NONFICTION - Oct. 31, 1993

UP THE AGENCY: The Funny Business of Advertising by Peter Mayle (St. Martin’s: $18.95; 160 pp.) Client: “What time is it?” Ad exec: “What time would you like it to be?” Thus Peter Mayle, author of the wildly (and deservedly) acclaimed “Provence” books, abstracts the alleged “business” of advertising. Until very recently--the Suits, inevitably, are replacing the “talented misfits”--the game has been an ongoing scrimmage between art and commerce, between mundane magnates (“pigs with checkbooks,” to the ad guys) and the “intransigent and highly opinionated” creative people yearning to breathe free, if only in an ad for depilatories. Refereeing are layers of execs. Mayle knows them all, bottom to top. He was a player in New York and London, 1962 to 1975, junior copywriter to creative director (“I think I was also a vice president, but I never had the cards printed”), and he knows what attracts them: “There cannot be many other occupations outside of organized crime or entertainment in which money can be made so quickly and at such a young age.” His tour is irreverent and enlightening, from the in place (Saint Paul de Vence) to the in sport (tennis) to the frenzied pursuit of status. Mayle also claims that the center of advertising has shifted to Britain. Could be. How can you beat a country that gave us “Are your armpits charmpits?”