* * *
Moments remembered:
Ned Doyle, frail with emphysema, and Bernbach, late in his illness, heading for lunch at the nearby Four Seasons.
“I have to walk slowly, Bill,” says Doyle.
Bernbach: “Ned, so do I.”
—
Winter of 1979-80. Long-time art director Lester Feldman returns to the agency after recovering from a heart attack. Bernbach slips down to Feldman’s office, closes the door and asks, “How are you, Lester?”
Feldman: “Fine, Bill, how are you?”
Bernbach: “Everybody has something.”
—
Spring of 1982. Executive VP Arie Kopelman, in earlier years a frequent dinner guest at the Bernbachs and something of a surrogate son, is in Bernbach’s office, telling him about a vacation trip with his wife. Bernbach asks how everything is going. Kopelman responds, “We have a wonderful marriage, the kids are great, and everything is going great in our lives at this point.”
Kopelman: “And his eyes welled up, a couple of tears came out. I’d never seen him cry before. And he said, ‘Arie, that’s what it’s all about. Nothing else counts. That’s what it’s all about.’ Those are the last words I remember him saying, ‘That’s what it’s all about.’”
—
Roy Grace, Marvin Honig and Bernbach lunching at the Four Seasons, late in 1981, regaling one another with anecdotes. “We were talking about advertising, the way it was,” remembered Grace. “And we didn’t know he was talking about Everything. We were talking about the fun we used to have, we didn’t have headaches. At that point we had Atari headaches, Polaroid headaches, Pan Am—they were all headaches, nobody wanted what we were doing. And Bernbach said, ‘It sure was wonderful, wasn’t it?’”
* * *
Once he’d engineered the change in CEO, Bernbach’s full attention moved to a proposed Volkswagen ad. Excitedly, he showed the ad to everyone who came into his office. Under a large photograph of dummies being shaken up in safety test procedures, the headline read: “Volkswagen is at the mercy of a bunch of German dummies.”
“Isn’t that great?” he’d ask. “That’s old Volkswagen.” But when the account people brought it to the factory, the ad was rejected.
“Germans no longer don’t know what ‘Lemon’ is,” said account manager John Leonard, one of Bernbach’s frequent lunch companions. “They know what German dummies are. So they turn it down, and you can understand that. So you look at it and you say, you can fix it, just take out the ‘German.’ But at the same time, the factory was saying ‘We have to go back to our German heritage; we don’t want to say we’re made in Pennsylvania.’ The feeling they wanted is, We’re made in the Black Forest by gnomes. So German is important. But then the factory won’t buy it.”
Like a deus ex machina, Bernbach’s old friend and admirer, client Arthur Stanton of Volkswagen of America, stepped in. He would sponsor the ad if Germany would not.
John Leonard: “And then Bill shows it to you in proof form, with ‘German’ in it, and says, ‘Arthur Stanton is running it, isn’t that great? That’s the way clients should be.’”
The ad was scheduled for the New York Times on Monday, October 4, 1982. Bernbach forgot his pain in the joy of imagining the stir the ad would cause, certain it would convince the industry that Doyle Dane Bernbach still had the stuff to turn out classics.
* * *
Bernbach and his wife planned to fly to London after the mid-September board meeting. They had next-day tickets when Bernbach developed another fever and his doctor insisted he check into the hospital.
Evelyn Bernbach vividly remembered the look on her husband’s face when they checked him in. “It was a look of ‘I know I’ll never come out of here alive.’”
For a week he ran a temperature of over 105. When the fever broke, visitors came to his room in New York Hospital. He told them about the upcoming Volkswagen ad, asked questions about the agency, and spoke not at all about his illness.
* * *
On Monday morning, October 4, the ad ran, with the headline: “Volkswagen is at the mercy of a bunch of dummies.”
At the last moment, a New York Times person called the agency to say the paper couldn’t run the ad as it stood. The switchboard found a mid-level VW account executive, who made an impromptu decision.
“Take out ‘German.’”
* * *
Bernbach never saw the ad as it ran. He died at 3 a.m. on Saturday, October 2, without having passed his creative crown to an heir.
21
Now What?
“The Future comes like an unwelcome guest.”—Edmund Gosse, May-Day
“He couldn’t pass on his prestige,” mourned Ned Doyle, after a 1986 mega-merger had dropped the founders’ names into the trashcan of advertising history. Later, many of the agency’s top executives would come to feel that things might have worked out differently if Bernbach had anointed a creative successor.
But . . . who?
In the late 1970s, the Wall Street Journal began a print campaign featuring interviews with advertising’s creative leaders. The architect of that campaign, Jim Johnston, later wrote:
“The program began with three obvious choices: William Bernbach, Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy. Once ads featuring Bernbach, Burnett and Ogilvy had been completed, the issue was whence to proceed.
“The advertising director of the Journal put the question to Bill Bernbach. Bernbach drew himself up to his full 5 foot 7 and said, ever so softly, ‘You’ve done Leo, David and me. There aren’t any other giants in our business.’”
