Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  * * *

  At Weintraub, Bernbach met the first great influence on his work in advertising—Paul Rand, the agency’s head art director. Though Rand was only 27, he was already known as one of the nation’s best graphic designers. Art magazines ran cover stories on this striking young apostle of European modern, Bauhaus, Le Corbusier. With playful and witty images, Rand made memorable such products as Dubonnet wine, Airwick, El Producto cigars, Lee Hats. Nobody could mistake Rand ads. He signed them, as an artist does his paintings—a privilege granted no other advertising art director before or since.

  Rand’s ads were visual ideas, with little or no copy. In American advertising, words were prime. Not just “Amazing!,” “Finest!” and the like, but also verbal ideas fashioned into slogans and themes that became part of America’s pop heritage in the years between the two world wars.

  “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” “You’ll wonder where the yellow went.” “Not a cough in a carload.” “Sal Hepatica for the smile of health.” “A skin you love to touch.” “The penalty of leadership.” “They laughed when I sat down at at the piano.” A great copywriter could make an agency’s fortune. Art directors, on the other hand, merely rendered the copywriters’ verbal ideas.

  Rand was on a different plane, and Bernbach was eager to learn from him. Soon the two young men were lunching together every day at Gluckstern’s deli-restaurant in the West 40s, Bernbach absorbing lessons that Rand, delighted by Bernbach’s interest, happily dispensed.

  “It’s possible to do good work and also be effective in the marketplace,” Rand would say. “The fact that most ads are lousy has nothing to do with the marketplace; it has to do with the fact that people are lousy.”

  Rand would speak about the need for an ad “to hold its own in a competitive race,” about arresting visual images, about avoiding artistic tricks, about solutions that stem from the product. Few American designers were working this way, but “other guys were doing it in Europe.”

  Bernbach came to Weintraub, Rand told me, as “a public relations guy who knew nothing about art, or advertising art.” When he left a year later, he had absorbed enough from Rand to prepare his ascent to patron saint of advertising art directors.

  * * *

  Bernbach mentioned Rand often in later interviews. His was the one name from Bernbach’s pre-DDB years that he could speak with pride. The New York Times would call Rand “one of the most influential and fascinating designers of our time.” As early as 1941 he’d been described as “a painter, lecturer, industrial designer, advertising artist who . . . [is] an idealist and a realist, using the language of the poet and the business man.” He designed logos for IBM, Westinghouse, ABC; taught design at Yale University; published brilliant books on design theory.

  In his earliest mention of Rand in print—a 1953 interview—Bernbach stated that Rand “did for the advertising artist what Beethoven did for the musician; he actually liberated him.”

  But as the years brought more and more acclaim to Rand, Bernbach’s memory of their early friendship shifted in emphasis. The image became that of two young men starting on an equal level of experience, with Bernbach emerging as the innovator and as a factor in Rand’s books.

  “There [at Weintraub] I got the integration between copy and art, which I innovated. I helped Paul with some books he was writing, and we integrated our copy and art like it wasn’t done before.”

  Rand, a man not easily stirred to rancor, never forgave Bernbach for such comments. “Everything has already been done,” Rand quoted the 12th century philosopher Maimonides.

  “The integration of copy and art had been done in Europe for years before. Imagine taking credit for something like that!” As for his classic book, Thoughts on Design, Bernbach had read the manuscript, but “didn’t so much as change a word.” What especially rankled Rand was “the myth that Bernbach taught me everything I ever knew about advertising.”

  * * *

  In later years, Bernbach did teach many young creative people everything they ever knew about advertising. And he did popularize (if not innovate) the integration of art and copy. If Rand liberated the advertising artist, Bernbach liberated the creative process.

  Bernbach was to advertising what Freud was to healing, wrote one of his best-known alumni, the flamboyant art director George Lois. “He encouraged artistry and imagery in an industry that sang the praises of walking a mile for a Camel and still rejoices over a jerk squeezing Charmin.”

  He also encouraged advertisers to use a touch of self-deprecation, perhaps humor at one’s own expense, to disarm consumers. And yet his own story, as he told it through the years, had not a trace of self-deprecation or humor. Each experience had been re-cast and heightened to make it worthy of inclusion in his life story.

  So it is with the autobiographical material of other famous men. But Bernbach’s uneasiness with the reality of his past would matter to the future of Doyle Dane Bernbach.

  Account Gains and Losses, 1961-1965

  In:

  1964 Democratic Presidential campaign

  American Airlines

  Avis Rent a Car

  Bankers Trust

  Bulova Watch

  Burlington Industries

  Continental Insurance

  Cool-Ray sunglasses

  Cracker Jack Co.

  Crown Zellerbach

  General Foods

  Gillette Company

  H.J. Heinz

  International Silver

  Jamaica Tourist Board

  Joseph E. Seagram

  Lees Carpets

  Lever Brothers

  Mobil Oil Corp.

