Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  The times they were a’changing, but Doyle Dane Bernbach was not.

  * * *

  Then-creative director Bob Levenson recalled it as a time for the agency when “strange was good.”

  A commercial for Thom McAn shoes featured a young man locked in his bedroom, stroking a shoe, a slightly-demented expression on his face. His mother, peering through the keyhole, shouts, “Irving, are you in there with the shoes again?”

  An Alka-Seltzer commercial set in a cafeteria centered on an apparent psychotic whose wild-eyed presence disturbs the digestive system of another customer, not to mention that of the viewer.

  Black-clad, barefoot peasant women swarm on a middle-east desert in a Lever Brothers commercial, chanting exaltations of idolatrous gratitude to a giant box of detergent, whose short-lived name was Hero.

  A Volkswagen bus sits, inexplicably, in the living room of Mr. Average Guy. We know he’s Mr. A. G. by the way he slurps his soup. The doorbell rings. An elderly couple, strangers to Mr. A. G., tell him they’ve come from “such a long way” to see the bus. He admits them, and the camera follows on a tour of the vehicle’s interior.

  “There was a sort of ‘Don’t worry, all you creative lunatics, you just keep doing what you’re doing, and we’ll take care of the account guys, we’ll take care of the clients. You just be as bananas as you can possibly be,’” Levenson recounted. “And it raised a generation of people who, because we buffered them from some ugly day-to-day realities, weren’t accustomed to them when they had to face them.”

  In fact, not facing ugly day-to-day realities was a way of life at the very top at the agency.

  Ned Doyle told a story that supported his own casual attitude towards complaints about the agency’s shortcomings:

  “One day Bill Howard, advertising director of Macy’s, arrived late for lunch with a few of us. ‘Sorry,’ he said, deadpan, ‘but Macy’s won’t open tomorrow.’ He waited for our shock, then broke into a grin. ‘If everything I heard this morning is true, Macy’s can’t possibly open tomorrow.’” Of course Macy’s opened the next day, and as far as Doyle was concerned, so would Doyle Dane Bernbach. Thriving businesses have a momentum of their own. If one stopped to analyze and try to fix things, one might disturb the vapors that in some mysterious way created the magic.

  Why tamper? The good news had always outweighed the bad news. A dip in the new business chart would soon right itself and point back in its historic direction—up. After all, the decade was ending with two of the agency’s Alka-Seltzer commercials, “Bride’s first meal” and “Mama Magadini,” the undisputed favorites of the year. Their punch lines, “Poached oysters?” and “Mama Mia, that’s-a some spicy meatball!” became part of the language.

  So what if creative teams, in their eagerness to achieve similar smashes, sometimes landed in the swamp of “strange is good”? They weren’t faulted for trying. The only sin at Doyle Dane Bernbach was playing it safe.

  * * *

  Strange people began turning up on the agency payroll. Seat-of-the-pants hiring judgments were presented as faits accompli to DDB’s thoroughly professional, increasingly frustrated, personnel department.

  A man named Dmitri arrived with some fanfare to head a special creative service. He claimed kinship with the Russian nobility, his family having been driven out by the bolsheviks, he said, “from St. Petersburg, the former name for Moscow.” Didn’t he mean Leningrad? Dmitri waved off the query. His work performance wasn’t much better than his Russian history, and Dmitri soon vanished.

  A young man called Kevin was hired to set up a music operation in the creative department. He was, a dozen wide-eyed staffers told me, the composer of two current pop hits—“Jean,” the theme song for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” and “Flying on a Jet Plane,” Peter, Paul and Mary’s top-ten record. The Uniroyal account group, mightily impressed, had commissioned Kevin to compose music for a commercial.

  Whoa! I knew enough about music royalties, from having written lyrics for children’s recordings, to have an idea of the money that would roll in to the composer of two pop hits. Kevin looked too seedy to be rolling in royalties. I walked across Fifth Avenue to Record World and checked the credits on “Kevin’s songs.” “Jean,” it turned out, was written by Rod McKuen, and “Jet Plane” by John Denver. Hearing this, the agency’s general manager shrugged, “But maybe he has talent.” The agency’s lawyer, on the other hand, shouted, “Get him out of here, and tear up his Uniroyal music! How could we ever believe he composed it?” Kevin left quietly.

  Dmitri and Kevin are worth mentioning only as egregious examples of the careless way the creative department was hiring in the ’70s. Hiring mistakes happen everywhere. It’s almost impossible to determine how much job-seeking writers, art directors or TV producers actually contributed to the portfolios of their ads and commercial reels. But total credulity about claims that are checkable bespeaks sloppiness or hubris. In the case of Kevin, a messy lawsuit against Uniroyal and other clients he “composed music” for, might have resulted.

  Few DDBers remember Dmitri or Kevin. Many would remember the strange new faces brought in by top management. For these, in time, would erode the confidence of the troops in their leaders, damage the agency’s image, and lead to payroll cuts that hurt the innocent.

  * * *

  To head a languishing subsidiary, Joe Daly made a seat-of-the-pants offer to Arvin Spelvin (not his real name), after hearing him spoken well of by former McCall’s editor Herbert Mayes.

