The LeBaron Secret by Stephen; Birmingham

LeBaron from—if she took a notion to—firing the lot of them and taking her business to Benton & Bowles. Benton & Bowles would be only too happy to take on Baronet. Only too happy.
    There are three Madison Avenue boys—Sari knows them well—and they have names. One is Mike Geraghty, thirty-fivish, a redheaded and freckled Irishman with a pleasantly open face. He is the account executive and, as such, he is the highest in their pecking order. It is Mike who assumes the privilege of standing closest to Sari’s desk—not over her shoulder, mind you, for that would be too presumptuous, too intimate; no one in the organization would have the temerity to do that. Mike stands, instead, just a little to the front, and a little to the side, of where Sari sits, with the newspaper-advertising proofs spread out in front of him for Sari’s inspection.
    The other two young men are from the agency’s Creative Department. One is Bob Petrocelli, the art director who designs the ads. The other is Howard Friedman, the copywriter who writes the words. These two sit, a little apart from each other, in straight chairs in front of Sari’s desk. An Irishman, an Italian, and a Jew, the three are a carefully calculated ethnic mix. Also at the meeting, seated on the big leather sofa at a short remove from the others, is Sari’s son Eric.
    The five are gathered in Sari’s office now, and the meeting has begun.
    The corporate headquarters of Baronet Vineyards are located in one of the older buildings on Montgomery Street, and the office that Sari LeBaron now occupies was originally designed to reflect Papa Julius LeBaron’s notion of what a winery executive’s office should be—grand and appropriately baronial, with decorative touches borrowed from both California and medieval Europe. The walls and high ceilings are paneled in lustrous dark walnut, embossed with heraldic shields and escutcheons, and the polished marble floor is laid out in an egg-and-dart design of white and gold. Sari’s desk is framed by immense windows of stained glass that depict, in their various panels, sword-bearing conquistadores in tight-fitting cuisses and kneepieces, golden breastplates and épaulières, and ostrich-plumed helmets, as well as tonsured monks in cassocks and surplices bearing jugs and pitchers of wine. The chairs and sofa are all large and vaguely Spanish in design, covered in a rich black leather that gives the room its own smoky, waxy, male smell; and tall brass column lamps support heavy, fluted parchment shades that are painted with more heraldry—shields and crests and other armorial trappings.
    The room is also boldly self-congratulatory. Set into a wall above the sofa, in an illuminated glass case, are displayed examples of Baronet products over the years in their various forms, shapes, and sizes—half-pints, pints, fifths, quarts, liters, half-gallons, and gallons—and varieties: the whites, the reds, the roses, the golden Angelicas, and so on. On the opposite wall, in an identical case, there is a collection of wineglasses of various origins and vintages. And the wall that faces Sari’s desk is what Papa liked to call his Trophy Wall. Here, in frames, are all the awards, medals, tributes, and citations—both civic and industrial—along with the signed photographs from United States Presidents, every one from Calvin Coolidge through Ronald Reagan (with Franklin Roosevelt excepted), that the LeBarons and their company have amassed over the years. These are grouped around a gold-framed portrait of black-mustachioed Grandpa Mario Barone, painted from an early photograph. But even here the hand of the crafty revisionist of history has been at work. The plaque below the portrait of the man responsible for all this gives him a name he would never have answered to: “Marc LeBaron,” and, below this, the words “Founder: 1830–1905.”
    Since Julius