Victor Kramer is Charming Old St Peter at This Very Moment
His smile. It was the first thing that struck me about Vic Kramer when I met 36 years ago. That was before he was a Victor. That big, toothy, mile wide smile and great handshake. It was like an ambassador had just walked into the front room of this two-story Mediterranean style house in West Hollywood that was the World Headquarters of the Argosy Group.
Vic had flown out to meet the troops. Argosy was the brainstorm of a hotshot-ex old Wall Street Journal reporter turned PR man named Richard Baker. Baker covered the insurance beat in New York, first for the Journal and later for an insurance trade magazine. He had met this Italian named Vic Kramer who was head of PR and advertising for Eastern Life Insurance Co. in NY. I was the PR manager for Beneficial Standard Life, a company, I came to find out, quite adept at ripping off old folks on their health insurance claims. So when Baker said he was assembling the first ever Ad and PR firm that would work exclusively for insurance companies. I jumped at the opportunity.
That night we all went to a very hip Sunset Blvd. trattoria to celebrate Vic’s arrival and Argosy’s launch. Wine flowed. Vic regaled us with stories—the days when he was a stringer with Time in Italy, Tales of the City in the late 60s when it was wet, wild and “mod” and you partied into the- night nightly. Vic was so utterly charming we knew our new coast-to-coast marketing communications venture would reap boatloads of gold.
Vic set up our New York office in a ground floor professional apartment at 221 E. 50 and was the great rainmaker. Like a pied piper, stuffy old insurance execs (are there any other kind) followed him to Argus’ New York. Meantime, we were landing all sorts of clients on the West Coast and in Chicago. And when we would meet with clients for brainstorming sessions, I just remember mini-bacchanals, sleepovers at the Essex House, sleepovers in our office which had its own loo and fold-down sofas.
When Vic would fly in for a client meeting, it was not quite like Mick Jagger coming to town but close—at least by staid insurance standards. The top executives were usually humorless business drones who could spout actuarial data. But the top guy, the CEO, was almost always a plutocrat who didn’t mind spending policyholder premiums and Vic always connected with him. They were buddies in a nanosecond.
One night, in Chicago, the CEO of a health insurance company in gritty Evanston heard Vic was coming to a planning meeting and immediately booked a huge room at the Drake for a private dinner complete with three wandering violinists for entertainment. Massive room for six people and everything flowed—starting with champagne and ending with cigars and Cognac. Vic held court with story after story of insurance industry skullduggery that rival insurance execs feasted on.
In the end, the chief executive, one Orrin Neiburger, broke into song, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” But, in the next breath, he gave us, the agency guys, a heart-stopping warning. If our expensive direct mail advertising campaign didn’t work, we were “dead meat, do you hear me? Dead meat.” We both looked to Vic for a quip that would lighten the moment but he wisely said nothing. Later that night we went out with the director of sales, Mitch “The Enforcer” Zepkin, who piloted a red Pontiac convertible that he parked anywhere he chose to park. Zepkin looked and carried himself like a Gambino captain. Victor charmed him. We closed the bars at 4 am and had to meet for breakfast at 7 am.
Vic Kramer’s reputation as a skilled diplomat who understood the arcane insurance world –and could explain it in English to befuddled reporters --spread. We had landed Equity Funding Corp. of America, a New York Stock Exchange Company, our biggest client. Two years later it proved to be the Enron of the insurance business and 21 people including the CEO went to prison. Before it imploded, Vic had left us and joined Equity Funding as VP communications when our client contact was convicted of mail fraud, wire fraud and other frauds.
In a series of trials, Vic had to testify before several grand juries and he saved our skins by saying that Dick and I knew nothing about the accuracy of the earnings press releases we wrote, based on input we received from the company, and sent out. At that time, the SEC was starting to hold PR firm liable for disseminating fraudulent financial information.
Vic’s trademark smile started to fade for a while. Vic had two expressions—smiling and jovial or very, very serious. He went back to New York and Boston and reinvented himself as a mutual fund marketing guru for two big fund houses and later consulted with American International Group and met and married Karen and started a new life. We did not keep in touch as much as we should have—my fault. But whenever I spoke with him, it was 1968 all over again. Same voice, same smile (it came through the phone), same laugh.
We talked about the old days and how wild they were. I remembered his dinner parties at an apartment he had where he cooked with abandon and pungent spices and great wines. At a time when most Los Angeleans thought wine was either red, white or pink, Vic sautéed with an expensive cabernet.
Other memories and stories and yarns spring to my addled mind when I think of Vic Kramer. Mostly he was so fortunate to find Karen who took care of him in so many ways. I remember thinking how lucky they were to circumnavigate the world a few years ago. I never did get to hear that story.
Vic, Victor, compadre, I toast you. I just know you’re up there with St. Peter and all the other saints, and all your old insurance and mutual fund cronies, with your cooking, your charisma, your infectious charm and your wonderful stories. I’ll see you up there someday. Just save me a good stool at the bar.
