Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  The presentation was informal, unrehearsed, impressive, especially with the bloated sales results Bernbach over-enthusiastically appended to each story. Fine for the go-go, expansive, risk-taking ’60s. New business poured in, spreading the warm feeling that the good times would go on forever.

  But Bernbach began to complain to a confidante that he constantly “ended up doing the whole job, making all the decisions.”

  “Bill didn’t feel that Doyle and Dane were especially important,” Dane mused several years after Bernbach’s death, “except maybe at keeping the agency sound financially. I think he viewed me, especially, in that category. That it could be the most successful agency, but be broke. Half in jest, half not in jest.”

  * * *

  Client Jack Dreyfus, head of the Dreyfus Fund, gave them a new perspective on their agency. They could sell shares to the public.

  “He used to say, ‘You’ve got a goldmine here! It’s ten times earnings!’” Doyle recalled. “We didn’t know what the hell that meant. So when that was interpreted into dollars, what the shares would bring on the market, we thought, ‘My God, a third of that for each of us is over a million dollars!’ Who the hell had a million dollars around here? Joe Daly was wearing the same goddamn suit he’d worn for five years.”

  The Dreyfus Fund didn’t handle public offerings. Doyle explored the idea further with Mark Appleman, who lived across the hall from him on East 19th Street, and worked in investor relations for Francis I. duPont, a brokerage house that did handle public offerings.

  Wall Street and Madison Avenue had little interest in one another at that time. How could a service business operate in a fishbowl? Would clients look at the necessary disclosures and conclude that their agencies’ salaries and profit margins were too high? Would they then insist on shaving fees? Would the revelation of who had how many shares breed discontent in agency management ranks? How much attention would management divert from client business to the care and feeding of financial analysts and shareholders? What of the costs of annual meetings, annual reports, proxy statements?

  The arguments against going public were formidable and daunting. They did not, at the time, include a fear of takeovers, presumed unthinkable in a personal service business.

  Still, going public seemed to make sense for Doyle Dane Bernbach. Two of the founders were aging. If they retired, or died, they or their estates would get only the book value of their shares. And that was very much lower than estimated market value, given the rapid growth and promise of the dynamic young agency. Accountants and lawyers studied the numbers and actuarial tables and gave their blessings. Doyle’s neighbor won the underwriting job for duPont.

  Doyle Dane Bernbach had achieved fame by doing the unexpected for clients. Now it was doing the unexpected for itself. Its trek to Wall Street made big news. Not that it was the first agency to go public. Two years earlier, the small and sassy creative agency headed by two Bernbach alumni, Papert Koenig & Lois (Julian Koenig and George Lois teamed on some of the earliest Volkswagen classics), had shocked Madison Avenue by putting its shares on the market, thereby reinforcing the belief that anyone could sell anything in the go-go ’60s. (PKL, dubbed “Stillman’s East” after the then-famous gym because of fist fights among its principals, didn’t survive the economic shake-out of the ’70s.)

  A year after PKL’s plunge, Foote, Cone & Belding went public. This was a weightier matter. But though FCB was larger, well-established, and respected, its base was Chicago, which cast a remoteness to the act. Now came Doyle Dane Bernbach, with the substance missing from PKL, the proximity FCB lacked, a reputation for trend-setting, and Maxwell Dane, who marshaled impressive statistics to prove to the investment community the essential stability of large advertising agencies. He paved the way for the J. Walter Thompsons, Interpublics, Ogilvys and Greys to sell their stock to the public, with consequences that long reverberated in the industry.

  * * *

  When they rode back uptown on an August day in 1964, the founders carried a check for $6,270,890.40, made out to “Maxwell Dane, as agent for shareholders.” Fifteen times earnings! Since they still owned 75 percent of their stock, the transaction seemed like a miracle.

  Of that sum, $1,602,468 went to Doyle. A like amount was shared by Bill and Evelyn Bernbach. Dane and his wife got $929,466. After the three founders, the largest sum went to Bob Gage, $539,071. Then the star account man, Joe Daly, with $494,859. A big drop to the next level: $293,596 for Ted Factor, and $239,308 for Eddie Russell, a contender with Daly for the aging Doyle’s job. The next drop was even steeper, down to $79,414 for Phyllis Robinson. Among the other creatives, art director Bill Taubin got $76,140; Helmut Krone, $65,988; copy chief David Reider, $47,588; copywriter Jack Dillon, $30,456; copywriters Paula Green and Bob Levenson, $15,863 each.

  “Very few people shared the stock, when you stop to think about it,” in Joe Daly’s opinion. “Very few. Doyle, Dane, Bernbach, myself and Gage. The rest? Forget it.” Inevitably, the event induced a Balzacian fascination with money in a place previously focused entirely on the creative product.

  Doyle swore that Dane had dragged his heels on a public offering, worried that his lesser share would be noticed by the press. It wasn’t.

  Dane attributed the resignation of the agency’s marketing maven, another contender for Doyle’s job, to his shock on comparing the number of shares he’d been given to those of Daly and Russell.

  Bernbach received calls from DDBers running foreign offices, hurt that people without bottom-line responsibilities had been rewarded, while they, who labored to create profits for the home office, had been overlooked.

