reliable finger.

“The finger guy must know the guy he fingers has plenty of ready scratch to begin with, and he must also know that this party is such a party as it not apt to make much disturbance about being snatched, such as telling the gendarmes.”

It also pays to know if the victim “does not care to have matches run up and down the bottom of his feet, which often happens to parties who are snatched and who do not seem to wish to settle their bill promptly, because many parties are very ticklish on the bottom of their feet, especially if the matches are lit.”

Now what is Runyon really doing here but describing a process? He could just as well be explaining a best practice in B2B.

Butch Minds the Baby

Then there’s “Butch Minds the Baby,” an even more perfect blending of style and content. Butch, a reformed hoodlum, is offered big money to break open a safe, but his wife is at a wake, so he has no choice but to take his infant son on the job.

The narrator, “a little dopey” from needled beer, tags along, although he feels that cracking a safe with a baby present is “very dishonorable.” (Who’s this narrator? As he says in another story, “Nobody pays any attention to me, because I am known to one and all as a guy who is just around.” This is the story, by the way, that opens with the memorable line: “One evening along about seven o’clock I am sitting in Mindy’s restaurant putting on the gefilte fish, which is a dish I am very fond of, when in come three parties from Brooklyn wearing caps as follows: Harry the Horse, Little Isadore, and Spanish John”).

The scenes follow with impeccable timing. Butch heats up milk in a saucepan next to the safe, Little Isadore muzzles the baby to keep him quiet, Butch blows the safe open and the police arrive on the scene.

By this time, young John Ignatius is “beating his own best record for squalling,” the narrator writes, “and as we go walking along Big Butch says to me like this:

“‘I dast not run,’ he says, ‘because if any coppers see me running they will start popping at me and maybe hit John Ignatius Junior, and besides running will joggle the milk up in him and make him sick. My old lady always warns me never to joggle John Ignatius Junior when he is full of milk.’

“‘Well, Butch,’ I say, ‘there is no milk in me, and I do not care if I am joggled up, so if you do not mind, I will start doing a piece of running at the next corner.’”

The story is based less on a plot than a premise. But the tone is pitch-perfect. And Runyon sustains it to the very end.

Mastery of His Language

I could go on. I could tell you about Blond Maurice, who in 1936 is placed in quicklime by “certain parties who do not wish him well.” (He shows up later eating cheese blintzes in Mindy’s). I could mention Rusty Charley, who is known to carry a gun “and sometimes to shoot people down as dead as door-nails with it if he does not like the way they wear their hats—and Rusty Charley is very critical of hats.”

But why bother? You can read about these characters—and many more—in a fairly recent Runyon collection from Penguin.

Runyon has been criticized for making hoodlums loveable. But he was the first to admit that he was a “hired Hessian on the typewriter.” He wrote to entertain people, and he succeeded, for at least a dozen of his stories were made into movies, and another couple used for the musical “Guys and Dolls.”

Were there better, more profound writers around? Sure. But as novelist William Kennedy wrote, “Far more serious writers than Runyon have fallen on their faces and other parts because they lacked what he had: a love and mastery of his language, a playful use of its idiosyncrasies.”

How to Write Copy Like R. Crumb

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

R. Crumb opens his comic, “The Fight,” with this line: “Uh oh, this oughta’ be good.”

Don’t ask what happens next, or the name of the comic book it was in—Crumb had not yet taken to illustrating the Bible. But what a setup: It’s a classic use of what I call the anonymous editorial voice.

It’s the voice you find in decks, captions and other unsigned copy in magazines. It’s the voice you see in old-time mail order ads, the kind Crumb read in comic books as a kid.

It’s Crumb’s voice, but he’s not using it as Crumb. Rather, he’s acting as an omnipresent narrator or huckster.

In one memorable piece, the cartoonist starts by saying, “You people better get hip to the fact that we’re livin’ in the—LAP O’ LUXURY.”

In another, he mimics a public service ad to make a satiric point:

“Cliffy the Clown says:

“‘You can help solve the OVERPOPULATION PROBLEM this quick, easy way! This year, why not COMMIT SUICIDE?”

Note that Crumb  is speaking right to the reader. He may dislike advertising, but he has learned from the great copywriters of old.

Now we’ve come full circle. The anonymous voice of which Crumb is a master is uniquely suited to content marketing.

Let’s say you’re doing a B2B white paper. Even without a byline, it has to sound like it came from a human being, preferably one you know: Think of Dick Cavett doing anonymous ad voiceovers

‘The Line, the Line’

An R. Crumb white paper wouldn’t be boring: He would take complex material and make it so vivid that anyone could understand it. And he would display two of his other great qualities: Pacing, and what one Crumb admirer has called “the line, the line.”

