Free The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan

and down. They had just needed some way to sign the ads. She shuddered to think of what might have happened if a great line had been demanded—every copywriter in the department coming up with hundreds of ideas and the best one thrown away like the Edsel.
    At the end of this evening’s program, they would show a shicling the campaign’s success, and then she would speak. Mary Frances Gerety would have the last word. At least for tonight.
    The dinner was two hours away. She felt desperate for a nap. But she still hadn’t worked out what she’d say onstage. Back home, she had sat down several times to write her speech, but something else always grabbed her attention. The doorbell rang or some interesting segment came on the news, and suddenly she forgot all about De Beers. Of course, this was how she had always worked. She was at her most creative when she waited until the last possible second—a mix of necessity and fear had served her well.
    Maybe she would open with that. Tell them that if she hadn’t been such a master procrastinator all her life, what they were here to celebrate might never have come to pass.
    Frances stood up. Her whole body felt sore from all the walking she’d d that,” she said.Y their husbands for a fone. They had seen the Tower of London. Oxford Street and the British Museum and Saint Paul’s Cathedral and the Palace of Westminster. Yesterday they took the train out to Bath, where the most famous and celebrated former resident was Jane Austen, though it seemed to Frances that Austen had lived there only for about three minutes.
    She had been athletic all her life. While they were traipsing around the city, she was too proud to mention that these days she rarely walked farther than the distance from the front door to the end of the driveway. But now she was paying for it. And somehow she’d have to squeeze into high heels tonight. Torture devices, that’s what they were. Frances had no idea how women worked and wore heels at the same time. For her, it was utterly impossible to think a clear thought while standing on the tips of her toes.
    She recalled a young Marilyn Monroe predicting such a fate for old-timers. Marilyn, who never got to get old. Or never
had
to get old, depending on how you looked at it.
    Frances belted it out as she made her way into the suite’s yellow sitting room. “Time rolls on and youth is gone and you can’t straighten up when you bend. But stiff back or stiff knees, you stand straight at Tiffany’s. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
    She plopped into a chair at the mahogany desk and looked out the window at the lush green treetops of Hyde Park. She cupped her chin in her hand and placed her elbow on the desk, a position she had assumed on a thousand other occasions when she was on deadline.
    De Beers had been one of the few campaigns that invented a need that didn’t previously exist. She jotted this down. Usually, when you wrote an ad, you wanted to highlight that something new and exciting had come along. But with De Beers, it was the opposite: Not only were they to impress upon average women and men—especially the men!—that diamonds were now an imperative for marriage, they were to make it seem as though it had always been that way. Before they got started, diamonds were for the wealthy alone. But now everyone and their mother wore one.
    They did it again years later with
Long Distance Is the Next Best Thing to Being There
. The campaign drove AT&T’s profits through the roof. Until that line, no one made long-distance calls. It was just too expensive. But the print ads grabbed people’s hearts, and eventually the televisionspots with the line
Reach Out and Touch Someone
took the whole thing over the top, with treacly melancholy music and video of babies talking to grandfathers three thousand miles away, and lovers telling each other how much they missed being together, and the soldier calling home from the battlefield.
    Be All You Can Be
was