Star Fitting : Chance for TV Spot Turns Men Into Model Contestants
This is about the guys other guys love to hate.
The men of the C&R; Clothiers ads.
Admit it--your lips are curling into sneers already, aren’t they, guys? You figure them for a bunch of lightweight pretty boys, right? Even some newspaper editors love to hate them, which is why you are reading this right now.
Unless you’ve been in an iron lung, you can’t have missed the haberdashery’s commercials: Handsome men pivot and gaze soulfully into the camera, transformed from their workaday clothes into reasonably priced C&R; splendor, all to the song, “What a Difference a Day Makes.”
There were 7,500 Southern California men who wanted to be just like them, hankering for a few watts of limelight. That many men were entered--by their girlfriends or sisters or wives or themselves--in a contest to find the next “C&R; Men.”
By the brutal standards of advertising aesthetics, they were winnowed down on Wednesday, from 50 good-looking men, to 15 undisputed hunks, and at last to five godlike creatures--the winners. Be looking for them in a new round of commercials soon; rest assured that your wife will.
So popular have these ads been, the C&R; people swear, that they’ve received fan letters by the thousands, from grandmas and girlfriends who swear their men could do that too. Women run to the screen at the first few bars of theme music. Men do too, and turn them off. An article in a Santa Monica high school newspaper complained about the unfair pressure guys are getting from girls to look like C&R; men.
What company would not exploit such a fever?
On Wednesday, all 50 walked before a video camera to perform the C&R; turn and level the smoldering C&R; gaze: Gatsby faces and Wall Street faces and Marlboro Man faces and Mt. Rushmore faces.
What the ad agency wanted was Everyman, and they got him, if Everyman is 20 to 35 years old, with a 34-inch inseam, a 17-inch neck, cheekbones like the Matterhorn and more curls than a chia pet.
They listed their hobbies (baseball, body science chemistry, spending time with my Vietnamese potbellied pygmy pig) and proudest accomplishments (saving a man’s life, overcoming the tremendous pressure to join a gang, marriage).
They primped before a bathroom mirror, poking fretfully at blemishes, combing and recombing their hair. A friend pulled at Brian Messner’s red tie. “Is it loose?” Messner worried. “It’s always loose. Damn. Can you fix it?”
They said all the right things, exuding generous good fellowship. “I’m just happy I got into the finals,” said Mark Silver, a hearing-impaired groundskeeper at Sea World with hopes for a modeling career.
“I was surprised. I thought there’d be a lot of attitudes, but everybody was nice,” said Ken Papotta Jr., a high school football coach in Simi Valley. “I met 15 new friends, that’s how I felt about it.”
“I think it’s a very nice compliment,” said neurosurgeon Jeffrey Thomas. “It does honor to the people who nominated me”--his wife and nurses at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.
“I never knew how hard it was to turn.”
Ah, that turn. Ric Coy’s high school students in Long Beach kept after him, “Come on, Mr. Coy, do your C&R; turn.”
He was here because he cut a deal with his students: “We were having conduct problems. I told them if they hit the books, I’d fill out an application.”
Maureen Nellis--”I run to see” the commercials--submitted her boyfriend’s photo to perk up his spirits. He made the cut, and she watched all the men awaiting their call.
“They’re so different from women. They were sitting on couches, talking. Girls in this (contest) wouldn’t be talking to each other. They were talking to each other, but they were scoping each other out, too. Just not so obviously.”
Her boyfriend, William Hummel, had grilled her at lunch: “He was asking, ‘What do you think of that guy? How do you think he’ll do?’ ”
By 2 o’clock, they knew.
As the 15 semifinalists were named and stepped forward, the others edged closer together, filling in the gaps in their ranks. Above the warm smiles, some cool sidelong glances: What has he got that I haven’t got?
They congratulated each other in manly fashion, grabbing each other’s biceps just above the elbows, they way guys do when a handshake isn’t good enough and a hug is too sissy.
Another series of turns and gazes, and it was down to five winners. Thomas, the neurosurgeon; Owen McKibbin, the pro volleyball player with the pet pig; Papotta, the coach; Paul Gamboa, in a T-shirt and Melrose jacket, a carpenter suddenly elevated from remodeling to modeling; and Larry Jones, a horse trainer, whose stiff new jeans and Western jacket assuredly didn’t come off the racks at C&R.;
Jones hooked his thumbs alongside his belt buckle--the one memorializing his late, great Arabian horse, Rising Star--and let out the hard truth:
“I don’t even own a suit. This is it right here.”
Thomas needled him about his application, the part about being a C&R; man. You shop there 20 times a year, right?
“Hey,” said Jones genially. “It said on the TV, no purchase required.”
