Peter Arnell Doesn't Know When to Quit

Every day, billion-dollar corporations entrust their brands to advertising guru Peter Arnell. But how much longer will they keep doing so now that Arnell no longer seems capable of managing his own brand?

Finding himself the laughingstock of an industry he long lorded over after a failed makeover of Tropicana and the leaking of a hideously pretentious and intellectually vacant Pepsi memo, Arnell turned to Newsweek for some image rehabilitation, offering himself up to Daniel Lyons for a profile.

Bad idea. This piece of image rehab's going to require its own image rehab. Arnell should have shrugged off the Tropicana debacle; instead, he reveals himself obsessed with it. "I can't believe that for the rest of my life I'm going to be known as Peter 'Tropicana' Arnell," he harrumphs.

And on top of that, Gross exhumes episodes from the adman's past that any sane person would have wanted to keep buried. Most of it has to do with his terrifying sadism towards underlings. "He is unencumbered with any sense of morality," says one former associate. "Until you experience it firsthand, it's just completely and utterly unfathomable."

Shadowing his subject at a meeting with some software developers, Gross collects plenty of ammunition for those who consider Arnell a "pompous, pretentious, phony intellectual -- a fraud, basically."

The meeting quickly turns weird...as Arnell, chomping oranges and spitting out seeds, starts expounding on Magritte's "Ceci N'est Pas une Pipe," dadaism, Meret Oppenheim's fur teacup at the Museum of Modern Art, the way Martha Stewart examines the leaves of a flower, the logo for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the style of Yves Saint Laurent dresses, wristwatches, polar bears stranded on ice floes, the Web site of Jenny Craig. The poor software guys, who've never met Arnell and didn't know what to expect, just sit there looking befuddled.