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California (carries on) Dreaming
Understanding the Californian ad business requires a knowledge of Hollywood, a course in surfing and a touch of lunacy. By Brian Davis
Caroline Marshall writes: This feature by Brian Davis is reprinted from Campaign of 7 February 1975. Many readers will remember Davis as one of the most gifted writers on advertising and film-making the business has ever seen; they may also remember his brief stint – of one week – as editor of Campaign in 1984. We reprint this feature as a tribute to Davis, following a recent Cutting Edge documentary on Channel 4 which charted the final tragic months of his life.
Davis... 'Los Angeles and its inhabitants are congenitally crazy'
As I walked into the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel on Los Angeles’ Wilshire Boulevard, a man wearing heavy make-up and carrying a hand- bag turned to me and said: “Soda water bottle, have a banana. I know what to do and you do too.” I don’t know why but this struck me as odd.
Scattered round the outer parts of the lobby, which resembled one of the more extravagant sets from Grand Hotel, were a troupe of Russian dancers, several scantily clad cheer-leaders, a brass band, a large black bellhop with an Afro hairdo, and a man wearing a gorilla suit. It wasn’t the kind of crowd you get at the Savoy.
“They’re making a movie,” said the desk clerk, who knew his way around. “If you ask me, it’s terrible. I wish
they’d go away.”
It turned out that the raison d’etre of the whole enterprise was Miss Linda Lovelace. The movie, roguishly entitled Linda Lovelace for Pres-ident, was a million-dollar attempt to transform her from a queen of hard porn into a legitimate actress – rumour has it she’s been taking acting lessons – and “Soda water bottle…” was a line from the screen-play. “Don’t bother to see it,” one of the crew said. “This is the company that brought you Gutter Girl.”
Meanwhile, in the Cocoanut Grove, a once fashionable nightclub ad-joining the Ambassador lobby, Peter Bogdanovich was coaching Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd and half the members of Central Casting through a sequence from his Cole
Porter musical, At Long Last Love. It was way behind schedule.
The extras, sweating profusely in their crumpled tuxedos, kept coming up for air, calling their agents, and mingling with the Linda Lovelace crowd.
“Why don’t you go in and watch?” one of them said to bemused passers-by. “Nobody knows what’s going on anyway.”
The whole scene, Nobody Ordered Wolves revisited, offered conclusive proof that what they’ve been saying all along is true: Los Angeles and its inhabitants are congenitally crazy. “Do you think they need a profess-ional drunk?” the first hotel guest I spoke to said. “I’m very good at doing professional drunks.”
I had no reason to doubt it...
ADR, writing in November 2020, adds: I found this Brian Davis tribute in Lockdown (the November one, not the Spring one) during a clear-out – and I reckoned it worth preserving for digital posterity.
I unearthed it in the most unexpected of places. For decades I have been a sometime hoarder of British magazine journalism and print design – the good, the bad, the ugly… and, equally joyfully, the eccentric and just plain insane.
I have wallet folders stuffed with all sorts of curiosities. I began acquiring (I know not why) this habit in my middle teens, but it reached a peak of intensity when, starting out as an apprentice feature writer in the mid-1980s, I became an avid curator of anything I thought I might profitably learn from. The compulsion began to wane a decade later when I finished my last tour of duty as an editor and embarked on a more picaresque writing career. Still, I amassed an interesting little trove.
But I didn’t rediscover the Davis article in one of my bulging folders. (They’re all in the attic now anyway, well beyond the scope of current archaeological activities.) I found it in a cache of ancient VHS cassettes lurking behind a façade of books on the lowest shelf of one of our least favoured bookcases.
The Campaign tearsheet was much folded, to the size of a quartered handkerchief (some of you may have to research this reference), and slipped into the cover of a VHS offering Jonathan Meades on Victoriana (to 1 hour and four minutes) followed by Brian’s Story, the Cutting Edge documentary broadcast by Channel 4 in May 2001. Both programmes, it (almost) goes without saying, were clearly taped off the telly.
The Campaign magazine tribute was published, as you’ll see from the page reproduced in its entirety, in the issue of 18 May 2001.
THOUGH WE WERE BOTH freelancers working for Campaign during the 1990s, I never actually met Brian, so my investment in the story of his death is not a personal one. Not directly at any rate.
I kept the VHS and its companion tearsheet because it touched on an institution I then knew well and there’s a thrill, however ghoulish under the circumstances, however vicarious, to feel thereby that you’re somehow sharing the spotlight. As in, you know: “That’s our boy out there, taking one for the team.”
Sad. But true.
More importantly, though, I was not alone in feeling that Brian’s death (and the brief notoriety surrounding it) had become tangled up with a larger and more abstract notion – that it somehow marked, in bleak and forceful fashion, the wretched decline of energy, bravura, ambition and sheer colour in British journalism.
This decline wasn’t seen as terminal. Not then. Now, of course, there’s a triple-point perspective in play here: 1975, 2001, 2020. In 2001, there was widespread optimism, despite the trials and tribulations experienced by the magazine industry across the 1990s, about the prospects for fine writing in the new Century. What utter fools we all were.
Now I’m curating this Brian Davis tearsheet in the expectation that it will be of interest when someone comes along in the future and reckons it might be a great idea to commission a brief history of British journalism, either as a book or a three-part set of one-hour Netflix-funded documentaries.
Because Davis should get at least a passing mention in the section about New Journalism. The Campaign article reproduced here is a fine example of a gifted writer taking up the techniques of Mailer and Capote and the Rolling Stone school of razzle dazzle… and sewing them seamlessly into a business magazine format.
Davis wasn’t ploughing a lone furrow. In the 1970s and 80s there were several writers operating at this level, particularly in that eternally fascinating interzone between big business and popular culture. But make no mistake – this example is more than worthy of admiration.
And if you’re interested in making a start on A Brief History of British Magazine Journalism, I’d be more than happy to put my shoulder to the wheel. Call me. I already have the arc of a structure in mind. Following a preamble that will take in pamphleteers, Addison’s Spectator and The Gentleman’s Magazine, the story will begin with the publication, in the July 1891 issue of The Strand Magazine, of “A Scandal in Bohemia.”
And the narrative won’t exactly end. It will merely fade, ever so slowly, to grey.