  Occidental Life

  Ocean Spray Cranberries

  Quaker Oats

  Sony

  Uniroyal

  WTS-Pharmacraft

  Out:

  General Mills

  Philip Morris

  (Alpine cigarets)

  Schenley

  Utica Club Beer

  5

  Cashing In

  “But it is pretty to see what money will do.”

  —Samuel Pepys

  Ned Doyle loved the thought of telling troublesome clients to go to hell. He fantasized exotic ways of doing so.

  “You go to a hardware store and buy a power mower,” he instructed Ted Factor, on the phone from the Coast with a string of complaints about client Ernest Gallo, the winemaker. “Put it in the back of your car and drive to the winery. When you get there, shove it up his ass and turn on the power.”

  Bernbach blanched. Doyle, like his real father, had lost his love and respect. In his devil-may-care style, Doyle would put his feet on the most majestic boardroom table and swear like the old Marine he was. Bernbach needed civility, niceness, good manners. Doyle embarrassed him.

  Doyle worried him, too, with his eagerness for face-offs with clients. Despite the myth, Bernbach had an almost morbid fear of losing clients. Not that he pandered to them, or gave them what they asked for. On the contrary, he would throw out finished ads that the client had approved, if he considered the work unworthy. He returned from vacation in the mid-60s and killed a pool of new client-approved commercials for Rheingold beer, although the agency would have to “eat” the very substantial production costs. The commercials were parodies of operas, a stupid way, in Bernbach’s opinion, to sell beer.

  But in the way he led creatives to “think about what they (the clients) are thinking about, he pursued harmony, not confrontation. Bernbach transmuted “the client’s wrong” into “the client’s right” day after day, year after year, while his legend as a heroic contender against insensitive advertisers grew—along with the agency’s reputation for “arrogance.” Young creatives who never met Bernbach would continue to invoke his name as the champion who would have fought for their rejected campaigns.

  Yet, from the beginning, Bernbach’s founding partners marveled at the intensity of his anxiety about client departures.

  The first cli
ent split was at Doyle’s insistence, when the Necchi-Elna sewing machine company gave its television advertising to another agency, asking Doyle Dane Bernbach to keep print.

  “You can’t handle an account like that,” Doyle told the client, and his partners. “You become a special pleader for one medium over another, and that’s untenable.” Necchi-Elna represented a fourth of the young agency’s billings.

  The deed done, the founders went to dinner. Doyle, expansive in his victory, drank rather than ate. Mac Dane ordered lobster and went vigorously at it. An ashen Bernbach watched him, incredulously.

  “How can you?” asked Bernbach, pushing away his own plate in his distress.

  Dane shrugged and continued cracking lobster claws. “You win some, you lose some,” said he.

  Neither forgot that dinner. To Bernbach, Dane’s hearty repast revealed surpassing insensitivity to loss. Dane remembered the night as his first glimpse into the depths of Bernbach’s fears and insecurities about matters Dane considered ordinary business comings and goings.

  * * *

  Some saw Doyle Dane Bernbach as the lengthened shadow of three men in one, indivisible. “As much one person as three men can be,” wrote an admiring journalist in 1959.

  “Do you think you know me well enough to refer to me by my first two names?” Bernbach would ask anyone who referred to the agency as “Doyle Dane.”

  The three men had flipped a coin to settle the order of their names in the agency title. After which, according to agency legend, Bernbach said, “Nothing will ever get between us, not even punctuation.”

  Walking into a room together, the three never failed to surprise people seeing them for the first time. They were shorter than average—although Bernbach and Doyle each felt he was considerably taller than the other. The three were older than expected for new celebrities. (Bernbach was 38, Dane 43 and Doyle 47 in the year the agency began.) They looked, as a trio, more like subway commuters from the outer boroughs than the founders of a Cinderella advertising agency.

  “The most unassuming, unprepossessing men you can recall ever having encountered,” in the words of a 1959 magazine profile.

  Joe Daly, the first account man to become a vice president of the agency, remembered his reaction on meeting them: “Those guys are Doyle, Dane and Bernbach?”

  * * *

  Dane had plenty of experience with business wins and losses as head of his own small agency. A lucky break changed his destiny. Doyle and Bernbach had enlisted Herb Strauss, one of Grey’s best account men, as third partner in their planned breakaway agency. Grey’s owners, getting wind of the plot, persuaded Strauss to stay by promising him the future presidency of Grey, a promise they kept. Their efforts to keep Bernbach and Gage from leaving failed.

  When Strauss pulled out, Dane pushed in, through his old friendship with Doyle, who had hired him as advertising promotion manager of Look magazine before the war. They had remained tennis partners in the years since.

  Dane offered a valuable asset—a going agency, incorporated and accredited by the media—which he would submerge into a new company. Doyle proposed the union to Bernbach, who would agree only if Dane accepted half the number of shares the “senior partners” would receive. After all, said Bernbach, they were bringing in the talent and the big account (Ohrbach’s). Doyle relayed the condition to Dane, who reflected for several days. The condition galled. But to reject it would hurt no one but himself, depriving him of a chance to break out into a promising new agency, an agency with a vision, with talent (Bernbach, Gage and Robinson) to realize that vision, and with a front man (Doyle) who knew everyone in town. Dane accepted.

