Roosevelt’s Cape
AT A DINNER PARTY thrown by Don Chilcutt years ago, I found myself sitting next to cataloger John Peterman. Chilcutt, who managed Peterman’s list, hoped that I would give the Marlboro Man some ink.
I was willing, but Peterman turned out to be a strange bird. No sooner had we sat down than he started entertaining me with this tale: “Man called up the other day. Said, ‘You want to go up in a single-engine crop duster?’ ‘Yup,’ I said. ‘Be at the airfield at noon on Sunday.'”
Huh?
Granted, my memory is hazy on the wording of that tale, but I’m certain there was no punch line, nor any subordinate clauses. And that was all he said to me that night, except to answer my request for an interview:
“Nope.”
But I noticed a month or two later that, whatever Peterman’s disdain of the trade media, he had no problem doing interviews with People magazine. This marked him in my book as a phonus balonus.
He reinforced this feeling many times over the years. For example, there was his product, the Roosevelt naval cape. As an FDR admirer, I was pleased that someone had remembered this element of his image. But then it occurred to me that Franklin Roosevelt’s cape did not have red lining.
And I decided that if I couldn’t trust Peterman on that, how could I believe what he said about King Farouk’s fez or Lady McDuff’s safari shorts? Welcome to the Steven Spielberg school of historical precision.
Not that Peterman wrote his own material. He may have done the merchandising, but the copy was ghosted by writer Don Staley. (One thing you have to say for Joe Sugarman is that he wrote the stuff himself.) I was also sort of put off by Peterman’s attitude when I finally did get him on the phone for a chat a year or two later. Peterman does not suffer fools lightly, and he left no doubt that he placed me in that category. When I asked if he was aiming at an upscale audience for a new catalog, he snapped, “What do you think?”
Finally, there was Peterman’s celebrity, which reached its peak with the “Seinfeld” TV series. I’m not knocking the value of an adoring public-Lillian Vernon certainly has one-but there was always something disingenuous about Peterman’s Jimmy Stewart disclaimers.
Still, what has the world gained with Peterman’s bankruptcy? The catalog-which was fun, after all-is now going to operate without Peterman. Good luck to them.
The catalog business, that bastion of the American entrepreneurial spirit, is now devoid of personality. Except for Lillian herself, how many larger-than-life characters are there? In the end, Peterman was an original, one of the few left in our buttoned-down world. For that, I will miss him.
