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CHAPTER 1: Our Shameful Secrets CHAPTER 2: Sundae at Schrafft's CHAPTER 4: Why Our Young People Are Still Being Kidnapped CHAPTER 5: Another Long Con Shot to Hell CHAPTER 6: In the Garden of the Stalactites CHAPTER 7: The Gypsy Fiddler of Gay Street CHAPTER 8: In the Matter of J.J.Diefenbaker CHAPTER 9: The Milkman's Daughter CHAPTER 10: The Great Doris Day Peanut Butter Mystery CHAPTER 11: Keen Teens International CHAPTER 12: Of Cults and Cowboys CHAPTER 13: A Role Model for Miss Sallie Chapter 14: The Domestic Economy of Mr. Hornblower Chapter 15: Monsieur Normale and the Funny Factory
| EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION
Chapter 1: Our Shameful Secrets When I worked in educational television it was so sordid I kept it secret from most of my friends. I didn’t even mention it to the relative I lived with. This is slightly ironic because if there was one person who could really appreciate self-debasement, it was Aunt Pudge. Aunt Pudge worked a dead-end job in a disreputable fringe of the publishing world and was always struggling, or said she was struggling, to better herself. Like most people of her generation, she thought the way you bettered yourself was by sleeping around with strange men you met at book parties and bars. Finally she gave up this strategy and started going with a man who wasn’t strange at all. In fact he was in advertising. Ted Bollender had spent the last twenty-five years at Ogilvy & Mather and Benton & Bowles and suchlike, but now he was moving out of that game and taking up something fresh and different. Yes, he and his partners were starting a chain of pricey “American-style” junk-food eateries in London. The food wouldn’t have to be great, he’d say—haw! haw! haw!—just so long as location and decor and advertising were tip-top. You shouldn’t think of it as a restaurant business, he explained. You should think of it as an advertising/public relations outfit that owns its own client, and in this case the client happens to be a restaurant with a unique and exciting theme, or (eventually) a whole slew of restaurants with different imaginative themes! I had no idea what he was talking about. However, he was a very jolly ad man and he talked a good line. Within five minutes of meeting him you found out he knew both Bob Fosse and Henry Kissinger. (And Bob Haldeman too, if you care, though not Richard Nixon.) He had an especially rich fund of Orson Welles stories. You got the idea that if you hung out with Ted, you too would get to know all these people. Pudge liked to say Ted had infectious enthusiasm. Anyway he infected her. Around New Year’s 1974 she quit her horrible job at Time-Life Books and sailed away with him. Before leaving she made up a page-and-a-half-long press release and handed it to everyone. It announced that Pudge was making a career move into public relations. She even gave it to her drycleaners. Pudge didn’t want some ugly story to get around about how she was getting married and going to work in her husband’s restaurant.
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