Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  Account manager Marty Kreston remembered it as a day when “nobody was leveling with anyone else.”

  Wardell thought everyone had “called a spade a spade and left feeling very good.”

  Arie Kopelman recalled its being “out of control.”

  Bob Gage couldn’t remember “what it was about.”

  Neil Austrian said his only memory of the day was a phone call from an associate in a drilling investment reporting that they’d struck oil.

  Roy Grace believed the meeting was “a public hanging of Paulson staged by Neil.”

  Even consensus has its Rashomon aspects.

  * * *

  Paulson was flabbergasted by the meeting and its outcome. “Discussions, discussions, discussions about what do we want DDB to be. When I was hired, I thought they’d already decided what they wanted to be. Bill and Joe and Neil said they wanted to retain the kinds of sophisticated companies they’d lost in the past. It was that simple.

  “Bernbach realized, whether just from a financial standpoint or otherwise, unless DDB could compete and retain those kinds of clients, the agency couldn’t grow with the other big agencies, the Ogilvys and the Young & Rubicams. Bill told me he no longer wanted the agency to have only a creative reputation. He wanted to maintain that reputation and importance, but he recognized that you have to have more than that.

  “What happened was, I’d say to Joe Daly and Neil, ‘I’m going to replace this person; we’re going to get account people who know what the hell they’re talking about. Do you support that?’ ‘Yes we do.’ Then came the politicking, and the account guys who felt threatened began to say, ‘This isn’t the right thing for DDB. These new guys don’t know advertising—they’re MBAs.’ And all of a sudden Neil started talking about too much emphasis on MBAs. And the creative people complaining that the creative product would be destroyed, and the unwillingness to work on package goods accounts.

  “So here the organization says they want to do this, and meanwhile you’ve got one department that says, ‘We’re not going to do it,’ and raising hell and sabotaging the operation.

  “How can somebody let that happen? You hire somebody to do something and then it starts to go to hell. The guy with the title of CEO is the guy who has to put that to rest. And that was Joe Daly at the time.”

  Daly. He’d grown more bleary-eyed and titular with the years, keeping late night hours with a young stewardess who’d become his constant companion. Austrian made the decisions, though it wasn’t clear how long he’d hold them. Neither of the two leaders, in all likelihood, could have worked out an amicable solution to this War of the Roses.

  “What Paulson hated was irresponsible creative, and that’s what he labeled Marvin,” observed Bill Wardell. “What Marvin hated was personality-less rules that hampered the creative process, and that was labeled Paulson.

  “Creative people like information, like good briefings,” Wardell continued. “They’re sitting there with their reputations on the line. Rather than make up ads out of whole cloth, they’d much rather have something real. None of that is incompatible with creative brilliance. It’s supportive of it. But we didn’t have anyone who could sell the agency on the proper value of research. It was served up in a goddamn box called Procter & Gamble/Paul Paulson, the antithesis of DDB, and it never got off the ground.

  “So those two people, Honig and Paulson, became labels, and then with their personality problems came to stand for the black-and-white issue. So petty. A non-issue, lying on the table, that everybody has labeled and caused to become a conflict.”

  * * *

  “Everybody says they want creative,” sighed Paulson. “The question is, what’s your idea of creativity? We said, we know what creativity is, and that’s what we’re going to deliver.

  “The client says, I want creativity, but nobody asks him what he means by that. An IBM thinks one thing, P&G another. The Japanese think that if it’s funny it’s creative. You go to P&G or General Foods or General Mills, they take their checklist out. They say, does it have the right selling idea? does it demonstrate the product? will it break through the clutter? That’s their idea of creative. Polaroid’s idea is a celebrity. Stroh’s is: understanding the beer drinker’s psyche, does our advertising look like what the beer drinker likes to identify with.

  “DDB commercials had clever ideas, well-produced, from an artistic point of view well done, clever, cast right, visually interesting, well-written. From a dramatic standpoint, terrific. From a selling point, they could be terrific, they could be disastrous.

  “The old-timers who started with Bill knew what a selling idea was. That’s how they built the agency. They really knew how to sell. The generation that followed were caught up with clever and different as their criteria for great advertising, and that was the world of difference.”

  * * *

  The off-campus meeting wasn’t quite “the same old bullshit.” The P&G decision made it different. Roy Grace made clear how much he didn’t want P&G in the agency. Austrian “had some issues about whether we should continue to invest against P&G,” recalled Paulson. And, he added, financial chief Bob Pfundstein “had pretty well concluded that we were not going to make money on P&G and maybe those kinds of accounts weren’t right for us anyway. So we were starting to make decisions about what kinds of clients we wanted. And at that board meeting we were cutting off a major portion of our market potential by that attitude towards the P&G kind of accounts.

  “And if that was the attitude of the agency, then the agency sure as hell didn’t need me,” concluded Paulson, “because that’s the kind of business I was going after, and the kinds of people I was bringing in.”

