by
Jeffrey Miller
March 4 marks the
sixth anniversary of death of John Candy, the great Canadian comedian. Candy
died of a heart attack at 43, in 1994, while he was on a film-shoot in Mexico.
I remember the date because he was born the same Hallowe'en as my wife,
and in a way he was responsible for my law career, such as it is.It was 1975 and
I was just out of university, working as a junior copywriter in the Toronto
office of Ogilvy & Mather, the multinational advertising agency, the
closest I have been to glamorous. In fact, O&M was probably the best
place I've ever worked -- something I have realized only in hindsight, of
course. I was miserable at the time, gnashing my teeth at my friends' envy.
I had scruples and, worse, standards. I was David Ogilvy in training, and
though I couldn't help admiring the cultured marketing guru and boulevardier,
I saw myself as James Thurber, and some days John Updike, Evelyn Waugh,
George Orwell, and Vladimir Nabokov all at once.I would have quit
advertising sooner, in fact, if I hadn't been lucky enough to work on the
Campbell's/Pepperidge Farm account. Then as now, it was a luxury to be able
to tout products that were actually worth touting. But the same quality
that made Campbell's products homey and safe, their conservatism, made them
fusty as a client. They tended to want us to mimic whatever O&M did
in New York, which we naturally took as an insult to our native genius.But as good agents,
we did what our principal told us. And New York was running the "I
Shoulda Had a V-8" campaign, V-8 being Campbell's tomato-based vegetable
cocktail. The idea was to show people consuming something less nutritious
and satisfying, then realizing, too late, that V-8 should have been what
advertisers liked to call "top of mind." There was a jingle ("With
just one sip to go/That's the wrong time to know"), then a clopping
sound effect (a "mnemonic") as the hapless consumer slapped his
head and said, "Wow! I shoulda had a V-8." Never mind that David
Ogilvy always reminded us, in his little red pamphlets that were standard
issue to every employee, "The consumer is not a moron, she is your
wife."We took the New
York V-8 concept, as it was inevitably called, into the studio to record
radio spots with John Candy and Dave Thomas, then known only locally for
their "Second City" dinner-theater gig in a dead backstreet downtown.
We had several scripts, but Candy asked if he could lay down an ad lib.
While the musicians played a slow blues, he sang and rapped what he called
the "Got Them Old, Coulda Had It, Shoulda Had It, V-8 Blues."
Convinced that I had an award-winner, a hilarious one-up on the Amurrican
office that would put me in line for creative director despite my scruples
(and because of my standards), I took the blues commercial to my boss, an
older and wiser woman who suggested that we pitch all three of the spots
we had recorded. You routinely did this with nervous clients, giving them
a choice from wild to wet, just in case. Candy, being the consummate mensch,
had recorded the scripted spots while throwing in two ad libs for free.The Campbell's
people probably smiled over "Got Them Shoulda Had a V-8 Blues,"
at least politely, but what I remember is a cliché: stony faces.
Candy's ad lib commercial stayed in the box, I took heat from my boss for
showing anger toward the client, and soon thereafter I quit advertising
to try to sell overwritten, over-mannered fiction to The New Yorker.For two years while
my wife paid the bills, I sat in a room in a characterless apartment near
an industrial park in East York, turning out dark, obscure, unpublished
stories about failure, and a novel about some innocents from Pickle Crow
-- a northern Ontario town I chose for its name and remoteness, a town I
have not visited to this day -- who become hippies in Boulder, Colorado.
I suppose that my scruples and standards kept me from pitching it to amicable
John Candy and John Hughes for one of their comedies. "Dear John: You
probably don't remember me, but..." But as a guy with standards, a
lame-duck novel, and no bank account to call my own, it occurred to me that
I had better go to law school.Was it a failure
of courage? Around the time I was accepted at Osgoode Hall, my beloved,
unrequiting New Yorker ran a cartoon in which a man holding a martini tells
a woman at a party, "I'm a lawyer. Isn't everybody?" It was like
vinegar on a wound. I still wanted to be James Thurber, or at least the
screenwriter on Trains, Planes and Automobiles. I read the cases as though
they were moralistic tragicomedies, life lessons like Uncle Buck. For Jurisprudence,
I even wrote a paper called "Case Law As Narrative," applying
to reported cases the techniques of myth criticism that Northrop Frye applied
to literature.I still sent the
occasional dark, overwritten story to The New Yorker, but only when I could
steal time from my job writing advertising copy about law books for the
legal publisher, Butterworths. I finally had learned not to squander my
past misery absolutely: I'd found a way to combine law and advertising,
albeit at slave wages. By then, I had read A.P. Herbert's story about the
writer who tries to claim champagne and trips to Monte Carlo as business
deductions against his taxes, and the consequent strain on his body as deductible
"wear and tear of machinery and plant." How could a writer "study
and depict the gilded life of Society without constant visits to the Saveloy
Grill Room, to Covent Garden, to the Riviera...," Herbert's unflinching
barrister, Albert Haddock, asks the chancery judge. For the writer and comedian,
all life is a business expense.Of course, in the
Great Assessment, the cost of living triumphs and some deductions are denied
us. Suddenly, unexpectedly, it became too late to package up a screenplay
with a covering letter that began: "Dear John: Perhaps you remember
the time we recorded 'The Shoulda Had the V-8 Blues.' I was really impressed
that you were as funny and unpretentious as you seemed to be onstage. I
know your time and energy are precious these days, but...'"Content Copyright©2004
Burden of Proof Research Inc.