These are on full view in the 1975 rant, “Let’s Talk Sense About This Here Modern America!” by “that cranky old fuddy duddy R. Crumb.” As it opens, an agonized America says, “Love me or leave me,” and Crumb adds: “This is not a happy comic strip.” He then runs through some rapid-fire visual bullet points:

  • America the Cruel Bully
  • America the Glutton
  • America the Greedy
  • America the UGLY!

Moving on, Crumb denounces motorcycles, calls for the return of trolley cars, depicts jet setters working in the fields (“Tsk! I just hate this ensemble I have to wear for this work!”), insults several ethnic groups and concludes by deploring aerosol sprays. Then, as easily as he gets you into it, you’re out. It’s a breathtaking performance even for someone who disagrees with the sentiments (and it would be hard to pinpoint Crumb’s politics).

“With comics, you’ve got to develop some kind of shorthand,” Crumb told the Paris Review when discussing his illustrated Book of Genesis last year. “You can’t make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn’t want all that detail, it interferes with the flow of the reading process.”

Here’s another lesson from Crumb. He told the Comics Journal that he’s an “entertaining cartoonist,” and not much else (“Bruegel, I ain’t,” he once said). His authority lies “almost in a satiric reflection of cartooning in some way. And maybe in telling a story.” That last phrase says it all.

Finally, Crumb makes every word count. “When you write slowly you have more time to think about how to word things,” he told the Paris Review. “I don’t type, I just handwrite everything in block letters. I take the time to think out how to articulate things.”

Not bad for a guy who admits he had trouble reading as a child.

Enough Storytelling–Let’s Tell the Truth

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

Abraham Lincoln was in a good mood as he got ready to go to the theater. The war was over, he’d shown the Rebels. He threw back a shot of bourbon. Now it was time for some fun.

Now, what’s wrong with that paragraph, besides the fact that it’s a total fabrication? Two things. First, it trivializes a tragic historical event. Second, there’s no way to know what Abraham Lincoln was thinking.

Still, I expect some writer to concoct a scene like this because that’s what the market demands (or so we’re told). We’ve entered the era of storytelling. And there’s no room for anything that slows down the narrative–like truth or attributions.

Maybe they’re right. But since most narrative I see moves slowly anyway (some of it is interminable, in fact) I’d just as soon we return to the journalistic basics. There are worse things than being dull and honest.

An Inexact Science

H.L. Mencken of Baltimore was 19 or so when he “took in the massive fact that journalism is not an exact science.” A rival reporter named de Bekker, rather than leave his barstool to report on a stevedore’s death, made up the facts on the spot, starting with the deceased’s name.

“Who gives a damn what it was?” de Bekker asked the two young competitors who were drinking with him. “The fact that another poor man has given his life to engorge the Interests is not news: it happens every ten minutes. The important thing here, the one thing that brings us vultures of the press down into this godforsaken wilderness is that the manner of his death was unusual–that men are not kicked overboard by mules every day. I move you, my esteemed contemporaries, that the name of the deceased be Ignaz Karpinski, that the name of his widow be Marie, that his age was thirty-six, that he lived at 1777 Fort avenue, and that he leaves eleven minor children.”

All three journalists present reported those sad facts, “along with various lively details that occurred to de Bekker after he had got down another beer,” Mencken recalled. And since their accounts were identical, they were applauded by their editors the next day for their unusual accuracy.

Making up facts is the cardinal sin of journalism. And while it was charming in Mencken’s telling, it’s now a surefire career destroyer (except in the blogosphere).

Another form of journalistic distortion is found in posed news photos, and in Time Inc.’s old March of Time documentaries. Case in point: Time’s 1938 feature on life inside Nazi Germany. In one scene, storm troopers collect money from ordinary Germans. Another shows nuns in a prison cell. But both scenes were shot in Hoboken, New Jersey, as I learned during a panel discussion at MOMA featuring Time archivist Bill Hooper.

The New Journalism

Does that mean that March of Time’s stepchildren, TV shows like 60 Minutes, fake their coverage? Uh, I didn’t say that… But the more daring the storytelling, the more careful one has to be about adhering to the journalistic rules.

This issue was hotly debated during the era of the so-called “New Journalism.” Not that it was a new idea, but reporters like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin showed that non-fiction could be written in narrative form like fiction. To do it, they had to find what Wolfe called the “objective correlative”—the telling detail.

