Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  I’ve never really been

  In here before.”

  Everyone howled, including Daly and Heekin.

  * * *

  Heekin, aware that Bernbach had lost faith in him but determined to restore it, set to work on a plan, later known as “Heekin’s book,” to correct the agency’s problems. Unknown to him, merger talks with Wells, Rich, Greene had opened just weeks after he became president of DDB. (see next chapter) He learned about the talks when the rest of us did, just before the story broke in the press.

  “Now Bernbach thinks perhaps Mary is a rabbit,” Heekin told me at the time. “He believes she’s sensational with clients. But she isn’t perfect either; she lost American Motors and Dr. Pepper. Nobody’s perfect. There are no rabbits.”

  * * *

  Heekin gave his “book” to Bernbach and Daly in July. Soon after, a staff memo from Daly announced “an extended leave of absence” for an executive vice-president who “has not been feeling at his best.” The man, an old DDB hand, had been targeted in Heekin’s book.

  “Two more of our executives have ‘gotten sick,’” Heekin told me a few weeks later, picking up, as the rest of the agency had, on the Orwellian term for getting sacked.

  The next scalps belonged to the president of DDB International, and the head of DDB’s research department. Both old-timers. Both targeted in Heekin’s book. Bernbach left for Europe to avoid the ugliness of the international head’s firing. “Wait ’til my plane takes off,” he instructed Daly, who did the deed.

  The fired research director stops in my office to tell me his story. Heekin had asked him to resign. Shocked and disbelieving, he had gone to Daly for a reprieve. Daly said he was sorry, but he’d given Heekin a free hand and thus could not reverse the decision.

  Aware by this time of a Bernbach-Daly plan to oust Heekin, I profess sympathy and offer help in writing a press release. And I think, Daly, you S.O.B., making every last bit of use of Heekin before announcing that he’s “gotten sick.”

  * * *

  Heekin’s book concluded with the point that “two men cannot run one company.” “He was right about that,” Daly said to me later that year. “And he was right about his other assessments of people. It’s a good book; I’ve got it in my drawer now. The only thing is, he won’t be implementing it—I will.”

  * * *

  An on-the-scene observer, former DDB account man Bill Wardell, related the theater-of-the-absurd episode of Heekin’s firing.

  “When Bernbach and Daly decided to get rid of Heekin, they concocted an offer which essentially was to demote him from president to executive VP in charge of something. Jim was meant to be at a meeting at Stroh’s with Daly and me on the very day this was happening, but he cancelled and went up to Williamstown.

  “[Lawyer] Josh Levine, who is the carrier of all news both good and bad, was delegated to write the letter and send it to Heekin in Williamstown, telling him this is what the agency decided to do. Not only was he not going to get more responsibility blah blah blah but he was in fact going to get less responsibility and what do you think of that.

  “Daly tells me all this in his usual mental state out in Detroit and says it’s going to be really fun and I can’t wait to see his reaction—he thinks he’s going to get more power and we’re firing him.

  “What Daly didn’t know was I’d just been on the phone for two hours with Jim from Williamstown, and Jim told me he was going to accept the job, totally overturning everybody’s plans, and take another run later. Live to fight another day . . . and they think I’m going to walk out, but I’ll trick them, I’m not going to do that.

  “Well, I felt duty-bound to tell Joe this was happening. Joe gets outraged. This is clearly not the plan. And he gets on the horn to Josh to have him change the offer. He says before Heekin can write some statesmanlike letter, I want another letter, registered and all that stuff, telling him we changed our minds and that he’s out of it.

  “Meanwhile, we’re running around telling Stroh Brewery he has the sniffles and can’t make the meeting. It was one of those wonderful days.”

  * * *

  One of Heekin’s most gentlemanly urgings in his brief reign dealt with press relations. Too often in recent years, DDB’s leaders had lashed out when a client left, defensively giving out proprietary information about market shares, etc., to prove the agency had done good work. No other large agency had such bad public manners about client departures.

  Heekin’s point, one I had tried without success to purvey, was that lashing out kept alive longer the news of another agency account loss. And no segment of the industry—advertisers or agencies—felt comfortable with the display of bad manners and with giving away client information. Better by far would be a simple and graceful, “We wish them well in their new relationship.”

  In that respect, Heekin was a man after my professional heart. So it was with incredulity that I picked up the Advertising Age issue of September 2, 1974, and read a front page headline, “Heekin quits as president with a blast at DDB’s execs.”

  Nothing gentlemanly here. Heekin, defending himself, sounded like Daly and Bernbach on departing clients. Worse.

  Among other comments, Heekin flew out at the “impetuous and unstable behavior that has characterized DDB over the past two years, and which I have been unable to prevent.”

  A careful statement on Heekin had been worked out with lawyer Josh Levine, while Bernbach champed at the bit, threatening to phone the trade press and reveal the “truth about Heekin’s stability.” Daly and Levine all but sat on Bernbach, extracting promises that he wouldn’t. That night, from his home, Bernbach called reporters anyway. He never told Daly and Levine, and they never knew. That was press relations at DDB.

