Fragment 34: The Life & Times of a Social Experiment
A marital relationship ends. A business relationship begins.
Where was I? Oh, yes, it’s the early eighties and I’m in the middle of a maelstrom. A marital maelstrom. With a partner who switches from delightful to venomous in the blink of an eye … with the venom significantly outweighing the delight.
That said, it was also a time of wonderful support from some friends. In Fragment 33 I explained that I had started getting some therapeutic group support, but I also benefited enormously from individual friends.
Herb Schmitz, the photographer, suggested I meet him one evening for a drink at a bar in the north-east corner of Soho Square. There he introduced me to a chap called David.
David had also gone through a stormy relationship and, after making his escape, now lived in a house in Ealing in west London. It was a detached property with four bedrooms. David was rattling around in it and there was literally room - or rooms - to spare.
As I recall, the decision that I could use a room in the house as a bolthole, and a further room when my daughter visited, was made after just a couple of drinks.
This proved to be a great success and I escaped on several occasions for periods of a few weeks at a time.
That, in and of itself, is weird, isn’t it? You’re in a supposedly ongoing relationship but you have to get out of it every so often to stop going nuts. But that’s the way it was. When things got too, too much I’d just get the hell out of it for, say, two or three weeks. Trouble was, I felt guilty about it. Having already had one marriage crash and burn under me I really did not want to ‘fail’ again. So I’d go back and, bizarrely, everything would be sweetness and light for a few hours … only to then turn nasty again.
But the incident that ultimately convinced me that the chasm between us really was unbridgeable happened in early 1984. At a funeral.
My wife’s cousin had died. Still under 40 years old at the time of his death, he had two children - girls, aged, if I remember right, 7 and 9. His marriage to the mother of the children had broken down at some point and, when he died, he had been married to a new spouse for two or three years.
Before the funeral, the family members assembled at the home of the deceased’s parents - that is, the children’s grandparents.
The doorbell rang. The children had been brought along so that they could attend their father’s funeral.
Upon realizing what was happening, his widow screamed and ran to the doorway, physically blocking it and screeching that the children must not be let in.
The grandparents, understandably deeply distressed, went to support the children. My wife volubly supported the widow. The chasm was so clearly on display that it was impossible not to grasp the level of intransigence.
Some time later, I met with my friend John Stadden, co-founder of the advertising and marketing agency, Stadden Hughes, in his office at 48 Fitzroy Street. In Fragment 27 I mentioned that Stadden Hughes had started out in Paradise Walk in Chelsea but it then moved to Fitzroy Street, three or four doors away from Fitzroy Square.
The ‘home’ problem was very much top of mind and I told John about the trouble I was having and how it interfered with access to my daughter. John’s response is as clear in my mind as if it had been yesterday, “We can’t have that”, and he then went on to tell me that I could have the first-floor apartment (first-floor in English, that is. An American would, I believe, call it the second-floor apartment). Anyway, whatever, first-floor or second-floor apartment, it became my home for the next fifteen years.
Let me outline the situation.
The house, designed by Robert Adam and built in the late 18th century, comprised ground floor, three floors above and a basement below.
Robert Adam (1728-1792), a Scot, working with his brothers, James and William, was a leader in the development of the Neoclassical style of architecture and design. And the Fitzrovia development was part of an expansion of fashionable London, completed in the early 19th century close to the route that led from The Queen’s House (bought by King George III for his wife Queen Charlotte and later to become Buckingham Palace) en route to what was to become The Regent’s Park.
The Fitzroy Street houses stood alongside those of Fitzroy Square which, to this day, remains one of London’s gems. The initial development of the square and environs, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was financed by one Charles FitzRoy, 1st Baron Southampton, a descendant of Charles Fitzroy, 2nd Duke of Grafton.
So, 48 Fitzroy Street is a classic Georgian house, which means that the Golden Ratio is everywhere in evidence in the design. And, looking at the front of the building it’s the English-first-floor-American-second-floor that is the grandest.
