Bernbach understood in his head that every success achieved by his grown-and-gone children was a tribute to his teaching and nurturing. But in his gut he felt only personal rejection.
* * *
One last look now at the story of Bernbach and his parents. The rift remained in the years after Bill’s request for help, despite occasional attempts by his siblings to bring them together.
On the morning after John’s birth in 1944, Bill’s older brother Harry went to his parents’ apartment on the Grand Concourse.
“Come on, Pa,” said Harry to Jacob, “I’m going to take you to see your grandson.” Jacob, anxious and hopeful, got dressed to go with Harry.
Rebecca threw herself across the door. “If you go, I’ll die,” she told Jacob. He paused, and did what he’d always done to keep the peace. He gave way to Rebecca’s demands. He shook his head sadly, and told Harry that he couldn’t go. “What can I do?” he pleaded.
Harry and his wife Helen remained close to Bill and Evelyn. Sister Minna, who never married, made the trip to Bay Ridge often to visit Bill and Evelyn. Bill saw his brother Graham, though less often. But his parents, not at all, until his father’s final illness.
In 1953, Jacob, a heavy smoker, lay dying of larynx cancer. Bill put aside his anger and went to the hospital for what would be a death-bed reconciliation. Evelyn accompanied Bill, trembling with the memory of her last meeting with Jacob—the awful night in 1938 when Harry and Helen invited them all to dinner, and Jacob wouldn’t speak to her. But Evelyn’s conciliatory mother had counseled her that a wife’s place is by her husband’s side at such times. That meant, even more terrifying, going to the Grand Concourse apartment after the funeral. Diffidently, Evelyn tried to help in the kitchen. Each time she did, Rebecca would grab whatever Evelyn had picked up and scream at her, presumably (Evelyn thought) something to do with the kosherness of her household. That ended their contact, until the mother’s final years, when she was quite senile, and Evelyn arranged for her sons to see their grandmother for the first time.
Soon after Jacob died, Rebecca went into a nursing home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Bill and Harry paid the bills until she died.
John Bernbach remembered the story of his father’s parents thus:
“I never met my grandfather. Never. I wasn’t allowed to, basically. My father’s mother I met, but by the time I met her she was senile. I’m sure that’s the only reason I was allowed to meet her. So I have really no knowledge of that part of my family. I did get to know my cousins, and I know them now, and my aunt and uncles, all of whom have died as well. But the fact of the matter is, that was not part of my growing up. And I must tell you that any knowledge that I do have, any contact I had with them, was due to my mother, who forced that to happen. She didn’t think it was right that my father should cut off his family.”
He cut them off?
“Absolutely. Because of the difficulties they had. He just didn’t want to have anything to do with his parents.”
* * *
Perhaps his colleagues didn’t know the origins of Bernbach’s intense response to the departure of a “child,” but they’d witnessed enough of his anger and depression to conclude that he wouldn’t want any defectors at his 65th birthday celebration in August, 1976. Instead, he accepted at once a proposal to bring together his creative offspring, past and present, for the event. Presumably he realized that the gathering would be a widely-reported homage, a gala tribute to his influence in the world of advertising.
The timing was perfect. Of the good years in the ’70s, none was happier than 1976. The triumvirate had mended many of the agency’s broken fences through 1975. Only one client departed in the whole of that year—Madison Laboratories—and that because of a product conflict. The barren new business streak had ended with the arrival of CBS Broadcast Group, the Shaeffer Pen company, Diamond/Sunsweet and Intergold. Gallagher had reported to the Board that he was “extremely optimistic about prospects for new business in the immediate future.” Importantly, the new willingness to listen to their requests, the on-time work, the back-up campaigns, the improved service departments, had altered client attitudes to the agency. They were now “extremely satisfied” with DDB’s services.
The acquisition blunders of the past had been buried in 1975. Expenses had been cut in a significant staff reduction. (“Couldn’t you put on somebody I don’t know?” Bernbach had asked Marv Honig, in a jokingly-ethnic rising inflection, when he saw a list of creatives about to be axed.)
In March, 1976, the agency had moved to 437 Madison Avenue. Nothing pleased Bernbach more than the awe visitors expressed when they entered the marble-and-glass executive floor.
“Boy, this is an impressive place,” enthused Paul Rand, the famed designer and one-time Bernbach mentor, invited up after years without contact. (Bernbach would ask him to put in a good word for DDB with IBM, a long-time Rand client. Rand did.)
“And Bernbach said to me,” Rand later recalled, “`I designed it.’ I mean, this is exactly what this guy said to me.”
To paraphrase Honig, “If anyone knows Bill, that’s the way he would say that he was happy with the offices.”