  * * *

  The agency’s weekly employment report for the weeks ending 8/30/74 and 9/6/74 listed nine positions filled and 29 “resignations and terminations.” Among the latter was James Heekin, Jr., President, Domestic Oper. Date released—8/31/74.

  14

  William and Mary

  “Historically, Americans have tried to solve their problems by leaving them behind.”—Arthur T. Hadley, The Straw Giant

  On April 22, 1974, Ned Doyle bought lunch in the Algonquin Hotel Rose Room for one of his favorite people, former Doyle Dane Bernbach creative star Mary Wells Lawrence. The following week, Mary took Bill Bernbach to lunch, and offered to buy his agency.

  Bernbach went back to his office and called Neil Austrian’s Wall Street office. Austrian was on a business trip to Seattle. Bernbach reached him there.

  “Can you fly back tonight? I’ve just had an amazing offer from Mary Wells.”

  Austrian flew back, and one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of Doyle Dane Bernbach opened.

  * * *

  “None of it would have happened,” a participant later recalled, “if Bernbach hadn’t been such an insecure person.”

  This time his insecurity about his image was overwhelmed by his insecurity about money, about providing for his family’s future. The obsessive drive “to take care of one’s own” again came to the fore, crowding out worries about legends, and the company he had built, and the people who were part of it.

  The loss of the important Uniroyal account, for which the agency had created the superb “Rain Tire” campaign, had shaken Bernbach badly. Worse, it felt like a pre-tremor to the Big One still to come. Bernbach’s greatest fear was that American Airlines, after a year of threats, would finally pull its account out of DDB, and in the process bring about the collapse of the financially weakened agency.

  Heekin, brought in to reverse the outflow, only brought dissension with Daly, turning every working day into aggravation and misery.

  It seemed sometimes that everything was wrong. So many important clients had left in the last few years. Lever Brothers, Quaker Oats, Warner-Lambert, Whirlpool, Sara Lee, Cracker Jack—the first losing streak in the agency’s history. Why? DDB’s advertising had given Leve
r its first successful new product in years, Close-Up toothpaste. The agency had rebuilt the image and sales of Cracker Jack. Sara Lee still used DDB’s campaign, “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee,” at its new agency. Yet they all left. They’d all had great advertising.

  And now American Airlines was about to leave. Joe Daly assured him American would stay. But Daly always told Bernbach things were great. Daly didn’t realize it, but Bernbach didn’t feel much more confidence in Daly than he’d had in Heekin.

  At the same time, the agency’s investments were coming to grief, one after another. Ross MacLennan, Mac Dane’s successor, had bombed. Bernbach and Daly had felt relief when Dane retired in 1971—”The Obstructionist” would be out of the way, the nay-sayer who threw cold water on every proposal to invest in outside opportunities. To be sure, Dane had proved right about KMS, a tiny company Bernbach and Daly had visited in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In their enthusiasm for the company’s search for fusion energy, they’d proposed that the agency invest a million dollars in KMS. Dane had talked them down to a half-million. And Dane’s was the only voice objecting to bringing in an Italian theatrical company’s production that Dane, with foresight, called “Orlando Fiasco.”

  Still, the agency had money to invest and wanted someone with vision to invest it. MacLennan’s first find was Trade Mart, the Oklahoma discount stores. Busy seeking more acquisitions, MacLennan had failed to keep an eye on Trade Mart or on Snark, a styrofoam sailboat company that once seemed DDB’s most promising acquisition. By 1974, Trade Mart and Snark were rapidly and terrifyingly heading down the drain, hemorrhaging the agency’s profits as they went.

  Few people, in or out of the agency, realized the extent of the damage. Advertising agency stocks, a miniscule category, had sunk almost out of sight in the general Wall Street OPEC-induced slough of despair. Analyst reports on the category issued forth occasionally, usually from the newest kid on the brokerage house block. As for Madison Avenue, its practitioners at the time were still innocently and charmingly focused on advertising, not finance.

  Maybe the agency shouldn’t have trumpeted its policy of seeking “under-marketed properties” and building them up with its marketing skills. What might prospective clients deduce from the agency’s inability to save its own properties from failure?

  All this would be swallowed up, would threaten no longer, in a merger with Wells, Rich, Greene.

  * * *

  It’s hard to imagine an event that would strike Madison Avenue as more unlikely, at that time, than a merger of Doyle Dane Bernbach and Wells, Rich, Greene. As for the step beyond, that the buyer would be Mary and the seller Bernbach, the concept was so outrageous that it had no credence whatsoever, not even after the deal fell through.

  They regularly bad-mouthed each other. Privately, Mary would say that Bernbach was living on an inflated reputation and was lazy. What she had to say publicly made for humiliating copy in Advertising Age—”DDB is yesterday; Wells, Rich, Greene is today.”

  Bernbach had suffered other humiliations at Mary’s hands. As copywriter on the agency’s French Government Tourist account in the 1950s, she and the Bernbachs had traveled together through France, the standard agency indoctrination trip. Evelyn later recalled that at every hotel, Mary took the grandest suite and arranged an ordinary room for the boss and his wife. Bernbach seethed and Evelyn trembled, but they didn’t complain to Mary. Neither could bear confrontation.

