“Your little voice,
So soft and kind;
Your little soul,
Your Little mind!”
Samuel Hoffenstein
Wee Folk
They were not bad tempered people. Like those to be found in too many New York offices. The Lockwoods had trust funds to keep them pleasant. And too their family home was that jewel box on The Sound. They sailed to Kennebunkport, Newport, Sag Harbor and closer to home to Oyster Bay. Pretentious places for indifferent people.
They also took their wooden sailing yacht, The Indian, down to Havana, where they had one of their company offices. They’d fly to Germany where they had another office, to France as well, Paris, where they had yet another and then be off to cruise the belle canals.
No, they were not pretentious. Not at all East Coast sophisticates. Instead they were a family of bores. Narrow minded to extreme and certainly never sensitive or empathetic of anyone. They found others for creativity, for imagination. They had none. How they could have been given so much with so little to show for it amazed me.
Mostly, the Lockwoods were blandly polite. With that as policy they ruled their employees with good will, noblesse oblige, feigning benevolence for unimportant lives.
Effortless superiority carried silently, such was their birth right. They commanded with affability while staying ruthlessly strict on overhead, preeminently salaries, and any piddling expense even to paperclips.
Although they kept their bigotry carefully to themselves, in my 35 years of association with them the Lockwoods never hired a Black employee, although when in time it became unavoidable in New York they did at last hire one Hispanic. The Lockwoods by policy hired only the needy young and the broken old. They who were pathetically grateful not to be yelled at—no yelling in the Lockwood office—and melted in love because they could leave at 5pm sharp and straggle back next morning whenever.
Lockwood workers except for editors and salesmen were women. Meaning even lower salaries. They went for Jews and Chinese applicants. Big tits for sure would get the job.
Lockwood Trade Journal was more than threadbare it was empty. When in time I sued the company for breach of contract it came to light that its records had never ever shown a profit, only loss, that on a monthly basis it was kept picked to the bone for the family’s welfare.
Their houses were in Sutton Manor —the private enclave where they’d clustered. Sutton Manor is on the Metro North line, they could train there from Grand Central in 40 minutes.
They were five, three sons and two daughters, all short. Diminutive, actually, little folk, all wee ones without magic or more than a modicum of intellect. Carbon copies of their father George Lockwood Sr., who we secretly called ‘Smokey’ because he looked like the bear. The five strongly resembling Smokey except without his dignity.
The grown children were ill intended, delusional, selfish, the boys more so. Here I add that although I reached to over six feet, I had grown up among smudges for hands and feet, those of my mother and grandfather. Grandfather ‘Wee’ Willy was of similar body smallness, yet a giant in goodness and of that old fashioned concept, of soul. Perhaps the Lockwoods took me in partly because they intuited my lack of height snobbery.
I knew also that they saw me for a hick naive, the John Steuart Curry ‘Baptism in Kansas’ sort of thing that so amused New Yorkers. They saw me as someone to manipulate. They couldn’t see from their vantage point how my eyes glittered over the riches of the land of Lockwood. They did want my intelligence, my creativity and imagination.
I should have been smart enough to know it would end badly, in a Manhattan court. I forgot the old truism that grandfather wee willy liked to say: if you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas.
The Carbon Copies
Old man Lockwood was a heavy shouldered ponderous fellow, no neck, big head, short legs. A rotund fellow who one never saw as short, carrying himself in self awareness like a Pasadena float.
The children were carbons of Smokey except without the grandeur. By body they were short of arm and leg. The males were barrel chested. Born without necks they moved about puffed up like toy soldiers on Christmas parade.
Looking at them I had to smother my mirth in recalling the Tennessee Williams’ line in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, ‘No neck little monsters.’
The sisters were Bobby (Marguerite) and Catherine. Catherine by repute was an authentic bag lady in Boston. The story bore out when an apple of a woman, shabby and confused, unlike her siblings who were as alert as parakeets, arrived in the office one day bags in hand.
Bobby was the sharpest of the lot, the oldest too. She taught in a girl’s school in Boston. I had the impression she ran the family, with an aloof disdain for them and too for anyone outside the clan.
Sisters Lockwood didn’t rise to five feet. Among the brothers Cris was the tallest, straight to attention and at a stretch maybe 5’4”. Fit, handsome, sociable yet also contemptuous of everything, he had a derogatory remark for all things great and small. Not a bright bulb. He was mostly a drunk. Yet in turns charming.
