With so many players, Duhé found himself at the center of something he barely understood. One afternoon in the fall of 1987, Duhé emerged from a two-hour meeting in a Dallas-area skyscraper with about half a dozen Bozell executives. "These are guys who charge $200 or $300 an hour," he told friends. And what had these high-octane types decided, exactly? Well, uh, something about positioning statements and, um, theme lines. "I felt like I was in Gordon Gekko's office, right out of Wall Street," recalls Eisenberg. "Here were these guys in $6-million suits, with slicked-back hair and 15 different phones, wheeling and dealing. And here were Rick Duhé and I sitting on a couch in the corner, watching everything that was going on. 'All we've got to do is get a million here,' we'd hear. He can't scrape up enough for lunch, and these Bozell guys are talking about a national rollout. It was the funniest meeting I've ever been in."
With Cajun Cola as his escort, debutante Duhé was coming out into a new world of high-flying finance. In December, Duhé was off to Chicago, where a franchising consulting firm picked him up by limo at his hotel. Then he jetted off for that first visit to New York City. On a frigid day in late January 1988, he met with Ross Colbert, a vice-president of Haas Financial Corp., an investment banking firm specializing in the beverage industry. He had come across Colbert at an industry trade show and sent off a business plan. "What we saw was a unique and clever product in a market that seemed to be receptive toward niche beverages," says Colbert. Distribution needed to be worked out, as he told Duhé over lunch, and marketing would cost a bundle. Don't worry, though, urged Colbert, who won Duhé over by showing him a list of a dozen potential investors. We'll try to raise $250,000 in fairly short order, Colbert explained, followed by about $750,000 by late spring. Lead me to that dotted line, Duhé thought.
With the money coming, Duhé could unwind. He spent the next two days ogling Wall Street, ferrying out to the Statue of Liberty, catching Rodney Dangerfield on Broadway. "It was like Jethro goes to the big city," he says. Walking in a late-night snowfall, dressed in his trench coat and sneakers, Duhé felt exhilarated. "It was exciting to be alive," he says. "Things were looking good."
The next morning, after downing his first cheese blintz, Duhé passed a homeless man sitting on a bench, shivering. For reasons he can't explain, he felt a kindred spirit with the man. Easing down next to him, Duhé struck up a conversation. For the next half hour, they talked about life, and fate, and gray skies. The man warmed up.
As Duhé rose to leave, he felt renewed. "It felt good to let him know that I cared," he says. "I wanted him to know that maybe, in some way, we were connected. Part of me understood what he was going through. "It felt as if I was only a few steps away from him."
* * *
"I'm a star!"
Duhé's hand was still quivering when he scribbled the words across his date book on March 2, 1988. Some advisers had assured him that Cajun Cola would be a media-driven product -- not successful so much because market testing showed it filled a need, but because newspapers and TV shows got people to try it. It sounded a little bit backward, but now Duhé could see how it worked. Under the headline "It's got dat zzzing!" -- Duhé's preferred slogan -- Shreveport's leading newspaper, The Times, reported that Cajun Cola would be on the supermarket shelves later that month.
The continuing absence of serious funding (though it pains Duhé to talk about it, his parents had by now kicked in a sizable sum) made Cajun Cola's appearance even more of a feat. In typical fashion, though, he managed to find a distributor who asked for no money up front. "We were looking for products and Cajun Cola fit right in," says Wendell Brooks, manager of Lin-Chris Munchies, the snack-food division of Shreveport Budweiser Distributors Inc. "Store managers liked the name, and it had a good-looking package."
That was Eisenberg's doing. Eisenberg had lobbied for a black can with a multicolored confetti design; then Canfield insisted that cola's true color was red. Duhé took some sketches and mock cans to informal focus groups, mostly composed of friends and art students. He settled on a five-color can that featured a pattern of green alligators and a full yellow moon against a bright red background. "Aside from some very unscientific polling," says Duhé, "it was strictly my personal preference." As was his decision to market the soda to young men, eager to test their mettle by tackling the spicy bite, and upscale types, who would mix it with, say, rum. "Of course, this decision came from a guy with years of marketing and beverage experience," notes Duhé, with a wink.
Then again, he was Mr. Cajun Cola.
Bozell helped shape his new identity. Before the product came out, they sat Duhé down for a day and tossed him about 25 of the toughest questions reporters were likely to ask. Duhé, a veteran Sunday School teacher, quickly learned to tell a story that was at least as palatable as the drink itself. In it, he cast himself as someone like the Kevin Costner character in Field of Dreams, a blind follower of his inner voice, practically willing his carbonated vision into existence.
During the week of April 6, just one year after the idea had first struck him, Duhé walked into a supermarket and ran smack into a 200-case display of Cajun Cola. Weary of reporting bank closings and savings-and-loan takeovers, the local media pounced on the new entrepreneur. Within a week, the Shreveport Journal had written two stories, and USA Today gave Cajun Cola its first national exposure. On April 28, he appeared on the local "Live at Five." The next afternoon he got booked on Shreveport's "Inside Story." "Everybody was talking about it," recalls Brooks. "Store managers were very impressed. District managers were calling us, wanting more."