* * *
Bernbach had never accepted another creative person into topmost management ranks. As far back as 1967 he’d demonstrated that disinclination. A phalanx of his creative stars, learning that Joe Daly was about to be named president of the agency, surged into Bernbach’s office and urged him to reconsider. Bob Gage was the man for the job—Bernbach’s creative partner, the greatest of all art directors, the man who broke new ground with every campaign. Daly’s appointment would “send the wrong signal” about the agency’s commitment to its creative heritage.
Bernbach’s blue eyes turned steely, his jaw tightened, his breath came fast. His children, questioning a decision about matters they simply didn’t understand. They saw his reaction and sheepishly turned tail. Daly remained the designee. (The agency’s history bristles with warnings of “sending the wrong signal”—warnings usually disregarded, and afterwards rued.)
Bernbach did, when Daly became president, give the title of Creative Director to Gage; the volume of work produced by the booming agency could no longer all be seen and edited by Bernbach. Gage hated the job and gave it back in a year or two. Next up was Bob Levenson, from 1969 to 1974. Marvin Honig followed Levenson, his term running from 1974 to 1979. Then, Roy Grace, who held the job at the time of Bernbach’s death.
So why wasn’t Grace the heir by virtue of being in the chair at the right time? Because this was Doyle Dane Bernbach, and nothing was ever as clear-cut as that. Each creative director had been found wanting by Bernbach. Each began with his apparent enthusiastic support. Sooner or later, that cooled. Then Bernbach would confide, to the men who ran the agency, his perceptions of the creative directors’ flaws. He sat at his round table, ready to override creative judgment calls.
Moreover, he undermined their authority by backing the agency’s unique “floating stars” system, whereby the great old creatives operated outside the organization chart, with Bernbach as final judge of their work. As long as Bernbach lived, there was only one creative head of Doyle Dane Bernbach.
And when he gave up the supposedly-ultimate power title of CEO, he topped that (as we have seen) with the truly-ultimate power title of “owner.”
* * *
Bernbach must have sensed the irritation and impatience stirred by the passive-aggressive way he dug in his heels and pretended, and thus forced others to pretend, that succession had no pressing relevance.
Perhaps one day they would learn that he was, in fact, irreplaceable.
Certainly he wouldn’t assuage their vexation by declaring Grace or Honig or Levenson worthy of stepping into his shoes. Grace didn’t care about nurturing creative people; he bruised too many egos. Honig, The Jokester, didn’t seem sufficiently serious. Neither Grace nor Honig could be counted on as effective spokesmen for the agency. They were the Peck’s bad boys of Doyle Dane Bernbach, enjoying the discomfort their utterances created. (As PR director, I became adept at steering the press out of their range.)
Levenson, on the other hand, expressed the agency’s philosophy more eloquently, more warmly and winningly, than Bernbach himself. To many staffers, Levenson was Bernbach’s only possible creative heir. But not to Bernbach, who remained highly critical (out of Levenson’s earshot) of the lax and indecisive and ultimately detrimental way he had run the creative operation a decade earlier.
Bernbach had worked too hard, come too far, shaped the image he’d wanted. He’d buried his past, swallowed the bitter anger of ostracism by his parents, risen to world fame. The legend must remain his—pure, undiluted by the imperfections he would sanctify by choosing Grace, Honig or Levenson as his heir.
There was another factor. When you hand over your role, you die before you’re dead. We want, more than anything else, to stay alive. Not giving up could make a difference in the progress of a life-threatening disease. The mysteries of spontaneous remission gave hope. And any day, a miracle drug might come out of a research lab somewhere in the world.
It wasn’t handing on the golden bough to support a merger with Foote, Cone and Belding, or to force Joe Daly to relinquish the CEO title to Neil Austrian. Those acts had to do with protecting the Bernbach family wealth, not with passing on one’s legend.
To be sure, anointing another might have changed the course of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s history, protecting the Bernbach family wealth along with the future of the agency itself. But how much did the future of the agency itself figure in his thoughts?
After the Wells, Rich, Greene episode, it was easy for Bernbach’s colleagues to feel skepticism on that score.
* * *
Bernbach’s death left each of his three non-heirs watchful for opportunities to outlast the other two. It wasn’t a situation that made for collegiality. Rather than the orderly transition one might expect when a leader has had time to contemplate his demise, another destructive contest was about to begin.
* * *
CEO Neil Austrian and post-Paulson president Barry Loughrane pondered Bernbach’s death, and tried to assess how best to deal with it—by enshrining his memory, or by blanking it out.
Almost from the beginning of the agency’s fame, and strongly from the time it went public, the question had been asked: “What would Doyle Dane Bernbach be without Bill Bernbach?”
In his presence, the question would be phrased, “What happens if you’re hit by a truck?” The remoteness of such a possibility cloaked the certainty of eventual death, and in this euphemistic framework Bernbach (and the rest of us) would confidently respond, “It won’t change things. The idea is too strong here.” The idea being Bernbach’s creative philosophy and the nurturing of talent that gave it life.