  Three weeks after the meeting, Paulson resigned, leaving behind a sadly-fragmented Doyle Dane Bernbach.

  20

  Passages

  “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” – William Saroyan

  It never was easy for Bernbach’s associates to watch their words, monitor their expressions, feign belief where they felt doubt. Deference to the sensitivities of leaders exists in every sphere—business, government, the arts, academia. But that expectation seemed uniquely hard at Doyle Dane Bernbach. For it went entirely against the grain of philosophy and corporate culture espoused by Bernbach himself.

  Doyle Dane Bernbach radiated the joy of creating advertising that was open, honest, never boastful, with a winning touch of self-deprecation, as in “It’s ugly, but it gets you there.”

  Truth was an article of faith, a cornerstone of the agency philosophy. One often saw reprints of the house ad that the agency created from the words of its first client: “I got a great gimmick. Let’s tell the truth.”—N. M. Ohrbach.

  Clients who wanted advertising that, figuratively, put their products on pedestals were teased with literal interpretations. Viz. the ad headlined “For six years now, the Chairman of Chivas Regal has been pleading for this ad,” and illustrated by a Chivas bottle atop a massive Ionic pedestal.

  Advertisers who balked at poking fun at themselves were chided by Bernbach. What if Volkswagen had rejected the “Lemon” ad, or Avis “We’re only number 2"? In advertising, as in life, Bernbach would tell them, “Nobody’s perfect, and nobody’s going to believe you if you claim to be.”

  A loose and open environment—an adult Summerhill, a copywriter called DDB in the ’60s, after the unrestrained British public school—encouraged the wonderfully fresh concepts and the confidence needed to sell them. People were who they were, and said what they felt, without self-censorship or fear.

  And so it was, everywhere but at the very top, where pretense became a way of life, in the need to protect the self-image of the agency’s greatest asset.

  * * *

  The most difficult, and most poignant, pretense came in Bernbach’s final years. Then the script called for acting as if the ravages of a terminal disease were invisible.

  A regular checkup in 1977 h
ad turned up an abnormal blood count. Perhaps the laboratory had erred. The test was repeated. The lab had not erred. Bernbach’s doctor put the news in a positive light. Although the diagnosis was chronic lymphatic leukemia, there was no present danger. People lived for ten, twenty, twenty-five years with chronic leukemia, and died of other causes.

  Nonetheless, it was cancer. And Bernbach had an almost preternatural fear of cancer. His father, his sister, a brother had died of cancer. It seemed a family curse. He’d given up smoking after his father’s death from throat cancer. He’d spoke up against advertising cigarets after the Surgeon General had pronounced the link between smoking and cancer—a costly business move (but “a principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something”). Now the dread disease had caught up with him.

  “It’s true,” an ashen-faced Bernbach told his secretary, Nancy Underwood, on coming back to the office. She was the one person in the agency he trusted with certain kinds of information. About his health, for she made his doctors’ appointments and filled out his medical forms. About his finances, for she kept the records and even selected bonds to purchase for his portfolio.

  Her immediate response reveals her insight into Bernbach’s way of suppressing bad news, by pretending it hadn’t happened.

  “Are you going to tell Mrs. Bernbach?”

  A pause, and then, “I don’t know.”

  Perhaps he wouldn’t have, at that time, but for Underwood’s prodding. She was scheduled to leave for a vacation in Portugal the following day.

  “If you don’t tell her, I won’t go,” she insisted. She would call the next morning; if by then he hadn’t told his wife, she would cancel Portugal and return to the office. When she called, Bernbach assured her he’d told Evelyn. Underwood went off, “feeling horrible.”

  Both women were sworn to secrecy, and kept their word.

  * * *

  The disease progressed somewhat faster than expected, and Bernbach’s doctor urged him to let his sons know what was happening. Bernbach asked John and Paul to lunch at “21,” and at an upstairs corner table, gave them his news, downplaying it as far as possible.

  They ought to know that he had leukemia. But it was not the kind of leukemia that killed you. It could go on for a very, very long time. Drugs were available now, and were constantly being improved. Under the circumstances, they ought not to worry. And above all, they must tell no one. Only they, their mother, Nancy and the doctors knew. He wanted no one else to know. No one at all.

  They understood why. They had absorbed his philosophy through their growing years. They knew the quote he often cited from Romain Rolland’s massive work, Jean Christophe, a novel close to Bernbach’s heart for its proposal that art should express moral truth and thus combat the disintegration of values.

  “A sick, passive man’s words may go completely unheeded, but a healthy, vital, energetic man uttering the same words may rock the world.”

  Paul: “He believed so much in the strength of the voice for effective communication. If people know you’re sick, it changes the way they look at you, the way they listen to you. . . . He said, don’t tell anybody, and we didn’t.”