Lockwood siblings did carry themselves in private-school propriety. They were a marvel to slouching me. Of most importance they stood oblivious to stature, theirs or others. Seemingly. One can’t always fathom the lurking resentment of short men any more than the pathetic embarrassment of very tall ones.
When I was first introduced to the family the youngest brother Fred was in the Merchant Marines, on a ship somewhere in the Sumatra Straits. They had to airlift him off when Smokey passed. He was the vaguest one who eventually died himself on a Peloton bike in the NYC Cornell club.
In time Robert’s adult son and daughter joined the company. To their credit neither liked it. Sunk in boredom the son could sometimes be glimpsed masturbating at his desk.
Smokey and Co. Inc.
It was strange to me when I made the discovery that none of the Lockwoods ever read a magazine they produced. Not a single copy. They’d open an issue only to count the ads therein. I think they saw them as their penny shoppers, except the pages were sold for thousands.
The older brothers-Lockwood hired me. Cris, his actual name being George Lockwood Jr, but born on Columbus Day hence his nickname became Cris, and Robert his younger brother. Cris was six years my senior, Robert three.
I was hired as their publishing company’s production manager the lowliest member of the editorial staff of Tobacco International their one remaining magazine, then the oldest and most venerable tobacco industry magazine. I had no experience. The position came with a yearly salary of $5200. Even in 1980 that was basically minimum wage. It amounted to the same as holding a stop sign, with a masters, on a highway construction site. I could only afford to live in one of the city’s worst slums.
Tobacco Internationalwas what was left in New York of the family’s one-time small empire of trade magazines concentrated on paper and tobacco. A decade before his death Smokey had decided to sell off his major publications, including his mighty Paper Trade Journalthe leader in its field with a circulation of 40,000 and too the German tobacco and paper magazines. Estelle the business manager whispered to me that it was because the old man didn’t think any of his sons capable of running the business after him.
The Havana office had closed abruptly with the arrival of revolutionaries, bearded pirates, scary and tall. Decades later I myself would stand next to Castro up close at a cigar gala in Havana, no longer scary, just old and tired. That left the family with Tobacco Internationalin New York and the French magazine La Papeteriein Paris.
According to Estelle he’d pocketed a fortune on the divestment. He and Estelle spent most mornings going over his investments, buying or selling as required, I heard their activity because my office was next to Smokey’s. Old Mr. Lockwood also delighted in opening banking accounts wherever gifts or cash awards pertained. Estelle remarked that he must have at least 50 toasters.
So it had become a small company, tailored down to its owners’ size. No matter, by itself Tobacco Internationalwas a King Solomon’s mine of advertising riches. At the time it was perhaps the most lucrative of all trade journals, someone once told me so. Its 27 issues a year carried 1800 pages of paid advertising keeping the entire Lockwood family in comfort.
Where American Dinosaurs Once roamed
The company dwelled at three Manhattan addresses in the years I was associated with it. First in the French building at 45thStreet and Fifth. Then the Bush Tower on 42ndStreet near Times Square. Later in the Standard Oil Building, home to Rockefellers, at 26 Broadway across from the ‘Raging Bull’ statue. Each building a monument to ages of bloated American capitalists.
All three buildings are landmark designated, for architecture, not for Lockwoods.
Landmark status was of no interest to Robert. Cheapness was all. He merely scouted the market for long term leases whenever the Manhattan real estate market went bust, as was its want.
Each office by family tradition could at utmost be on a 9thfloor. This said to be because a pyrophobic grandfather had learned that FDNY extension ladders went no higher.
Offices were always cramped, trending toward shabby, frayed carpet, ill-used office chairs for worn out or soon-to-be worn out workers. The Lockwoods simpered with pride on how little they paid in salaries, how rarely and tiny the raises they gave, and yet how they ‘managed’ to keep most of their employees with them for years.
Nothing except windows interrupted their walls other than a large framed photo of The Indian, in pride of place, dashing through spray. They showed it for all to see like a renaissance altarpiece. In the succession of rentals it was hung in what they called ‘the library’, designated a conference room with an antique mahogany table that generations of Lockwoods had carted over and about Manhattan Island.
Wherever, the ‘libraries’ were the same, lined with shelves for holding all the issues of the various magazines that the company had published back to 1872. The volumes made for a genteel look in leather and gilt binding. Dumpy as they were the Lockwoods did like a good show.
A Lockwood Baptism
I should have seen it all coming that very summer afternoon in 1985. We walked to the edge of the Sound, behind us on the slope the white bulk of the Lockwood house. My three year old’s hand was secure in mine. Cris Lockwood swaggered along never getting too close to my height in daylight. When possible the Lockwoods kept clear of anything that would diminish them.
