Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  8

  Bernbach’s Book

  “Between the idea and the reality . . . Falls the Shadow”—T.S.Eliot

  The secrecy, the heartache, the pretense, the disappointed expectations that would fester in the gap between image and reality are most visible, perhaps, in a scan of the episode known as “Bill Bernbach’s book.”

  In 1966, David Ogilvy’s book, “Confessions of an Advertising Man,” reached the best-seller list. A few years earlier, Ted Bates chief (and Ogilvy brother-in-law) Rosser Reeves had scored with a book titled “Reality in Advertising.” The public seemed intrigued by the subject of advertising. Which adman would be next to gain best-sellerdom?

  In the late ‘60s, a major publisher approached former New York Times advertising news columnist Walter Carlson with an offer to write a book with, for, or on Bill Bernbach or the glamorous Mary Wells. Carlson instantly opted for a book on and with Bernbach.

  Bernbach listened with interest to Carlson’s proposal on his role in bringing a Bernbach book to publication. Carlson was gentle and modest, but also reassuringly professional. The 20-year veteran of the Times had written often and admiringly about Bernbach and the agency in his column. An unsigned essay on advertising in the Encyclopedia Britannica 1967 Yearbook—an encomium to “the Bernbach school”—turned out to be a Carlson product.

  The concept had appeal. Less work for Bernbach. And Carlson wrote well. Importantly, he was outside the agency. Bernbach could not have asked an agency writer to do what Carlson was proposing. That could diminish his stature within the agency, or raise the collaborator to an unwanted plateau.

  Lawyers joined the discussions. Carlson’s hopes ran high. The potential for great prestige as Bernbach’s co-writer, and for large and long-running royalties, was dazzling. Bernbach’s thoughts were running on a different track.

  Years later, Carlson recalled that the deal collapsed over percentages of royalties. Knowing he’d do more than fifty percent of the work, he asked for half of the royalties. Bernbach balked.

  Possibly. Nobody ever described Bernbach as openhanded with money. But a lawyer involved in the negotiations had a different memory—that the talks fell apart not on money, but on credits. At the very least, the ex-Timesman wanted the words “as told to Walter Carlson” under Bernbach’s name. Not in small type somewhere inside the book. In readable type, on the book’s cover.

  Possibly Berrnbach had imagined the project as pure ghost writing. Journalists did that for famous people in those days, silently, and for a small percentage of the royalties or, more usually, a set fee. Nary a trace of their hand would be found in the books they had ghosted. Bernbach may even have planned to mention Carlson’s name in the acknowledgements. Something along the lines of, “Thanks, too, to Walter Carlson, without whose help in pulling together material. . . . etc.”

  The man who fought Time magazine to wrest full credit on the Ohrbach cat ad was not likely to accept another man’s by-line on the cover of his book. But Carlson (whose wife happened to be a hard-digging trade reporter) was told the problem was the money. Negotiations ended.

  Carlson felt the disappointment deeply. Bernbach’s colleagues felt nothing. They had no idea, then or later, that the talks had been going on.

  * * *

  Bernbach signed a contract of his own with Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, accepting a then-generous advance of $l0,000. He put the money into trust funds for his sons.

  No ghosts haunted the scene this time. This was Bernbach, making a commitment of his own, signing, taking the money, stashing it into his children’s future. Such a process has a momentum of its own, creating an illusion that the job is already half under one’s belt.

  Bernbach fairly danced with joy as he told his colleagues about the contract with the fine and famous publishing house. Privately, a few felt doubts from the onset. They saw Bernbach as a great editor and great conceptualizer. “A headline is an idea,” said one. “It’s not writing.”

  “What happens in the other 29 seconds?” Bob Gage once asked when Bernbach offered an idea for a 30-second commercial.

  What would happen to the hundreds of blank pages for a book?

  “He’ll never write it,” whispered one of his associates to another.

  “Oh yes he will,” responded the other. “He would hate to return a hunk of money like that.”

  * * *

  Bernbach exhuded confidence about the project.

  “How’s it going?” he’d be asked.

  “Just great. I’m getting a lot down,” he buoyantly answered.

  * * *

  Contracts mattered mightily to Bernbach. The promise of a contract would entice him into negotiations to sell his agency to his former employee and glamorous competitor, Mary Wells, in 1974. When those talks ended, his fears were eradicated by a 10-year contract from Doyle Dane Bernbach (see chapter titled “Fathers and Sons”). The explosions of relief and exhilaration set off by that contract would strike some as excessive, given that it was his agency.

  By that time, Bernbach had experienced two decades of fame, and the admiration of the industry. But fame and admiration do not necessarily overcome the self-doubts of earlier years. Success can also stir concerns about one’s worthiness, about being found to be less than one’s image.

  A contract confirmed one’s worthiness. The Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich contract showed that the world beyond advertising believed in him. And that strengthened his belief in himself.

  * * *

  The years slipped by. “How’s it coming?” one of the lawyers on the deal asked every six months. “Just great,” Bernbach responded with enthusiasm.

