Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  * * *

  Bernbach, munching Hershey bars for energy, tossed ideas out to Bob Gage, who would be heralded by commercial artists as “the art director of the ages.” Gage never said no to any of Bernbach’s suggestions. He just sat there, bulkily, impassively, until one caught his fancy. Often he thought Bernbach’s suggestions “corny.” Like “SNIAGRAB,” bargains spelled backwards, for Ohrbach’s.

  Bernbach’s proposed headlines almost always embraced a visual idea. On his “Liberal trade-in” concept for Ohrbach’s, he imagined “this man carrying his wife.” “I thought it was corny,” said Gage. “But then I did it in a way where she was stiff as a board across the page. And it looked good, you know?” (And it was pinned to bulletin boards all over town.)

  Bernbach came up with an image for Flexalum window blinds as soon as he heard the company’s problem. Women had turned off of blinds because the slats attracted dirt and were hard to clean. Flexalum used a special coating, but proclaiming “the amazing new discovery!” had no impact.

  “Dirt bounces off like a ball,” suggested Bernbach, and Gage’s artwork showed just that: a ball bouncing off of a window blind. Bernbach and Doyle took the ad, by subway, to the company.

  “They looked at the ad, and gave us the account,” recalled Doyle. “We took a taxi back. That was our first presentation for a piece of new business.”

  A new Max Factor lipstick, “See Red,” triggered the vision of a small drama. “They’ll go mad over you when they ‘See Red’” ran Bernbach’s headline. On one side of the ad, two pre-yuppie men snarl in nose-to-nose competition for the voluptuous young woman on the other side. The ad long remained a favorite of Gage’s. “The very situation that drew attention,” he said, “also told the story of the product. There was a perfect integration of art and copy. In those days, particularly in cosmetic advertising, that was really new.”

  Bernbach was “the most visual” copywriter Gage ever worked with. So much so that Gage, in the mid-50s, “tried not to see Bill often, to prove I could do it without him.”

  * * *

  The pause in the creation of a Doyle Dane Bernbach ad, between finding the concept and getting client approval, was Bernbach’s cut-off point. He had no inclination to write “all the little words.” The idea was the excitement. The body copy was drudgery. Phyllis Robinson at first, and later Judy Protas, finished the job.

  * * *

  The earliest clients were entrepreneurs, often first-generation Americans. They took chances and made their own decisions. N.M.Ohrbach taught the agency a thing or two about advertising (“I got a great gimmick. Let’s tell the truth.”). Others simply placed their faith in Bernbach (“If Bill says okay, then run it.”).

  If they were different from one another, they all had the same dream of achieving success, and the energy to work for it. Among the most memorable was Whitey Rubin, head of Levy’s bread.

  “He was always very interested in the advertising,” Doyle related, “vitally interested in getting the best ads for his money. One time, excited about his campaign, he looked Bernbach straight in the eye, pointed his finger at him and said, ‘Bernbach, I want you should write ads, that when a woman reads them, she’ll think if she doesn’t eat Levy’s bread she wouldn’t menstruate.’ Bernbach didn’t think he’d heard right. ‘WHAT?’ Whitey repeated his statement. Bill said, ‘That’s going to be a very hard ad to write.’”

  Years later, when the agency had to deal with layers of brand managers at vast corporations, its principals looked back with nostalgia and gratitude to the old entrepreneurs who let Doyle Dane Bernbach do its best advertising.

  * * *

  Madison Avenue, the business, was a small and parochial place, gossipy, convivial. At the Art Directors Club, members buzzed with admiration for Bob Gage’s graphic inventions. One such they termed “exploding the page.” A woman soaring, the headline “Fly,” the Ohrbach logo clinging to the edges of the page, the center stunningly empty.

  At the Illustrators Club, Gage’s name struck fear. Members worried that his powerful use of photography would set off an avalanche of imitation and render illustration out of fashion. Indeed, that happened.

  Copywriters learned the name Bill Bernbach, and thought perhaps they could remain in advertising without losing their self-esteem.

  At local bistros, the regulars at first spoke of “Ned’s agency,” Doyle being the only principal they knew. They snickered at the client list. So the ads made a splash. For local clothing stores and glove makers and Jewish rye bread. What did that have to do with selling cars, or airlines, or soap? Just a local phenomenon.

  But the client list grew, the staff grew, the legend grew, the excitement inside the young agency built.

  The new talent included Helmut Krone, Lester Feldman, Bill Taubin in art; Judy Protas, David Reider, Mary Wells, Paula Green in copy. Krone and Green would come up with “We try harder. We’re only Number 2" for Avis. Taubin and Protas with “You don’t have to be Jewish” for Levy’s rye bread. Feldman with the lion prowling Wall Street for the Dreyfus Fund. Reider with Utica Club’s “Sometimes I wonder if it pays to make beer this way.”

  None of them was a name before coming to DDB. So perhaps it was not surprising that in the early years the press described all the work as “Mr. Bernbach’s ads.” What came to bother some creatives was Bernbach’s apparent encouragement of that term, and the way his superb editing skills led to an ownership position in the credits for their campaigns.

