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"Whoa!" Paul said. "My face is on the label?" "Of course," said Stew. "How else do you get their attention?" Paul balked: "My face on a bottle of salad dressing? Not a chance in hell." Stew offered a proposal: "I'd like to set up a tasting. If your dressing is something special and you have a good label on it, I'll get Andy Crowley at Ken's to bottle it and I'll kick off your sales with a big promotion at my store." We told him that Crowley already turned us down. "Gentlemen," Stew said, "I am Andy's best customer--I sell more Ken's than all his other customers combined. If your dressing measures up, I assure you he will bottle it."
We are on [their boat] the Caca de Toro, mock fishing. The president and vice president of Salad King are having an executive meeting, not knowing which will sink first--the boat or the business. Paul is still brooding over the tacky suggestion that he put his face on a bottle of salad dressing. Hotch suggested that perhaps the time had come to bag the whole idea. The bobber dipped and Paul reeled in a hermit crab. "You know, there could be a kind of justice here, Hotch. I go on television all the time to hustle my films. TV gets me and my time for free, and the film gets exposure for free--mutual and circular exploitation, so to speak. Now then, if we were to go the lowest of the low road and plaster my face on a bottle of oil and vinegar dressing just to line our pockets, it would stink. But to go the low road to get to the high road--for charity, for the common good--now there's an idea worth the hustle, a reciprocal trade agreement." Then he and the hermit crab went in for a swim.
Stew asked Andy to come down to his store to discuss the situation. Andy spent two hours explaining the fundamentals of the business, and at one point, Andy recalls, "when I mentioned a cash discount, Paul interrupted me and asked, 'What's that?'" Finally, after hours of discussion, Stew interjected himself and said, "Okay, Andy, enough! I want to go ahead on this. I'll buy 2,000 cases. Are you going to make it?" "What was I going to say," Andy says, "other than okay, because he was one of my biggest customers."
We are now in business, but we are determined that it not turn into serious business. We devise a mock Napoleonic "N" with a laurel wreath around it for the neck of the bottle. On the label we poke fun at the usual corny hype on our competitors' bottles with Nomen Vide Optima Expecta ("See the Name, Expect the Best"), Tutto Naturale, and in place of a copyright notice, we have "Appellation Newman Controlee." As a spoof of businesses that tout their ancestry, our slogan is "Fine Foods Since February."