They came up from a sleek three-story mansion obviously designed in a cautious deference to Frank Lloyd Wright. It had been built in 1910 by their grandfather as a young man for his bride. It came down to them with more rooms than they needed and a foundation lapped by the Long Island Sound.
The house was striking, all in white, outside and inside, with a huge stain glass sky light over the central stair case and an inspired array of view-filled windows. Such so that inside it The Sound suddenly came into every room. Water rippled in the sun on its walls. My one envy of them, the Lockwoods, their house. Anyone from Kansas would covet that rich shimmer of light on water.
I was often in it, their only worker graced with access. My pass was my WASP pedigree, my charm. Their other workers were Irish, Jews and benighted residents of Staten Island. To them I think I was a slave warrior, celtic, fair and polite, entertaining, a tall possession. I was to be shown off in their Rome, paraded in invisible chains. They did also value the money I made for them, a lot of money.
Cris, I and my son came together to the dock jutting out into the cool northern water. Without warning Cris stopped on the planking, bent down and snatched up my beautiful prince. In the same move he pivoted and sank the toddler to his waist in dark water cold even in summer.
My son was too shocked to cry out. He just looked up at me tilting his golden curls. He gave me a look of both supplication and accusation—how could daddy have let this happen.
I hugged him close and clucked indignation. Turning to carry him in haste back to the house for dry clothes behind me I heard from Cris, “Now at least you don’t need to baptize him.” Typical shrugging commentary. Laughter. A peek into the mind of these heedless folk.
Cris
Cris was the more handsome, also the most arrogant, entitlement an aura he carried with commanding insouciance. He also liked the sound of his own voice and one could see him cadging up thoughts in his mind that he thought sounded good enough to speak.
A ball of gray snot often glistened in one nostril about which someone must have apprised him because he frequently blew his nose.
Cris the latent bully, door to his closet somewhat ajar. Perhaps this proclivity explained why he was so aggressively masculine. He took charge in a conversation, steered people his way. He’d tell me when drunk a detailed account of how he had anal intercourse, with he said his wife. When he got into a fist fight by the copying machine with the editor of Tobacco International, which I witnessed, it was because the editor had injudiciously remarked “I think you’re that way too.”
My very first week on the job, that I so desperately needed and had grubbed for in rising panic, Chris said ‘come with me’ one lunch hour. He guided me to the Times Square porno video booths, pathetic raunch with sorry looking women.
After that this became something he demanded of me a couple of times per month. It escalated until he took me to one sleaze hole where a window opened inside the booth and for a few bucks you were invited to poke a finger into a girl under a scarlet strobe.
To my surprise Cris squeezed into the tiny booth with me saying “It’s cheaper this way.” The girls behind the shutter started shouting, “Hey you! No two guys in the same booth!”
That was the last time I went along on his lunch hour prowl.
Robert The-Frog Sausage Fingers
Robert’s Lockwood’s Roman brow looked quite large on his figure being both heavy and distinguished. This noble quality disappeared in descent down to pudgy very short fingers. Bloated Vienna sausages out of a tin. Some employees called Robert ‘Sausage Fingers’. All agreed there was something repugnant about those fingers.
His feet too. Looking at Robert’s feet in preppy penny loafers caused a moment of alarm because they had such an ephemeral dainty quality as if they were shrinking before your eyes.
Bright light through the large windows of the French Building. Robert sits at his desk, probably bought in a New York Board of Education equipment auction. That because it seems to be a teacher’s desk from the 50s, gun metal and preposterously ugly, of gum and dried snot, from a classroom in the Bronx.
Robert wears his white striped button down shirt, same kind as he always wore. Just like his dad, his heavy no-neck build makes the shirt collar strangle him at his chin. His high-rider blue slacks are always the same. The clip-on tie he’s wearing is too long so that the tip dangles down between his legs.
I hear tell he buys pants and tie in the Boys Department of Mays on Union Square. His cute feet in Buster Browns. His socks slip down below the high-riders revealing half of his hairless calves.
There Robert sits in the wan light spill-off of 45thStreet. When nervous Robert Lockwood knocks his knees. Buries his head to hide in papers. He never reprimands or fires anyone himself, asking others to do so. Contention of any kind is his nemesis. When cornered Robert squawks like a cartoon animal. If tension rises in the office he’ll flee to hide in the toilet.
