The Real Mad Men

by Andrew Cracknell

  Hayes did everything a good client of any creative endeavor should do: he shortened the lines of communication and approval (to just him), simplified the briefing and, having chosen Lois, backed his ideas. Time and again he went out on a limb for controversial concepts. He was rewarded with a 400 percent sales increase over the ten years. Not all of that can be attributed to the covers, but there can be no doubt that they helped enormously.

  Hayes approached Lois in the summer of 1962 simply for advice on how better to present the magazine. The more Lois got into the convoluted and byzantine ways in which a committee of people would decide what went on the cover and then stumble to the approval of whatever ideas were presented (“group grope” as Lois contemptuously dismisses it), the itchier he became to get involved. It wasn’t a job for PKL and Lois didn’t approve of freelance, but he offered to do a couple of covers on spec.

  Although not strictly an advertising project, Lois’s idea was to approach it as such. Demonstrating the difference between a designer and an advertising art director, he went beyond simply laying out graphic elements in an eye-catching fashion, making the cover a narrative idea. “It helps to sell the magazine. If you do a cover correctly,… it almost crystallizes what the magazines want to say. And in fact there have been times when I’ve done covers that have crystallized that point, with a change of direction inside.”

  Other than the photograph and a short pithy line, there was nothing on the front apart from the date and Esquire masthead. Not only did this help the magazine stand out against the visual tumult of the news stands, but their domination on the page enhanced the explosive nature of the ideas.

  THE COVERS WERE frequently controversial. With the quietly set line “The Passion of Muhammad Ali,” one showed Ali in boxing gear pierced by arrows, in the style of St. Sebastian. Another featured a Norman Rockwell-esque child, complete with coke and hamburger, looking in shock at a TV set showing Jack Ruby killing Lee Oswald. Although the story is about the background to the killing, the picture takes it onto a further plane, the loss of American innocence.

  On another cover, Andy Warhol falls backward into a can of Campbell’s tomato soup to signify the end of pop art. Warhol was excited; he thought they were going to make a giant can and fill it with soup. Fischer shot the picture in two parts, dropping a marble into a can of thinned soup to make the splash and then stripping in a separate shot of Warhol.

  As Fischer remembers it, “We had a green room where we stuck people with pastries while they were waiting for the [shoot]. My daughter who was maybe ten at the time went down there and saw Warhol and he said. ‘I’m bored, I’m bored’, and she said, ‘I just got a homework assignment—let me bring it down’. It was a map of the United States and she was supposed to color it in—and Andy Warhol colored it in for her. She didn’t know who he was. But he didn’t go over the lines. She was very happy with it”.

  “Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.”

  GEORGE LOIS

  Fischer and Lois worked well together. At the time Lois said of Fischer, “He understands what I’m trying to do. I explain the ad and I don’t explain the picture. He understands the advertising. He’s a good art director himself. I’d rather talk to Carl than talk to a technician because he understands it all.”

  Yet another controversial cover showed Nixon’s face, beset by four hands holding makeup, including lipstick, to the caption, “Nixon’s last chance—this time he’d better look right.” It’s a reference to the terrible impression he made on the TV debates against Kennedy in 1960, pale, sweating, with a heavy jowl shadow, that supposedly cost him the election. Lois says he got a phone call from an incensed White House aide: “We know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to make him look like a faggot!”

  ONE OF LOIS’ FAVORITE covers, and one of the most ambiguous images imaginable, was taken by Fischer for the November 1970 issue. On March 16, 1968, between 350 and 500 Vietnamese (mainly women and children, some of whom had been sexually abused and tortured) were massacred in the hamlets of My Lai and My Khe by a unit of the US Army under the command of Lieutenant “Rusty” Calley. Just before Calley’s trial, Esquire decided to publish extracts from a book about him and this became the subject for the cover.

  Fischer’s photograph shows a seated Calley, surrounded by trusting Asian children, smiling broadly like an indulgent older brother. It was shot in Fischer’s East Eighty-third Street studio.