  The fact that Mary had achieved greater success than any of Bernbach’s alumni had not, previously, seemed a matter of pride to her former boss. In the privacy of his office Bernbach would speculate, in pre-Lib terms, on the means of Mary’s rapid rise in the industry.

  “She’s a c—,” added Daly, no mincer of words.

  Who could credit their talking merger?

  * * *

  Daly: “Mary told him, ‘Bill, I want to come home,’ and Bill bought it.”

  Bernbach proudly repeated to me, at the time, something else Mary told him: that she knew she would never be what he was to advertising. That she had become fascinated by the business and financial side, and that was where she meant to be tops.

  As the negotiations got under way, Mary took to sending large bouquets of flowers—daily, Evelyn recalled—to the Bernbach apartment in United Nations Plaza.

  Mary wowed them. “She is so smart,” everybody said.

  * * *

  Bernbach, who with his wife owned 266,780 shares of the agency, couldn’t forget the brief period when Doyle Dane Bernbach stock rose above $50 a share, boosting the value of his holdings to a heady $13 million plus. Since then, the shares had tumbled to $9, and his total value to under $2.5 million. What was to prevent the price from dropping through the floor? Mary offered $17 per share in a leveraged buy-out. That would mean $4.5 million to the Bernbachs, far below the bird-in-the-bush old high, but at least firmly in hand. Secondly, and irresistibly, she offered Bernbach a 10-year contract that would continue to be paid to Evelyn in the event of his death. All the nagging worries about his family’s security would end.

  He told Doyle in confidence that “things were afoot” that he could not disclose, but that he ought not sell off any more of his agency shares. Doyle didn’t tell Bernbach that Mary called him frequently, and that he had suggested that she insist on the title Chief Executive Officer of the merged agency.

  Doyle: “I told her, that way nobody can ever touch you.”

  “Well, that will gum up the deal,” said one of the negotiators, who knew Bernbach well. Bernbach would never accept an organization chart that put Mary over him. Even Mary had her doubts. Doyle remembered her asking him to call Bernbach and float the idea. But Doyle couldn’t, without revealing his close contacts with Mary. He confidently asserted that a call from Mary herself would secure Bernbach’s agreement.

  And indeed, Bernbach soon after astonished his negotiators by informing them that Mary would be CEO and that was fine with him. Clearly, the only thing he wanted was Out.

  * * *

  Neil Austrian and Mike Herman, brainy young partners in a small Wall Street investment banking firm, looked at the numbers and shook their heads. They’d been retained by Doyle Dane Bernbach a year or so earlier, to screen acquisition proposals and prevent further disasters. They had recommended against every proposal since, either because the people were wrong, or because they “couldn’t get comfortable with the agency’s strategy—what the fit was and why,” Austrian said later.

  They had no ax to grind; they exuded financial brilliance and honesty, and Austrian was a nephew by marriage of Bernbach’s brother. Bernbach trusted him profoundly. But he didn’t want to believe Austrian’s assessment of Mary’s proposal. Austrian and Herman understood the intricacies of a leveraged buy-out as no one in the agency did, and they thought this one was “not financeable.”

  “Meaning,” Austrian explained later, “Mary was going to try to do it with debt. Given all the problems Doyle Dane Bernbach was perceived to be having—in terms of losing business, a boat company losing millions of dollars a year, a discount store operation that was heading for bankruptcy—it would be a very, very tough deal to finance.”

  They did believe that the agency could survive the loss of American Airlines, “and that Bill himself could come out financially far better off than what Mary had offered at the time. And we recommended against it, on a pure financial basis, not understanding, quite honestly, then, all the emotional wrenching that you go through, in terms of your own ego, your own pride, and the public relations impact on an agency when you lose an account like that.”

  Bernbach listened to them, but they didn’t say what he wanted to hear. Instead, the bankers and lawyers began the business of quietly working out terms for the takeover. Within the agency, only Daly and MacLennan were taken into Bernbach’s confidence in the earliest stages of negotiations.

  Jim Heekin remained in the dark. He went right on working on ways to regain Bernbach’s faith in him. When the talks seemed at an
end (though they were not), Heekin sent a note to Mary, expressing his regret that her plan hadn’t worked. It had been “a bold stroke,” and there were few enough bold strokes in this business. Mary responded by sending Heekin a small woven silver basket filled with candy kisses, and a handwritten card: “Dear Jim. Thank you for your lovely note. Mary.”

  “She is so smart,” said Heekin.

  Gentleman Jim. His exclusion from the talks should have told him he’d be the first to walk the plank in a merger. At that point, he was still hoping for a chance to fight another day.

  * * *

  As the talks progressed, some department heads, sworn to secrecy, began meetings with Mary and her people, working out details of the coming combination. The agency’s international head brought two glasses and a bottle of Dom Perignon to his meeting with Mary. (He walked the plank when the deal failed and Heekin’s “book” was implemented.)

  On the highest level, the talks addressed the great account conflicts a combination would produce. Mary had TWA; DDB had, though shakily, American Airlines. Mary had Sun Oil; DDB had Mobil Oil, a strong relationship.