By rule he’s always affable to the hired help. They who were bought at discount, perhaps also at Mays on Union Square? He knows it’s very important to keep them happy and chained in place at their galley oars.
Robert is taking his habitual late morning coffee, swamping the oil spill coffee into a filthy mug with an argosy of Cremora. A mug so foul it threatened the office ladies with the heaves. He opens the jar of industrial grade powder.
One large black fly, distressingly bloated, impressively hairy, spirals out from the jar mouth, rises in a halting flight like a stalling Cessna from the depths of the jar. Robert eyes the creature apathetically.
He proceeds to spoon the creamer, heaping spoonful upon spoonful into his coffee, idly stirring it in while playing on a calculator with the other hand. He’s toting up another advertising count.
Robert is the dangerous one among the Lockwoods. The smartest, the most ambitious, the most devious. Robert took over the company when Cris was hung out to dry wet from his booze inspired delusions. Cris was no cautionary tale, however.
Just as before, Robert continues swilling scotch every evening at his desk, Johnnie Walker Black. His begins to show the ravages, same as for his father and brothers, turning puffy and pasty with a fine web of veins.
His features show only insipid acceptance. Regarding him as a classic bust he looked a bit refined even contemplative, like an Aurelian emperor with sightless eyes modeled in play dough.
The deceptive harmlessness hides an ever calculating nature, one habituated to seeking any possible advantage. He is a minor Prince by Machiavelli Jr.
Most signature to him is deceit. Robert Lockwood to my knowledge can not tell a truth. He’s a liar. Inveterate. He’ll lie about anything, everything, all things great and small. Lying pathologically, a genuine mytholymanic forever creating lies and plotting to cover them up.
Again Cat On A Hot Tin Roofcomes to mind. I hear the lines “What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?”
Tennessee Williams would have had no truck in Robert, no suffering there, no tragedy and, from appearances nothing in the crotch of his pants.
I never saw Robert smile, never laugh. Perhaps someone once told him that impassivity made him look taller? Perhaps he thought it made him look honest.
Nor did he frown. Just posed. An enigmatic bull frog who wouldn’t croak. He’d just let his fly escape.
Any Tight Orifice Would Do
They were truly tight fisted, Robert the more so. Once at the exclusive Greenbrier resort for a tobacco industry blowout when we’d been married for only three days, and without money or time for a celebration, Robert’s wife urged him to let us go to the hotel’s swag restaurant on the company’s account.
Robert looked sideways, whining ‘isn’t that really expensive?’ Meaning forget it.
I knew the Lockwoods were tight, when still an employee of the company before I turned private contractor the paychecks sometimes bounced. Other times Estelle would come round to ask that the checks not be cashed until some date or other.
On that Greenbrier occasion he did his “I’m the boss” imitation. He puffed out his chest.
An elderly gentleman, standing with us, among the last of Virginia’s titled and learned tidal aristocracy was the drawling chairman of a powerful tobacco leaf trading company. A major client. He put his face into Robert’s.
“Lockwood, a lot of my money is in your pocket. How many ads over the years have I run in your magazine? When your daddy was alive and I came to New York he took me to the yacht club. Now I come up and you take me to Blimpies. Let these kids have an evening.”
Liquid Nights On Broadway
In leaving at the stroke of 5pm, by never staying late, the staff made their one timid gesture towards mutiny. Standard Manhattan office routine demanded long hours.
Cris and Robert were not unhappy with this. They could begin their happy hours, plural, when the hired help left for their long subway trek home to small apartment living. At 5pm out came their bottles and tumblers. They each kept their own stash stocked and hidden in their desks. They drank Johnnie Walker Black exclusively, always neat.
Once a week on Fridays tradition was to leave work and repair as a Lockwood squadron down to the Cattleman’s, a restaurant and popular bar on the ground floor of the French Building. Serious drinking there. That’s how I can bear witness to the remarkable amounts of booze the two consumed.
We workers couldn’t afford the Cattleman’s so Chris bought us rounds. Classic Beers and Balls. I figure he spent on account at Cattleman’s per annum the same as for one of his employee’s salaries.
There I’d hear stories of parties in the office, orgies across Manhattan in the night, wild times on their yacht, revelry in the Lockwood mansion on The Sound. Lottie Greenbaum the circulation manager and longest serving employee recounted with relish how Smokey would chase the women into the powder room bellowing “come out, come out wherever you are.”
If you ever told these things about the Lockwoods to the people they did business with the reaction was knowing laughter. They hadn’t fooled many if any. The children were so full of their little selves they assumed they were fool proof.
