Bobby Kennedy in Harlem

       
          

                 I kept looking for the magic scene but maybe it was never filmed.  TLC had a two hour long documentary The Kennedys, Home Movies last night, narrated by Stockard Channing.  And it was powerful, seeing so much promise and tragedy condensed into two hours.  

             Bill Murphy was there and saw it, so this is his story, and I’d like for him to come claim it.  He was a beginning copywriter at JWT, like me, in those Mad Men days and we were friends in the same creative group.  Bill heard Bobby Kennedy was coming to speak in Harlem so he got on t he subway and went to look for himself.

                 When he got out at 125th street, he found a big crowd around Bobby.  A white man in a sea of black faces.  It was Kennedy’s first visit to Harlem and his speech was not going well. The crowd was silent, skeptical.  Kennedy’s flat nasal New England tones sounded alien, wrong, like what the hell did he know about Harlem?

                     So Kennedy said, “would you like to sing a song?”  "Anybody want to sing a song?" No response.  Bobby Kennedy was a brave man.  There was no band, of course, and no music to sing to.  He sang, “WE SHALL OVERCOME.” his tuneless New England voice sailed right past the crowd.  He sang the second line, “WE SHALL OVERCOME.”  No response.  He persevered, “WE SHALL OVERCOME SOMEDAY AY AY AY AYYY.”

                   Murphy had the suspicion that this could turn ugly.  The crowd was not buying a white man singing their song on their street.

              “DEEP IN MY HEART, I DO BELIEVE.  THAT WE SHALL OVERCOME ONE DAY.”  Nothing.  Except a few murmurs.  

               Incredibly Bobby Kennedy started the second verse.  “WE’LL WALK HAND IN HAND.” Nothing, no response.  He sang the second line, “WE’LL WALK HAND IN HAND,” and a couple of voices joined in. By the time he got to the end of the verse the whole crowd was singing with all their heart, recognizing a great heart was there on their street that afternoon.

              You can’t help but think, this would have been a better, different country if they hadn’t shot Jack and Bobby and Martin Luther King.   

 

               His words sound antique now, too naive for prime time.  But at the time, they promised that the America we learned about in school was true.:

              "This is a generous and compassionate country, that's what I want a country to stand for, not bias, not laws, not disorder, but compassion and love and peace. That's what this country should stand for and that's what I intend to do." RFK

Flying with the gods

           

          So she’s not guilty after all.  Continental Airlines has a film that’s supposed to show she was on fire before she ran over that titanium strip.  The French court didn’t believe it and I don’t want to believe it either.   She was so beautiful.  Yes, she was ridiculously expensive, high maintenance and profligate with fuel. I didn't care.  I was in love with her.

                    

                        The Ford of Europe account was in ruins at JWT the world’s largest ad agency.  After much agony and chopping of heads and fees, Ford had allowed JWT to keep the account but they weren’t relaxed or happy.  Ford was the largest account in Europe and JWT needed a creative director to run "the creative side of things."  It was a terrible job with a life expectancy of a few months.  Maybe weeks.  It was a wonderful job, combat on the front lines.  France, Italy, Germany, Spain a total of thirteen countries to keep happy at the same time.  Tremendous responsibility, no authority. Based in London, day trips to Rome. If somebody powerful wasn’t pissed off at you, you weren’t doing your job. Would I fly to London for an interview?  On the Concorde?

                      The plane was ego with wings.  It took off with a thunder that shook the earth but not you.  You were sunk into soft, deep maroon leather.  Dom Perignon champagne in a crystal flute, caviar in a little silver dish, dinner on the way.  To be served at 2,200 MPH.

She rose in an arc, cruised up the coast and then in a display of power that seemed impossible for such a small plane, accelerated like a 4th of July rocket until the sky was black overhead the earth curved like a green and blue and white ball below and the big mach meter at the head of the cabin read Mach 2.2.  The sonic boom was long gone, trailing miles behind us.  Inside we were an intimate little club of wonderfully bright and happy souls, telling stories, making friends. 

                    She was so small inside, only 88 seats,  the flight attendants had to crouch a little as they served and soothed, pampered and smiled.  Isn’t this fun.  Aren’t we lucky.  Oh yes, yes, yes.  Just a little more, please.  No, I'll keep the glass.

