The Real Mad Men

by Andrew Cracknell

  Good question. Hertz and Carl Ally had put them in a difficult position. Nothing that they were saying could be refuted, and retaliating would probably only turn what had been an engaging spectator sport into an undignified public squabble. DDB did try, with a couple of half-hearted ads. Ally replied just once and then, amid some accusation from the industry that it had become more about the two agencies yelling at each other than trying to shift a client’s product, Hertz moved on to a more assertive and positive campaign. DDB, too, abandoned ‘We try harder’ only 90 days after the Hertz campaign broke. After a change of ownership at Avis, they lost the account.

  Oddly, both campaigns can justifiably claim success. For four years DDB had markedly improved Avis’s share, but then Hertz’s campaign froze their relative positions. Both campaigns had opened new ways in which companies could compete, not just in the market place, but in the media. For Carl Ally, Hertz confirmed the company in the same way that VW had confirmed DDB.

  Carl Ally Inc was now properly established, a third front after DDB and PKL in the revolutionary war. It became another aspirational destination for creative people with new ideas. Stories of the wild and often lascivious behaviour of its paunchy, rumpled leader – Gargano can’t be certain he ever saw Ally with his shirt properly tucked in, no matter how elevated the occasion – delighted and appalled New York, possibly attracting creatives as much as the work.

  HELAYNE SPIVAK, a secretary turned writer who eventually became creative director of Y&R, remembers being grabbed by Ally who happily ‘rammed his tongue down my throat, right there by my desk. The others must have taken him to one side and said, “Look Carl, you can’t go on like this and you’ve got to go and apologise to Helayne”.’

  Carly Ally’s hugely successful campaign for Hertz; how to put down your smaller competitors without looking like a bully.

  She giggles as she tells it. ‘So he came up to me and by way of apology – he did it again! I suppose I should have been upset but somehow, it didn’t really offend; it was Carl, I guess, it was just the way he was.’

  Another secretary, Pat Sutula (later Langer), who also became a writer, remembers an all-staff memo from Ally announcing yet another party on some puny pretext. ‘It ended “I want you all there – remember, there’s still three of you I haven’t yet had”, and I thought, Oh my God, I’ve only been here three weeks, he must mean me!’

  This is monstrous by today’s standards, but he carried it off. Even though the agency ended in fractiousness in the 1980s, affection for the man was enormous and lasted his lifetime. Marsha Cohen, who worked with him in the eighties, said, ‘He had a very distinctive flat, Midwestern accent, very noticeable to a New Yorker – he did not sound like the rest of us, that’s for sure. So even though he said irreverant things and cursed like a sailor… there was a little of the hick in him, which I think probably softened the expletives.’

  His huge appetite for fun and adventure (he was never far from a party and never without an aircraft of some sort to fly himself to meetings whenever possible), and his passion for the work and for ‘his people’, endeared him to the staff.

  One of the more radical ideas was the all-year-round four-day week, designed to give the staff longer leisure breaks. To reassure clients that their agency wasn’t slacking, it was policed vigorously and Ally insisted that people worked 36 hours minimum each week.

  It started as an experiment, and when it was confirmed a T-shirt for the staff was produced featuring a sketch of Ally and the words, ‘First, Fridays Off. Now, Free Underwear’.

  It’s difficult to imagine Reeves, Ogilvy or Bernbach doing that, or their staff being anything other than embarrassed by it. But it was so different at Carl Ally Inc.

  8Changing Times

  ‘I’ve got a friend at an agency – I can’t say which one – all they do all day long is sit around and smoke mary jane.’

  PAUL KINSEY TO PEGGY OLSEN MAD MEN

  In a recollection of his days at the New York office of Campbell Ewald, Amil Gargano noted the gulf between the Old and the New. Their offices at 488 Madison Avenue were one floor above the establishment Norman, Craig & Kummel agency.