Of the Lockwood drinkers Cris was the most profound. Cris‘s drinking grew ever more problematic. Daily consumption of a bottle and more altered Cris’s short term memory, then long term too.
Drunkenly he visited us many times at my home in France. He made hapless passes at my wife. The final visit he rolled away at end of the weekend semi-conscious. I had to help get on his flight at the Toulouse airport off for a week of work in Athens. The office in New York heard nothing from him for several days. Lost weekend became a lost stretch of Scotch and gyros.
That was when Robert took charge. He flew to Greece to fetch Cris home, cram him onto a flight as a carry on. Then he had the Board strip him of authority, his crown as a haughty first son was taken away. Off he went with the DTs to a posh sanitarium in the Wisconsin woods.
The Lockwood brothers travelled manically. Even when they didn’t need to, they migrated as blindly as birds. Winging off to points around the globe. More than 50% of the time they were somewhere other than in New York. Visiting clients, exploring for new ones, lost in industrial estates on four continents, trudging the floors of trade shows throughout the US, Europe and Asia.
They like me lied their way into advertising budgets. They’d taught me how to although I readily embellished my own outlandish tales of circulation, pass-along readership, market influence with far more imaginative pitches.
The heaviest part of their luggage were bottles of Johnnie Walker. Never leave home without it.
Platform Shoes
Things turned around for them in those 1990s. Robert was cunning and plotting, with nary a shred of the vision thing although shrewd enough to know he lacked it and to find people to work with him who didn’t, and whose advise he deferred to. In time he bought Smokeshopa publication for the tobacco store sector and also, more importantly, Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, the magazine of reference for the global coffee and tea industries. The Company opened an office in Bangkok for its Tobacco Asiaand Tea & Coffee Asiamagazines.
Most important, someone convinced Robert to be really brave and fund the creation ofSmoke, Cigars and Life’s Burning Desires. It was a pretentious success. A big one.
Smoke immediately became thecompany’s pride, a new consumer magazine for the American cigar craze of the 1990s and early 2000s. It carried a bounty of advertising, a glittering kingdom in luxury goods. It was a classic jerk off magazine for young guys with Rolex watches (or for those craving one). It showcased lots of big tits. On the covers were folks like Alex Baldwin, Mel Gibson and Elle Macpherson.
Smokeas the company’s first ever consumer magazine made Robert a few inches taller. It was his pair of platform shoes.
For my part I gave the Lockwoods two tradeshows, Tea & Coffee WorldCup Exhibition and Symposium for those industries’ global businesses and Eurotabfor tobacco. I created them from nothing and put them both on the Lockwood plate. I turned the tea and coffee magazine and trade show into the showcase for the suddenly fashionable espresso coffees and espresso brewing machines.
My advertising sales came to more than 250 pages a year in those golden times. The Lockwood magazines were also publishing almost 150 pages of my articles. For a while I was perhaps the leading business journalist for the tobacco, tea and coffee industries.
While I didn’t get rich I was making more than any boy from Kansas could want. I was also earning on commissions more than anyone in the company, even the Lockwoods. That proved a dangerous visibility.
I prided myself on my independence of Robert, that I was not his employee but rather a virtual partner protected by a fancy Manhattan contract. In fact, I was a Lockwood vassal State.
Robert Sacks Rome
Then there were the febrile and pathetic Roman aristocrats who had rented their swank place on a hill above Rome for a World Cup Tea & Coffee exhibition party. Robert stiffed them completely, left them holding the receipts with disbelieving looks for an entire evening of class entertainment, jazz piano, Italian tartina with spumante– and the view. The lights of the ancient city spread like jewels before Robert’s penny loafers.
Or again in Rome, where he skipped without paying for the rental of the main hall of the Fiera di Roma, including the all important utilities, for a large three day international fair which the company had organized and from which it profited by a few million dollars.
Those were the hottest days on record in Rome and to protect itself from further loss the Fair turned off the air conditioning. Nigh to 10,000 visitors dripped sweat through the hall. About 200 exhibitors looked to be taking showers. Their cumulative rage made the fair even hotter.
I pleaded with Robert to at least buy bottles of water to take along the aisles for the exhibitors. Robert didn’t yield. Threats from all sides, and most especially from the Fiera, turned what would have been a great exhibition into a rout.
Last day at closing the fair sent some Italian muscle after Robert to collect in full. Mean looking dark skinned fellows in shiny blue suits. Noble Roman head cooked, Robert pipped in his ‘don’t hurt me’ cartoon voice—‘Help me get of here!’.