  2

  The Private Sector

  “At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him.” —Bill Bernbach

  Years later, when presidential advisers and leaders in the worlds of art and science and finance sought his help in matters of persuasion, Bernbach would sometimes say, but only to a trusted friend, “Can you believe all this is happening to a little Jewish boy from the Bronx?”

  It was a question for the good times, the great times, expressed with a joyous sense of wonder. This was the private Bernbach, revealing for a moment the core of his self-image.

  Publicly, Bernbach gave away as little of himself as possible. David Ogilvy, Bernbach’s life-long rival for the esteem of the industry, revelled in his past, publishing books filled with provocative personal anecdotes, gleefully disclosing such details as his propensity to create ads while “at stool.”

  “The Showman,” Bernbach contemptuously (and privately) called Ogilvy for these displays. His final put-down: “Name one creative person ever to emerge from under Ogilvy.” Publishers waited in vain for Bernbach to write his own personal anecdotes.

  Early in my tenure at the agency, I innocently asked Bernbach, for an in-house publication, if he had ever considered writing fiction. “No, never,” he replied, rather sternly. Ever the pursuing journalist, I followed up with, “Why do you think that is so?” He drew himself up and responded, “I have no sores to squeeze.” The subject was closed.

  I would remember those words often in later years.

  * * *

  “Playing it safe can be the most dangerous thing in the world,” Bernbach counseled advertisers, “because you’re presenting people with an idea they’ve seen before, and you won’t have impact.”

  Bernbach was the great proponent, the philosopher of risk-taking in advertising. Mainstream agencies and major clients pooh-poohed that approach until Doyle Dane Bernbach’s remarkable results with “doing it different” could no longer be denied.

  Yet in his own life, Bernbach felt comfortable only with the familiar. He took the same route to work each day. He requested the same suites in the same hotels on business and personal trips. He ate at the same restaurants, the Algonquin Hotel’s Rose Room for many years; later the Four Seasons and “21.” When the agency moved to a new building, he ordered his old office re
plicated, even to the extent of having the floor torn up and re-installed in his new quarters.

  With fame and growing fortune, he evolved a style of dressing that would never change. Soft-sculpted suits in shades of grey. Unvarying blue shirts, custom-made by London’s Turnbull & Asser. Navy blue silk foulards discretely patterned with dots or dot-sized diamonds in red or white. “The corporate cravat,” a New York Times style writer called such ties, in an article titled “Tales That Ties Tell.”

  “Dots,” the slightly-tongue-in-cheek article asserted, “are the most conservative pattern of all, favored defensively, by those nervous about being thought low, drunken or cynical . . . by those whose fiduciary honor must be thought beyond question. . . .”

  Bernbach’s conservative and consistent style of dress expressed outwardly his traditionalist values as husband and father. “Square,” in the opinion of those colleagues who didn’t, as he always did, rush home to their wives and children after work. But that square devotion seeped into the marrow of the agency, inducing the feeling that a corporate family loyalty would last forever.

  * * *

  “Rules are made to be broken,” Bernbach often urged the faint of heart, creative people who got stuck in conventional wisdom, or clients who balked at accepting ads too strong for their tastes.

  Did it signify that the philosopher of iconoclasm in advertising should wrap each day in the comfort of the tried and true? The question didn’t arise because Bernbach’s passion for privacy had kept his image focused entirely on his ideas, not on his habits.

  And why not, really? His philosophy, not his personal life, is what changed advertising. But the gap between philosophy and his lifestyle, it will perhaps be seen, provide space for misconceptions and misunderstandings that would contribute mightily to the ultimate fate of Doyle Dane Bernbach.

  * * *

  When they met as co-workers at Grey Advertising just after World War II, Ned Doyle saw Bill Bernbach as “a nice little guy, very creative, with gold-rimmed glasses, and on the scared side.”

  One supposes that Bernbach saw Doyle in a bright, heroic light. Doyle, then 43 and ten years Bernbach’s senior, had returned from the Pacific theater of operations as a captain in Marine Corps Aviation, having had to talk and battle his way into the service after being rejected for his age.

  Bernbach would always look up to war heroes. His own war service had lasted but two months. At his induction physical, his pulse raced so fast that the doctors thought he had “taken something.” They sent him to the infirmary and kept him for several days, long enough for any “something” to wear off. His pulse continued to race at the same alarming speed, 148 beats per minute. The examiners decided that rate might be normal for him, and shipped him to boot camp. An examining doctor there soon shipped him back home, certain he wouldn’t survive training.

  Later, his official biographies would cover that period with a brief phrase about Bernbach’s “stretch in the U.S. Army.”

  Not until the last year of his life did Bernbach respond to an interviewer’s question about his wartime experience. Then Bernbach said “. . . they found out about me in Washington. The guy who ran public relations, General somebody in Washington, found out I was at Fort Eustis, and he sent for me. But I had gotten out a day before he sent for me, because I had some kind of fast heartbeat or something, and I was too old, to be honest.”

  He was 31 at the time.