  Enter Spelvin, short and demanding, spouting orders for expensive office equipment and furnishings. That seemed rather cheeky in a place known for its plain, pipe-rack, shirtsleeve environment. Soon enough word spread that Spelvin was “a bit of a kook.” Well, many creative people are, thought Dick Kane, the agency’s personnel director.

  “Being a bit of a kook,” said Kane, years after the episode, “doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not good for the agency, but it’s kind of a red flag for somebody in my position.” He called a trustworthy contact at Spelvin’s former agency—one of the oldest, largest and most respected on Madison Avenue.

  Kane: “I got an earful. They were ready to send him to prison. One of the worst people. Kickbacks, everything. They’d found out one day and fired him. And we picked him up.”

  On hearing the bill of particulars, Daly withdrew his support. Exit Spelvin. His memory, however, survived, as Exhibit A in juicy agency gossip about management’s weird personnel decisions.

  * * *

  Far more puzzling was the sudden appearance early in 1970 of a tall, heavy-set, perspiring stranger we’ll call (for the sake of his survivors) Edward J. Sewell. Daly had hired him, without a word to Personnel, as senior vice president in charge of acquisitions, a slot for which Personnel was vetting highly-placed candidates.

  Sewell had two items on his agenda on the first day of his employment. One brought him to my office—a press announcement. On paper, his credentials looked strong. Twenty years with a Wall Street banking firm, the last eight as president. Board member for a number of prominent companies.

  So why was this man sweating? And why did he keep harping on his wife’s social connections in Washington, D.C.? He showed no interest in how or whether the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal would play the release—only in what the Washington Post would do with it. An extraordinary priority, given his career to date and his mission for the agency. Something was awfully askew here.

  His second concern brought him to Dick Kane, via Mac Dane, who alerted him that Sewell was “very interested in our medical coverage.”

  Kane: “Mind you, I expected a superstar. We’d been looking for a top level person for that job. Someone with the qualifications to become president of the agency. He walks into my office and I could see he was frightened to death. I shook his hand. It was like sticking your hand in dishwater, it was so wet and so limp. I really thought he was ill.”

  Sewell would talk about nothing but medical cov
erage. When they finished, Kane called the Wall Street banking firm that had employed Sewell for 20 years. The head personnel officer told Kane that Sewell had been out of the bank for a year. He refused to tell Kane why Sewell left. Kane determined that no one from Doyle Dane Bernbach had bothered to run even the most cursory check on Sewell.

  “How the hell did we hire this guy?” a senior vice president griped to Kane a few weeks later.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” shrugged Kane.

  “I was on a plane with him,” the senior VP related, “and he broke out in a nervous sweat and went absolutely crazy because he was expected to open some doors to somebody we wanted to do business with. I told Daly to get this guy out of here before he ruins us.”

  Sewell did not venture forth again on behalf of the agency. He sat in an office on the management floor, his door tightly shut, counting off the days until the end of his year’s employment contract, protected by medical benefits.

  The phrase “nervous breakdown” attached itself to the Sewell episode. Since no one ever knew him, the words were spoken, not in sympathy for the man, but rather to bolster the bizzareness of Exhibit B.

  * * *

  Skipping slightly out of sequence, I recall the arrival, in December 1971, of a sniffish man, slender and tight and patrician in elegantly-tailored three-piece suits of European origin. He peers through his spectacles as a Prussian would through a monocle, with a disdainful air. Perhaps he is looking down his nose at the raffish environment of the agency. The art director with uncombed blond curls cascading over his Mickey Mouse T-shirt. The circulating, bra-less secretary in the city’s shortest hot pants. The aging TV producer sporting Indian beads and cowboy boots, discussing the sexual proclivities of auditioning actresses. The sea of beads and jeans and gold chains and Abercrombie & Fitch fishing bags. Oh, lost, and by the wind-grieved shore!

  Here, to help Doyle Dane Bernbach reap new business, is Oscar Lubow, a person of renown in the industry. A former principal in weighty research firms—Daniel Starch & Staff, C. E. Hooper Inc., The Public Pulse Worldwide Inc. One-time head of business development for Young & Rubicam. A man trailing advanced education degrees and military honors.

  Lubow is Bernbach’s idea. Daly has no choice but to go along, for the agency’s new business record is deteriorating scarily under his presidency, and Bernbach’s wind is up.

  Bernbach allows Lubow the title of Assistant to the Chairman, himself being chairman. What Bernbach will not allow, in his concern about image, is a peep about new business activities. He wants no rip in the industry vision of Doyle Dane Bernbach beating off advertisers clamoring for admission.

  So Bernbach comes up with positioning Lubow in two primary roles: “government relations in the U.S. and abroad,” and “forward planning of agency structure and services, both here and abroad.”

  “Who’s our guy in backward planning?” I ask Daly when I’m alone with him in his office.

  “You just organize the press conference,” he growls.

  “Not I,” I state, surprising myself with my cool, this being my first face-off with Daly. (I reported to Mac Dane until he retired in November 1971.) “Lubow’s here for new business. If we make fools of the press, they won’t forgive us.”