The accommodation was - how shall we say? - compact, basically two living rooms plus kitchen and bathroom. However, the ceiling height, at close to four meters or thirteen feet, meant that the rooms, although not very large, felt quite spacious.
At the rear a magnificent, large, bowed window looked out onto … well, originally, I presume it would have looked out onto a garden but, at some point, probably the 1960s or 1970s, the premises had been extended to the rear with the addition of office accommodation and an apartment. At this time, the apartment was used by John Stadden as his office.
The additions all adjoined the original building but it was very elegantly designed with the large bowed window looking out on to an atrium.
I gratefully accepted John Stadden’s offer and set about extricating myself from the marriage. By this time all that mattered to me was getting the hell out of it and, in March or April 1985, I left. So far as the challenge of taking some personal possessions with me was concerned, I was helped by my friend Mike Hendry.
There is a strand of the story, an important strand, that, thus far, I haven’t mentioned. Time to rectify that omission.
If you have read earlier fragments you may recall that my first marriage, to my daughter’s mother, ended when, in 1977, she left me for another chap who, at the time of the break-up, ran a wine bar in Croydon, to the south of London.
But, later, I think it must have been in 1980 or 1981, my ex-wife announced that they were relocating to Marbella in Spain because her new husband was to manage a wine bar there. And she wanted to take my daughter with them.
There were some heated conversations about this but, in the end, I went along with it because a) my daughter needed her mum and b) if I’m honest with myself, I think I hoped that the new situation might give me time to sort out the problem with wife #2.
The Spanish adventure did not last long. After what must have been less than three years out there my ex-wife fled. Literally. She piled herself, my daughter and some belongings into a car and just drove.
I subsequently learned that her new beau, who she had actually married, had proved to be a deeply unpleasant, violent alcoholic.
My primary concern was to establish whether or not there had been any misbehavior towards my daughter, and whether or not there were any ongoing effects. While I was able to satisfy myself that there had been no physical violence towards her, I do believe that the whole episode contributed to some awful psychological scars.
Anyway, at the time of my conversation with John Stadden and my move to 48 Fitzroy Street, my daughter was safely back in the UK.
The move to Fitzrovia was life-changing.
Mind you, it needed to be because I had allowed the problems of the marriage to upend my working life and shatter my confidence.
However, I continued with the group therapy that I had signed up for and behind the scenes, so to speak, a new conversation had started. It was with John Doff, the film and audio-visual producer that I introduced in Fragment #29. I had involved him in quite a lot of projects for various clients and he and I had become friends.
If I remember it right, it was at dinner one evening in the Little Akropolis restaurant in Charlotte Street. This small and distinctly unposh Greek establishment, owned and run by an absolutely lovely chap called Nicky, was a favourite watering hole. And it was there that John said he had an idea for ‘a long-copy agency’.
When, as a young man, he had arrived in post-war London, John had got a job at the London Press Exchange, one of the earliest of London’s advertising agencies, and had got involved in advertising and information film making. Subsequently, he did a stint at another ad agency, Foote, Cone, Belding, and distinguished himself as a pretty good advertising copywriter.
And that evening in Little Akropolis he talked about the fact that advertising copy was astonishingly well catered for in London. Indeed, at that time, London figured very high in the list of places in the world where great ad copy was being generated.
Just up the street from where we sat were Saatchi & Saatchi and McCann Erickson (now simply McCann). And, within a radius of perhaps a couple of miles were a dozen or more other great agencies that were turning out superb work.
BUT … John pointed out, there was, perhaps, a gap in the market for long copy. What about the film scripts and brochures, and other communications formats where a greater word count was involved? Would I join him in starting an agency to specialize in this kind of work?
At this stage, I was certainly not confident about my own writing ability but John tried to reassure me. What had I got to lose? I said, “Yes”.
And so it was that we formed a company called Write Solutions Limited.
More about this next time.
Thanks for reading.