Verwandte Artikel zu The Engagements

9780307958716: The Engagements
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 030795871X ISBN 13: 9780307958716
Verlag: KNOPF, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

From the New York Times best-selling author of Commencement and Maine comes a gorgeous, sprawling novel about marriage—about those who marry in a white heat of passion, those who marry for partnership and comfort, and those who live together, love each other, and have absolutely no intention of ruining it all with a wedding.

Evelyn has been married to her husband for forty years—forty years since he slipped off her first wedding ring and put his own in its place. Delphine has seen both sides of love—the ecstatic, glorious highs of seduction, and the bitter, spiteful fury that descends when it’s over. James, a paramedic who works the night shift, knows his wife’s family thinks she could have done better; while Kate, partnered with Dan for a decade, has seen every kind of wedding—beach weddings, backyard weddings, castle weddings—and has vowed never, ever, to have one of her own.

As these lives and marriages unfold in surprising ways, we meet Frances Gerety, a young advertising copywriter in 1947. Frances is working on the De Beers campaign and she needs a signature line, so, one night before bed, she scribbles a phrase on a scrap of paper: “A Diamond Is Forever.” And that line changes everything.

A rich, layered, exhilarating novel spanning nearly a hundred years, The Engagements captures four wholly unique marriages, while tracing the story of diamonds in America, and the way—for better or for worse—these glittering stones have come to symbolize our deepest hopes for everlasting love.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. Courtney Sullivan is the author of the New York Times best-selling novels Commencement and Maine. Maine was named a Best Book of the Year by Time magazine and a Washington Post Notable Book for 2011. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Allure, Real Simple, and New York magazine, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1947

Frances poured the last bitter remains of the coffeepot into her cup. The small kitchen table was covered in paper: layouts, copies of confidential reports, lousy ideas she had scrapped hours ago, and good ones, already published inLook, Vogue, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Harper’s Bazaar, to remind her that she had done it before and could do it again.

For once, the apartment building was silent. Usually, from off in some distant corner she could hear a baby crying, a couple arguing, a toilet flushing. But it was past three a.m. The revelers had long been asleep, and the milkmen weren’t yet awake.

Her roommate had gone to bed around ten— at the sight of her standing there in her nightgown and curlers, Frances was overcome with professional jealousy, even though Ann was only a secretary in a law office, who would spend tomorrow the same way she spent every day, fetching coffee and taking dictation.

Frances had just finished writing the newest De Beers copy, a honeymoon series with pictures of pretty places newlyweds might go—the rocky coast of Maine! Arizona! Paris! And something generic for people without much money, which she labeledBy the river.

In a way, that one was the most important of them all, since they were trying to appeal to the average Joe. A decade earlier, when De Beers first came on as a client, the agency had done a lot of surveying to find out the strength— or really the weakness— of the diamond engagement ring tradition. In those days, not many women had wanted one. It was considered just absolutely money down the drain. They’d take a washing machine or a new car, anything but an expensive diamond ring. She had helped to
change all that.

The honeymoon ads read, May your happiness last as long as your diamond. A pretty good line, she thought.

“Time for bed, Frank,” she whispered to herself, the same words her mother had whispered to her every night when she was a child.

She was just about to switch off the light when she saw the blank signature line that the art director had drawn on the layouts, which she was meant to fill in by morning.

“Rats.”

Frances sat back down, lit a cigarette, and picked up a pencil.

A day earlier, Gerry Lauck, head of the New York office, had called her.

“I think we should have something that identifies this as diamond advertising,” he said. “A signature line. What do you think?”

When Gerry Lauck asked what you thought, it was wise to understand that he was not actually asking. In her opinion, the man was a genius. Unpredictable and a bit gloomy at times, but perhaps all geniuses were like that.

“Yes, perfect,” she said.

Gerry looked like Winston Churchill, he acted like Winston Churchill, and sometimes Frances believed he thought hewas Winston Churchill. He even had fits of depression. The first time she had to go to New York to show him her ideas, she was scared to death. Gerry looked them over, his face giving no indication of what he thought. After several torturous minutes, he smiled and said, “Frances, you write beautifully. More important, you know how to sell.”