One seminal example of the genre is Breslin’s 1963 article,  A Death in Emergency Room One. The beginning:

The call bothered Malcolm Perry. ‘Dr. Tom Shires, STAT,’ the girl’s voice said over the page in the doctor’s cafeteria at Parkland Memorial Hospital. The ‘STAT’ meant emergency. Nobody ever called Tom Shires, the hospital’s chief resident in surgery, for an emergency. And Shires, Perry’s superior, was out of town for the day. Malcolm Perry looked at the salmon croquettes on the plate in front of him. Then he put down his fork and went over to a telephone.

“‘This is Dr. Perry taking Dr. Shires’ page,’ he said.

“‘President Kennedy has been shot. STAT,’ the operator said. “They are bringing him into the emergency room now.

Perry hung up and walked quickly out of the cafeteria and down a flight of stairs and pushed through a brown door and a nurse pointed to Emergency Room One, and Dr. Perry walked into it. The room is narrow and has gray tiled walls and a cream-colored ceiling. In the middle of it, on an aluminum hospital cart, the President of the United States had been placed on his back and he was dying while a huge lamp glared in his face.

To read that piece even now is to feel the enormity of the event. But Breslin wasn’t in the emergency room as it unfolded (nor in the cafeteria)—that scene is, to the best of my knowledge, based on interviews with participants. Yet it was published within 48 hours of the assassination.

In another powerful story, Breslin profiled an unemployed Vietnam vet, a Congressional Medal of Honor holder, who had crawled through enemy fire to save wounded fellow solders. The hero’s life unravels as older men at the VFW ply him with drinks.

Were these accurate depictions? They apparently were, but they couldn’t have been easy to do, given that facts don’t always lend themselves to narrative. Even time sequences have to be exact, as writer Janet Malcolm found out—she was criticized for a scene in which the subject says in person things he actually said later on the phone.

Then  there’s the ever-present threat of libel. No wonder Breslin and Wolfe sought a larger canvas—in fiction.

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote moved in the opposite direction. His book, “In Cold Blood,” on the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas, was the world’s first nonfiction novel, he claimed.

It doesn’t matter what it was called.  This was narrative the way it should be done, as you can tell from the very first paragraph:

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

Capote, one of our finest prose writers, finished  the book with a scene that brought closure to the story: The detective who worked on the case encounters a friend of one of the victims in the cemetery. “The message is clear: life continues even amidst death,” wrote Capote’s biographer, Gerald Clarke.

The only problem is that it never happened. Unethical? Most journalists would say so. But, as Norman Mailer observed at the time, “Truman must have his tone.”

Sorry, Kid, You’re No Truman Capote

Some might wink at Capote’s transgression—he wrote an American classic. But consider what has followed. These days, everything has to be written like fiction, even history, yet few writers have Capote’s gift for narrative or Breslin’s flair or reportorial doggedness.

Writers must now entertain above all else. Serious topics take on a storybook quality—it’s almost as if readers lack the attention spans to handle more complex forms of information. But not everything can be dramatic or entertaining.

At least a few journalistic malefactors—those caught making up stories—were driven by this need to startle and/or amuse, I believe. Not that this makes it forgivable—or even sensible. Few writers can invent anything better than what happens in reality.

Egregious factual liberties are also taken, I suspect, with that staple of self-help magazine articles: The composite character. They are simply not believable. How can you check?

Then there’s plagiarism. Some well-known historians have been caught using almost identical language to that of other writers. I wonder if they left out attributions that should have gone in because they got in the way of the story.

In narrative, as in all other forms of nonfiction writing, there are no substitutes for precision and clarity.

Give Me Two Minutes of Your Reading Time: A Tribute to Gene Schwartz

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

An acquaintance who knew him only as a big-time art collector once asked Gene Schwartz, “Do you work for a living?”

A good question, given that Gene seemed to be rich with no visible means of support. But he rarely discussed his work because these society types wouldn’t have understood. So his New York Times obituary in 1995 mentioned his art collection and his memberships on museum boards, but barely reflected that he made his mark writing raging junk-mail headlines like, “She Fled the Hospital when the Doctor said ‘Cut Her Open.’” “How to Develop Psychic Dominance Over Others,” and “Super Potency at any Age,” and was a certifiable lunatic.

Gene himself admitted he was a little odd—at least in print. “The copywriter is the person who looks at things that other people don’t see,” he once said. “As a result, the copywriter writes in a way that’s strangely fascinating…offbeat…and somewhat crazy.”

