(Sept. 14) - Michael Gates Gill, who once made about $160,000 a year as an advertising executive and who now earns around $10.50 an hour making coffee at Starbucks, has written a book called How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else, and it is so admiring of the firm, one fears he has drunk of the Grande Iced Kool-Aid.
His story divorced, broke, entitled middle-aged white guy with brain tumor and no health insurance learns to respect persons of other races who did not go to Yale has been optioned by Tom Hanks. Of course.
Still, if you think Mr. Gill, who is 67 and the son of the late New Yorker critic Brendan Gill, is planning to toss his green apron the minute the Moviebucks come in and get
himself a splendiferous life, he denies it. The affable Mr. Gill, who says he got somewhat under $50,000 as an advance and swears he did not run the manuscript past the corporate bigs, loves serving coffee at the Starbucks here. Status? A big house? He claims to no longer need them. He likes his simple apartment.
And simple it is. The living room of the rental apartment, in an old Victorian a few blocks away from the Bronxville train station, is mostly unfurnished, and what furniture there is is plastic he likes decorating with summer furniture, Mr. Gill says, because it reminds him of picnics and it is cheap. The bed consists of a double mattress atop two single bedsprings. In lieu of a bureau, clothing is stored in wire baskets, a system hes proud of. It seemed like a perfect solution, Mr. Gill says. The problem with a bureau is you cant see where your underwear is, you cant see your socks, you have to open the drawer. I can see socks, underwear, everything is right there. This is what they call the open office.
Youre not dating anyone, are you? the reporter asks.
No, Im not, Mr. Gill says. And one of the things I like about Starbucks, it offers an affectionate, nurturing environment so I dont feel lonely in that sense.
Because a woman would never allow this, says the reporter.
I think youre probably right, Mr. Gill says. If you contrast the world I grew up in and the world I created here, there are so many differences I think its not by accident. One of the great sorts of relief to me is to come home to this little place and have virtually nothing. I think part of it may have to do with my stage of life.
He is a big man, articulate, charming (though, it will turn out, selective in telling his life story, omitting details like a first marriage). Surprisingly, for a fellow who once socialized with Frank Lloyd Wright and the Kennedys, and had clients like Ford and Christian Dior, he is not at all defensive about being a coffee jock though you should know that now that he qualifies for Social Security, he works only 20 hours a week there; it will be one day a week while he does his book tour.
At the Bronxville Starbucks, where a framed excerpt from his book in AARP magazine is displayed on the counter and customers greet him by name, he seems genuinely happy, though when a photographer is 12 inches from your nose, whos to know whats genuine? Later, when he takes his visitors to his childhood home, an imposing stone Tudor mansion in Bronxvilles Lawrence Park, a hilltop neighborhood of mansions, there is little nostalgia. Although he was one of seven children, he felt lonely here, Mr. Gill says his father was usually in Manhattan.
Brendan Gills position, his son says, did allow him to socialize with writers like Ernest Hemingway and E. B. White. There were often large parties.
I remember John Updike coming out to the house, and my father said, you have to rub his hair, he has the smoothest hair of any animal in the world.
What? Thats kind of weird.
My father had previously been the most brilliant, facile writer at The New Yorker. But Updike was a magician of such facility, you couldnt believe it. My fathers way of introducing him was not as a magical writer with such speed that had been Fathers role instead he brought him in as a furry, silky animal: youve got to pat the top of his head. I dont want to use the word whats a nicer word than humiliating? but it was pretty humiliating.
For his 21st birthday, his father invited Brendan Behan to the party. Mr. Behan, no stranger to raising a little hell, arrived with his wife, his mistress and his probation officer.
At 21, Mr. Gill also came into a $100,000 inheritance. He went through it in three years.
How did he go through the money so fast? I bought a lot of Champagne for a lot of people, he says.
He left Yale a few credits short of graduating, but it didnt matter a classmate set him up as a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson. Mr. Gill married twice, had four children and rose to become a creative director and vice president. He owned a farmhouse in Connecticut very Currier & Ives, he says. But he found the way people treated one another in advertising brutal. One Christmas, when his young children were still opening their presents, a Ford executive demanded Mr. Gill fly out to Detroit that day to discuss a campaign. Mr. Gill did. At 53, when he was working for a division of J. Walter Thompson in Los Angeles, he lost his job. The reason he gives is not uncommon in the corporate world: they could get a younger person for a quarter of his salary. (A spokesman for JWT, as the company is now called, said he was let go as part of a reduction in the corporate office staff.) During the next 10 years, Mr. Gill ran his own consulting company and had an affair that led to the birth of a son and a divorce. He was, although he does not write about it in Starbucks, the co-author of an advice book, Fired Up!: The Proven Principles of Successful Entrepreneurs, in which he claimed to have left corporate life voluntarily rather than spend his life talking and dreaming of an entrepreneurial existence.
Being fired was not like a good recommendation to sell a book, he says when asked about this.
His business failed. The woman with whom he had the affair left him. At 63, he had a diagnosis of acoustic neuroma, a brain tumor. He was without health insurance.
One week after the diagnosis, he was sitting in a Starbucks on Manhattans Upper East Side, wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, his cellphone resting on top of his expensive T. Anthony briefcase as if he were expecting a call. The manager, a young, African-American woman, impulsively asked if hed be interested in a job. Was I that transparent? Mr. Gill writes. Could she see that I was really one of lifes losers? Did I, a former creative director of J. Walter Thompson, want a job at Starbucks? He did, desperately. And Starbucks provided health insurance.
Several anxious weeks later, Mr. Gill, who up to this point has lived only in his WASP-y social circle, gets the job; suddenly he is the minority employee.
He enters a world in which employees are called partners, customers are guests and, most impressive to Mr. Gill, everyone seems to be treated with respect, even homeless people who need to use the bathroom. It is also a world where everything, even cleaning grubby tiles, is given a positive spin.
We have a grout problem, the manager said one day. Or maybe I should say we have a grout opportunity.
When the manager showed him how to clean the toilet, he was surprised by how little revulsion I felt for a job I would have previously thought beneath me. He had fallen, he writes, into a job where people could be nicer and the work environment better than I had ever believed possible. To his astonishment, he realized he was happier than he had ever been.
But what about something that would trouble most people who had enjoyed the life he once had, the loss of status? In his book, he writes about his concern, when he was first working at Starbucks, about family and friends coming to see him before he could do his job well, but wasnt there more to it than that?
Im sort of a reluctant witness to my own sense of humiliation, Mr. Gill says. It took me a couple of years to admit I was fired. Im sort of like really in denial even now about how painful it must have been for me.
How did his children react?
With the kids it was, well, at least hes trying to work, Mr. Gill says. And then, goodness, Starbucks is socially acceptable. He senses that the reporter is skeptical, Mr. Gill says, but he likes this life. He likes punching a clock and not taking the work home with him. He likes being able to have time to spend with his kids.
Its true he doesnt socialize with his former friends, but he does not feel lonely. He reads, listens to classical music on the radio. The brain tumor, which still worries him, has not grown in the four years since diagnosis, so he does not face imminent surgery. He truly enjoys the work.
What you are doing is trying to help other people enjoy something, he says. Its not doing Iraq policy, its not even doing a serious multimillion dollar ad campaign. Its just trying to serve a good cup of coffee.
I always feel better after working a shift, maybe because my own life feels so complicated there are so many things you cant control. You cant control relationships, you cant control life, but I can get that drink just the way they want it, that double tall skim latte.