  “It was very straightforward to do.” He thinks for a moment. “One of the things that amazes me is why people let their pictures be taken in such compromising situations.… I had observed in all the years of working only one or two people ever refuse to do something on the cover on the magazine. It’s important promotion for people.… I mean, did he understand what was happening? I mean, how stupid can you be?”

  A selection of the most scintillating and shocking Esquire covers created by George Lois in the 1960s.

  When asked if Calley may have thought it was expiation, Fischer says, “I really don’t know what he thought. Expiation would be the last thing I would think of. I think he would think, ‘Look, I’m friendly with kids’, but who knows what he thought? The fact that he did it at all was extraordinary.”

  He parodies Lois’ brief: ‘This fucking fuck is going to sit around these fucking kids and we’re going to take a crazy picture.”

  Lois had him pose unsmiling and then smiling, and decided the smiling one was the one he wanted. He is ambiguous even about its ambiguity. “It meant different things to different people. A lot of people who thought the war was terrific looked at it and said ‘Calley, he said he didn’t do anything wrong. Maybe he killed… but he fought for this country, he doesn’t look guilty.’ Other people looked at it and were shocked, saying, ‘That son of a bitch, killer, sitting there with children he killed.’”

  It was the most controversial from a decade of controversial covers. It offended a lot of people. Lois isn’t bothered. He bathes in the reaction and exults in the uproar.

  9Thinking Big

  “We’re being bought by McCann—do you know what that means?”

  DON DRAPER TO PEGGY OLSEN MAD MEN

  In a triumphalist piece in New York magazine Jerry Della Femina proclaimed the old-style agencies vanquished by the creative revolutionaries who were now carousing uninhibitedly up and down the Avenue. It actually appeared in the April 27, 1970, edition but one section could have been published at any time from the early sixties, with increasing accuracy as the decade went on.

  “In a sense [clients of] the older agencies are asking for divorces, and then they’re running out with these young chicks. And so what the older agencies do is try to act like a woman who is trying to hold onto her husband.… The older agencies go out and buy a load of cosmetics and eyeshadow and they put all this stuff on and do their hair—this is what they’re doing when they start hiring freaky young kids at star salaries.” Della Femina should know—he’d only recently been the happy recipient of a handsome salary from Bates for exactly that reason.

  The older agencies were fairly certain they knew what their clients wanted—more of what they’d been giving them for years. But even in the late fifties as Benton & Bowles demonstrated when they hired newer, edgier creative people like Amil Gargano and Ed McCabe, they were already looking over their shoulders at this strange new competition coming up on them. As the decade went on they thought they should have a few more exotic writers and art directors around to prevent their clients from flirting with the newer, sexier agencies.

  JWT, still the largest agency, took it one stage further when in 1967 they lured Ron Rosenfeld away from DDB to be their creative director on a record $100,000 salary. It was a Judy Wald placement and widely recognized as a gamble; Lore Parker, still happily at DDB, said at the time, “It never seems to work for an old-line conservative agency to bring in DDB people to work under the old system. I am holding
my breath to see what will happen with Ron Rosenfeld going to JWT.” She didn’t have to hold it for long. You can’t graft one culture onto another—unless there’s a massive upheaval, the existing culture will always squeeze out the interloper. Within eighteen months the experiment was over and Rosenfeld had left to set up his own agency with Len Sirowitz and Marion Harper—Harper, Rosenfeld, and Sirowitz.

  BY MID-DECADE the gulf between Old and New had become a chasm. Bernbach’s style of advertising and of running an agency was either loved or loathed—there was no halfway point. Shorthanded as “Creative Advertising,” it was either the curse or the savior of the industry.

  Driven by a combination of incomprehension and fear—and some justifiable concern as much of the new work was not conceived with the discipline of DDB’s creative department—the criticism came from those agencies too inert, and with clients too entrenched, to adapt.

