Mary hadn’t yet succeeded in raising the money, financiers having grasped the magnitude of the Trade Mart and Snark fiascos, when the advertising news columnists for both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, Philip Dougherty and George Lazarus, called to say they knew about the talks and would publish what they had unless the agency could convince them that their sources were wrong.
How would American Airlines react to that piece of news? AA’s executives had not, of course, been told of the talks. A major point of the exercise was Bernbach’s wish to get out from under the sword the airline held over the agency’s head. Given the tensions of the past year, AA might well surmise that DDB had been plotting to beat the airline to the kill.
If Mary couldn’t raise the money, Doyle Dane Bernbach would be dead with AA—unless the agency could convince its client that reports of merger talks were greatly exaggerated, that the reality was far less than met the eye.
That afternoon, June 6, a legalistic statement was quickly issued, in a genre not yet familiar to the advertising trade press. The chairmen of the two agencies, Bernbach and Mary, “announced today that the agencies have been holding talks concerning a possible combination of the two advertising agencies. The talks have not been fruitful and have been discontinued.”
Legally, technically, the statement was true. What remained under wraps (including from me, although I was now handling press relations on the story) was that Mary had until June 21 to raise the money.
Two very strange weeks followed.
* * *
Dougherty’s June 7 column, headlined “Doyle-Wells Deal Is Reported Off,” described the original rumor as “unbelievable,” and noted that “even the discussion of ‘the possibility of combining the two advertising agencies’ will boggle most minds in the business.”
That disbelief, inside and outside the agency, could be counted on to help stamp out the fires of the story. I spoke my part with complete conviction, sure in my heart that my agency would never merge, unaware then of the fears and insecurities that bred the episode, un-briefed on the depth and breadth of the talks, and uninformed of the fact that the two agencies might yet combine.
The latter point, at least, came clear when Bernbach asked me to add the words “for the moment” to a follow-up statement about the discontinuance of the talks. He quickly accepted my warning that such words would flag the press that “the melody lingered on.” He saw at once that they had flagged me. He understood that I now understood. Something changed in our relationship—perhaps for the truer.
Most of the trade press took our word and let up on the story. Then we heard from Advertising Age reporter Bob Donath. He had a quote, he said, from a WRG client, who had been reassured that if there was a merger, his account would be kept and the conflicting one jettisoned.
“It has to be TWA,” Bernbach and the agency lawyer agreed.
“Maybe it’s Sun Oil,” I offered.
“No, it’s not Sun Oil,” responded Bernbach. That clarified the plan on the second large client conflict.
If the TWA quote ran, American Airlines would surely leave his agency, said Bernbach. Fred Danzig, Advertising Age’s editor, assured me there was no way the TWA comment would not run—”because uppermost in the story about the merger talks is the problem of client conflicts.”
Through the difficult hours that followed—which included calls to Mary about whether she had in fact given such assurance to TWA (she said she hadn’t), and whether she would call Ad Age to say she hadn’t (she wouldn’t, but she’d be happy to call Al Casey of American Airlines and tell him, an offer Bernbach quickly refused)—Bernbach reacted as Bernbach often did in crises. Quiet agitation, deep and rapid breathing, set jaw, flaring nostrils, and in his eyes, his incredibly blue eyes, a look of having been betrayed by life, by fate. He could stir in those around him profound feelings of protectiveness.
We went to work and hammered out a statement to the press that we hoped would pacify American Airlines:
“Since the discussions were terminated at an early stage, there was no reason to talk to or reassure any of our clients. The talks just had not advanced to the point where client conflicts were resolved.”
* * *
Neil Austrian proved right; Mary’s plan was not financeable. He urged Bernbach not to worry; if it was the 10-year contract he so badly wanted, he should ask Doyle Dane Bernbach for one. Surely they’d give it to him. (They did.) As for mergers, there were other prospects, Austrian advised. He’d talk to Needham, Harper in Chicago—that could be a good fit. Austrian was right about that, if prematurely. And Bernbach’s stock, at a low, could in time prove far more valuable than Mary’s four million dollar plus offer. Austrian was right about that, too.
A few days after the proposed deal broke up, Austrian had a visitor, who arrived without having called ahead, at his investment firm office at Fifth Avenue and 54th Street. A man named Ned Doyle, announced Austrian’s secretary. The two men had never met.
Doyle entered, and stood studying Austrian, who stood a head taller than Doyle. Like Doyle, Austrian had been a football star in college, and like Doyle, he was a jock with a brain.
“So you’re the guy who keeps saying no to all the deals we want to do,” Doyle opened, dead-pan. Austrian knew he was going to love this guy.
“Well if you’re so goddamn smart, why don’t you come work for us?” pressed Doyle. Austrian replied that he’d rather stay in investment banking than move into advertising. But Bernbach was pressing him too, and before summer’s end, the founders had convinced Austrian that the opportunity to turn Doyle Dane Bernbach around could bring him fortune, fame, and a helluva lot of fun.