  High-level creatives approached Dane with gripes about “how come so-and-so got that much, and I only got . . . ”

  On every level, DDBers marveled at the Wall Street magic that overnight had made their leaders millionaires. Some began to dream of opening their own agencies.

  * * *

  Bernbach and Doyle remained equal shareholders after the 1964 offering. Not so after a second public offering of agency stock in 1966. Bernbach sat that one out after a market downturn forced the underwriters, unable to defer the announced event, to offer the stock at a price Bernbach thought too low. Doyle didn’t like the price either, but took a more philosophical view, which he expressed to the underwriters in typical Doyle fashion.

  “When I go see a whore, I expect to get fucked.”

  Still, Doyle participated in the offering, reducing his holdings and leaving Bernbach, who didn’t, with some 16 percent of the agency stock, by far the largest block.

  * * *

  Going public “suddenly put a substantial amount of cash in the founders’ hands,” recalled a lawyer involved in the event, “so that they could begin living like the successful people they were.”

  Bill and Evelyn Bernbach moved from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to one of Manhattan’s most striking apartment buildings, the United Nations Plaza. Mac Dane bought a co-op on Park Avenue and 67th Street. Doyle remained in his East 19th Street penthouse apartment, but bought and sold several summer residences, a research firm, and a basketball team. Joe Daly moved into a world he’d longed to enter—buying, breeding and racing horses. Ted Factor began collecting antique automobiles. Bob Gage later recalled that the stock sale enabled him to feel “like I had some money, which was a good feeling.”

  The agency’s biggest guns had been rewarded. The smaller guns settled for stock options and the hope that the share price would keep going up.

  * * *

  In time, going public came to be seen by many as perhaps the single most important event in the eventual decline of the agency. “It’s not an unmitigated blessing,” conceded Mac Dane, two decades after the event. Understating, in his trademark style, Dane cited the deadliest result of going public for a service business: “You become a little more interested in your bottom line.”

  True, the agency became mesmerized by its bottom line. But the later perception among the creatives tha
t going public ended DDB’s willingness to say “take this campaign or else” to balky clients, does not hold up. Bernbach never said “take this campaign or else” to a client.

  6

  Talking about Writing

  “It is not every question that deserves an answer.”

  —Publilius Syrus, Maxims

  Bill Bernbach was all too visibly uncomfortable. His visitor, Denis Higgins, a senior editor of Advertising Age, scribbled a note. He would afterwards write that Bernbach had regarded him “with the manner of a man who is being grilled by an auditor from the Internal Revenue Service and who in his heart knows he is innocent.” An acute observation.

  Bernbach’s anxiety surprised Higgins, for the occasion marked a singular honor. Bernbach had received recognition as an industry immortal with his induction into the Copywriters Hall of Fame. Now came the ritual Hall of Fame interview, to run in the most important publication in the field.

  “WILLIAM BERNBACH Talks About How He Writes Copy,” the headline would read.

  The year was 1965 and Doyle Dane Bernbach was the idol of the industry. Its founders were not only famous now, but rich, after selling a portion of their stock to the public. Every creative person in the business would sift Bernbach’s words, seeking nuggets of inspiration that might help their own careers.

  But Bernbach had no desire to discuss the particulars of how he wrote copy. He was ready with a testy answer to Higgins’ first such question.

  “I remember those old Times interviews where the interviewer would talk to the novelist or short story writer, and say, ‘What time do you get up in the morning? What do you have for breakfast? What time do you start work?’ And the whole implication is that if you eat corn flakes at 6:30 in the morning, and then take a walk and then take a nap and then start working and then stop at noon, you too can be a great writer.”

  Higgins was taken aback. Most admen savored questions about how they did what they did. Later in the interview:

  “Q. I wanted to ask you briefly about your own habits.

  “A. (laughter)

  “Q. Why are you laughing?

  “A. I’m laughing because you are going to habits again as if that were the answer.

  “Q. No, it’s not the answer. I realize it’s not the answer. What I mean by habits—when you did write body copy, were you your own editor, even though you were the boss?

  “A. Yes, sure, absolutely.

  “Q. And you don’t need an outsider, a third man to edit you?”

  Bernbach ignored the follow-up question and talked instead about editing others. Higgins couldn’t play prosecutor; he went on to other questions, asked with increasing irritability.

  All writers need editors. Why this puzzling insistence that he, Bernbach, did not? Altogether, the interview elicited very little about how Bernbach wrote copy, and finally, Higgins figuratively threw up his hands and asked Bernbach to name his favorite among the ads he had turned out through the years.

  Said Bernbach: “Well, you know I started with the Ohrbach campaign myself. And I did the Ohrbach ads personally for about 17 years running. So I have a deep affection for them. I did the cat ad, for example. You know the one I mean. . . .”

  * * *

  Everyone in the business knew the cat ad. The one cattily headlined, “I found out about Joan,” spoken by a tabby who peered from under a fashionable hat, suavely clenching a long cigaret holder in its mouth.

