Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising

by Christopher Wixson

  Fig. 5.1Irish Clipper advertisement, The New Yorker (July 17, 1948)

  The ad’s appearance was preceded by a novel vanguard, a wave of promotional “articles” that emphasized Shaw’s participation throughout the copywriting process as a strategy to infuse his copy with integrity and veracity. Appearing a month prior to the color ads, a New York Times article entitled “‘Plug’ for Airways Written by Shaw” announced in its opening sentence that “Bernard Shaw… has turned huckster” and that “Ireland was the theme that induced the irascible exile to take pencil in hand.” The piece goes on to iterate what Shaw wrote and the changes he made to the ad’s copy as does another short item that ran that same week in Time magazine entitled “Free Irish Air.” Editor & Publisher , a trade publication for the newspaper industry, was the first to reproduce a facsimile of the copy typescript with Shaw’s handwritten revisions in the June 19th issue (under the heading “Bernard Shaw Touches Up Agency Copy for Airline”). Even after the ad eventually appeared, supplemental notices continued to emerge, and the facsimile of Shaw’s handwritten copy revisions from March resurfaced “especially reproduced from the original typescript for readers of The Saturday Review” in its July 17, 1948 issue (see Fig. 5.2). TSR dutifully directed its readers to “see the complete 4-color version” appearing “now on the newsstands.” 22

  Fig. 5.2Irish Clipper advertisement, The Saturday Review (July 17, 1948), p. 6

  Within the industry as well, periodicals called attention to the campaign and its celebrity spokesman. For example, a short piece entitled “‘As Corrected’ By G.B.S.” ran in Tide : The News Magazine of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations (July 23, 1948) to relate how the Saturday Review of Literature , “proud of its burning interest in everything George Bernard Shaw does, sprang to action” upon hearing of the playwright’s copy revision and asked permission from JWT to “run the actual proof in the magazine … with all the messy alterations, printers’ symbols etc. … instead of the fancy finished product.” Tide also noted that “it was the first time Pan Am ever advertised in SRL.” 23

  Within the agency, this flurry of promotional activity was recognized and celebrated in the June 21 edition of The J.W. T. News :PAN AMERICAN WORLD AIRWAYS (NY) began last week to reap – double free – newsprint benefits far beyond any publicist’s wildest dreams from an advertisement scheduled to appear in July. New York City newspapers and wire services across the nation reported at length how advertising and literary and financial history had been made. George Bernard Shaw (pardon – “Bernard Shaw”) had taken a fling at copywriting and – for free – had, on the solicitation of JWT, written an advertisement telling the pleasures of a flight to Ireland on Pan American Airways. 24

  A few weeks later, The J.W. T. News continued to trumpet the success of the supplemental notices:Advance publicity stories made much of the fact that George Bernard Shaw, at the request of JWT, wrote this advertisement to promote travel by air to Ireland. Clippings are still coming in to Pan Am from Los Angeles, Dallas, Kansas City, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Miami, New Orleans and Boston, as well as those already collected from New York City and the advertising press. “Nemo,” the weather man on Station WOR (NY), used the Shaw statement, unsolicited, in an amusing radio interview on the subject of Irish weather. Dublin and London papers are also carrying the story. 25

  The piece also proudly directed its readers to “note that in this advertisement, G.B.S. says nothing at all about the product—the Clipper. He only ‘testifies’ about IRELAND; and thereby shows how true it is that ‘names make news’ even if they are only associated with the product or the client’s name.” 26 Nonetheless, as with the previous Simmons campaign, the issue of compensation again resurfaced. 27

