The Kitchen Table

It all started innocently enough.

We were working for Norwegian Cruise Line when a new president was appointed. His name was Adam Aron, and he would become one of our bravest clients ever. The beginning of our relationship, though, was, uh, interesting.

I took him to dinner, and he said he didn’t like the work we were doing. “So I have a couple options,” he said. “I can fire you or give you one chance to get the campaign right.”

“I like choice number two,” I said.

“I thought you might say that. Okay, well, here’s the idea I think we should pursue. All cruise lines feature great-looking food and spacious cabins and foreign capitals. So they all look the same. We have to do something different. Let’s start with a simple question:  why do people go on cruises?”

I stammered something about peace and quasi-adventure.

“No,” he said. “They go on cruises because they think they’re going to have sex.”

There was a long pause while I conjured images of saggy things around the ship’s pool.

“It doesn’t matter what age they are,” Adam said, reading my mind. “Everyone thinks something magical is going to happen. You’re going to meet somebody new. You’re going to rekindle a romance with your spouse.”

“And then you’re going to have sex.”

“Well, you know. So you think.”

I had to admit, it was clear. “It’s going to come out like a fashion campaign,” I said.  “Something like Calvin Klein’s black-and-white magazine ads.”

“I like that,” he said.

So began a campaign that would send Steve Simpson and Steve Luker to the Caribbean and Seychelles for weeks on end. The writing and art direction were absolutely unusual, and the whole thing would go on to win the $100,000 Grand Kelly, Best In Show at the One Show, a slew of Gold Lions, and probably a lot of other things I’ve forgotten about.  The advertising promised “It’s Different Out Here,” and featured wistful shots of hard-bodied types enjoying the tropics, all photographed in glistening black and white.   Indeed, it was different out there on those ships: the people were really fucking old. But we didn’t let that stop us.

For a while, Adam Aron was the famous soaring man-child of the cruise industry.  Inevitably, however, the fact that Norwegian had no new ships caught up to them, in an industry that demanded newness at every turn.

Sometime in 1994, there came a time when Norwegian couldn’t quite pay their monthly fees to us. Instead of getting upset about it, our cruise industry account guy, Marty Wenzell, told me that we might be able to receive payment in the form of a company cruise.

“You mean the whole company? With, like, spouses and partners and all that?” I asked.

“Well, there wouldn’t be enough money to bring spouses and partners.”

“It sounds dangerous,” I told him. “People will act up, wreck things. There will be lawsuits, PR disasters, messy romantic things. The client will want to fire us.”

There was a long silence in which I suspect that both of us were thinking that was exactly why we might want to do it.

Marty shrugged. “It would only be a four-day cruise. Not much time for anything much to go wrong.”

Somehow everyone in a position to stop the thing miraculously agreed with Marty. And so, on a lovely spring Thursday, we all boarded a plane to Los Angeles. People carried big knapsacks, the contents of which concerned me, but I didn’t say anything. At Los Angeles Harbor, we boarded the Norwegian Sky and steamed toward Catalina (ships always “steam,” even if they’re really burning sooty low-grade crude). I remember people around the pool, drinks in hand, kind of pinching themselves to see if they were dreaming. It was an idyllic picture. It wouldn’t last long.

We landed for a few hours in Catalina. As I went ashore to buy a T-shirt, some already very tequila-friendly coworkers loudly told me they were going snorkeling. From the looks of them, I was pretty sure they would die. But I just smiled and waved.

A few others rented golf carts to drive around the island. Deposits were lost. I watched as one load of revelers left a main road and drove off onto the lawn of what looked to be a private estate.

As the ship prepared to leave Catalina, it dawned on us that one of the great challenges of the cruise was going to be getting everyone back on the ship. Since this was an era before cell phones, it was a physical and mental exercise. Where was he when you saw him last?  Did anyone else go to the Drunken Clam? Oh, there she is facedown asleep on the rocks.  Somehow, invaluable people much more organized than I am shepherded woozy stragglers back to safety.

Or at least they thought it was safety. It might have been safer to be left behind.

On our first morning at sea, we attempted to make the cruise a constructive event by holding a company meeting in the ship’s theater. Our president, the elegant Colin Probert, was supposed to speak at length to open the meeting. He never showed up. Neither did about half the company. There was snoring in the audience.

Cleverly assessing our audience, we basically put the constructive thing on ice. Instead, we played a pretty hilarious video in which our main competitor and former boss, Hal Riney, blew up our ship from a nearby submarine. (It’s attached here.) Then, it was back to the pool as we headed to Rosarito Beach (bad idea) and on to Ensenada (really bad idea).

It is important to note that no one knows everything that happened on the trip. This is lucky, actually, as the burden of such memories would be similar to visions of crossing the nine rings of hell. As time went on, it got
more and more like some Borges story or Hieronymus Bosch painting: you knew all kinds of shocking things were going on around you, but you could only take in so much.

I remember, for instance, a food fight breaking out on our first evening in the dining room. A roll was thrown by one of the senior art directors, and suddenly the air was full of drumsticks and peas. In the fray, the managing director of one of our largest accounts pressed her bottom against the window of the room. Yes, her bottom.

Later that night, I was on the top deck of the ship when another senior account executive grabbed a chaise lounge in both hands and hurled it off the ship, cushions and all. It disappeared into the moonlit water below.

An elevator opened with our world-famous head of planning, Jon Steel, inside. He was wearing a T-shirt that read “I’m with Fuzznuts.”

In the theater one night, I awakened a loudly sleeping producer and escorted him back to his room. He had his arm over me like a war casualty, when suddenly he realized that it was me who was assisting him. His eyes focused hard on my face. “Oh fuck,” he said.

Our head of print production, Max Fallon, held a Scotch tasting in his room. It was going to be the one goddamn classy event of the weekend, he said, and he’d stockpiled a number of expensive single malts for the event. When I got over to his room, a crowd was gathered around as a young woman in rather revealing clothing jumped up and down on the bed. Let’s just say that all the parts of her didn’t necessarily go up and down in perfect unison.

About three days in, for reasons I shudder to imagine, the drains in an entire wing of cabins backed up and overflowed. This might have been the last straw.

Around four o’clock that day, I received an envelope in my room. It was an elegant-looking form letter with the captain’s letterhead at the top. “Dear ______,” it read, and they had filled in “Mr. Goodby.” It continued: “The captain requests the pleasure of your company in his quarters to discuss ______.” In that blank they wrote, “the behavior of your company.”

A couple hours later, I was in front of a white-uniformed Norwegian guy who politely explained that there were other passengers on the ship besides our employees. They were people who had spent a lot of money, he said, to bring their parents on an anniversary cruise or to return to a spot made sentimental years ago. I must say, when he put it in perspective like that, in such human terms, it really made me want a drink.

As I said, no one has a complete picture of exactly what happened out there. But maybe you remember a movie called Cinema Paradiso, in which the owner of a small movie house in Italy has his projectionist cut the sexy parts out of all the movies he shows. At the end of the movie, the owner sits down with a drink and watches all the dirty parts, taped end to end, as the daylight fades around him.

Somewhere, I am told, there is such a collection of videos from the cruise. I have not seen it. I hope it is in a really fucking thick vault.

Upon our return, we watched the mail every day for subpoenas. Incredibly, none ever arrived. I think the statute of limitations may finally be over.

No, it will never happen again.