  Never again, not even in the final week of his life, when he lay in the hospital with a high fever, did Bernbach mention his leukemia to his sons.

  * * *

  In 1978, Bernbach added a new passage to his basic stump speech on the art of persuasion and the power of insight into the compulsions that drive a man, instincts that dominate his actions.

  “We want, more than anything else, to stay alive.”

  * * *

  John remembered the moment when he fully realized his father would die:

  “He had come to Europe on a business trip. We were in Paris, alone, which was unusual; my mother wasn’t there. I suspect she was in London with Jane. We got to the airport, the Charles de Gaulle airport, where they have moving stairways between various parts of the main terminal building. There’s one series that’s on quite a steep angle, because they cross inside of a circle with futuristic plastic tubing.

  “We were halfway up when he stumbled and fell backwards, and rolled down this lengthy thing. And it was obvious to me that he was so weak that he couldn’t stop himself. When I raced back down against the treadmill, he couldn’t stand up. And he was terribly, terribly upset. And as a result of course I was upset, and what he was so upset about was he was so embarrassed. Not for me, but for himself in front of the public, so to speak. You know how fastidious he was. His coat had got wrinkled, and his shoes had got scuffed, and he was terribly, terribly upset.

  “I guess there’s always a time, except in the case of sudden death, when you become aware of just how mortal a particular loved one is. And that was the moment.”

  * * *

  The disease took a leap from stage one to stage three without pausing at stage two. Attacking the immune system, the disease left Bernbach vulnerable to opportunistic llnesses.

  “People think leukemia is a relatively painless disease, but it’s far from that,” Evelyn would recall.

  From 1980, Bernbach was ill much of the time with, among other afflictions, a painful case of shingles. “And for all the time he looked terrible,” Paul related. “People kept on asking ‘How’s your father?’ John and I dutifully said, ‘He’s okay, he has a cold, or he has a sore throat, an infection, or something.’ But obviously we were not going to violate our trust.”

  John: “He was in terrible discomfort. It was a very difficult time. He could have stayed home in bed; he was tired, he would have liked to. But on the other hand he realized the importance of the effort of getting up, getting dressed, going to the office, sitting at his table, and writing, or doing something useful every day.

  “It was a time when maybe he felt that people weren’t appreciating him. He felt it incumbent upon himself to prove to the organization that he was still needed, necessary.”

  Who didn’t appreciate him? we asked.

  John pulled back a touch. “I don’t know. I think he just generally felt that way. Rightly or wrongly.”

  * * *

  Needed or necessary wasn’t the issue for the inhabitants of the other offices along the marble-and-glass executive floor. What preoccupied them was the agony of being in thrall to a dying king who showed no sign of passing the mantle of his creative authority. They clustered, and whispered, and worried, and when Bernbach approached, they broke into death-denying smiles, supporting his pretense that all was well.

  “In that last year, anybody looking at him would know that this man was on the way,” recalled Joe Daly, long after.

  Nancy Underwood kept track of his medicines, handing him cards telling him what to take and when. He asked no questions about what he was taking. Hearing the medicines named would give substance to the unthinkable.

  Eventually, John and Paul took Neil Austrian into their confidence, knowing that their father believed that, in Paul’s words, “of the people who were around, Neil was the only one he thought capable of running the company.”

  Now Austrian was sworn to secrecy—and also pledged to conceal his knowing from Bernbach. To go on acting, in effect. Moreover, as chief operating officer of the agency, he couldn’t even discuss the truth with Daly, the chief executive officer.

  But Daly knew, “through a third party.” In typical Doyle Dane Bernbach management style, Daly was sure that only he knew, and he didn’t tell Austrian what he knew; Austrian was sure he alone in top management knew. So that left Austrian discussing a “game plan”—who would do what when Bernbach died—not with the CEO, but with Bernbach’s secretary.

  * * *

  One day, late in the summer of 1982, Bernbach sat down in Austrian’s office and began to talk about Daly and the job of running the agency.

  “Remember, I knew he was dying, and he didn’t know I knew,” Austrian related. “He said he wanted to make a change; he wanted me to be CEO. We chatted about it, and I said, ‘I’m more than willing to let J
oe remain CEO until he’s 65.’ [Daly would turn 65 the following year.] Bill got very upset and said, ‘No! We’re going to do it right now, at the September meeting. I don’t want to wait any longer. I want to make sure this company is in good hands.’ And knowing about Bill’s health, it was very clear that he wanted to make sure this took place while he was still alive and had control over the situation, that he didn’t want the CEO issue unresolved.”

  Bernbach got that wish at the next board meeting, two weeks before he died.

  “Running the company” had no emotional connection for Bernbach with the creative leadership of the agency. Through a string of creative directors, Bernbach held the throne, ignoring the contenders, sitting tight, clutching to his bosom the golden bough.

  Austrian and the others waited, unable to ask Bernbach the fateful, necessary question: Who is your creative heir?