  In a “Talk of the Town” piece from July of 1948 entitled “Copywriter,” The New Yorker took up the subject of the campaign, most curious that the prominently featured “encomium by Bernard Shaw on his native land” had allegedly been provided gratis: “inasmuch as Shaw’s fame as a writer is scarcely second to his fame as a shrewd and firm man with a pound or dollar, we have looked into this report.” 28 In the piece, campaign “engineer” Gelston Hardy confirms that this account of the “unprecedented gift of words [that] shook J. Walter Thompson” is indeed accurate. A month prior, Time’s “Fresh Irish Air” enhanced its own retelling of the story of the negotiations with Shaw (“a hard man with a dollar”) with an exchange between offices concerning payment. In Hardy’s account, JWT’s “London office thought Shaw’s endorsement might be obtained by a ‘combination of audacity and a large sum of money’ ($4000 was suggested)” while “New York suggested London try ‘audacity’ … leaving the money for him to bring up.” The story concluded by indicating that “up to last week, with the ad ready to run, Copywriter Shaw had not even mentioned the matter of payment.” 29 The New York Times article also emphasizes that Shaw produced this copywriting “for free” while Editor & Publisher’s piece recounts the anxious inter-office exchange over the issue of paying Shaw. 30 In the entire body of meta-publicity that surrounds the campaign, the story of Shaw’s involvement is told and retold, always reproducing his lines about Ireland and usually interwoven, to a greater or lesser degree, with accounts of solicitation, remuneration, and copy revisions negotiations. If these clues suggest that the campaign with Shaw was part of a larger effort to restore credibility to personality advertising , who better than the prophet who demonized authors turning to commerce and refused Harrods ’ tempting advances to restore public faith in testimonial-based marketing? After the critical scrutiny it had received during the previous decade over its endorsement practices, JWT claimed it had “redoubled its efforts to verify all statements used in testimonial advertising, reexamined its practice of paying for statements, and opted to play it safe in situations where other advertising strategies could work just as well.” 31 The extensive and unusual preemptive publicity blitz for the Irish Air campaign is interesting in this light, particularly its obsessive foregrounding of how the sausage is made. Indeed, the process garnered as much if not more attention than the product.

  In addition to exposing Shaw at work drafting copy, the campaign also illuminated the “invisible hands” at the agency who were attracting publicity all their own. The mythology around the playwright’s role grew to engulf even the staffers who orchestrated it, most protrusively Gel Hardy . In August 1948, J.W.T. News duly recognized the attention from the New Yorker with a blurb entitled “Claims to Fame”: “Few of the famous – or infamous – make the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” editorial feature, but JWT’s Gel Hardy rated three columns last week [in which] Gel’s activities on the now much-acclaimed G.B. Shaw, Pan Am. Advertisement were cited.” 32 Likewise, the very first sentence of a December 1948 profile of Hardy in the weekly J. Walter Thompson staff newsletter reads, “One of Gel Hardy’s recent Pan American advertisements was written in collaboration with George Bernard Shaw.” 33

  More incredible is the degree to which Shaw’s name became synonymous with that of Dorothea Campbell Blaker in JWT’s London office, whom Hardy enlisted to contact the playwright initially for permission to use the leaflet quote. 34 The colorful Blaker came to the J. Walter Thompson agency in the late 1920s as a freelance worker on testimonial assignments initially and eventually rose to become head of the Legal and Personality Department where she handled “intransigent celebrities, would-be self-publicists, nervous housewives, and enthusiastic hypochondriacs alike with amazing charm and tact.” 35 In 1947, Blaker was featured in the “How Well Do You Know Your JWT’ERS?” column of the weekly J. Walter Thompson staff newsletter. Accompanied by a sketch of the subject in profile, with close-cropped hair and a necktie, the piece began: “If you want an English film star signed up, or a Pond’s beauty, or a celebrated footballer or any person of note (including George Bernard Shaw) you apply to the Personality Department, JWT-London. And there you will find ‘Bill’ Blaker.” 36

  Round the Square , a monthly publication is
sued by the J. Walter Thompson London office, itself ran a profile of Blaker in 1953. It maintains that, for an affirmation of Blaker’s motto (“It can’t be done – but we’ll do it.”), “one can’t do better than to study – on the wall of her room – a selection of the correspondence that passed between her office and that of the Sage of Ayot, which shows how Bill’s department, after a wordy battle with the most indefatigable non-co-operator of them all, finally won for an advertisement the magic initials, G.B.S.” 37

  Staffer Peter Yeo , in his memoirs published privately in 1988, remembered her at the agency’s annual fête and gala, forsaking “her rather masculine, tweedy apparel for a regular evening gown [and intoning] in a deep contralto.” Yeo goes on to note that Blaker’s “biggest achievement was to get George Bernard Shaw, a fierce opponent of publicity, to sponsor an advertisement for Pan-American Airways” and recalled the “signed photograph of the great man hanging in her office.” 38 Indeed, in a circa 1950 company photograph as well as in another photo published with her 1953 newsletter profile, two letters (matted, framed, and hung) flanking the signed photograph are visible behind Blaker , Shaw benevolently gazing down at the manager at work. 39