  “I would see Norman B. Norman, wearing a Chesterfield topcoat, fedora, a long-stemmed pipe tightly gripped in his jaw, moving in long strides through the lobby to enter his vintage Rolls Royce, his driver dutifully standing at kerb side with his hand on the open rear door. I remember thinking how out of touch one of us must have been.”

  Creative people were still dressing smartly for business but the preppy style was retreating before the sharper elegance that was flooding into the business with the younger, less reverential breed. In a 1964 ad in an advertising trade magazine, a stock photo library service, ran an ad showing sixteen smartly-attired art directors—none of them had dressed in a particularly special style for the shoot. They are all of Italian origin, the “Graphic Mafia” as photographer Carl Fischer called them. By today’s standards the ad is breathtakingly politically incorrect. Under the headline “Are Italian art directors more creative?”, came the offer “This week only, special discount for Italian art directors on Wide World’s file of 50 million photos.”

  There was, of course, uproar from every non-Italian. Staged or real, the upshot was that after a complaint by Lou Dorfsman at CBS on behalf of Jewish art directors, the offer was extended to all. Although the flags of neither Helmut Krone nor George Lois had been represented in this global bunfight, one way or another the ethnics had arrived and were hogging the spotlight.

  DDB was very much still the beacon on the hill for all creative people, but internally it was a dull, almost dowdy environment where the staff largely kept their heads down and got on with the job. “But at the same time, it wasn’t a monastery; there were shenanigans going on, screwing on desks and people being sick in their waste baskets,” says Kuperman reassuringly.

  JOE DALY, the head of account management, was in some ways a clone of Ned Doyle: Irish, charismatic, hard drinking, and hard living. After Fordham University and war service as a much decorated fighter pilot at Guadalcanal and Midway on the USS Enterprise, he joined DDB in 1959 just a few months after it was founded. He made his mark, becoming president in 1968 and CEO in 1976. As the lead executive on the Polaroid and Avis accounts he was one of the most colorful leaders the agency ever had, and he was utterly dedicated to his clients. A colleague once said that if Daly ever became president of the United States, his first loyalty would still be to Polaroid.

  He was also a womanizer, another thing he had in common with Doyle. According to Doris Willens, “Stewardesses of American Airlines, one of Daly’s major accounts, and the scrubbed blonde demonstrators at Polaroid conventions were among Daly’s favorite targets.… Daly’s wife vented her anger one night by piling all his suits into a bathtub and running steaming hot water until they shrank beyond salvation.”

  But in this area of expertise even Daly was outplayed by the older Doyle, as Daly himself once acknowledged: “He’d go up to a women and say, ‘Hey, you’ and pop! I tell you, that guy was very, very wicked with women.” Both men slowly lost the respect of the morally-grounded Bernbach, but Daly would regularly redeem himself at early morning meetings even after a long night of licentious excess.

  At every level there has always been a certain amount of what Joy Golden, a writer who started at BBDO in 1952, calls “a little nonsense at the office” but, she adds, “nothing like as bad as in Mad Men.” One of the key factors influencing social behavior in that era was the 1960 legalization of the contraceptive pill and the resulting sexual liberation, although the more libidinous behavior was not the province of ad people alone. This was also the year of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, in which a clerk climbs the corporate ladder in exchange for allowing senior executives the use of his apartment to take their girlfriends. It could have been Sterling Cooper—but it was set in a life insurance office.

  DRINKING ON AGENCY premises was comparatively rare, although not unk
nown. It was rumored that some OB&M executives would smuggle lunchtime drinks into the office from Rattazzi’s, across the road. They did so to liven up the bland fare served in the cafeteria, installed by Ogilvy himself in the clearly futile attempt to stop his employees drinking alcohol at lunchtime.

  Dick Rattazzi, the former maître d’ at the showbiz restaurant Sardis, had opened his dimly lit two-floored restaurant at 9 East Forty-eighth Street in May 1956. It became such a noisy media haunt in the sixties that a group of ad agency people who practically lived there had a plaque erected outside the premises, in celebration of its notoriety as a Madison Avenue joint.