  Ned Doyle kept asking, too, until the day that Bernbach told him, still with enthusiasm, that his editor at the publishing house had informed him that “Mr. Jovanovich was going to handle him personally.”

  “I figured,” said Doyle, after Bernbach’s death, “that meant the editor had thrown up his hands. I stopped asking.”

  The editor wanted what editors always want: revealing anecdotes, fresh insights, a bit of self-revelation—a reader’s money’s worth. Instead, Bernbach gave him material pulled together by his two secretaries out of his basic stump speech, his guest lectures to business classes, the 3x5" cards on which he noted his thoughts about the art of persuasion, and relevant quotations from others. Theory, ideas. Increasingly familiar to the industry, and without the personal recollections that would bring ideas to vibrant life.

  The editor returned the material as unacceptable. Bernbach fell into a slough of despond, made up of his insecurities. The editor asked off the project, but the contract remained in force, and Jovanovich himself stood ready to shepherd a new manuscript from Bernbach.

  None came forth.

  * * *

  Bernbach didn’t tell his colleagues about the rejected manuscript. Instead he sounded a positive note—Mr. Jovanovich was going to handle him personally. His transparent face showed how little he would appreciate further questions on how the book was going. Now his colleagues were left with another Bernbach area of sensitivity, another subject on which they had to monitor their words.

  Through the ’70s, the agency acutely felt the lack of a Bernbach book to attract new business. The whispers of doubt on the management floor grew more agitated.

  “Why doesn’t he write the bloody book?”

  “Did he ever write an ad?”

  * * *

  Neil Austrian, who solved many of the agency’s problems in the ’70s by facing them, broke into Bernbach’s silence about the book with the suggestion that a writer be hired to help “finish” it.

  “It would be terrific for the agency if we could get the book that you’ve been writing out while you’re still actively involved,” opened Austrian, proposing a woman author he’d met as a candidate to “help you get this book written.”

  Austrian: “Bill pulled his glasses down and looked over them at me and said, ‘You want her to write words in my book?’ And that ended
the discussion. Bill absolutely refused any help. In essence, I was told to stay out of it.”

  The strange game continued, Bernbach holding on to the promise of “my book,” and his colleagues pretending to believe he was writing it.

  * * *

  Bernbach did in time accept help, from a source under his control insofar as terms, division of labor, and implications were concerned. Had he accepted Austrian’s offer to put a ghostwriter on the agency payroll, the news would have trickled out. Someone else’s words in his book? Unthinkable.

  Bernbach’s friend Brendan Gill, the New Yorker magazine writer, had a happier suggestion. Bernbach didn’t need a ghostwriter. He needed someone to help him get his own words on paper. Gill’s 28-year-old son Michael could conduct a series of interviews that would evolve into the long-awaited book.

  And so a new phase got under way. Michael Gill came often at first. Bernbach’s secretaries would transcribe the tapes of each session for the young writer, who hoped to shape them into a book. But as the transcribed interviews piled up, they came to resemble the material rejected by Harcourt, Brace.

  The intervals between interviews grew longer. In time and in secret, the new attempt faded out. But true to the pattern found in Bernbach’s life, no one—not his sons, not top agency management—could say after his death whether or not Michael Gill was actually writing Bill Bernbach’s book. They would check and learn that Michael Gill wasn’t. They then renewed his involvement, but the project came to naught.

  * * *

  Bernbach never stopped believing he would somehow write his book. In the final months of his battle with leukemia, he lunched one day at the Gloucester House, across from the 50th Street entrance to DDB’s headquarters, with client Bruce Gelb, entertaining him with anecdotes about the early years of the agency.

  “What great stories, Bill,” said Gelb. “You should put them on tape.”

  Replied Bernbach, “Well, I’m including some of them in my book.”

  * * *

  As his illness progressed and pain sometimes kept him from going to the office, Bernbach made plans to work on his book at home. A roll-top desk and files were set up in his United Nations Plaza apartment.

  He completed a page of dedication that would eventually become the dedication of “Bill Bernbach’s Book,” a $50 coffee-table book written by copywriter Bob Levenson and published in 1987 by Villard House, a subsidiary of Random House. (The Bernbach family had returned the Harcourt, Brace advance to regain ownership of the material.)

  One paragraph in the dedication stands out as Bernbach, not as an advertising man, but as a citizen of the world.

  “. . . What happens to society is going to affect us with ever-increasing rapidity. The world has progressed to the point where its most powerful force is public opinion. And I believe that in this new, complex, dynamic world it is not the great book or the epic play, as once was the case, that will shape that opinion, but those who understand the mass media and the techniques of mass persuasion. The metabolism of the world has changed. We [in the communications field] must ally ourselves with great ideas and carry them to the public. We must practice our skills in behalf of society. We must not just believe in what we sell. We must sell what we believe in . . .”

  “Bill Bernbach’s Book” gives the reader brief histories of the agency’s major accounts, “a bit of biography” on Bernbach, and many of Bernbach’s best-known aphorisms, sprinkled through the handsome pages of classic Doyle Dane Bernbach ads and commercials.

