Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  “Do it different” had its exceptions.

  “Don’t change something good,” Bernbach instructed. Antique Bourbon came to the agency with an old slogan, “If you can find a better bourbon, buy it.” Said Bernbach to the client, “I’m not going to touch that. It’s a great line.”

  Also: “If you have something important to say, say it.” Don’t be cute when you could be giving the reader significant new information about a product.”

  Bernbach confided to copywriter David Reider that, in his shirt pocket, he kept a slip of paper with three words, “Maybe he’s right.”

  The client? The account person? The other guy? A lesson on the flip side of arrogance? A lesson for them, or for himself?

  * * *

  Like one’s real father, Bernbach wasn’t always patient and protective and homiletic. On bad days, days when he learned of an account in trouble, he’d be tight-lipped, agitated, angry, icy, harshly critical.

  Even on good days, creatives entered his office with trepidation, anxious about how he might react to their boards.

  “It was terrifying,” said Paula Green, “because you wanted so desperately for him to like what you did. And you were terrified he wouldn’t like it . . . not terrified of him, but of his disapproval. That’s very parental. Teacher/parent. When there’s a teacher you adore . . . The only thing that could really upset me was his disappointment in me.

  “You were aware of his special reputation. So it wasn’t that we needed psychoanalysis; it’s that we were in a very particular situation. You learned to look very hard at your work before you showed it to Bill. And to ask yourself, where is he going to find holes? You became your own greatest critic. What’s Bill going to see? Where’s the hole? Where’s the problem? You learned by anticipating, knowing that he had such a sharp eye for a weakness in an idea of a campaign.”

  Roy Grace, who became one of the agency’s top art directors, remembered showing Bernbach some boards when he began working on the Volkswagen account in 1963. Bernbach studied them and said, “Whenever you show a VW, it should be either very large or very small on the page.” Grace nodded and asked, “Why? Bernbach looked at me steadily with cold blue eyes for about 15 seconds. I never asked him Why again.”

  Grace came to love being with Bernbach.

  “He was the world’s greatest audience. There was no fooling him, no bull-shitting him. He would be infuriated if you opened with, ‘The client loved it.’ If the work was good, his little feet started dancing. It was like bringing an enormous present to a little kid. If the work wasn’t good, beware. He turned icy, he could cut you up, or he could just be indifferent.

  “He could take things apart and tell you the how of them. He had an understanding that everything has to be reduced to its simplest form, and then expanded on. He could look at a piece and in a flash know if it was ‘there.’ The ultimate compliment was, ‘You know how good this is? I’m going to put it on my reel.’”

  “With Bill, God bless him, you never, never, never, never knew,” mused Bill Taubin, one of the agency’s Hall of Fame art directors. He and copywriter David Reider loved a line they came up with for El Al. The Israeli airline made all its flights at night. Well, then, it would be “The only fly-by-night airline.” Congratulating themselves on their idea, they took it to Bernbach.

  “He said, and I’ll never forget his reaction, ‘Are you kidding?’” End of meeting.

  An art director still fresh from a mainstream agency, listened to Bernbach critique his boards, and then, pencil poised to make notes, asked, “What do you want, Bill?” Bernbach froze. What he wanted was people who could come up with fresh ideas of their own, time and again. The question ended the A/D’s career at Doyle Dane Bernbach.

  * * *

  The Art Directors Club gave Bernbach a special award in 1959 “for his impatience with the trite and usual, for proving that boldness and originality in art direction are successful selling tools, for working with art directors and encouraging them to grow creatively. . . .”

  On the agency’s tenth birthday, Advertising Age ran an article that opened with these words:

  “Of all the ways an agency can win fame and fortune for itself and its clients,there are two most frequent: the sheer weight of advertising; the impact of advertising. For Doyle Dane Bernbach . . . there’s no question but that the freshness, originality and piercing quality of most of its advertising has done the trick. . . .”

  Bernbach and his agency dazzled the press throughout the Golden Age of Advertising:

  “Now even the most ardent skeptics have to admit that the ‘Doyle Dane Bernbach approach’ works. . . .”—Art Direction, January 1, 1960.

  “DDB’s inventive campaigns have not only won the agency a blue-chip roster of 40 clients but something even harder to come by: the admiration of the ad industry. . . .”—Newsweek, June 8, 1964.

  “The ‘hot agency’ of 1964 was Doyle Dane Bernbach.”— New York Times, January 11, 1965.

  “This agency stands as one of the powerful forces in photography today. . . .”—Photography Annual, 1966.

  “It is quite possible that the effect of DDB is as culturally significant as that of, let us say, writers such as Mickey Spillane, Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, or artists such as Paul Klee, Andy Warhol, George Bellows—even if the motifs are more commercial. . . .” — Advertising Age columnist Stephen Baker, November 1, 1965.

