Aurora Dawn Page 7

  The reader may not approve of this pairing-off. I recount the events as they occurred.

  CHAPTER 7

  In which the reader has the privilege of meeting

  Talmadge Marquis,

  reigning satrap in the industrial realm of Soap,

  and learns more of the truly fascinating history

  of Aurora Dawn; but which he may skip if he

  is only following the love story.

  THERE IS A school of philosophy which holds that there is no such thing in the world as evil, and that what strikes the common sense of mankind as evil is only “the absence of Being where Being should be.” The argument, simple and ingenious, runs so: no being is perfect in this universe, except the Supreme Being; all other beings are imperfect, and are constantly striving to become more perfect; but, in so far as they are imperfect they lack true Being, and it is this imperfection which appears to us as Evil. Adherents of this doctrine are quite obdurate. I once overheard a two-hour argument in which one disputant was at last crowded to the wall with the instance of a drunken husband strangling his wife and two babies, and was asked whether he did not consider this an instance of evil? “No,” he replied with great calm, “properly understood it is merely an absence of Being where Being should be …” and, in the shocked silence which ensued, he conceded, “a considerable absence.”

  –The absence of Being where Being should be–

  Talmadge Marquis was known far and wide to suffer from a considerable absence of Being in this sense. To the unphilosophic view of people engaged in making soap and producing radio programs, he seemed (such was their lack of insight) to be an entirely evil bully, loud, capricious and mean, and as obstinately resistant to progress as a hundred square miles of mud. They saw this large man, with his large, red face, large, bellowing voice, and large indifference to reason and good manners as an epitome of badness, not having the scholastic training to recognize in him an imperfect Being struggling toward perfection. This grievous error was so widespread that he was hated by those he employed, feared by those he benefited, and despised by those who were beyond his power. The pity was that, for all his upward striving, he seemed to acquire no Being whatever, because in the twenty years since he had inherited the Marquis company at the death of his father he had only become more perverse and noisy in the opinion of all who knew him, whereas he had started with no small endowment of these qualities.

  It is important to emphasize that although Marquis was a soap manufacturer according to his income tax return and his own innermost belief, he knew less about the article than a first-year student of organic chemistry, and could no more have manufactured a piece of passable soap, given the necessary materials and apparatus, than he could have written a sonnet cycle on the subject. Aurora Dawn, the soap and the industrial plant alike, had been created by his father. A man of power, Talmadge Marquis, Senior, would, in other centuries, have organized a crusade, or rifled the Indies, or won a throne, or founded a religious order, or led a revolution; having erupted out of the well of eternity into nineteenth-century America, he made and sold soap. He understood better than the chemical engineers in his employ what the essential problem was. They saw it as a matter of producing a saleable cleansing substance. He saw it as a matter of creating a new popular habit. He smashed at the populace with all manner of powerful sermonizing in journals and on billboards, playing on strings of fear, love, and hope in their souls, until he had a good number of them broken like children to an obedient trotting to drug stores at regular intervals for the purchase of his little pink bars. He won a domain for himself out of the national economy in this democratic way; and in his old age, shrewdly estimating his son as a man of very mediocre parts, he buttressed his conquest with talented managers and careful lawyers, and died in the comforting faith that the principality would endure, despite the new prince.

  Talmadge Marquis, who had smarted for years under his father’s low opinion of him, took up the scepter with a flourish. He had been in power for less than a year when, by fiat, against the advice of all his father’s counselors, he changed the color of the soap to white and ordered the spending of two million dollars to popularize the slogan, “Snow White, Snow Pure.” This caused the resignation of the general manager of production, a genius of chemical engineering named Abraham Serf, who had adored “Old T.M.,” and who had quietly effected the smooth running of the plant and the excellence of the product for several decades. The sales of Aurora Dawn soap dropped forty percent in a single year, and the value of the Marquis Company stock sagged. On the verge of a breakup, Marquis was rescued by a banker, none other than our acquaintance Stephen English, who purchased a controlling interest in the corporation, rehired Serf and politely ordered Marquis never again to overrule the general manager in matters of technical policy. The presidency of the company and the entire outward picture of control were left as before with Marquis at the head. The original roseate hue of the product was restored, and two million dollars were allotted to popularize the slogan, “There Is Nothing Purer Than the Dawn–and the Dawn Is PINK.”

  Thus balked in his first effort to assert his rule, Marquis became so irascible that within six months he lost his wife and half of his office staff. He made up the defection of his spouse with a procession of young women strikingly similar in dimensions, coloring, and morality, changes occurring, as a rule, when intimacy with Marquis strained the large tolerance of these companionable damsels. In time an office force evolved around him made up of people with a limitless capacity for bearing contumely so long as they were well paid. The arrival of Marquis in his office was the occasion of a series of white-toothed smiles as he passed along the desks, implying as much friendliness as the snarls of cougars. He was aware of this, and usually found a curious pleasure in moving through the atmosphere of impotent hate.