  Their names coalesced into one. But any impression that the three men had some kind of bond based on equality was strictly illusory.

  The intensity and complexity of feelings between Doyle and Bernbach never ensnared Dane. Nobody viewed him as a rival. Neither glamour nor artistry emanated from his sensible presence. “Benign accountant” was the phrase some used to describe his looks. Bernbach, out of Dane’s hearing, called him “the shopkeeper.” And indeed one could imagine him behind a neighborhood store counter, wearing a hardware apron, peering benevolently over his glasses, knowing every customer’s names and family problems.

  Like Bernbach, Dane led a life of utter rectitude, faithfully riding the subway home to the wife he married in 1939, and their only child, Henry James Dane. Unlike Bernbach, Dane loved physical exertion, playing a dogged game of tennis, and spinning on Rockefeller Center’s ice rink at noontime. Unlike his partners at the start, Dane had always made time for community and political activities. Doyle looked on Dane’s work for “good causes” with his usual jaundiced eye

  “Where’ve you been, Mac?” he’d asked when Dane returned to the agency at an off hour. “Agency business or obituary business?”

  All three partners would amass impressive obituary material in the years ahead. And public service would become one of the splendid hallmarks of the agency.

  Another, of equal importance, was the agency tradition of caring for the welfare of its people. The source and guardian of that vital tenet was the accidental partner, Maxwell Dane.

  * * *

  Dane watched Bernbach grow less dependent on Doyle, “a father figure Bill really leaned on in the early days,” as Bernbach “achieved more prominence and gained more self-confidence.”

  Bernbach must have seen the shift differently, a result of his disappointment with Doyle’s behavior, rather than his improving opinion of himself. Doyle gave him problems, inside the agency as well as with clients Doyle was eager to dump.

  Bob Gage told a story about showing Doyle his finished artwork for a Max Factor ad. “I had Helburn shoot the photograph, and I loved the girl, and the artwork was beautiful. Here’s the way the conversation with Ned went: ‘Bob, this is just beautiful. Really beautiful.’ So I picked it up and started to walk out, and he said, ‘But isn’t she cross-eyed? Here, let me take another look at it.’ He did, and then said, ‘She’s a cross-eyed bitch!’

  “So I decided never to show Ned another piece of work like that,” Gage related, laughing at the memory, and loving Doyle, “just a sensational man,” nonetheless.

  One day soon after, Bernbach came into Gage’s office and confided that he’d “had it out with Ned.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Gage.

  “I told Ned the creative decisions are mine. He has nothing to do with the creative. And Ned finally agreed.”

  The anger, and courage, that propelled Bernbach into such a scene might be deduced from the almost total absence of other such scenes in Bernbach’s life. He would remain silent when most deeply hurt or disappointed. The atmosphere would cloud over; the offending person could feel Bernbach’s brooding unhappiness. But words were rarely spoken.

  In this case, the outcome of the scene with Doyle seemed to surprise Bernbach.”That Ned is really something,” he said to Gage a few weeks later. “He means what he says. He’s never interfered since.”

  * * *

  In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, their relationship continued to change. Doyle felt the loss of Bernbach’s former admiration. He drank more. Inevitably, that inflamed Bernbach’s feeling that Doyle was betraying him.

  “I think Bernbach was always worried about me because of my drinking,” Doyle said in 1977, when he and I began an oral history project. “He didn’t know when I might fall in the gutter, but he never criticized me.”

  Instead, Bernbach swallowed his anger and assumed more of Doyle’s responsibilities. By 1960, when Nancy Underwood became Bernbach’s secretary, the agency’s perception of Doyle was that he “didn’t work.”

  Bernbach, by contrast, worked demonically to cover the bases. Underwood logged 200 calls to Bernbach’s office on a single, record-setting (but not by much) day. He tried to return every call, in addition to reviewing every ad, even trade ads, for every client. Many of the calls were from advertisers, eager to talk to the hot agency about handli
ng some of their business. Underwood screened calls before bothering Bernbach with them. Doyle, more and more, was left out of the loop.

  “Is this about new business?” Underwood would ask. If so, a second question followed. “Do you have an agency now?” Whether yes or no, she asked the third and most vital question. “How much do you intend to spend?” She had the authority to tell the caller, if the figure was too low, that she was sorry, but the agency didn’t handle accounts of that size. She soon convinced Bernbach to give her the names of some smaller agencies for referrals, “out of sheer good manners.”

  How many advertisers with small budgets but great potential slipped through the cracks no one knows. The scenario could only have played out in an agency so explosively successful and so unskilled in management techniques as Doyle Dane Bernbach in the ‘60s.

  Presentations to potential clients were nothing more than Bernbach showing agency ads out of “the black box,” a leather presentation case, and telling the story behind each. Underwood would stock the black box, selecting ads she deemed relevant to the advertiser’s business. Bernbach would ask her, when he picked up the case, what she’d put in this time.