They had liked each other ever since. Half the employees of N. W. Ayer were afraid of Gerry Lauck, or couldn’t stand him. The other half thought he hung the moon, and Frances was one of them.

“The line shouldn’t say anything about De Beers, of course,” Gerry continued over the phone.

“Of course.”

For nine years, De Beers had spent millions on ads that barely mentioned the company itself. To even name it as a distributor would be breaking the law. So the advertisements were simply for diamonds, and they were beautiful. Ayer pulled out all the stops. They couldn’t show pictures of diamond jewelry in the ads, which left the art department in a pickle. In theory, Gerry had nothing to do with creative. He was a straight-up businessman and just handed out the assignments. But as an art lover, he thought to commission a series of original paintings from Lucioni, Berman, Lamotte, and Dame Laura Knight. He purchased preexisting works from some of the finest galleries in Europe for the De Beers collection, by Dalí, Picasso, and Edzard.

The resulting four- color ads showed gorgeous landscapes, cities, cathedrals. Printed on the page, just below the artist’s creation, would be a box displaying illustrations of stones, ranging from half a carat to three carats, along with approximate prices for each. Gerry was the first person to create an ad campaign featuring fine art. A year or two later, everyone in the business was doing it.

“I’ll need the tagline by tomorrow,” Gerry said. “I’ll be in to Philadelphia in the morning and then on to South Africa by late afternoon.”

“Sure thing,” Frances said, and then promptly forgot all about it until now, the middle of the night.

She sighed. If she hadn’t been bucking all her life for the title of World’s Biggest Procrastinator, maybe she ’d get some sleep one of these days. She knew she had to work tonight, but still she had stayed out with her pal Dorothy Dignam until Dorothy had to catch the nine o’clock train back to Penn Station.

Dorothy started as an Ayer copywriter in the Philadelphia office in 1930, but soon after Frances came to the agency four years back, Dorothy moved to the New York office at 30 Rockefeller Center to head up the public relations department. Like Frances, De Beers was her main priority. They had publicists in Miami, Hollywood, and Paris, too, just for this one client. Dorothy had even arranged for the creation of a short film with Columbia Pictures,The Magic Stone: Diamonds Through the Centuries. It started playing in theaters in September 1945 and by the time the run was over, it had been seen by more than fifteen million people.

Her friend would never tell her age, but Frances guessed that Dorothy was at least a decade and a half older than she was, probably about fifty. She had been in advertising in Chicago in the last year of the First World War. She was theChicago Herald’s society reporter at seventeen years old and stayed until the day Mr. Hearst moved in and moved her out. She went from there to the offices of the Contented Cow milk company as a copywriter, and later to Ayer.

Dorothy was a real hot ticket. She was something of a model for Frances. She had traveled the world for Ayer in the thirties, working in London, Paris, and Geneva for Ford, sailing to Norway and Sweden to study household electrical progress. She even made frequent visits to Hollywood, where she went to the Trocadero for dinner and saw all the stars. She once ran into Joan Crawford in Bullocks Wilshire. Dorothy bought size 16 of the dress that Joan had purchased in size 14.Just an inexpensive black daytime frock and very useful to both of us, I’m surewas how she had described it in a postcard she sent.

Their dinner tonight had started off as a business meeting, but after two martinis each they were laughing uproariously at a table at Bookbinder’s, eating oysters and telling jokes about the fellas at work. They were endlessly amused by the things they were expected to know as women in the office. A few years ago, Dorothy started keeping a sheet of paper in the vacant drawer under her typewriter, and every question that was asked of her, she typed down.

Tonight, she had read Frances a few of the latest: “How should a woman look when her son is seventeen? Could a winter hat have a bird’s nest on it? Is Macy’s singular or plural? Do women ever warble in the bathtub?...

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Verlag
KNOPF
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
030795871X
ISBN 13 
9780307958716
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
383
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