  Two years after the snow-white-snow-pure episode, an event in the life of Talmadge Marquis restored his credit in the industry, changed his way of work and, in no small measure, wrought a revolution in national habits of living: he discovered the radio.

  Far from being the roaring colossus it is now, broadcasting was an industry on a small scale when Marquis decided to try vending his soap by means of wireless entertainment. Although he was later hailed as the “pioneer” of radio merchandising, when he took the first step he was as innocent of its implication as he was of the workings of God’s laws that made possible electric pulsing of sound through silent space. An imaginative radio entrepreneur persuaded him to attend an audition of entertainers, and Marquis was so enchanted with the homage paid him by these people, well known to him through his devoted attendance at musical comedies, that he could not resist acquiescing to this dubious experiment in popularizing Aurora Dawn.

  No American except a congenitally deaf one needs to be reminded of what followed. Sales of the soap increased so sharply upon this first venture that Marquis realized he had stumbled into El Dorado. During the next five years, while conservative manufacturers were debating the propriety of invading private homes with spoken pleas for their products, Marquis started program upon program, and harnessed the full strength of this vast new selling machine to drive Aurora Dawn soap up to a fantastic level of popularity. His mathematical charts of sales became Andes, Himalayas of new peaks, while his competitors fumbled in the foothills of journalistic and billboard selling. In time they all imitated him, but in the interim Aurora Dawn had soared into the advertisers’ Ninth Heaven of “household words,” beyond compare; and the pink bar became almost as usual a phenomenon in American homes as running water.

  It is safe to say that during all this Marquis had not a glimmer of what was happening, namely, that a very old institution, the medicine show, was being revived in a mechanized form. The basic motion: attracting the attention of idle people with amusement, and then diverting that attention to a commodity: was old in Oriental bazaars when Abraham went forth from Ur of the Chaldees; the slight innovation of radio lay in its use of the myste
ry of electromagnetism to make its way into the hitherto sacred privacy of family circles, there to perform its tricks and cry its wares. Talmadge Marquis, however, knew only that he had been wafted to a Prophet’s Paradise of groveling attendance, infinite puissance, and unending indulgence of appetite. Fawned on, flirted with, bowed to, he lost whatever sense of proportion he had and became as whimsical as Nero. Riding this mighty new selling engine, it was impossible for him to make a mistake. His decisions, which diverted golden streams of dollars one way or another and therefore called forth the most desperate efforts to please and placate him, were choices between Aphrodite and Helen, for he was first in the field and had the entire range of American amusement at his command. He could afford to offend skillful artists until they threw his rich contracts into his face, for there were always others to grasp for his money; he could indulge with safety the urge to meddle, which had proved so disastrous when he applied it to an obdurate substance like soap, for the quicksilver spirits of comedy and music slipped through his fingers, and, while satisfying himself that his ideas were improving his programs, he actually did them only slight harm. The whole development was as lucky a turn for Aurora Dawn as Old T.M. might have prayed for on his deathbed. Marquis abandoned all but the faintest pretense of being concerned with the making and distribution of soap, leaving those matters in the hands of his father’s brilliant oligarchy of managers, much to the increase of their happiness and efficiency. He spent his days as the arbiter of merit and taste in all the entertainment for which he was paying and soon acquired among the gossipy folk of the amusement world a legendary fearsomeness combining features of the reputations of the Marquis de Sade and the Erl King.

  In all this I am, of course, striving only to reproduce the impression which Talmadge Marquis made on unphilosophical minds unable to perceive that, in truth, he was suffering from an absence of Being where Being should be.

  This chapter is an example of how the teller of a true story is hampered. Absolutely nothing has happened. Laura Beaton and Stephen English are still walking up East Fifty-second Street, leaning forward into the March wind; Andrew and the painter are still in their taxicab. Unless I make the excuse that the taxi has been held up by a traffic jam in front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral during all this time, I must plead guilty to the sin of having permitted the story to come to a standstill. Yet, friend, had you been ushered without this dull explanation into the presence of Marquis, you would eventually have hurled the book across the room, revolted by its implausibility. No writer of fiction could be forgiven for carving such an odd puppet, but the Creator’s extravagances we accept de facto. The praying mantis exists; so does the bat, so does the cuttlefish, so does the duck-billed platypus; and so did Talmadge Marquis, of whose history your author is but the wide-eyed and humble recorder.

  CHAPTER 8

  In which, to make up for our previous discursiveness, there is nothing but pure plot.

  THE ATMOSPHERE was oppressive with Power.

  In Talmadge Marquis’s inner office on the seventy-eighth floor of the Empire State Building were gathered four masters of men: Marquis himself, Wilhelm Van Wirt (whom the attentive reader will remember as Andrew’s mentor, the sales manager of the Republic Broadcasting Company), and two gentlemen named Walter B. Grovill and Thomas Leach, whose joined patronyms formed the name of an advertising firm known wherever anybody ate the bread of broadcasting. As to these two new figures on our stage, we are determined to leave description and proceed with our tale. You must be content, then, to know that Grovill was large, fat, and pale, and ended most of his utterances with a conciliatory giggle, while Leach was small, bitter-visaged, and pale, and incessantly twisted a college ring around his third finger by flicking it with his thumb. Some day, if spared, we may tell the story of these two although it will not be so wholesome and improving a tale as this one, containing, as it must, considerably more human error and fewer interludes of innocent romance.

