Schmertz Blurts

That Herb Schmertz—what a mouth. It’s not enough that he should blight breakfast with those Mobil advertorials on the New York Times op-ed page week after week since 1970. Not enough that they should be better written than most of the real columns. Offering feisty opinions. On national issues. With pithy sentences like this one. Not enough that this “vice president of public affairs” has appointed himself media watchdog. Zapping inaccuracies. Pricking conceits. (At one point excommunicating the Wall Street Journal because of its supposedly biased reporting of Mobil.) Not enough even that he should grab gobs of public goodwill for the oil company by underwriting Masterpiece Theatre and sponsoring museum exhibitions. Now he has to write a book about it?

But yes. In a bid for minor Iacoccadom, he’s enlisted the ubiquitous Bill Novak as co-writer. And he calls it Goodbye to the Low Profile: Or, the Art of Creative Confrontation (Little, Brown). It starts as a how-to manual for C.E.O.s on dealing with the dreaded press, and ends up as a how-did account of Mobil’s (read Herb’s) more celebrated P.R. gambits. Throw in a few Jewish jokes and what have you got? The greatest advertorial ever told.

In his big comer office at Mobil headquarters in New York, a rangy, rumpled-looking Schmertz, fifty-six, dodges queries with a drawling ease. Is the Mobil voice his voice? “Oh, it’s as much [former Mobil chairman] Rawleigh Warner’s as mine.” Does it bother him that many people find it obnoxious? “Those are basically people who disagree with us.” Does it bother him that many people find him obnoxious? “If they want to debate the issues and positions I’ve taken, that’s fine,” he says with a laugh. “If they want to debate my style or what I’m about, where does that get anybody?” And just who is Herb Schmertz anyway? “In the Catskills,” he says, “in the Borscht Belt, they used to have a guy at the hotel whose job it was to create tumult, get everyone involved in the dancing. They’d call him a tummeler. I guess that’s what I am.”

Michael Shnayerson