By Gil Zeimer

I enjoyed a charmed advertising career and was lucky enough to work with many celebrities along the way.

They include Joan Baez and then San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein; ventriloquist Paul Winchell; Pernell Roberts from Bonanza and Trapper John, M.D. fame; Country Joe MacDonald; Henny Youngman; Sally Kellerman; Don Pardo from Saturday Night Live; and all of the KRON-TV NewsCenter 4 broadcasters.

I’ve also worked with Louis Lindley, Jr. and Robert Smith, but you know them better as Slim Pickens and Wolfman Jack.

Now most of these folks were very down-to-earth and easy to work with. A few insisted on limos and other perks. But a few were real pains in the ass. It all comes with the territory of being a celebrity.

How to Marry a Star to an Ad Campaign
Picking the right celebrity to fit a client’s brand is a tricky issue. First, most of these folks cost five to seven figures per year for endorsing your product long-term, or big bucks for a one-time deal.

The contracts are very specific — you only have access to them from a few hours here and there, or for a specific number of days a year, depending on what you negotiate. For example, Pernell Roberts was the spokesperson for a bank in Dallas when I worked for an ad agency there, and we only had him for five days per year to shoot radio and TV commercials in New York or Hollywood. So choose your celebrity wisely.

Then, there’s the downside of working with someone so famous and so cantankerous that the pain far outweighs the pleasure.

Here are some true stories of the best and worst celebrities I’ve worked with…

A Safeway Radio and TV Campaign
In the early 1980s, my creative group at Ketchum Advertising in San Francisco pitched the concept of using celebrity voices to elevate the brand name of one of America’s biggest grocery chains. This was one of the first major campaigns I ever worked on.

My Creative Director and the other writer crafted 60-second radio and 30-second TV scripts for Rodney Dangerfield, Minnie Pearl, and Slim Pickens, while I worked up a few scripts for Henny Youngman, who was one of my parents’ favorite comedians.

Rodney’s Safeway commercials focused on all the respect that Safeway had earned with their quality products, while he lamented with his catch-phrase, “I don’t get no respect, no respect at all…”

Minnie Pearl, who appeared on the Grand Ole Opry stage for more than 50 years and was a star on the “Hee Haw” TV show for two decades, started off with her script with her signature greeting, “How-dy!” Because she always had a price tag hanging off her straw hat, her commercial talked about how affordable and fresh Safeway produce was.

Slim Pickens, who I got to record in a Los Angeles recording studio, because my boss when to New York to work with Henny Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield. Slim was a really nice guy and very accommodating to my requests. His commercial was for Safeway meat and he said, “Golly! Look at those steaks…” Ironically, we had first chosen Jim Nabors for that “Golly” role, but he turned down the opportunity.

During some downtime in the studio, I asked Slim about his acting career. He shared a great story about filming “One Eyed Jacks” with Marlon Brando and their contest to see who could eat the most sandwiches and drink the most beers.

The “Dr. Strangelove” movie made Slim a big star. He played Major Kong and his iconic scene featured him riding an atomic bomb like a bucking bronco as it dropped toward Russia to start World War III.

So I also asked him to pretend he was playing that role and asked him to yell, “Wahooo for Safeway!” He was more than happy to comply for the radio commercials. By the way, I recently saw “Dr. Strangelove” on the London stage, starring Steve Coogan in the Dr. Strangelove, the U.S. President, the rogue Army general, and the Slim Pickens roles.

Now Henny Youngman was a stand-up comedian and musician best-known for his catch-phrase, “Take my wife… please”. He appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show many time and was on the Borscht Belt comedy circuit in the Catskills during the 1950s and 1960s.

Because I still have a video of his TV commercial that was shot around 1980, I remember that I started his script with his famous words. He said, “Take my wife, please!… Can she eat! Last week, she wore out a fork. Fortunately, she buys Safeway’s own brands. The more Town House canned goods she eats, the more money I save. She eats so many Bel-Air fruit pies, they’re naming an orchard after her. And she can drink that Lucerne milk until the cows come home. Safeway brands are terrific folks, and I save enough money to buy better jokes. So go to Safeway, and take my wife, please. She hasn’t left the table in a week!”

The tagline was “Safeway. Where everything’s right, including the price.”

By the way, it was well-known that Henny stole other comedians’ material, so my original script said, “I save enough money to steal better jokes”, but he preferred to say, “buy better jokes”, so we went with that.

Sally Kellerman: “Prima-donna” Personified
Let’s now flash forward a few years. I was working in Dallas at an ad agency and our client was Clear Eyes eye drops. My art director and I wrote a script using Sally Kellerman, who played “Hot Lips” in “M*A*S*H” movie directed by Robert Altman.

She had a sexy, sultry voice that we thought would make people want to use Clear Eyes eye drops, so we hired her for a TV animatic.

That’s the terminology for a storyboard of all the hand-drawn frames of a commercial that is then videotaped and synched with the recorded voiceover. Next, it’s tested in focus groups to see if the audience likes it.

Anyway, my Creative Director was a self-centered dickwad. Normally, the writer would go to the recording session, as I’ve done hundreds of times in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, New York, and even Nashville. But he said, “I’m going to handle this one, you stay here in Dallas” because he saw an opportunity to go to Los Angeles for a few days, live the good life on the client’s dime, and do drugs with a beautiful actress.

Well, the joke was on him, because Sally, may she rest in peace, was over two hours late for the recording session. When she eventually showed up, she was stoned out of her mind, and was barely able to function to record the script.

As a gesture of good faith, my Creative Director had her record a message for my home answering machine, similar to what contestants get on “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me”. It said something like, “This isn’t just any voice machine, it’s Gil’s. He’s not here right now, so leave a message. Gil Zeimer… what a man!”

I used that recording with great pride for many years, until a freelance client from Del Monte Foods called me at home, heard it, and thought it wasn’t very professional.

Working With The Wolfman
Finally, I had a great time working with Wolfman Jack, whose real name was Robert Smith. Because he played such a prominent role in the “American Graffiti” movie, I had the brainstorm to hire him as the voice talent for a radio commercial to promote a screening on Channel 4 in San Francisco.

He had already seen and approved the script through his talent agency. My ad agency flew him from L.A. to SFO early one morning and he arrived at 9 a.m. at the recording studio before going to KRON-TV for a press conference and talk show interviews.

While he was drinking a gigantic cup of coffee and looked half-awake, I introduced myself and asked meekly, “Would you prefer that I call you Robert or Wolfman?”

He replied in his famous gravelly voice, “Uh… call me The Wolfman”.

The script started like this – and he recorded it perfectly in one take, rising slowly from his chair in the studio and becoming very animated… “All right, all right, all right, this is The Wolfman comin’ at ya! Join me on KRON-TV Channel 4 this Saturday night at 8 o’clock for a very special, fifth-anniversary screening of ‘American Graffiti’.

“I’ll be there to interview George Lucas… Francis Ford Coppola… Ron Howard… Harrison Ford… Richard Dreyfuss… Cindy Williams… and many more stars…
Owwwwwww”!

So that was a lot of fun to see Wolfman Jack in action because he was one of the most popular DJs in radio history.

A Final Word of Advice
As I said before, choose your celebrity wisely and make sure it’s a good fit for the product he or she will be advertising. But you never know who will show up –– a congenial actor with great talent or someone in a very altered state.

The End.