* * *
The devastating uncertainties—about the agency, about his own financial security—had been put to rout. From the minutes of the September 12, 1975, Board minutes:
“The Chairman [Daly] said the Board should consider the fact that William Bernbach has reached the age of sixty-four and will come within the scope of the retirement policy of the Corporation next year. He stated that in his opinion, Mr. Bernbach’s contribution to the Corporation is and has been and continues to be unique, and that his continued active participation is and will be extremely important to the Corporation.
“The Chairman went on to say that he was still very much in favor of the Corporation’s retirement policy and would even go on to state that if he, the Chairman, requested a long-term contract when he was sixty-four or sixty-five years of age, the Board should not grant him one, However, he felt that Mr. Bernbach represented a very unusual and unique situation and that an exception should be made in his case.”
Perhaps Daly’s gratuitous comments on the retirement policy vis-a-vis his own future were meant to stroke Doyle and Dane, who continued as board members, and who may have felt some annoyance at the way the rules always applied to them, and always were bent for Bernbach.
Daly swore he meant what he said. Ironically, when events led to his being offered a five-year contract as he approached his 65th birthday, he grabbed it.
“I’d said, `When I’m 65 I want to get out of here,’ he reflected later, “But now I’m 65 and I don’t have a home life anymore. And what did I want? A five-year contract, and I’ll give up the CEO. Bill gave up the CEO to me when he was 65, and he stayed on.”
Bill and Joe. Competitive to the end.
* * *
Bernbach’s 10-year contract was drawn up in October 1975 and was kept under wraps until August 1976, when it became the lead paragraph in a press release that only secondarily noted Daly’s ascension to CEO. So Bernbach remained king. Officially, chairman of the executive committee. More importantly, as he laughingly pointed out, “owner.”
What better time to show his “children,” including the ones who’d left, how splendidly things had turned out for him? Gallagher’s embarrassing fall hadn’t yet happened, nor had Bernbach’s disenchantment with Honig begun to fester. The perfect moment to invite the kids and take them through the marble-and-glass palace, let them see that the glories weren’t all in the past. (But only the past would become legend. “The Australian aborigines have in their lore a kind of time called The Dream Time, when there was heaven on earth,” Tony Morgan, executive VP of TBWA Advertising, remarked on a creative panel in 1989, “And their ancestors lived in it. I think for us in advertising, The Dream Time, whether we were there or not, is Doyle Dane Bernbach in the 1960s.”)
* * *
Bernbach, as fath
er, encouraged and developed the talents of his creatives, took credit for many of their accomplishments, felt devastated when they left him, and resented any implication of their outdoing him.
Ted Factor couldn’t resist getting under Bernbach’s skin by extravagantly praising Phyllis Robinson’s copy. “I’d talk about how great Phyllis’ work was on, say, Max Factor Pink lipsticks.” Robinson wrote much of the body copy on the ads attributed to Bernbach. “Invariably, Bill would rejoin with, ‘Do you know where Phyllis was when I found her?’” [In Grey’s promotion department, that’s where.] The impish Factor had “four or five statements with which I could pick away at Bill’s ego, and I knew exactly what his response would be every time.”
* * *
In proposing the celebration, I’d stumbled on one of the little secrets his colleagues kept close about Bernbach—his singular unforgivingness of those who’d left him. Once he agreed to the event, I stumbled on something that surprised me even more, his “children’s” attitude towards him.
I wanted anecdotes for the occasion. Lively little stories from the creatives on lessons they’d learned from Bernbach. Collected, they’d provide a treasure for Bernbach, and wonderful material for publicity.
A memo asking creatives for such memories elicited one or two responses. Telephone follow-ups produced a fair return from former DDBers, nothing from working DDBers. What was going on? I walked into every occupied creative office and asked for anecdotes.
“Don’t you know there are no anecdotes about Bill?” an old-hand copywriter stated.
“I don’t wish to,” said an art director, flatly.
“You wouldn’t want what I have to say,” said an associate creative director.
“Don’t you know,” a DDB veteran explained, “the creatives have always had a love/hate relationship with Bill.” No, I didn’t, at that stage, know.
My reaction was outrage. I turned scold, berating them for lack of gratitude to the man who taught the world the difference between advertising and great advertising. The man who’d made their best work possible. The man who’d elevated creatives to the top of the profession.
They began to come through.
* * *
All was forgiven in the love fest that was Bernbach’s 65th birthday party. Embraces greeted the prodigals, eyes teared over, every trace of doubt and anger and resentment melted in the excitement of shared memories, sharing the historic celebration. And underlying every moment, the pride and wonder and gratitude for having lived in The Dream Time, when there was heaven on earth.
Bernbach stood glowing before them, and told what was in his heart: “I look around and I think, what a helluvan agency we could have.”
* * *
On the block-long walls of the executive floor were pinned 22 anecdotes, blown up and mounted on large styrofoam boards. Bernbach flushed with pleasure as he read them. Some related funny inside jokes. Ken Duskin, former DDB art director, told a favorite agency tale of how he came a-cropper for his extravagant expense accounts:
“Everything I know about advertising (if I know anything at all) I learned from Bill. But the one thing I learned from him that stands out most in my mind is never to order Chateau Lafitte Rothschild wine when he was picking up the check.”