  A little-known story about the cat ad may illuminate some of the puzzling aspects of the Copywriters Hall of Fame interview. The ad ran in March 1958 issues of newspapers in New York, Newark and Los Angeles—Ohrbach’s turf. Hundreds of readers wrote to request copies, a rare event in those days. Time magazine reported that “the greatest compliment came from Madison Avenue, where admen paid their respects by posting the Ohrbach’s ad on their own bulletin boards.” Time’s story ended with one adman’s view, “A masterpiece.”

  Alas, Time credited only one of the ad’s creators. “Produced by the Manhattan ad agency of Doyle Dane Bernbach, Inc. and written by a 35-year-old bachelor girl named Judith Protas. . . .”

  Bernbach saw red. Protas had warned the Time reporter to be careful about credits, because Bob Gage and Bill Bernbach, “the head of this agency,” had created the concept. Only afterwards had she written the body copy. What did Time care about credits and egos? Time aimed for tight stories with every fact either informative or entertaining. Protas’ age, sex and marital status made the delicious bitchiness of the copy more fun. Says the cat about Joan:

  “The way she talks, you’d think she was in Who’s Who. Well! I found out what’s with her. Her husband owns a bank? Sweetie, not even a bank account. Why that palace of theirs has wall-to-wall mortgages! And that car? Darling, that’s horsepower, not earning power. They won it in a fifty-cent raffle! Can you imagine? And those clothes! Of course she does dress divinely. But really . . . a mink stole, and Paris suits, and all those dresses . . . on his income? Well, darling. I found out about that too. I just happened to be going her way and I saw Joan come out of Ohrbach’s!”

  A quarter of a century later, and Bernbach dead, Protas still felt the sting of his fury about Time’s story. The nation’s premiere news magazine rarely considered ads worthy of editorial coverage. They’d written up the cat ad as a “masterpiece” and failed to attribute it to Bernbach, who thought of it as his own. The concept, not the body copy, gave an ad its life force.

  “He never forgot, and I don’t think he ever forgave,” Protas recalled in 1983, “because it was one of the big explosive successes of the agency.”

  Two weeks after naming Protas as the ad’s writer, Time ran a story titled “Adman’s Adman.” It trumpeted the growing success of Bernbach and his agency. On his work for Ohrbach’s, it noted that “he stressed sophistication instead of price with the eye-catching illustration and a minimum of copy that later became his trademark. (See Bernbach’s recent cat ad. TIME, March 17). . . .”

  Somehow, Bernbach had convinced Time to make good its earlier lapse. Almost certainly, the hand of the magazine’s business side reached out to the editorial offices. Editors do not soon forget such incidents. Still, Bernbach had won his point. (Gage was used to being left out of the credits and didn’t much care, having a strong sense of his worth and no ego problems.)

  So ended the cat ad story. Or did it? In 1962, Time sent out phalanxes of reporters for a landmark story on the advertising business. The cover of its October 12 issue featured photographs of twelve agency executives. Each represented “an advertising philosophy or technique that has helped to make the industry what it is and seems likely to shape its future.”

  David Ogilvy was there, and Leo Burnett. Fairfax Cone and Marion Harper. So were Robert Mondell Ganger and Henry Guy Little, names not widely known even then. Bernbach, who more than anyone was shaping advertising’s future, did not appear on Time’s cover. Was it a deliberate omission? This time, no protesting telephone calls could repair the damage. One can’t remake a Time cover.

  * * *

  The image of Bernbach copywriting almost everything produced in the early days by the young agency was bolstered by press reprints of what they identified as “Bernbach’s ads.” And they were Bernbach’s ads, either in concept or in shaping. But beyond the headlines, he did very little writing, even before the founding of Doyle Dane Bernbach.

  Bob Gage: “He used to do the headlines with me, and the concepts with me, and then he would let Judy Protas write the body copy. He’d go back up to his room. He never wrote body copy. Only on rare occasions.”

  What about back in the days when Gage worked with him at Grey Advertising? “I’m sure he wrote something, but I don’t know. He got bored with it after the headline.”

  Doyle: “Hank Hunter of Olin Mathieson told Bill the company was going to shorten its name to Olin. They would need an ad. Bill said, ‘I’ve got the ad. “Call me by my first name.”’ Hunter said, ‘Bill, you’re crazy. You should take t
he assignment back to your office, give me fifty other names, tell me this is the one you suggest, and charge me $50,000. . . .’”

  “What idiot changed the Chivas Regal bottle?” moaned the copywriter assigned to the account. “That’s the headline!” pounced Bernbach, and another classic ad was born.

  From Helmut Krone’s wastepaper basket, Bernbach fished wads of crumpled papers and beamed upon spreading open a sheet with the words, “We’re only Number Two. So we try harder.”

  What did it matter if Bernbach did or did not write much beyond the headlines? To advertising history, it matters not at all. In attempting to understand Bernbach, it signifies.

  * * *

  The sense of unease among his closest colleagues grew along with his collection of press notices. They pondered his need to take credit for so much that others helped create. They wondered what drove him to portray the quality of his writing when pushed, as in the Higgins interview, as above and beyond the need for an editor—a claim no other writer would make. They saw that the more his image became that of “writer,” the pricklier became his sensitivities.