  “The only great school for copywriters is Doyle Dane Bernbach—it’s the Harvard Business School of copywriters and a great institution which Bill Bernbach started. . . .”—Madison Avenue Magazine, November, 1968.

  Some of his early colleagues remembered Bernbach as “a sweet, unassuming guy before he started to believe his press notices.” But how could such press notices not have had an effect?

  The adulation added to his aura. People walking into his office—clients, staffers, politicians—would enter nodding vigorously, and their heads kept bobbing while Bernbach talked.

  “I’ve seen people come into his office and literally tremble,” said Roy Grace. “The sheer size and scope of what he represented was so enormously powerful and attractive.”

  How could he remain modest and unassuming, when statesmen sought him out for advice?

  President John F. Kennedy, looking ahead to his 1964 re-election campaign, said to his brother Bobby, “Get me the agency that does the Volkswagen advertising.”

  How could he remain modest and unassuming when proposals were floated to establish a “Bill Bernbach Academy of Advertising,” perhaps stimulated by the Madison Avenue magazine comment?

  Bernbach introduced the idea to Ted Factor, the agency’s West Coast head, as they drove from Monterey to San Francisco on business. The agency’s creatives would double as teachers. The Academy would bring more income and even wider fame, Bernbach excitedly told Factor.

  “Are you serious?” asked Factor. “There’ll be people all over the country with diplomas saying they’re Bernbach graduates. That will water down the value to a client of having Doyle Dane Bernbach as his agency.”

  Snapped Bernbach, “Anyone can find a negative.”

  “He really wanted it,” Factor recalled. “But I never heard another word about it after that.”

  In time, there were people all over the country who had learned from Bernbach. And that did water down the value of having Doyle Dane Bernbach as one’s agency. But it also improved the quality of work turned out by agencies everywhere.

  4

  Past Imperfect

  “It’s a rule of human nature that a man wants to be admired.”

  —Bill Bernbach

  As Bernbach’s reputation grew, so did requests for interviews and biographical material. Very little in his past seemed to him worth reprising. Bernbach loved elegance, beauty, tastefulness. He insisted on quality in every element of an ad, quality that would rub off on, and burnish, the image of the product.

  Not that one could create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. O
n the contrary, “the magic is in the product,” he preached. But one made choices, along the way, of what to include, and what to omit, in presenting the product to the public.

  The beauty of advertising was control. The media ran the ads given them, in the space or time purchased. The power to shape perceptions was yours.

  Life itself was rather messier. One had somehow to acknowledge the past. Editors and reporters didn’t simply print what one gave them. They might accept an unwillingness to discuss the personal, but they insisted on a full-scale review of a subject’s professional background.

  Bernbach did what many others do. He put the best possible spin on the available material.

  * * *

  Some of the available material Bernbach wished he could excise, including his most significant pre-DDB job, copy chief of Grey Advertising. “Couldn’t you just refer to it as ‘another agency?’” he would suggest to an interviewer. The Grey connection made him visibly uneasy, possibly because of Grey’s reputation when he worked there, as the prototypical “Seventh Avenue” agency. Or perhaps because of the contempt he professed to feel for Grey management’s values and standards.

  “Whenever I had to make a management decision,” Doyle cracked more than once, “I thought of what Larry Valenstein would do in that situation, and then did the exact opposite.”

  Yet Grey’s founders, Valenstein and Arthur Fatt, had discovered Bernbach, working in a tiny retail promotion subsidiary. They’d recognized his talent and pushed him forward fast, proud and supportive of his work. Fatt, especially, regarded him almost as a son. Bernbach’s leaving surprised and devastated him—a reaction not unlike Bernbach’s when creative stars left him. None of this intense personal connection was I aware of until after Bernbach’s death. I had worked at Grey in the early ‘60s. I remembered how Fatt would turn ashen at a mention of Bernbach’s name.

  Breakaway agencies are a fact of business life. Not often do their origins enter the realm of the unmentionable.

  The intensity of Bernbach’s desire to bury the Grey connection, the contempt he felt towards the founders, suggests something deeper than business. An aftershock, perhaps, of the father/son temblor in his personal life. With Grey, Bernbach did the abandoning. That’s easier to do if you tell yourself that the “father” deserves what he’s getting.

  * * *

  The industry memory of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s origins in Grey trailed off and in time evaporated, what with the total lack of family resemblance to keep it alive. Doyle Dane Bernbach would be seen as rising from a sea of boiling creativity, life-sized and pure and radiant as Botticelli’s Venus. How much more aesthetic if Bernbach could begin his own story with the birth of Doyle Dane Bernbach, when he began to emerge as the person he wanted to be.

  * * *

  The business with his parents, for example. In some families, time leads to forgiveness. Perhaps Bernbach hoped his parents would come to accept Evelyn and rescind their dire, old-country response to his marriage. He didn’t doubt that, whatever their disappointments, parents come through for their children in times of need.