Some were eye-witness accounts of well-known episodes, such as this from another former DDB art director, Len Sirowitz:
“Since this is a birthday party, I have a birthday anecdote to tell, the birthday of a DDB blue chip client.
“My memory takes me back to the middle ’60s when I had the honor of attending the first orientation meeting with Bill at a brand new client, Mobil.
“A VP on the client side was speaking rather proudly about their newly proposed logo design commemorating the company’s 100th birthday. He said, with starry-eyed pride, ‘Just look at that. It will be displayed on gas stations all over America. Just look at that red O. Right in the center, it will say 1866-1966. Isn’t that wonderful. Do you know what that means?’
“At that point, Bill stood up and, with cool aplomb, said to his newest client, ‘IT MEANS YOU JUST DIED!’
“So what did I learn from all this? I learned, if you’re Bill Bernbach, you can get away with anything.”
Some illustrated how Bernbach connected the small things in life with the art of persuasion. When he suggested placing the tag in the middle as well as the end of a commercial, he told a surprised copywriter, Helen Miller, “Something that’s almost like a mistake is what gets a person’s attention.
“For instance, when my boys were little, they would come into the bathroom each morning to watch me shave. Now, I had one pair of shorts that had a tear in them, which my wife had mended. I wore those shorts maybe one day out of the seven in a week.
“One day when I was wearing them, my older boy said, ‘Daddy, why do you always wear those shorts?’ People remember the mend. The rough spot when everything else is smooth.”
One anecdote illuminated how Bernbach’s concern about “nice” affected the agency’s advertising. It centered on a Sony campaign that showed Sonys turning up in news-making real-life situations, such as the ’72 Democratic convention. About that time, Life magazine ran a photo of chess genius Bobby Fischer sprawled in his Reykjavik hotel room with a chess board and his Sony radio.
Copywriter Lore Parker described what happened.
“Bobby Fischer—the super-genius media star of the moment! In ten minutes, the picture became a Sony ad. Fischer’s agency said yes. Life said yes. Bill Bernbach said no.
“No!
“’I think it’s wrong,’ said Bill, ‘to work with someone so selfish and ill-mannered— a man [whose bad manners are] making this country look bad in the eyes of the world.’”
Parker “hated Bill for two whole days . . . and then I tried in vain to think of a single exploitative or morally questionable ad that had ever come out of DDB.
“How old-fashioned,” she concluded. “How square. How wonderful.”
All the anecdotal offerings had been set in type, save for one, the one that meant the most to Bernbach. Three one-sentence paragraphs, handwritten by Bob Gage:
“I brought my talent to Bill.
“He recognized it, educated it and inspired it.
“He put the feather in my cap.”
Account Gains and Losses, 1979-81
In:
Allied Chemical
American Greetings Corp.
Borden
Burpee seeds
C&C Cola
Chanel
Citibank
Diner’s Club
Gagliardi Brothers
IBM Corporate
IBM Office Products
Paine Webber
Pan Am
Sherwin-Williams stores
Universal Pictures
Weight Watchers
Out:
American Airlines
Avianca
Avis Rent-a-Car (second time)
Diamond-Sunsweet
Levy’s bread
Ponderosa
Publishers Clearing House
Standard Brands (Blue Bonnet)
Twentieth-Century Fox
Wrangler jeans
17
The Guy from Compton
“Nice guys finish last.”—Leo Durocher
Inside and outside, the perception grew stronger through 1976 and 1977 that Doyle Dane Bernbach had got it back together. Early in 1977, the editors of anny gave their “1976 Hottest Shop award” in the above-$75 million category to DDB. Their reasons:
“Last year, DDB stayed busy on all fronts, not the least of which was in the billings area (up $78,929,000). Aided by prestigious new account gains, the shop also received further testimony of its abilities by multi-million-dollar added assignments from many existing clients. Additionally, its well-executed media purchases coupled with a direct mail agency acquisition proved to many that this granddaddy of creative shops had matured into a well-run business organiza
tion.”
If “well-run business organization” seemed slightly extravagant to some sharp-eyed insiders, their observations were swamped in the prevailing excitement of new business, new products, new campaigns.
Neil Austrian’s financial brilliance led the agency to record high income and earnings in 1976, 1977, 1978. Wall Street analysts couldn’t issue enthusiastic “buy” reports fast enough. In 1978, the stock split 3-for-2. (And skipping just slightly ahead, to indicate how much Wall Street knows, Joe Daly won the Wall Street Transcript award in 1980 for “Best Chief Executive in the Advertising Industry,” based on a poll of ad industry analysts. Daly won again in 1982, this time jointly with Austrian, making him the first ad executive to win the honor twice.)
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