  Daly stares at me. He has, I realize, never until this moment considered that a company spokesperson might resist a management decision. I also realize that this is a man used to getting his way, a man who believes in selling above all, truth being subjective in any case. I figure ours will be a short-lived relationship, but I don’t blink. Finally, Daly pulls himself out of his chair and disappears into Bernbach’s office. Long minutes later, he returns.

  “Okay, forget the press conference. Just put out the release.”

  The release is only marginally less awful than a press conference. But I am stunned at having won any part of this battle, and I give in to the rest. I put out what Bernbach wants said, in quotes attributed to him. I feel I have just lost my professional virginity. I also sense that I have passed a test of sorts with Daly. In the years ahead, I will win some and lose some, but Daly will never fail to listen.

  When the Lubow news hits the street, phone calls pour in to Ned Doyle and others, the general import being that Doyle Dane Bernbach should expect from Lubow large expenditures and minimal results. Doyle chides Daly on the hiring. Daly repeats Lubow’s claim to have brought in $80 million in new business for Young & Rubicam. Doyle shrugs and bets Daly that Lubow won’t bring in a single piece of new business in the year ahead. Daly doesn’t see how he can lose. He takes Doyle’s bet.

  * * *

  What followed was a comic opera. Lubow traveled the country in first class, issuing weekly “Summaries” on a new agency form emblazoned “CONFIDENTIAL—REPORT OF NEW BUSINESS CONFERENCE—CONFIDENTIAL.” Down the left-hand margin, in splendid cloak-and-dagger style, ran the warning words, “PLEASE READ AND DESTROY.” Each “summary” was a list—of corporate executives and their companies.

  “Had Oscar contacted these people, was he planning to—or what?” scribbled Ted Factor, the puckish head of DDB’s profitable and prestigious Los Angeles office, member of the agency’s powerful executive committee, confidante of Bernbach, and newly-elected “Western Advertising Man of the Year.”

  If Factor asked the question mischievously at first (he’d had calls about Lubow’s hiring too), the tone changed to panic when a Lubow “summary” came out listing six important prospects in Factor’s own territory: Bank of America, Dole, Del Monte, Castle & Cooke, Levi-Strauss, and Sunsweet Growers. Lubow didn’t respond to Factor’s urgent queries about what, if any, contacts had actually taken place. Factor called Daly.

  “Do you know how foolish and disorganized his do-it-yourself operation could make us look? Like the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. . . .”

  Factor to Daly, in a confidential memo: “. . . I will need information on calls made in the West, so that future contacts will be conducted in such a way that the right hand of DDB will seem to know what the left hand is doing. . . .”

  Daly memo to management supervisors and domestic office heads on new business procedures: “We all recognize that it is increasingly important to coordinate our total contact with new business prospects so that the left hand of DDB knows what the right hand is doing. . . .”

  Left hand and right remained uncoordinated. Factor never learned what Lubow was doing in his territory, or anywhere else.

  * * *

  Agency gossip had by now picked up on some of the unusual expenditures of the “forward planner.” Since a new business department had never been needed in the past, minds were boggled by Lubow’s ordering of hundreds of reels of agency commercials. What did he do with them?

  Ted Factor found an answer on his desk one morning. A DDB-L.A. account man had received a letter from an old friend, an executive of a large California company. Gleefully, while shedding written crocodile tears, Factor forwarded the letter to Daly.

  “Please tell your new business bloodhounds to lay off,” the writer began unceremoniously. “Our account is not up for grabs. If and when it ever is, I will tell you . . . Quite frankly . . . your New York office’s overture to R— would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. First, he received a can of film in the mail. No advance warning that it was coming. Nothing to explain what it was. Or what to do with it. It just appeared—and so became an imposition.

  “Others, of course, reviewed the film and found it was a selection of DDB’s spots. The only trouble was that the reviewers were so ticked off at the imposition on their time, plus the ham-handed, mysterious method of delivery, that even if the stuff had been exceptional, they’d have played hell liking it. . . . [Two weeks later] R— got a note from one Oscar B. Lubow which announced that he was to receive a complimentary copy of a drug study done for Governor Rockefeller a couple of years ago. How nice. Just what the hell is he supposed to do with that? How is it relevant to peddling our product? DDB? Os
car Lubow? Governor Rockefeller?

  “R—-‘s comments on that letter will remain privileged. But I assure you they were pertinent. As I say, do yourself a favor: tell ’em to lay off. . . .”

  Daly promised Factor he would “shoot Oscar down.”

  * * *

  Doyle watched the calendar run out on Lubow’s first year at the agency. Not a single piece of 1972’s new business could be traced to his activities. Doyle never stopped reminding Daly of their bet. If Daly lost, the chiding would go on forever.

  Daly called in Lubow, who had remained un-shot down, and pressed him for something, anything, in the way of new business. Lubow then brought forth a minnow. The Bank of the Commonwealth, a Detroit bank, would happily name Doyle Dane Bernbach as its agency. But its billings were below the agency’s minimum. And servicing a small Detroit account from New York could only cost the agency money.