* * *
American Airlines never did leave Doyle Dane Bernbach. In 1981, during another crisis on the account, an angry Bernbach demonstrated his still-powerful hold on the industry by signing up the Pan-American account and dumping American faster than the airline could say, “Bozell & Jacobs,” the agency slated to compete with DDB in a creative shoot-out. But that’s another story, with yet another unhappy ending. We’ll get to that.
* * *
On Monday, June 3, 1974, Doyle Dane Bernbach celebrated the 25th anniversary of its founding with an exuberant party on a Hudson Dayliner. Its climax was a musical, written and performed by DDBers—a funny and touching and rousing tribute to the agency. The troops leapt to their feet at the end, cheering and singing along, in love with DDB and its founders and everything they represented, professionally and ethically. Ned Doyle, Mac Dane and Joe Daly laughed and cheered with the rest of the staff. Bernbach sat quietly, somewhere between grim and pensive. Why did the joyful songs have such an unexpected effect on Bernbach, and on no one else? Later, I would wonder if he had felt pain, hearing a thousand DDBers celebrating the agency he was in the process of trying to sell off.
15
Once More, from the Top
“Pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and start all over again.”
—Popular song
“I bequeath my liver to ‘21,’” intoned Tom Gallagher, settling down to draw up a new will, after a liquid lunch at that Mecca of achievers.
“Another in the line of drunken Irish presidents of DDB,” sighed more than one agency staffer.
“Joe, your agency can afford only one drunk,” said a client to Daly, “and you were there first.”
Welcome to the post-Heekin era at Doyle Dane Bernbach.
* * *
It should have been wonderful, and for several years it was. Heekin had vanished, the awful merger story had dissolved, American Airlines had settled down with a new DDB campaign (“Doing what we do best”), and a new management team had been installed. Tom Gallagher, president, worldwide. Neil Austrian, executive vice president, chief financial officer, chief administrative officer. Marvin Honig, executive vice president, creative director.
Not that the powerful old managers had faded into the sunset, or had “gotten sick.” Bernbach remained CEO worldwide.
Daly kept his old title, chairman of the board. The press release said his domain had been expanded from domestic to cover worldwide responsibilities. Whatever that signified.
In truth, Gallagher was meant to be over Daly.
“When Daly left for England to tell Gallagher he had the job,” Ned Doyle recounted, “I rehearsed him three times before he left. I said, ‘Joe, I want you to repeat what you’re going to say: This guy is the boss, and you are going to take orders from him.’ Someone had to run the place, and Joe said he didn’t want to. So we sought Gallagher out.
“Now I’ll guarantee you that Joe never told that to Gallagher. Because when Gallagher came over, Daly did everything to cut his nuts out. He wouldn’t let him in on Polaroid; he wouldn’t let him in on Mobil; he tried to keep him away from Volkswagen. And even when we got Bayer Aspirin, Daly took that over rather than give it to Tom. He made the guy helpless. (Pause) Now then of course Gallagher liked the liquor.”
The chicken-or-the-egg question around the agency became, did Daly keep the power accounts in his own grasp because Gallagher drank? Or did Gallagher drown his woes because Daly wouldn’t give him a room in the castle?
Bob Levenson later commented that all the men who followed Daly as president, drinkers and non-drinkers alike, had in common that “they were presidents of Doyle Dane Bernbach except for American Airlines, Volkswagen, Polaroid and Mobil. And being president of Stroh beer and Scott fertilizers is not really the job that any of them thought they were going to get. The self-destruct seeds were there a long time ago. There was no way in the world, except for death and old age . . . maybe . . . that would allow for letting go of the power base.”
* * *
Tom Gallagher was widely known in England, where he was an international rugby star. A large man of 45, with the sad/alert look of a champion basset hound, the soul of a poet, and the temper and strength of a bull. And his voice! Ah, his voice. Honey-gravel bass, enchantingly Irish. He was charismatic and contradictory; erudite, eloquent and witty, but also politically innocent, unpredictable and self-destructive. In a place where people with big titles too often manifested their littleness, Gallagher loomed refreshingly larger than life. He could have made the difference, said DDBers. If only. . . .
Here was a man who “lives and dies the business,” in a key phrase from a confidential report on Gallagher. Ross MacLennan sent the report to Daly, Bernbach, Doyle and Ted Factor—the search team—on July 2, 1974. By then Mary Wells had failed to raise the money for the takeover. The next move, dumping Heekin, required a replacement president.
Several of the agency’s account managers politicked for higher office, confident of their ability to be president. They felt, and said, that going outside to fill top positions demonstrated DDB’s lack of management depth and preparation for succession. Alas, none of the politickers had stature or the support of the troops. Not a rabbit in the lot.
On the other hand, outsiders of presumed stature had brought only grief to the agency.
Someone floated Gallagher’s name, and things fell into place for the search team, except for Factor, who objected to choosing “from a field of one.”