  The success of this promotion of staffers and personalities went on to become a series in 1949 for Pan-American , again featuring not only endorsements from Robert W. Service, Billy Rose, and Lowell Thomas but also accounts of the intrepid JWT agents committed to securing participation from difficult celebrities. According to the JWT News, “these advertisements are a far cry from typical ‘testimonials’ that read ‘I like your clipper because …’ and naturally they are hard to get. For the current advertisement, a well-known JWT copywriter interviewed pajama-clad Billy Rose for several hours to accomplish his mission.” 40 After running its course through periodicals and newspapers, an initial printing of travel posters, and even a postage stamp, iterations of Shaw’s image and lines continue to be emblazoned in travel-related guidebooks and on websites to this day, as occasionally does the erroneously attributed leaflet quote that engendered the campaign. On behalf of the Pan-American Clipper, JWT’s ingeniousness at turning the workings of campaign creation inside-out not only created an enormous amount of incidental publicity but also infused the “personality ” copy with much-needed authenticity and probity. The degree to which JWT had a hand in placing those preemptive notices in trade publications and outlets such as Time and The New Yorker (where suspiciously the ads would also eventually appear) is unknown, but the agency’s canny involvement with cross-marketing practices is well documented.

  To what degree Shaw was aware of the extent to which JWT would anchor their campaign around his participation is also unknown. Nonetheless, his extensive contributions exemplify how committed he was to striving for autonomy over his copy. Yet, his copywriting for the Clipper also reflects his ambivalence towards commodity culture and his sensitivity in particular to the difficulties of marketing Ireland. If Shaw’s lines lack the usual impishness and bombast of Shavian rhetoric and, beyond a banal nod to generic mental fitness, don’t exert their usual pull towards a lifestyle worthy of emulation, they nonetheless contain implicit echoes of three plays that span Shaw’s playwriting career. The nod to flexibility of mind within the Irish climate seems to proceed from an exchange from Back to Methuselah : THE WOMAN:Have you been sent here to make your mind flexible?

  THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN:What an extraordinary question! Pray do you find my mind noticeably stiff?

  THE WOMAN:Perhaps you do not know that you are on the west coast of Ireland, and that it is the practice among natives of the Eastern Island to spend some years here to acquire mental flexibility. The climate has that effect.

  THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [haughtily]:I was born, not in the Eastern Island, but, thank God, in dear old British Baghdad; and I am not in need of a mental health resort. 41

  Shaw’s copy also evokes yet contradicts Larry Doyle’s miasmic view of the Irish climate in John Bull’s Other Island : DOYLE:My dear Tom, you only need a touch of the Irish climate to be as big a fool as I am myself. … The dullness! the hopelessness! The ignorance! the bigotry!

  BROADBENT [matter-of-factly]:The usual thing in the country, Larry. Just the same here.

  DOYLE [hastily]:No, no: the climate is different. Here, if the life is dull, you can be dull too, and no great harm done. [Going off into a passionate dream] But your wits can’t thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You’ve no such colors in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heartscalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! 42

  Shaw’s negative characterization of the travel industry as a whole is perhaps most direct in Popsy’s account of one consequence of her newfound wealth and independence in Too True to Be Good , to which his copy lines further lightly allude:I was devoured by parasites: by tourist agencies, steamboat companies, railways, motor car people, hotel keepers, dressmakers, servants, all trying to get my money by selling me things I don’t really want; shoving me all over the globe to look at what they call new skies, though they know as well as I do that it is only the same old sky everywhere; and disabling me by doing all the things for me that I ought to do for myself to keep myself in health. 43

  Sharply critical of an industry that serves what he calls in the play’s preface a class a “vagrant rootless rich … detached from work, from responsibility, from tradition, from every sort of prescribed routine,” 44 it perhaps is surprising that he agreed to participate in the Clipper campaign, beyond a sharp rebuke of the euphemistic misrepresentation of Ireland in the leaflet quote. The intertextual play between his copy and passages in the plays would most likely be lost on the ordinary reader, and the larger vision articulated by the ad as a whole seems uncomfortably close to what Broadbent imagines.