  At the end of the 1930s, Bernbach found himself in need. Jobless, and with no jobs available for which he had experience, he asked Jacob for financial help to see him through. Jacob, prodded by Rebecca, refused. The hurt of the first rejection was now compounded by anger, outrage, humiliation. The slender thread of hope for reconciliation snapped. His parents had forsworn him when he married. Now he forswore them.

  Lesser traumas have upended stronger psyches. Bernbach swallowed his anger and, looking back later from the pinnacle of success, could claim, and perhaps believe, that he “had no sores to squeeze.”

  * * *

  The parents/son split resolved one potential mixed-marriage problem: Bill’s and Evelyn’s children would be raised in the Catholic church.

  Evelyn’s large and embracing family—parents, six sisters and a brother—had a healing effect on Bill. He loved to sit at the long dining room table on a Sunday and share their warmth, the good talk, the heaps of tangy Italian dishes. He overcame the old habit of picking at his food. He filled out some, and stood straighter. Even when he’d metamorphosed into a legend in the world of advertising, his happiest kind of Sunday afternoon was dinner with the Carbone family.

  But that was private, and never part of the projected public image.

  * * *

  His five or six years at Schenley had to be covered in his biographical material. It was a long stretch, his first job after graduating from New York University, and not exactly image-enhancing. Simply, then, he distilled the half-decade experience into a single anecdote that ends with his writing his way out of the mailroom and into the advertising department. The listener, or reader, assumes Bernbach continued writing Schenley ads until he left the company. Evelyn, who was there, shook her head when asked about Bill’s ads for Schenley.

  Bernbach related the story of his interview for a copywriting job at the William Weintraub agency in 1940.

  “I said, ‘Well I have no experience.’ He [Weintraub] said, ‘Then why don’t you just write me a letter, telling me why you should have this job.’ I said, ‘I don’t know why I should have the job; I don’t even know if I’m equipped.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you write the letter anyway?’” Bernbach did, and got the job, his first in an advertising agency, without a portfolio of ads to show Weintraub.

  * * *

  Grover Whalen, who had plucked the promising young man out of Schenley’s mailroom and helped shape him socially, took Bernbach along when he became president of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. (Whalen gets no mention in Bernbach’s biographies.)

  In a bureau that handled public relations functions, Bernbach wrote brochures, articles, a booklet about the history of fairs. He wrote short speeches for Whalen. Perhaps greetings and comments for visiting celebrities. That may have been the source of his basic anecdote about his Fair job.

  “I ghosted speeches for a lot of prominent people—for governors, mayors, a lot of prominent people.” The anecdote was quoted in many interviews. Once, however, while Bernbach was visiting Hawaii, a reporter for a local newspaper pressed for elaboration. Which governors, mayors, prominent people? she asked. If he turned his icy blue gaze on her, he didn’t succeed in squelching the subject. She wrote:

  “Bernbach’s introduction to the advertising business came as a ghost writer for a string of politicians whom he refused to name.”

  In summing up his career trajectory, Bernbach usually went from the Fair to the Weintraub agency. “I thought it might be a good idea to ghost for some products instead of people. It might be lucrative and it might be very interesting,” he said more than once.

  In fact, a year passed before Weintraub hired Bernbach. A year without a job. Evelyn brought home her small pay from Schenley, where she’d stayed on as a receptionist. Wives’ pay never covered living costs then. That was when Bernbach asked his parents to help, and when they refused.

  Desperately needing work, Bernbach took on a free-lance assignment that must have come through a Schenley acquaintance still friendly with the old bootleg bunch. Bernbach would do promotion on a new product, Talkavision, which an underworld character named Yermie Stern hoped would elevate him to the world of legitimate business.

  News of the assignment alarmed a Schenley executive who cared about the young couple. “This is serious stuff,” he warned Evelyn. Talkavision was sponsored by mobsters, including Three Fingers Brown. Bill had to get the hell away from those people, fast. Why hadn’t she told him things were that bad? He’d see what he could do for Bill with the head of Schenley’s ad agency, Bill Weintraub.

  And so, at 30, Bernbach entered the advertising business.

  * * *

  The year of unemployment blipped out of Bernbach’s history, never to be mentioned in interviews or biographies. It wasn’t quite a total loss, however. One of Bernbach’s most effective stories came out of a Yermie Stern incident. The story concludes wi
th Yermie’s anger when an associate phones to explain why he can’t attend an important meeting.

  “Son of a gun,” says Yermie. “Everything happens to me. His father died.”

  Yermie’s reaction perfectly illustrated Bernbach’s most basic belief about the art of persuasion:

  “Everyone feels he is the center of the universe . . . Nothing interests him as much as himself. You begin to communicate with him, you get his attention, when what you say has value for him.” Bernbach found value in the most unexpected places.

  Much later, his colleagues would whisper about Bernbach’s obsessive concern with money. A family friend saw it from another perspective—as a morbid fear of poverty rooted in his frightening jobless year.