To that workable response, an addendum was now added: After all, Bernbach wasn’t involved in day-to-day operations for many months before his death, and things hadn’t changed. So why should they now? It was a comforting thought to everyone who worked for, or cared about the future of, Doyle Dane Bernbach.
Even Helmut Krone, who so often had said there were only two people he would work for, Bernbach and himself, professed a calm assurance, pointing with a frown to the massive press coverage of Bernbach’s death and asking, “What’s all the fuss about Bernbach’s death, when he hasn’t been active in the affairs of the agency for so long?”
The clients, chief among them Seagram’s, who had continued to ask, “Has Bill seen this ad?” and been told “yes” at times when he hadn’t, did not, in their sorrow over Bernbach’s death, stop to cross-examine their account people on the accuracy of their earlier assurances. And they remained clients of the agency through the stormy months ahead.
The “fuss” about Bernbach’s death, of course, was a measure of the impact of the man and his philosophy on advertising everywhere. The man who launched the creative revolution; who changed the face of advertising; who brought pride and joy to the business, who altered the power structure of the industry; who elevated advertising to an art.
But once the tumult and the shouting died, what then, Austrian and Loughrane mulled, should the agency do with Bernbach’s memory? Loughrane had learned, when he’d taken over the agency’s West Coast operations several years earlier, that his toughest problem was the perception that Doyle Dane Bernbach wasn’t as good as it used to be. And that every reference to its great past reinforced the thought that it wasn’t as good as it used to be. Mary Wells’ old line, “DDB is yesterday,” still reverberated. The sentimentality of Bernbach fans notwithstanding, new business could not be won with old quotes and classic ads. And old clients might find reminders of Bernbach’s absence perturbing. Doyle Dane Bernbach would have to stand young and tall and proud in the present, not on the glories of its past.
They elected to bring up Bernbach’s name as seldom as possible.
* * *
The decision wasn’t announced, but it was felt.
“It was almost as if people were afraid to mention Bernbach’s name in the hallways,” recalled an account group head. He sensed “an understanding” not to talk about Bernbach. “Instead of honoring and revering him, saying he left us with something important, there was fear at the very mention of his name.”
Perhaps some words that Bernbach’s friend Brendan Gill wrote in another context have relevance here:
“With some diffidence, I suggest that when distinguished figures in any field of endeavor come to belong to us through an earned fame—a fame bearing not the least taint of mere celebrity—we begin to count on them never to die, since our lives will be irreparably narrowed and lessened by their deaths . . . They have had imposed upon them without their knowledge a family relationship and by dying have committed the fault, inexcusable in any family, of abandoning us. May not this be the reason that, as so often happens, we ignore the great dead for a time and seem to forget them, and then, when the fault of their abandoning us has been forgiven, bring them back eagerly into our lives? . . .”
* * *
Early thoughts of turning Bernbach’s office into a kind of museum, a hallowed ground, with great ads on the walls, a place to go and perhaps meditate on Bernbach and what he stood for, drifted out of the corner windows overlooking the spires of New York’s glorious St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Instead, Austrian contemplated the power symbols of office space. The marble-and-glass executive corridor (called by the troops, depending on the news of the moment, either “the ‘A’ deck on the Ship of Fools” or “the ‘A’ deck on the Titanic”) stretched a full block, from 49th to 50th street, on the Madison Avenue side of the building. Bernbach’s office covered a large corner on the 50th street side. Joe Daly’s spread over the 49th street corner.
By now Austrian had succeeded Daly as CEO. But Daly had a 5-year contract and dibs on his corner office. Austrian’s office lay in the dull center of the stretch, between Bob Pfundstein’s and a small kitchen. Loose as Austrian looked about appearances, with his shirt tail out and one sleeve rolled up, he couldn’t long ignore the implications of having a lesser office than Daly. Especially given Daly’s remarkable record of holding onto power while presidents crashed around him.
&n
bsp; Austrian waited for a respectable period, then commandeered Bernbach’s office as his own. He even expanded it, absorbing the space occupied by the small kitchen. Everyone agreed that the aesthetics of the “A” deck were improved by eliminating the view, en route to the CEO’s office, of a sink full of dirty coffee cups.
Nobody ever after mentioned the Bernbach “museum.”
* * *
Bernbach’s memory wouldn’t stay down. Austrian himself soon found need to call it up, trying to muster enthusiasm for a cigaret account. (See chapter “Tobacco Road”) But at the May 1983 annual shareholder meeting, neither Austrian nor Loughrane spoke of Bernbach in their addresses.
“There wasn’t a word about Bill until finally, at the end of Bob Levenson’s talk, he nervously brought Bill’s name in,” recalled Evelyn Bernbach, still angry three years after the episode. She added, “I waited outside and when Neil came out I collared him and berated him, and he responded with ‘That was planned.’”
Nobody's Perfect Page 21