To counter I gathered the tallest men around and had them surround Robert and hustle him out back to safety through the loading docks.
He would get me too in the end. I figure that during the many years I sold advertising for them I myself brought into their tight small fists, their gaping high rider pant pockets, about 20 million after commission and the small overhead I cost them. I think I brought the Lockwoods, to their own account, from my sales for their five magazines and two international trade show, up towards 100 million in time.
Being the company’s agent in Italy I had the most to gain, and to lose in Rome. The debacle did cost me dearly. My Tea & Coffee World Cup exhibition was never the same. Tea & Coffee Magazine was never the same.
Rome marked our apex, the beginning of our decline and fall.
Trump World Trump World
I am in the Lockwood office, August evening after 9pm, their office windows are great black slabs of Manhattan ill omen. Not particularly for me or them, or for any of us, just remarkable as emblems of nighttime in New York, everything on edge, canyon dark coming early through the old windows of skyscrapers. Saying to me that the jittery frenzy was ebbing only as it darkened, turning sexy and jazzy.
This summer evening the office door opens wide for a self important entourage to bristle through. There’s a fussing of orange, Queens-hick hair. It’s Donald Trump with lawyers come like a German general to discuss terms of surrender.
Lockwood is going into business with Donald! To publish Trump World Magazine!! A magazine from shining cover to shining cover about Donald Trump himself!!! Oh how exciting it all is!!!!
Trump Worldis a twin to ‘Smoke’, aimed at the same fringe complexes of high rollers, golf bums, wannabes with serious self esteem issues. Tits again, show girls on steroids, gambling, cigars, flashes in the pan in everything. It’s the simulacra on glossy paper of the vulgar, sycophantic world of Donald and Melania.
I’m involved peripherally, in selling ads for the new magazine, to the Cubans—Montecristo and Cohiba–to the Dutch—Balmoral, Schimmelpenninck –and even to the Italians for their own ‘macho macho man’, for Garibaldi’s beloved Toscana cigars. From this my pants become stuffed with cash, enough to make me sound like a big bag of fall leaves when I move. I’m more than seduced I became complicit to what I abhorred (‘the vulgar, sycophantic world of Trump). Hot glitz on toast.
A coke head by the name of Michael Jacobson, an aging adolescent, has been an ad salesman for Smokeand mysteriously is named publisher of Trump World. Robert will eventually need to bundle Michael off for a coke cure, probably to the same place in the Wisconsin woods were his brother detoxed.
You Don’t Get My Vote
When the Lockwoods throw a launch party for Trump World at Trump offices in the Trump Tower, for sure Trump came with his Trump girl friend, gold digger of the moment, Melania Kraus, on his arm.
Trump was in his glory as a TV host then, top rating for “The Apprentice”. Since Lockwood was involved it was of course a tight fisted miserly affair, people had to buy tickets for their drinks, grub though was free, discount hors oeuvres still cold from the freezer.
Waiters recruited from the Lockwood office (including my 16 year old son in the cloak room he was spending the summer with us in New York as a summer intern.). Lockwood staff who worked the launch were promised payment but never saw it, my son included.
Asked what Melania looked like my perspicacious youngest son replied, “kind of like a whore, dad.”
Trump World failed at an enormous loss after two issues. Robert landed on both little feet although he did get stuck with whopping printing bills. This escapade was not discussed much, but I understand it had soured Robert on Trump. And where one Lockwood went the others were sure to follow. Ardent Republicans in due course I wondered who they could have voted for?
When a presidential election was in sway they’d put up posters in the office for their cherished Republican candidate. At a point near to the election they’d come round to all their employees with a face to face nudge, “And who are you voting for?” Wrong answer and you’d be in for a long sales pitch of dubious integrity.
How does one argue politics with one’s boss?
Queen Juenne
Decline and fall of the Lockwood Journal Company began with booze. Those hundreds of bottles of Scotch, mixed with Cris, arrogant and stupid, Robert, recreant and mendacious. But Juenne pinned the tail on the donkey.
Robert hired her as a saleswomen, the first woman ever as such. Then after a few months he suddenly to the surprise of all named her company vice president, telling the staff to report to her and her alone. This was an office coup unheard in Lockwood history, no one without the name had ever held such authority.
It caused indignation among the others, uproar, barricades were thrown up in the bullpen. Cobblestones flew threw the decaying air of the library.