  On West Fifty-second Street, in the former speakeasy 21, Rosser Reeves would be at his regular table eating his habitual corned beef hash, the surrounding tables packed with ad people. They thronged the pavements of Forty-sixth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenue, “Restaurant Row” as it became known, while Tehran was a popular hang-out for the DDB crowd. Ted Shaine, a DDB art director, remembers noisy gatherings in the Mens Bar at the long-gone Biltmore Hotel at Grand Central Station. “It was like a club. There was a room there where you could actually mix your own martinis and I guess after one or two things could get a little sloppy. You could get food there but no one went there to eat. I ordered a salad once and everyone stood round, poking it—‘what’s that?’ It was a great institution.”

  He also recalls a bar called Cheetah, a forerunner of the legendary Studio 54 of the seventies and eighties. “It was right near the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. It was phenomenal, there was a house band, not DJs like now, but there was music and dancing. I’m talking ’64 to ’67. We’d work very hard all day and then go out all night. It was an amazing time.”

  ONE MAN WHO LIVED THE LIFE was Jerry Della Femina, a Brooklyn-born college dropout. While he was working as a messenger boy in the late 1950s delivering to advertising agencies, he was attracted to the job of copywriter as “they didn’t look like they were working.” After several years hawking his book of sample ads he had created in his spare time, he finally got a job in 1961 at Daniel & Charles, a small Jewish run agency.

  Within a year he was fired. He had set up a freelance creative consultancy using Daniel & Charles’ address on his letterhead, and in error sent a soliciation to one of their clients. But this was a time of full employment, jobs were plentiful, and he quickly found another at DK&G, one of the agencies attempting to follow in DDB’s creative footsteps.

  Here he gained his first piece of notoriety when he managed to feature a nude woman—in an ad for a foot ointment. Next he won several awards for work on Talon Zippers. Although he himself would admit the campaign had been running for some years before he was assigned to it, his executions were noticeably witty, fun, and daring—not unlike the fellow himself.

  Outrageous behavior, good-natured controversy, and ribald laughter accompanied this bald bear of a man wherever he went. His next move, to Bates along with three other creative people from DK&G, was one of those controversies. Bates was still at the opposite end of the prevailing creative mood and represented the worst of the stuff-shirted old world that Jerry and his ilk were fast shucking off. But there was a scheming method in this seeming madness. He knew they would pay him good money because they valued him as an energetic high-profile Italian writer who could help them appear sexier. And he knew he could learn from them.

  The Achilles heel of the new creative agencies—and even, to a certain extent, of Ogilvy—was creating advertising for packaged goods, those low-priced, fast-moving grocery items that are the backbone of everyday marketing. The newer agencies were terrific at communicating the values of luxury goods or items with a more considered purchase, like cars or clothing, but a “creative” answer to the challenge of selling a soap powder or a cake mix had so far largely eluded them. Della Femina figured that if he could combine the Bates USP style of work for products like M&Ms and Anacin with the new, more street wise approaches, he could mold a new way of advertising for even the most mundane of products.

  But he also used Bates as a publicity platform for the next step in his career, upping his profile further by making speeches and writing articles that were often unapproved, and sometimes even in contradiction of views held by the Bates management. After one such speech, he phoned Fred Danzig, a reporter at Advertising Age from 1962 until his retirement as Editor in 1994, and told him that he was in deep trouble with Archie Forster, the head of Bates, and was going to be fired.

  “So that Monday in Ad Age, [he ran the] headline, ‘Della Femina to be fired’. I got called down by Forster. He was an old Southerner and he said, ‘What are we going to do with you, boy?’ And I said, ‘Well, Archie, if you read Ad Age today you are probably going to fire me.’ He said, ‘I can’t fire you when you say you are going to be fired!… You bought yourself some time didn’t you, boy?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I guess I did.’ I knew I was going to start my own agency anyway. I just needed that time. I did a lot of work for Bates on Panasonic and I learned a lot there. It was a great education.”