Too true. And by the time he died at age 68, Gene Schwartz had written more over-the-top copy, sold more products and provided more sheer entertainment than any two copywriters combined. And if you don’t believe it, give us two minutes of your reading time and we’ll prove it (as Gene wrote in an ad).

First, a little history.

Though he was born in Butte, Montana, and carried a part of that town within him all his life, Gene Schwartz was at heart a Manhattan sophisticate. He came to the big town in 1949 to write the Great American Novel, and found himself working as a messenger for the Huber Hoge mail order agency.

Within a year or two, he was copy chief, and in 1954 he started his own mail order firm, Eugene Stevens Inc. He offered vitamins, tranquilizers, potions and industrial products, many developed in the in-house research lab and all on the up-and-up, according to Andi Emerson, who worked for Gene for a few years and calls that period “the most fun time of my life.”

It was indeed an inspiring era, judging by the copy that survives.

As we sat in her Greenwich Village office drinking coffee one day in 1995, Andi, founder of the John Caples awards and herself a mail order legend, pulled out a frayed yellow newspaper ad from the Sept. 23, 1956 edition of the New York Journal American: “Here is the Tablet Doctors give Their Wives to Reduce!”

The body copy reads like something out of a Terry Southern satire: “After 27 years of research! After thousands of Reducing Miracles performed in doctors’ offices! Now you can lose UP TO 33 POUNDS — SO QUICKLY THAT YOUR FRIENDS WILL GASP IN ASTONISHMENT — without starvation diets, without a single hungry moment, without even giving up the foods you love!”

“His headlines were just fierce,” Andi commented, turning to another clipping, from 1958: “Now! The Miracle Gas-Saver that Europe Couldn’t Hide!”

Among the curiosities in Andi’s Eugene Stevens file are several copies of a magalog titled, “Car Digest,” which featured how-to articles on auto care and offered a variety of products — sort of an early-day infomercial in print. Each opened with an introduction by Gene, using the name Eugene Stevens. Why Stevens? Because in those days, “You couldn’t be Jewish and you couldn’t be a female,” Andi said.

But the real gems were to be found among his space ads and mailing pieces of the period:

“Give me a One Evening and I’ll Give You a Push-Button Memory”

“Now a tranquilizer Pill without a Doctor’s Prescription! Released to you for the first time!”.

“Full-Grown Trees — One foot tall.”

Emerson’s favorite came in a number 10 manila envelope headed, “Inside this package…A WIRE NAIL THAT CUTS THROUGH ARMOR PLATE!

“Yes! Inside this package is a common 20 penny wire nail – but a wire nail that cuts through armor plate as though it were made of wood!”

“They said you couldn’t sell metal hardeners by mail,” Andi laughed. “But we did — to GE, and many others.”

The firm pulled in maybe $4-million a year–big money in those days. “We were the biggest,” Emerson said.

But it couldn’t go on. Gene turned to freelance copywriting and marketing of self-help books for a living, and Emerson started her own agency. Why he closed Stevens is unclear today but one thing’s for sure: he never looked back. “I don’t save my ads,” he told an interviewer. “That would be living in the past. I’m interested in tomorrow…not yesterday.”

Hard to understand? You’re not alone. As the years went by and the dollars rolled in, intimates began to realize there were several Gene Schwartes, each compartmentalized as if he had no relation to the others.

There was the author of the how-to classic, “Breakthrough Advertising,” dubbed by writer Richard Armstrong “the secret weapon of most of the great direct mail copywriters I’ve known.”

There was the freelance copywriter, who sold millions of subscriptions and books for clients like Rodale. His package titled, “How to Get the Guts of 300 Business Magazines in 30 Minutes,” put Boardroom Reports into business, even though Gene’s fee took up much of Marty Edelston’s start-up capital.

There was the six-foot, four-inch society person, who cut such a figure next to his stunning wife Barbara. Celebrated for their style, and for their habit of buying modern art and then giving it to museums, they were often photographed in their Park Ave. pied de terre by publications like New York magazine. (And yes, he was a spiritualist, writing a book titled, “You’re not far From the Kingdom of God,” which took 100 sayings of Jesus and found their roots in the Old Testament).

But all of these respectable versions of Gene Schwartz took a back seat to the snake-oil salesman who right up to the end sold miracle cures out of a small office in New York. The man who once wrote great newspaper ads but delegated most direct mail chores to his assistants had by this time become a direct mail master, mailing maybe 12-million pieces a year and accumulating a file of 178,211 12-month buyers with an average sale of $32.98, according to a data card from The SpeciaLists.