           The flight, with its long glide down over Ireland and Wales into London’s Heathrow was over way too soon.  I gathered up my luggage got a cab and headed for London, demoted now to another jet- lagged working stiff..  But for a while, I had flown up among the gods.  I would flew her again and again (OK twice again), but that first flight is the one I remember.

How Film Director Morgan Hutchins got his name

Me and my Allard, watching traffic outside the new flat

         I'd never realized until I was shuffling through some stuff and saw the photo on the left. I thought I'd just made it up, had had an idea for the incoming kid's name out of the blue. 

        Laurence must have shot that picture with my camera that sunny afternoon when we drove over to see Laurence and Pat Hutchin’s new flat on Pond Street across from the Royal Free Hospital.   Pat was expecting their first child in a few weeks and their new flat in Hampstead was a big step up. Pat was beautiful and Laurence was handsome. They were both gifted artists and the kid was going to be a great kid.

Karen twirls her Isadora Duncan scarf as
Bob gets the cover out of the boot in case of rain.

         Pat was on her way to being famous for her first children's book, Rosie’s Walk and world famous for her more than 25 books, novels and plays .  Laurence was an art director at JWT and would be famous as a commercial film director. Here’s a beauty called The Red Balloon he did for a new town called Milton Keynes.

           So they were just beginning careers that would take them all over the world and happily expecting their first child.  But they couldn’t agree on a name.  They knew the baby would be a boy, but John or Alan or Henry or William, or Keith . . . they’d been squabbling  about names for months and getting nowhere. Both of them stubborn as mules.  Or, more accurately, as stubborn as artists. 

Proud Daddy making a silly face. Pat with Morgan a wee bump.

             Their flat had a spectacular view and a small terrace where we looked out over London as had lunch and wine.  They both kept trying to get us to choose a name that the other one didn’t like.  And out of the blue I said, “how about Morgan?”  Pat liked it because morgan means morning in German. And Laurence liked it because it was the name of a roarty British sports car. 

           But who knew that the London Film Director, Morgan Hutchins, who is working on his first feature (‘The Postman’ Written by Harry Hill,) was named by a car that was blue.

Oh, Joke, Joke, Joke

           A large square room in London,  tall steel framed windows at one end,  a desk at each corner.  
         Llewellyn Thomas, kewpie doll face, tight blond curls, wide eye’d innocence his usual look, the one he’d inherited from his father, Dylan Thomas.  That look meant he’d just thought of something wickedly funny. Llewellyn was in one corner. 

Dylan Thomas with Llewellyn on his left. Dylan's mother, Florence, wife Caitlin, daughter Aeron and other son Coln in front.

           Assia Wevill, green eyes, sexy in a dark, zoftig, smokey way, like she knew so much more than you, you would have no idea what was happening before it was over.  She was a poet, having an affair with (later Britain's poet laureate) Ted Hughes and pregnant with his child when Hughes wife, the great poet Sylvia Plath, killed herself.  The New Yorker would publish two of Assia's poems in the week after she killed herself, as Sylvia Plath had killed herself, with her head in her gas oven.

Assia in 1965

              Tom Rayfield, freshly down from Cambridge in another corner.  Tom was very bright and very shy.  It took some practice before you could separate his mumbles into words.
              And me fresh off the boat, in the back corner against the wall. They all assumed I knew nothing and they were right.
             I was in JWT’s London office because I’d done an ad at JWT NY for a bank that ran in The New Yorker.  The bank’s chairman was also the chairman of Y&R.  His wife read the ad and said, "you should hire this guy." So Y&R offered me, with two years experience, twice what I was making. JWT offered me a job in London for half my salary.  So I said yes and  Karen and I got married, took a 6 week honeymoon in Europe, and came back to New York to sail for London on The SS France.  
            The conversation in that room was faster, sharper, and wittier than anything I’d heard before.  Full of references I did not know.  They’d burst into laughter and I’d have no idea why.  It was a month before I spoke.
              "What? What" Tom Rayfield said.  "It spoke, it spoke.  What’d you say," he demanded.
              I repeated what I’d said.
              “Oh, Tom said.  “Joke. Joke.  Joke.”
               Twenty five years later, I was on my way to the airport in Portugal when I read the news that JWT had been sold and had lost the Ford account.  I was, by then, in the Hapsburg panoply of advertising titles, International VP and Creative Director on Europe's largest account, Ford.  Soon, obviously, to be unemployed.  And it was Tom who gave me a list of a dozen things I might do.  One of them was to become the Dick Francis of motor racing.  Which I did.