  IT WAS WHILE WORKING on Panasonic that he came up with one of the most famous lines in advertising history, more so even than “Think Small” or “Lemon.” His suggestion was unveiled to an internal meeting of senior Bates executives who were struggling to find a solution to selling Japanese electronics products less than twenty years after the end of the war in the Pacific. They all leaned forward eagerly when their expensive new star copywriter solemnly announced, “Gentlemen, I have it.” There was a gasp of horror as he unveiled: “From those wonderful folks who brought you Pearl Harbor.”

  It was never seriously intended; there’s a tradition in advertising of writing outrageous ads that could never run. Often, they’re the first flights of fancy by a creative team when they initially get the brief—they get all of the cynicism and the ribaldry out of the way before they knuckle down to the task. Bob Olsen got a copywriter job from Phyllis Robinson on the strength of a campaign that never ran. The line was, “If it isn’t Wolfschmidt’s Vodka, it isn’t breakfast.” David Herzbrun, with George Lois, wrote a headline for Lanteen Diaphragms and Vaginal Gel: “Lanteen: Fecund to None.” Both Della Femina and Carl Ally lay claim to the unsurprisingly never-used line for Preparation H, a haemorrhoids treatment: “Up yours with ours—and kiss your piles goodbye.” The Pearl Harbor line was used, and to great effect, although not to sell televisions or stereos. Della Femina made it the title of his memoir and it sold many thousands of copies.

  Jerry Della Femina gained attention and awards for his work on Talon Zippers ads while at DK&G.

  DELLA FEMINA WAS thirty-one, and his partner Ron Travisano twenty-nine, when they opened their eponymous agency in 1967. From day one it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. Jerry himself said in a Fortune interview in April 1987, “My management skills aren’t as good as they should be. Heaven knows what’s happening on my watch.”

  What was happening was, in the words of art director Ted Shaine, “like Woodstock—without the mud. It was a party the whole time.” Bob Kuperman, who went there as creative director in 1968, said, “We did do some work but it was limited. Most of it was either at night or on your own. There was a lot of dart throwing, a lot of card games. It was the least business-like place I worked.” As an art director who once worked with Della Femina says, “Before I met him I thought he was all smoke and mirrors. But at least then I thought it was real smoke and real mirrors.” It’s a quote that Jerry still finds hilarious.

  He’s very proud of the atmosphere. “We work very late,” he said at the time. “We work until one, two in the morning every night almost. We start very early, we spend a lot of time together and we like each other. It’s a nice feeling. There’s music going on in the agency almost all the time. People are enjoying themselves, there’s a lot of fun.”

  There was also a lot of boozing, marijuana, and sex. Jerry says, “We had a cleaning lady, Virginia, who swore when she wrote her book she’d make more money than an
yone else. Because she caught every couple.”

  He expresses regret at the passing of their lascivious annual event, the agency Sex Contest. He claims it started when they first opened, and lasted for as long as thirty years:

  “Everyone voted for the person they most wanted to go to bed with. There was a gay vote and ménage-a-trois vote, too. It was solemn vote counting, with poll watchers and everything. Talk about a well-kept secret; if it had come out, it would have destroyed us. It was the wildest thing, and good sophomoric fun. We’d do it around Christmas season. The winning couple would win a weekend at the Plaza Hotel. We don’t know if anyone ever used it. I can’t remember the second prize, but third place was offering Ron Travisano’s couch. There were people who campaigned. One woman, an account person, had posters: ‘Like Bloomingdale’s, I’m open after 9 every night.’”

  One year a prospective client, known to be a devout churchgoer, made a surprise visit to the agency a few days before the vote. Staff were rushing round the agency tearing down the more lewd posters as he was coming up in the elevator. They thought they’d got them all until he asked for the men’s room. It was then that someone remembered one of the female staff had stuck little signs just above the urinal bowls: “Want any help with that? Vote for me!” They managed to keep him engaged in small talk just long enough to get the signs removed.