  Its publication put countless noses out of joint among the copywriters and art directors who had worked on the ads, none of which carried the names of their creators. Said one: “Levenson wrote the book exactly the way Bernbach would have done. With no credits.”

  * * *

  “The funny thing,” reflected Bob Gage a few years after Bernbach’s death, “is that Bill could never write a book. He had a speech. That’s what he wrote—the speech.”

  “The speech,” as we shall see later, had a modular format. Parts got added and subtracted as needed over the years. A segment he added in 1978, by which time he knew he had leukemia, and always included thereafter, seems especially poignant against the backdrop of his failed efforts to put himself into a book.

  “I came across a prayer in a wonderful book by the eminent poet W. H. Auden called ‘A Certain World’ in which he collected the pieces that he most enjoyed reading in his life. He felt that such a book would convey the kind of man he was far more accurately than his autobiography could. For no man, he too understood, could be completely objective about himself. [Author’s emphasis]

  “The [Auden] book was divided into different subjects, and in the section on ‘prayers’ there was this one by St. Augustine: ‘Dear Lord, make me chaste and continent, but not just yet.’

  “I can’t think of a more vivid example of the uphill, if not the impossible, battle that reason and logic have in the final conduct of a man.”

  Ostensibly, the point of the segment is St. Augustine’s plea, which never failed to trigger the laughter of self-recognition among audiences. But what, in fact, do the italicized lines add to the audience’s appreciation? Bernbach the editor excised superfluous lines.

  Far from being superfluous, those lines, I believe, carried a message from the deepest corners of Bernbach’s heart: Autobiographical writing will not be forthcoming from me, friends. But in any case it would not have done the job. You will discover more of the man I was through the kinds of men I admired and read and so often quoted in my speeches: Albert Einstein, Aristotle, John Maynard Keynes, Sir Kenneth Clark, James Watson, biologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, philosopher Henry Byerly, sociologist Daniel Bell, Artur Rubinstein, Thelonius Monk. Remember me in that company.

  Account Gains and Losses, 1970-71

  In:

  Avianca

  Boise Cascade

  Korvettes

  Lehman Brothers

  National Liberty Corp.

  O.M. Scott

  Schick Safety Razor

  Terminix

  United Virginia Bankshares

  Out:

  Alka-Seltzer

  Boise Cascade

  Gillette

  International Silver

  Lehn & Fink

  Monsanto (Chemstrand)

  New York Racing Association

  Occidental Life

  9

  New Faces

  “We have two requisites for people working at Doyle Dane Bernbach. Number one, they have to be nice people. And number two, they have to have a lot of talent. I’m sorry for the nice guy who doesn’t have talent, but that’s bad for my business. And I don’t give a damn how much talent the son-of-a-bitch has. I don’t want him. Life’s too short.”

  —Bill Bernbach

  As the turbulent ’60s came to an end, Doyle Dane Bernbach found itself, for the first time in its celebrated young life, losing more business than it was gaining. The agency had been perfect for the unruly, energy-releasing, do-your-own-thing ’60s. A corporate flower child, defying convention with love and an open heart, the agency shrugged off encrustations of The Way Things Were Always Done.

  Not that the agency worked to shape itself to the anti-establishment times. More likely its engaging counter-culture messages (“Think small,” “We’re only number 2,” “You don’t have to be Jewish”) gave impetus to the tradition-breaking ’60s. Doyle Dane Bernbach was ’60s back in the stiff-necked ’50s. Ahead of its time, its work dominated the advertising of the ’60s.

  What corporate attitude could better have suited the Age of Aquarius than Bernbach’s exhortation to “do it different” and his belief that “rules are meant to be broken? (Too often forgotten was his admonition, “never do so at the expense of selling.”) But where once Doyle Dane Bernbach was the only agency that knew “how to do it,” other shops now were at least trying.

  The stunning success of DDB’s campaigns (imagine the glow of a Volkswagen or Polaroid or Avis client, a
t board meetings and cocktail parties!) forced mainstream agencies to strengthen their own creative line-ups, often with pirated DDBers, as valued old clients requested a “DDB look” for their ads.

  Creative talent was in demand everywhere. New agencies sprang up, some headed by DDB alumni, Bernbach’s children, showing they could cross the street by themselves. Bernbach, deeply disturbed by defections, repeatedly made the point that a DDB writer or art director is not a DDB writer or art director at another agency. A transplanted flower does not grow the same way in different soil. (See chapter, “The Basic Stump Speech.”) To be sure, Doyle Dane Bernbach remained the cynosure, the mother church, the seat of the founder of creativity as religion, the best place to work. But no longer the only place to get good work.

  Management hadn’t quite taken that in. Nor did they grasp the import of the backlash that was gathering force in a nation tired of revolution, tired of hairy young people, tired of older people who didn’t make them behave. Or a business world tired of equating “no rules” with “liberating,” ready to respond to parameters (whatever that meant), to every kind of copy testing, to any set of catchy rules (“24 ways to improve whatever”).