  Barton Cummings, President of Compton-Advertising, the major P&G agency responsible for some of the dreariest of Madison Avenue’s output, described it in Richard Gilbert’s Marching up Madison Avenue as as “The Museum of Modern Art School of Advertising” and accused it of wasting clients’ money. “What really produces sales is not art work but solid merchandising, research, and media spadework backed by straightforward, convincing advertising.” You can hear the quivering indignation.

  The creative side, when it could be bothered, hit back. In a brilliant satire, Communication Arts magazine gravely demonstrated the “shortcomings” of DDB’s “Think Small” (see overleaf) and step by step systematically ruined it by showing how a Compton style agency would have “improved” the ad. It attracted at least one approving letter.

  In business terms the “creative” agencies and the clients they represented were a tiny proportion of total advertising activity. Nevertheless, the noise within the trade was coming entirely from them. In 1965 when Mobil, at the time a major gasoline advertiser, took their business from Bates and gave it to DDB, it was perceived if not as the beginning of the end, at least the end of the beginning of the Creative Revolution, with the spoils going to the renegades.

  At Bates, Reeves suddenly retired, claiming it had always been his intention to go at fifty-five. There’s some evidence to suggest that he was beginning to wonder whether he’d got it all entirely right after all. He confided to Ed McCabe that he felt “over positioned,” that he’d found himself, as a necessary business gambit, defending the tasteless work he’d secretly begun to hate.

  Ogilvy & Mather (they’d dropped the Benson in 1964) was growing healthily but the agency’s reputation for interesting and original work was a fast-fading memory, stuck as they were with Ogilvy’s rigid and increasingly discredited rules.

  BUT BIG WASN’T NECESSARILY all bad. Y&R had maintained a degree of creative integrity for several decades and flourished in the new atmosphere. They found the perfect creative leader for their times in Steve Frankfurt, an intelligent and articulate art director. Yet another student of Alexey Brodovitch and the Pratt Institute, Frankfurt’s initial experience had been in film, and he brought that to bear in his advertising career, approaching commercials in a less rigid way than had hitherto been attempted.

  Most commercials shot by New York agencies in the fifties and early sixties were made by three major companies, with technicians and directors more used to shooting live commercials within sponsored programs. Many had limited experience of the wider aspects of filmmaking yet they controlled the business, treating the process like a factory production line, exercising minimum imagination and very little effort, while the creative teams were given almost no role in the execution of their ideas.

  The revolutionizing of this system aided the larger Creative Revolution. Photographers who had previously been employed by agencies for stills shoots gradually began to be used by those same agencies for commercials. They brought a few advantages: they had already worked in color and were ready for its increasing presence in TV commercials throughout the sixties; they were used to the ways of the advertising system and understood the relationship between creative people and the account people, the agency and the client; and they were more prepared to cooperate.

  At Carl Ally, Amil Gargano found the director that their agency producer had hired to shoot their first Volvo commercials patronizing, inflexible, and lacking in enthusiasm. He fired him after the first day and employed Mike Cuesta, a photographer he’d used before. It was the start of Cuesta’s career as a commercials director.

  Irving Penn, Steve Horn, Bert Stern, and Harold Becker all trod the same path, while Bob Giraldi and George Gomes made the switch across from agency art director. Howard Zeiff, who’d shot stills for Levy’s and Polaroid for DDB in the fifties, became the most awarded and sought-after director of the late sixties. His reel by 1970 was a roll call of the absolute best of US advertising, stories told with exquisite timing and bathed in humanity; affectionate, realistic and always funny.

  As an art director at Y&R, Frankfurt saw his commercials with an imaginative advertiser’s eye, asking for techniques and ideas that wouldn’t have occurred to the hidebound directors who were normally employed. A spot with no words at all was unheard of then but it didn’t stop Frankfurt; for Johnson & Johnson he shot a baby in close-up from the mother’s point of view rather than the conventional posed setup, making it more personal and emotional. He used stop-motion and borrowed from contemporary art—he saw no barriers to where you could go to make a commercial.