Gallagher did have a double advantage. He would count as an insider, for he ran the agency’s London office, having been acquired with the Gallagher/Smail agency three years earlier. Since then, he’d built a strong new business record. Good, very good. Yet, being overseas, he had the advantage of distance, the boon of underexposure. The deficiencies of the politicking account managers were known all too well. Not Gallagher’s. Daly and Bernbach knew him chiefly from international meetings, where he reveled in the night life of the host city, but . . . everyone did, if less indefatigably. And throw in his fame as a jock. Quite irresistible.
Still, after the haste and burn of the Lubow, MacLennan and Heekin hirings, the search team needed a bit of independent reassurance. MacLennan attributed his confidential report, anonymously, to “a source.” British? American? Insider? Outsider? Client? Journalist? Never mind, it supported the team’s hopes.
The report ran five paragraphs. The first two recounted Gallagher’s agency background, as a key account man and top new business getter for Norman, Craig & Kummel, and then for Gallagher/Smail. The final three paragraphs are worth perusing in light of the aftermath.
“Even in those days, when in his early 30s [working for NC&K-London), Tom tended to operate at the top level of client companies. He was well known as an international rugby player and, of course, did not hesitate to capitalize on this. However, his success was not at the ‘old boy’ network level but among the leading marketing managers. He was and is able to get to people high up in a company and to convince the prospect of his willingness to give a great deal of his agency’s and his personal time and attention.
“He apparently lives and dies the business. He is meticulous about details yet willing to delegate a great deal of responsibility. Creative people like working with him because he gives them a clear sense of direction—what can meet the marketing need and can be sold to the client—and avoids directions which might prove to be a waste of time. He worked here in New York, for NCK, for a little less than a year, on the Colgate account.
“The negatives are he spends a great deal of time and money living with and entertaining his clients. While generous in this regard, the money is spent on clients and not necessarily on himself. Tom can be stiff-necked, stubborn, and quite rough on people at times, but most apologetic after one of his ‘rows.’”
Nothing about excessive drinking.
“Nobody in New York knew,” Neil Austrian said a dozen years later.
But perhaps it wasn’t even so. Perhaps the situation exacerbated the condition? Austrian thought the question over.
“Bill Bernbach told me that he thought, in hindsight, Tom should have been a lot tougher coming in, and demanded all the accounts, and maybe the title CEO before he took the job. Not let the accounts stay with Joe. Maybe the board should have insisted on that. I didn’t know from nothing. I was just the new kid coming in.”
The board didn’t insist. A participant remembers Bernbach saying at the time, “I couldn’t do that to Joe.”
* * *
Why not? Austrian responds that Bernbach was “an extraordinarily loyal person,” and so he stuck with Daly, as he’d stuck with Doyle.
“Loyalty was really important to him,” John Bernbach affirmed. “That’s something he taught us, the importance of loyalty. If you’re associated with something, you defend it, you protect it. Even if you know it’s wrong, you deal with the problem privately, but as far as the outside world is concerned, it’s a united front. That’s the way he was, and he drummed that into us as kids growing up.”
Ned Doyle was the risk taker who put Doyle Dane Bernbach together. Daly had helped to build it bigger than Doyle had ever envisioned. Bernbach bitched about each to the other, but somehow left each feeling that he remained in Bernbach’s favor—at least most of the time.
“Ned was a cross to bear,” Paul Bernbach remarked, years later.
And Daly? Well, here is what Bernbach once said, in respect to all his presidents: “Imagine what I could have done if I’d had Jock Elliott.”
Elliott, the man most responsible for the superb management of Ogilvy—the ultimate rabbit of Bernbach’s dreams.
* * *
Daly saw Bernbach’s behavior to Doyle less as loyalty than as an inexplicable inability to “stand up” to the older man. Certainly it had nothing to do with fear of losing any business, for Doyle controlled none, and believed as a matter of principle that no individual should. Daly believed otherwise, as we have seen.
Gallagher arrived in New York in 1974, just a year after Bernbach’s damaging encounter with Polaroid’s Dr. Land. The memory still burned. This was hardly the moment to press Daly to relinquish his death grip on Polaroid.
Daly didn’t then, or any time after, feel a single compunction about refusing to let other presidents near his accounts.
“When I did, they fucked ’em up,” said he simply, when the tumult died.
And that’s possible. But the problem, as Neil Austrian mused after the mega-merger, was that “the account group looked at Joe as their leader. And the senior level of account management believed that the way you succeed at DDB is you lock in your own account. Don’t worry about the agency; worry about yourself. A terrible way to run a business.
“Maybe way back, the risk [of Daly walking] should have been taken. And you takes what you gets. Because to live under the gun like that forever was a terrible, terrible way to run a business. It permeates the agency. We tried for a long while to break that, to make it Our Client, One Agency, and it’s very tough.
“Joe played games with Tom on that when Tom came in. This is mine, this is yours. It should have been ours.”
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