AD MAN’S ADVENTURES

AD MAN’S ADVENTURES

With a long career as an advertising executive under his belt, Geoffrey Charlton-Perrin is spinning fiction, some based on real life and cooked up from his imagination.

BY MITCH HURST

The quote, “England and America are two nations divided by a common language,” has a number of variations and no one is quite sure if it was first uttered by Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw. Nevertheless, the quote became a favorite of Churchill’s during World War II to describe the two major Allies’ important relationship.

Fast forward to the late 1960s and Geoffrey Charlton-Perrin was sitting in his office in London glancing at the papers. An advertising executive at the time, he noticed an advertisement in Advertising Age for a senior position in the United States, and specifically someone with a firm command of British English. Being the adventurous sort, Charlton-Perrin went through the interview process and came out on top, landing with his wife (and new life) in New York in 1968.

“At that time in England we looked to America as the capital of advertising, so we came over and my plan was to stay for two years, get some experience, and then go back and do good things in London,” Charlton-Perrin says.

When it was nearing his self-imposed deadline to return to London, there were two young boys in the family and at least one of them would have lost a year of schooling, so the family stayed on in America, and Charlton-Perrin would eventually go on to work for advertising agencies in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Chicago.

Now retired, the Northbrook resident spends his time writing novels, and has just published 2121: The Battle for Survival Begins.

The young adult fiction book tells the story of Alec Brassington, a young hero who sets aside his plans to go to university to fight for his country during an attempted foreign invasion. 2121 is available both as an e-book and in paperback and has received favorable reviews.

Those who work in advertising are generally good storytellers, so it’s no surprise that Charlton-Perrin and others with an advertising background become successful writers of both fiction and nonfictions.

To date, he’s published a children’s book along with 2121, and has a few more not-yet-published works in can, including a novel for adults.

If you talk to old advertising war horses about the AMC series Madmen, they’ll tell you a few of the plot twists were a bit far-fetched, but that the producers got the atmosphere, the costumes, and the characters of the 1960s advertising era spot on. Charlton-Perrin has his own Madmen-worthy stories, one he wrote about decades after it happened. It goes something like this.

Charlton-Perrin is working for an agency, and it lands an account for a company that provides business tools to other companies. He’s overseeing a number of creative teams and the team assigned to the new account just can’t come up with anything the client likes.

“The executive of the agency pulls me in and says, ’We’re getting close to a deadline and if we don’t make it, we’re probably going to lose the account. I want you to personally write this’,” Charlton-Perrin says.

Drawing upon his considerable literary skills, Charlton-Perrin proceeds to write six 60-second spots filled with language that conveys the message that this is smart, innovative company that sells tools companies use to be more efficient and can make them more successful. The client bit, and it was on to the next challenge. Charlton-Perrin needed not just authoritative words; he needed an authoritative voice to read them.

“The first actor we wanted to read the spots was unavailable, and so I thought, ‘I’ll shoot for the moon, I’ll go for Orson Welles’, never expecting to get him,” Charlton-Perrin says. “When we called his agent, he was available and willing to do it. The only problem was he spent six months a year in L.A. and the other six months in Paris, and our deadline was looming.”

Charlton-Perrin hopped a plane to Paris to pay Welles and Welles assured him a recording studio could be secured to capture the spots. On the day the recording was scheduled Welles shows up, an imposing figure in black suit, black shirt, and black hat, with a small entourage.

The studio was in an old house, with a movie recording studio on the second floor for dubbing films into foreign languages and an audio recording studio on the third floor up a narrow staircase, to narrow, it turns out for Welles to navigate, so they were forced to record the spots on videotape, which was a much more cumbersome process. There was also the fact that Welles was at the time fighting a cold and about halfway through what was to be a four-hour recording Welles simply said he couldn’t continue and wished to reschedule when he was in better health.

“He asked me to call him in a couple of days to see if he would be ready to record and what could I do?” Charlton-Perrin says. “We were up against a deadline, and he was clearly suffering but I couldn’t help it.”

After spending a few days with his brother in London (his hotel in Paris refused to extend his reservation), Charlton-Perrin flew back to Paris for a rescheduled recording session. While there was no entourage, Welles brought with him a tiny dog that was propped on his arm while he spoke into to microphone. At one point the dog fell asleep and could be heard on the tape snoring as Welles tried to keep him quiet.

Still suffering from a cold, Welles slipped into moments of impatience and testiness, (“a struggle of wills,” Charlton-Perrin says) but in the end he got what he needed. He hitched a ride with Welles’s driver to his hotel, and then made his way to Orly airport. After arguing with authorities at Orly about having to put his Welles recordings through the security scanning machine (he was worried they’d be erased; they survived) he jetted home, let the editors do their thing, and the spots ran on time.

“We had a very amicable conversation driving back to my hotel, and I asked him why he did movies like The Muppet Movie when he had done Citizen Kane and The Third Man,” Charlton-Perrin says. “He didn’t take offense at all at the question. ‘I do those to get the money to fund my own projects’.”

2121: The Battle for Survival Begins, by Geoffrey Charlton-Perrine, is available in paperback and as an e-book on Amazon.com.