Even I off alone and thriving in France became a person of interest since by then after Robert I was the key person in the company. But Juenne wanted herself between me and Robert.
I informed Robert this wouldn’t work for anyone. He whined, “Can’t you try, Jonathan, please.” I told him the truth, she wouldn’t understand the matters I needed to bring to his attention and there was no time to educate her. Obviously, I myself had acquired a touch of arrogance.
It became apparent I needed to spend a week in New York to seek a solution. I arrived to find far more of a mess than I could have guessed. Robert had become seriously smitten with Juenne.
By association with Cris I knew what kind of women the Lockwood boys favored. Dish-water blondes, flirts flying blimps in front like Hindenburgs.
A short woman, of course, at the end of her 30s. Spoke in a gushing Carolina drawl. Dressed younger than she was. Wore too much makeup. Spoke to you too close and with a hand on your forearm. TikTak breath. But Oh those breasts. Robert must have been sporting a boner when he found the courage to hire her.
That visit to New York was fraught with suspense as Robert took me for long walks around Midtown while he babbled in a hyperventilating way about Juenne. Walking through Bryant Park I feared he’d have a heart attack relating how he’d fallen for her immediately. At first sight he became so besotted with her that in the 14thcentury he’d have been judged bewitched.
Late nights in the office there’d been blow jobs. Ultimately they’d fucked quickly, manically, in the library, on the table top below that worshipful photo of the family boat.
Robert’s first infidelity or so he blubbered to me. I think it so, he was too frightened of everything to have committed more.
Not Your Average Lockwood
Virginia, Robert’s wife, I’d known well for years. When people met her they were in disbelief. Virginia was a true beauty, very much an Ava Gardner type slightly taller than him, a captivating face with emerald eyes. She came with rough edges, from a working class family, louche grammar and chewing gum. Virginia had married Robert when quite young, probably pregnant.
Her mother, famous in office gossip for finding Robert disgusting and saying so, publically admonished her beautiful daughter, “Keep yourself nice, Jenny, you never know who might come along.”
He asked me to come for Sunday dinner at his home in Sutton Manor on the same street where his mother still lived. That afternoon was a scene from a play by Clarence. Good laughs what with Virginia sweetly in the dark, Robert almost incoherent, his knees going gang busters, and me for the conniving servant.
“Don’t tell Virginia whatever you do,” I counseled. This as Robert returned again and again to his compulsion to confess. He was in such a sweaty dither that I insisted that afternoon he should talk to his friend who was a shrink. The only friend he apparently had. He did it whimpering on the phone. Shrink told him what I had.
No good. Robert leapt with his lemmings. An hour after I left to drive back into the City he told Virginia.
I had witnessed Virginia taking sad mute walks in the gardens of the Greenbrier Hotel. I’d seen her turn herself off like a radio. One beautiful and troubled lady.
All Fall Down
That spring evening after Virginia heard all about Juenne she bugged out. Screaming obscenities into the Sutton Manor night she threw all of Robert’s possessions onto the front lawn, the neighbors gathered to gawk on their manicured property lines.
Robert, horrified, tried to reason with her. At the commotion his mother, kitty, living only a few yards away had arrived in a rush, also trying unsuccessfully to calm her daughter in law.
Raving, Virginia dashed about with a kitchen knife ripping up his clothes. That was when Kitty phoned emergency. Virginia was taken off in restraints. It took months for her to recover and when she did she stripped Robert bare of money and possessions. Only the company and the yacht could be protected, those she never got near.
I was asked if she could really have loved Robert that much. No, I think madness was in her nature plus the chagrin for having put up with him for so long only to see him get shaken down by a hussy.
Juenne sued for sexual harassment. The Lockwood Trade Journal Company board of directors, all the Lockwoods, settled with her for a quarter million.
Nevertheless Robert remained president and the Lockwood ship sailed on through the storm.
I sailed along trapped in the rigging. Robert never once alluded to that afternoon, not to me. For years after I watched him in his life’s progress amazed as he shouldered on as if nothing had happened, proceeding on in his cloud of unknowing.
Ma!
Catherine Lockwood, Kitty, was of similar height to her sons yet so much bigger. Among them she made a beam of light. How they clamored at her in their need like hungry baby birds. “Ma!”
After moving to France I visited the company often in New York, spending time in the office to schmooze. I’d stay with old Mrs. Lockwood. Since the death of Smokey she wandered alone in her big house. Kitty their mother. In her late 70s.