  * * *

  More than his service record attracted Bernbach to Doyle. He had a keen mind, honed at Fordham Law School, and the Irish gift of keeping a table in laughter. From his mother’s side, Doyle had inherited a German kind of rough, no-nonsense honesty. He dealt straight. And most wonderfully, he propounded a then-rare view of advertising—that the heart of an agency is its creative work.

  Bernbach never lost his skinny-little-city-kid admiration of jocks, and Doyle shone in that area too. Sports fans remembered him as star quarterback for Englewood High and for Hamilton College.

  Doyle’s unshakeable self-confidence must also have appealed to a Bernbach ruffled by events of the previous ten years. After Hamilton, Doyle had moved easily into a job as magazine space salesman, attending Fordham Law School at night. He passed the bar in 1931, only to find entry law jobs paid $10 a week. He earned $75 selling space. He opted against a career in law.

  The Great Depression, which scarred so many lives and psyches, scarcely scratched Doyle. He kept moving up, in big jobs on big magazines, in Chicago and New York, jobs that glittered with days and nights of entertaining. He seemed to know half the clients and agency men in those cities, and they all enjoyed his stories and his insights into the business. Women adored him; they were bees to his honeysuckle. In the parlance of the time, Doyle was “a man about town.”

  * * *

  Doyle was also a risk taker, a man who loved new, different, chancy. When he came out of the service, he wanted

  to try something different—working on the agency side of business. Grey Advertising hired him, at 43, to be an account man. He soon attracted Grey’s copy chief, Bill Bernbach.

  Bernbach took to dropping into Doyle’s office in the late afternoon, wired with excitement about having “just created the greatest ad ever made.” Doyle quickly saw that Bernbach “was really something,” definitely worth taking a risk on. He also sized up the copy chief as unworldly, and unaware of the rest of the world of advertising.

  Bernbach sought Doyle’s approbation, but had no patience with tales of the industry. What did the past have to teach? Every day was a fresh beginning! Every assignment had the potential of turning out “the greatest ad ever made!” Why bother with the history of advertising? The very idea of advertising was too limiting, too narrow gauge. Bernbach saw the business instead as the art of persuasion, and took energy not from other people’s ads, but from the writings of biologists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, biochemists, sociologists, even jazz musicians. There lay insights that could change the future of advertising.

  It was the future that would help erase some of the pain of the past.

  * * *

  A small story, having to do with Bernbach’s birthdate, August 13. Those who told me the story heard it from Bernbach many years later. The scene (in one version) was an Ohrbach’s board meeting. Or (another version) a birthday party for N. M. Ohrbach. No matter. At every event he attended, Ohrbach was the center of nervous attention, an imperious huge bear of an entrepreneur. He was, at the time, the agency’s most important client, the man who’d made it possible for Doyle and Bernbach to open their own agency by promising them his business. In that sense, he was the man who begot Doyle Dane Bernbach.

  At the gathering, Ohrbach, born under the sign of Leo, asked the group for their birth signs. Geminis, Scorpios, Cancers . . . as the signs rattled off, Ohrbach stood prouder and prouder, surely the only Lion in the room. Until Bernbach’s turn. Ohrbach appeared stunned when he heard Bernbach’s birth date. He peered scornfully down from his great height, and said, “You’re a Leo?” As much as to say, “you’ve just ruined the image of a Leo.”

  Bernbach was reminded of the episode in 1969, on the agency’s 20th anniversary. A special issue of the DDB News carried a feature on the birth signs of the ten board members. Only Bernbach was a Leo.

  The finding delighted Bernbach. Now he could relate the Ohrbach story with special relish. Ohrbach’s words must have seared at the time; down-putting words from the man to whom Bernbach’s agency owed its birth. He’d long since proven his worth to N. M., and to his real father, too.

  * * *

  Bill Bernbach was born in the Bronx in 1911, the fourth and youngest child of Jacob and Rebecca Bernbach, immigrants who arrived from Russia and Austria at the end of the 19th century.

  Jacob, like N.M. Ohrbach, was a large man with a large sense of himself. His talent as a designer of coats and suits enabled him to afford an apartment for his family in the Grand Concourse’s flagship building. He dressed with his own se
nse of style, favoring vests with white braiding, which struck some relatives as peacockery. He had his portrait painted; it hung alone and patriarchically in the living room.

  For all that, Jacob could quake before Rebecca, a tiny, simian woman who terrified her family with bodeful reflections on her health, and threats that she would surely die if they acted against her will. In her kosher kitchen she prepared only the bland food she could digest. The children picked at their food and looked underfed.

  But there were other forms of nourishment in the Bernbach household. Music and art. Minna, the oldest child, and Bill, twelve years her junior, studied piano with devotion and talent. Harry, two years younger than Minna, played the violin with a love that lasted through his lifetime. Graham, two years younger than Harry, sketched and dreamed of becoming a great painter.

  Friends and neighbors marveled at the young Bernbachs’ talent, their ambition, their vitality. One remembered Bill at the age of 12, taking a girl cousin by the hand and running her over to meet his piano teacher, all the while enthusiastically selling her on the importance and pleasure of music.