As an example of his later mastery, consider the package titled, “How to Develop Psychic Dominance Over Others — either when you’re with them, or from far away.” Gene promised, “The first signs of psychic power appear in less than an hour.”

Results were even faster for respondents to this ad: “Can you make Onions Into Medicine that Rids You of a Dripping Cold?”

Gene claimed, “It takes less than 60 seconds.” (Pretty good remedies they were, too; by reading the advertised book: A person could learn to “Draw the infection out of a swelling, stubborn wound with cabbage leaves — even if modern remedies have failed: and “Let ordinary water cure cramps during menopause.”)

Good government types might wonder if there wasn’t a bit of blarney in these pieces, but the fact is that they accurately mirror what was written about in the books. For example, the copy inside the “Cut Her Open” package very precisely reports on the contents of a book on natural healing by one Dr. Eugene Wagner.

And a four-color package that asks the question, “Why Do Chinese Women Have Such an Impossibly Low Rate of Breast Cancer?”, also carefully reflects a book, “The Tao of Balanced Diet,” by Dr. Stephen Chang. (“Gene Schwartz in color–I don’t believe it,” Emerson exclaimed).

“He once told me, I don’t sell products, I sell dreams,” said Jack Baer of Muldoon & Baer. Gene believed in these books, because he read them and relied on their precepts himself.

After suffering a stroke in 1978, Gene was helped by Dr. Chang, a believer in Taoist healing principles. The package he wrote in 1979 for Dr. Chang’s book,”The Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises,” is still in the mail today, with only slight revisions.

The letter opened: “This may be the most startling health news you have ever read, dear friend—And we are going to let you prove its merits to yourself, without risking a single penny.”

These lines were overshadowed by the envelope headline, “How to Rub Your Stomach Away.”

“Can’t you picture this mailing being entered in the Caples or the Echo Awards and seeing all those judges running from the room gagging and screaming?” asked the newsletter Who’s Mailing What!. Despite this, the newsletter continued, Gene was “one of the greatest — and least known — copywriters in the world.”

“You’d have to be deceased not to respond to this,” Jim Rosenfield said of one Gene’s pieces. And Martin Decker wrote, “The rite of passage for everyone entering this industry should be to memorize a Gene Schwartz package after understanding the marketing, creative and copy strategy underlying it.”

Outside of the actual pieces, Gene’s legacy to direct marketing can be found in a couple of documents that, happily, are still around. One is a pamphlet published by Boardroom Reports, titled, “38 Ways to Make Your Headlines Great Headlines.”

“Your headline has only one job — to stop your prospect and compel him or her to read the second sentence of your ad,” he wrote. “The most obvious headline, of course, is simply to state the claim in its barest form. “Lose Weight,” or “Stop Corns,” for example. “And if you are the first in your field, there is no better way.

“But where you are competitive, or where the thought is too complicated to be stated simply and directly, you must reinforce that claim by adding variations, enlargements, or embellishments to the main headline claim of the ad. I call this process Verbalization.”

As for what do to after you get the reader to the second sentence, we turn to a 1987 interview Milt Pierce did with Gene for Direct Marketing magazine. Gene told Milt that a good direct response copywriter has four attributes: indefatigability, clarity, craziness and humility.

Listen, children: You won’t hear this kind of wisdom every day.

“When I talk about indefatigability, I mean that copywriting is research,” he told Pierce. “You can always determine the ad that has had the best research; it has something I call “claim density.” It’s packed with facts, with information, with ideas. You can’t get that without doing a lot of research.”

And clarity?

“It quite simple. Clear writing is strong writing.”

About humility, a virtue we’ve not found in strong supply among some
copywriters, he said: “The copywriter puts himself last. The customer comes first. The product comes second. The writing is what comes last. Above all, the copywriter has got to have integrity. He — or she — must never write an ad just to please the client…or to make money…or to meet a deadline…and never, never write an ad for a bad product.”

Shortly after his death, we spent some time with Gene’s former employees, who say that his firm, Instant Improvement, Inc., will remain open. We got the grand tour, from the back room with the metal bookshelves and carboard file drawers to Gene’s office itself, with his many honors and photos of Gene and Barbara with notables on the walls. What struck us most about the staffers is that they remained upset almost two months after his death by heart attack. And they were proud of what he had done.

“How many copies have we sold of “Rub?” one employee asked another.”

“I don’t know. Maybe 260,000.”

The great ones are going, and it’s unlikely that we’ll replace them from the ranks of the MBAs who dominate the field today.