  Travel marketing is indeed among the central preoccupations of John Bull’s Other Island ; in fact, the set design for the firm of Doyle and Broadbent calls for a “pictorial advertisement of a steamship company” to hang on the wall. 45 Kathleen Ochshorn has pointed out that Shaw’s 1904 play “anticipates the international marketing of Ireland’s beauty and the exploitation of its rural landscape [to further a] postcolonial economy based on tourism.” 46 Guided by the rhetoric of Murray’s guidebook, Broadbent plans to marshal available material resources towards an imaginative repackaging of Irishness as they “make a Garden city of Rosscullen” and render “the Round Tower … thoroughly repaired and restored.” 47 Shaw had, in an 1896 theatrical review, affirmed his commitment to “the saving work of reducing the sham Ireland of romance to a heap of unsightly ruins” but here as copywriter risks complicity with the commodification of a certain idyllic image of Ireland, repurposing sites like Ashford Castle for tourist consumption. 48 Like Tim Haffigan’s act of “native impersonation” in John Bull’s Other Island , Shaw’s ad text is fraught with the danger of Ireland imitating “its own colonially coercive image for commercial ends.” 49

  Recent scholarly discussions have formulated tourism in colonial terms, situating “the contemporary marketing of ‘Ireland’ [within] a wider system of globalization in which cultural signifiers circulate at the behest and under the aegis of powerful national/corporate formations, replicating the earlier colonial heritage.” 50 As Mark Phelan observes, John Bull’s Other Island staged this nascent trend with an “implicit connection between tourism and colonialism … explicitly articulated in Broadbent’s closing vision of golf courses built on the west coast of Ireland: a conflation of imperial and tourist rhetoric that has proved astonishingly prescient.” 51 In the evolution of modern advertising, “copywriters … shifted [focus] with the beginning of the century from the object for sale to the consumer’s subjective associations and experiences” 52 but also emphasized a notion of “authenticity,” a concept central to current scholarly discussions of
consumerist culture and modernism. Jennifer Outka recently has charted the late nineteenth-century advent of a “commodified authentic” in which “new objects and places were packaged and sold as mini-representations of supposedly noncommercial values: nostalgic evocations of an English rural past; appeals to an original, genuine article; and images of a purified aesthetic free from any taint of the mass market.” 53 In Too True to Be Good , the Patient’s account of her experience following her act one escape outlines the process through which virtues and the natural world are commodified and packaged as copy: “Popsy stole my necklace, and got me to run away with him by a wonderful speech he made about freedom and sunshine and lovely scenery. Sweetie made me write it all down and sell it to a tourist agency as an advertisement.” 54

  In similar ways, travel marketing often deployed discourse from an imperial past, and the tourist industry marks one intersection of Irish cultural representation and commodity capitalism within which what Colin Graham characterizes as the “peddling of the authentic in an explicit and populist way” becomes a potentially neo-imperialist act. 55 Since the early 1970s, sociologists have understood tourism as motivated by a desire for authenticity, a quality deemed a casualty of alienated, industrialized modernity, 56 and thus travel marketing invested in representing destinations as opportunities for encounters with “authentic” inhabitants and practices, especially what Nina Wang calls “ethnic, history or cultural tourism which involve the representation of the Other or the past.” 57 Especially over as contested an ideological space as Ireland, though, this practice of “staging authenticity” has a much deeper resonance. Because “authenticity” is precisely what imperialism denies the colonized culture, decolonization engenders a quest for authenticity in which native inhabitants strive to recover and reclaim an authentic (in this case) “Irishness” apart from imperial ideological constructions. In the preface to the published version of the play, Shaw gauged the Abbey Theater’s refusal to stage John Bull’s Other Island to be a function of the play being “uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal,” 58 suggesting Yeats and other members were perhaps as invested in commodifying the Irish “authentic” to further its ends as Broadbent was to further his. As Brad Kent has argued, “Yeats’s decolonizing of Irish identity led to another form of colonization, a recolonization of Irish identity [so that] the constructs of both nationalists and imperialists, the fixed identities inherent in stereotypes, are two aspects of the same process of mummification,” and John Bull’s Other Island critiques “the dangerous essentialism of both the colonial and the emergent national constructs.” 59