Early of a morning I’d watch Kitty from the guest room windows stepping out of the house and down her front lawn to the Sutton Manor dock and boathouse. Catch her making a lady like progress toward her morning dip.
She did the same every morning going down for her swim in a demur black bathing suit indifferent to her sagging buttocks and breasts. Her skin was burnt parchment ruined from far too much sun incautiously taken on various waters, on an assortment of yacht decks.
Kitty’s father had been a professor at Cornell where Smokey met her. Everyone in the family went to Cornell, just as all were boarded at private schools. Everyone sailed. All were oddly subdued, even tedious.
The children were ashamed of her. I saw so in their eyes, part in resentment for her being’ a tad eccentric’, inimical they thought to themselves? Also because Kitty held to a deep Catholic faith while the rest of the family were terminally lapsed Methodist. Her children resented that catholic taint in their blood. Blacks, Hispanics, Democrats, Catholics, all those threats. Their petit Weltanschauung shrank at each passing generation.
Also, as she aged she became a bit batty. She’d scrutinize you up close, pushing her wizened face at yours, tickling strands of gray hair and her crackling voice asking a question about Pascal. Yet a loving, gracious, brightly smart creature. I more than liked her, I was smitten with her.
Kitty and I we drank sherry. It was very good sherry. Fino, Manzanilla from around Cadiz. Kitty got titterish, I got loaded.
Kitty excited, hops from topic to topic an old budgie. She’ll ask me in her bird-bright way about the Cathars, the poetry of W.B. Yeats, the masters of the Italian renaissance. It’s a groggy uncertain voice. Many diverse subjects she skips about in as I refill her glass.
When she died I saw in her obituary that she’d been known as the ‘matriarch of Sutton Manor.’ She did deserve a title, something more honorable than ’Mother of Lockwoods.’
Almost To The End
Credit for listing the Lockwood Company to starboard is mine. I took Robert on when I first caught him poaching in my preserve of advertising clients.
I knew he’d grown envious of my success and greedy enough to covet my clients. To protect myself from him years before I’d had a smart Manhattan lawyer draw up a contract that was as strong as could be made.
But then on a business trip to Italy someone whispered to me that Robert had taken a stray from me when I wasn’t looking and claimed the commission for himself for years. The steal amounted to about $40,000 that ought to have been mine by contract.
Confronting Robert with this was informative. He blithered off into a script of lies, handling it by refusing to admit it existed. I called in my lawyer to brandish my club, that if he didn’t pay me my due I’d take him to court and worse, I’d leave him. It worked. He paid.
But I’d made the mistake of making the unthinkable real, that we could somehow divorce. When I’d joined the company 35 years earlier, a wise old editor had told me, ‘never think you’re indispensible. You never are’.
Silly Me, I Did Prove Dispensable
It came with another of ‘my’ World Cup Tea & Coffee Exhibitions. This time in Vienna. Tradeshows were sensitive matters to me. The two I’d created for the company from nothing, World Cup and Eurotab, together had grown to mean several million dollars of profit. World Cup was held every two years. For the Vienna edition I billed 1.5 million in exhibition space to the Lockwood account. My commission on space came to $200,000.
Robert would not pay.
I argued, then threatened. I thought he’d back away. He didn’t. Then I felt the fury of the righteous and had my lawyer cite Lockwood Trade Journal for breach of contract.
Robert fled from New York and me on The Indian. Sailing incommunicado. A Viking funeral that burned us alive at our respective funerals.
In the end the court gave me no more than the amount I was owed. That was a pyrrhic victory, I’d asked for a million. Small satisfaction that Lockwood & Co almost immediately began to slip into decline without my sales. They lasted less than another decade.
The Indian being one of the largest wooden yachts on the East Coast was given to a museum. The insurance on it I heard was too much for Robert to bear post divorce.
That splendid dainty mansion on The Sound? The family kept it for a few years after Kitty’s death. Then it fell from their sausage fingers due to Robert’s clutching at money, his refusal to pay for a new roof allowed the next hurricane to enter and wash down all its insides. It was bought for a pittance by a venture Capitalist.
Suddenly Last Summer
The company ended its days in arrears to all and abiding in a couple of rooms in a walk up over a motor scooter parts shop in Long Island City, NY. Not far from the very neighborhoods where the Lockwoods had consigned so many employees to live.
On 20 June last year the Lockwood Trade Journal Company closed down. It earned no obituary for its 150 years of life, only a terse notice on LinkedIn — OUT OF BUSINESS JUNE 2020. To my knowledge no one was sad.
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