  His talent and creative leadership skills earned him the presidency of the agency in 1967, unprecedented for an art director. Of all the agencies that predated DDB, Y&R under Frankfurt’s leadership was the only one to garner any respect from the new creative generation, with such work as their emotional Wings of Man campaign for Eastern Airlines. But in 1971, at the age of forty, he stepped down, later saying, “I never had a frustrating day in that company—until I became president.”

  He went back to Hollywood to a new career in film publicity, back to his core skill as an art director. Amongst his subsequent output was the world-famous poster for Rosemary’s Baby.

  Back on Madison Avenue, according to a Newsweek article on the state of US advertising, in the first seven months of 1969 more than a hundred new agencies had started up. This is a little difficult to believe—that’s roughly two every three working days—but it does reflect the optimistic fervor with which the creative community regarded the business. As the article says, “Most of them have been the undertaking of one to four young creative people who have served a term with an old-line agency… who seek… the freedom to exercise their talents (and dress) as they wish.”

  Their dress, in keeping with the times, had transformed since the day those sixteen Italian art directors lined up for their shoot. Newsweek reported the head of one of the leading agencies as saying, “You should see the things walking around back in our creative department. Frazzled hair, denims, neckerchiefs, the works.” Another said, “My God! We hired a new copywriter the other day—a very good one—and he came to work in his bare feet!” Fifteen years earlier Al Reis, a young account man at a Madison Avenue industrial agency, received a querulous all-staff memo from the president demanding that male staff wear knee-length socks so that no bare leg would show when they sat down.

  Enthusiasm is one thing, foresight is another. Already there were signs that perhaps this “freedom to exercise their talents” was not all it appeared to be. PKL had already imploded, the partners barely speaking to each other. Koenig, by his own admission, was bored and absent a lot of the time, Lois was angry, and Papert was distracted by the demands of running what was now a public company. By 1967, Lois had left with Ron Holland to set up Lois Holland Callaway.

  Further, the move to gain respectability and transparency by going public had apparently backfired; according to Papert, far from making the agency look respectable “PKL looked like it was doing better than P&G. They accused us of looking after ourselves rather than P&G.”
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  BUT NONE OF THIS turbulence had any effect on the one man whose ideas were light years away from the writers and art directors cavorting in their newfound freedoms. Marion Harper Jr. had set his sights on issues, both personal and professional, of truly immense consequence.

  A campaign for Eastern Airlines, “The Wings of Man,” created by Steve Frankfurt at Young & Rubicam. This advertisement was on the author’s office wall in London in the late 1960s.

  Harper joined McCann-Erickson, a large New York agency, in 1939 at the age of twenty-three as a trainee. Nine years later he was the president. That his trajectory through the ranks of what was a very conservative company was so rapid came as no surprise to those who knew of his phenomenal work ethic, focus, and intellect.

  Born in Oklahama in 1916, his precocity was quickly obvious. At the age of ten he was addressing the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the Oklahoma State Capitol on his chosen subject, “The Time is Here for the North and South to Forget their Differences and Pull Together.” His mother, an occasional newspaper columnist who was both politically and socially aware, brought him up after his father, a newspaper space salesman, had left the family and moved to New York.

  Harper worked diligently at school and after two years at Andover went to Yale, leaving in 1938 with top honors in math, economics, and psychology. His father, by then a vice president of General Foods, was an early believer in marketing and distribution research. It was a leaning that rubbed off on Marion; he’d worked his summer vacations as a door-to-door salesman, mainly of women’s goods, experimenting on the relative effectiveness of different sales pitches.

  The following year he started in the postroom at McCann Erickson at 285 Madison Avenue. Hanging around the research department and asking endless questions laced with a few ideas of his own quickly got him promoted, and he was given his own research project to oversee, a method of testing ad copy prior to publication. He was mind-numbingly diligent in his analysis and by the age of twenty-six he was head of copy research, by thirty director of research, and by thirty-two, in 1948, president of McCann-Erickson.