  The daunting array of four great men sat on one side of Marquis’s wide leather-topped desk, rather in the aspect of a general court-martial; and facing them on the other side sat the fearless Andrew Reale. (Stretched on a large blue sofa at the other side of the room, gazing out of the wide windows at the noble panorama of the city of stone and rivers, reclined the disheveled Michael Wilde, whose presence had been explained by Marquis and quickly forgotten by everyone.)

  “Andy, you’d better redeem me,” Van Wirt was saying with worried joviality. “I presumed on Mr. Marquis’s time to arrange this meeting simply on the basis of your telegram saying you’d signed Stanfield.”

  “I have signed him,” said Andrew. He took from his breast pocket the paper to which Stanfield had put his signature the previous morning and unfolding it carefully, he extended it to Marquis. The soap maker scanned the document. As his eye fell on the Faithful Shepherd’s signature a grin of triumph broadened his mouth, but as his eyes traveled through the typewritten paragraphs his expression changed, and his physiognomy began to approximate the appearance of cirrus clouds, shifting winds, a falling barometer and other signs of an approaching storm.

  “I’ll be G––d,” he exclaimed. “Van Wirt, do you know what’s in this G––d agreement?”

  “Why, no,” said the unfortunate sales manager, with the look of a man in a frail craft running before the gale, “I entrusted the entire arrangement to Reale. Of course he’s a little young, and he may have slipped up on a detail or two, but nothing that can’t be–”

  “A detail or two?” roared Marquis. “Why, G––n it, how about reading what your company is trying to get me into before sending out your G––n wet errand boys on a man’s business?” He threw the paper to Van Wirt.

  (It should be said here that Marquis’s conversation, regarded solely as a numerical achievement in violations of the Third Commandment, was remarkable; and, as sophisticated readers would be fatigued and innocent ones baffled by repeated dashes, and as we do not intend to offend by printing his oaths, we will simply ask the audience to assume the single blasphemy, “Goddamn,” inserted in his every third phrase during moments of anger, fear, excitement, surprise, or pleasure.)

  Van Wirt pounced on the paper and his head moved from side to side in short jerks, so eagerly did he examine it. Dismay dawned on his face. The ring on Leach’s finger increased its speed of rotation, and Grovill’s smile solidified.

  “Andy!” said Van Wirt in a tremulous voice, “no commercials? What does this mean? You exceeded your authority–”

  “I know I did, Mr. Van Wirt,” said our hero, with oleaginous deference. “Please hear me out, gentlemen–and first, notice that that paper does not in the least bind us, except as to the manner of presentation of a proposed program. It only binds Stanfield.”

  Marquis took the document out of Van Wirt’s hands with a glare at him, and ran his finger along several lines; then he passed it to Grovill and bent a glance on Andrew Reale in which the barometer was still falling rapidly.

  “Gentlemen,” said Andrew, “when you want to induce a religious fanatic to come on the radio to sell soap, after he has already declared publicly that the Saviour isn’t for sale, you are facing a rather unusual problem in personal relations. I was given carte blanche on this problem and told that my career in my company would advance or end according to the way I solved it. I accepted the challenge, and devised a presentation which, I thought, would cause Father Stanfield to agree to come on the air under commercial sponsorship. As you see, it worked. The remaining question is, will this manner of presentation still sell soap? I think it will sell vast quantities of it.

  “That paper binds us to limit our commercial identification to a single sentence at the beginning and at the end of Stanfield’s half hour of broadcasting, to this effect:

  “The Marquis Company, makers of Aurora Dawn Soap and Aurora Dawn Soap Products, have turned over the next half hour of radio time to Father Stanfield’s Fold of the Faithful Shepherd, as an Aurora Dawn contribution to t
he religious life of America.

  “There is to be no further reference to the product.”

  As he said this, Andrew Reale rose to his feet and, pressing his fists on Marquis’s desk, proceeded with great earnestness. He had the attention of everyone in the room, not excepting Michael Wilde, who sat up on the sofa and leaned forward.

  “Now, it is my belief that such a gesture will create an amount of good will for the product that could not be approximated by sledge-hammer sales talks. America is a religious country, despite the atmosphere around radio studios. Every pastor and every churchgoer in the land will speak with favor of this uniquely unselfish act on the part of a soap company. The word-of-mouth advertising will be colossal, and it will be solid selling of Aurora Dawn, gentlemen, because, if you will notice, in that brief announcement Father Stanfield has accepted six mentions of the name: three at the beginning of the program, and three more at the end. Six times your product is identified, Mr. Marquis, tied to the selling power of God himself. I don’t think that’s a disservice to Aurora Dawn.”

  Mr. Marquis’s face began to undergo curious and indecipherable alterations of expression.