The Real Mad Men

by Andrew Cracknell

  She had massive energy. While cool and sophisticated, she was not above masculine rough-and-tumble and was surrounded by a praetorian guard of young, male creative people who were dazzled by her. It’s unquestionable she hypnotized people, male and female. There are colleagues from the 1960s who are still enthralled by her, and have massive respect and admiration for her—although affection is a little less evident. There’s even a little whiff of fear. Getting people to talk about her even now is a little like asking around for information on a mafia Don: John will speak if Jill goes first. “Tell me what Jack says and I’ll tell you if I agree with him.” “Don’t ask me about that, ask Joan.”

  Rumors of both random kindness and random ruthlessness circulate equally. One story, unconfirmed, placed her in her office late one afternoon, where she had summoned a creative team, while her make-up artist prepared her for an evening function. With her back to the team, she fired them through the reflection in her mirror.

  Time and again you’re told she was a marketing genius, that she had the most extraordinary insights into the minds of the consumer, no matter who or for what product. When later she won American Motors, the male creative staff couldn’t wait to get their hands oily, believing that a car, and a fairly downmarket car at that, was not something Mary would understand. But within days of getting the assignment, she’d given them a detailed rundown of every model and its potential role in possible buyers’ lives. Apparently, she was spot on.

  NEXT FOR WELLS at Jack Tinker was another of those lucky bounces that seem to preface so many great breakthroughs. In a trip to the west coast to court Continental airlines, their executive vice president, Harding Lawrence, confided to Wells that he was about to leave to head up a little-known Texas airline, Braniff, and he’d rather Tinker saved themselves for that account. This led to one of the most famous airline campaigns of all time—and certainly the making of Mary Wells, in both creative and business terms.

  Braniff had plenty of lucrative routes, particularly to Central and South America, but almost no awareness. And Lawrence had big ideas, including immediate investment in a new fleet, and thus an urgent need to sell seats, which could only be brought about by instant fame.

  This is where Wells’ superlative sense of not just style but the application of style came in. An airline is an airline—they fly the same planes, seat you in the same seats, serve the same food. And, as she noticed, they did it in a utilitarian, almost military style. These were the early days of the jet age, before flying became packagable as romantic. Indeed, as DDB had noted with El Al, most airline advertising tended to be little more than timetable publication—there wasn’t much else to say. Y&R hadn’t even started their emotional Wings of Man campaign for Eastern Airlines.

  In her 2002 autobiography A Big Life (in Advertising), Wells described her epiphany one morning when standing in a check-in line at Chicago airport. “Airlines had developed out of the military… planes were metallic or white with a stripe painted down the middle to make them look as if they could get up and fly. The terminals were greige. They had off-white walls, cheap stone or linoleum floors, grey metal benches, there were tacky signs stuck into walls… Stewardesses, as they were called, were dressed to look like nurses.… There were no interesting ideas, no place for your eyes to rest, nothing smart anywhere.”

  Color. That was the answer. Vibrant, raging, scintillating, Braniff planes would be like brilliant flying jewels, like no planes you’d ever seen before, each painted in a different vivid color. The fabrics would dazzle and the stewardesses would dress in the most outrageous outfits. Alexander Girard was hired to design the interiors, Emilio Pucci to create the outfits for the stewardesses—or hostesses as Braniff now called them. A flight on Braniff was to be a party. Ideas on ticketing, seating, and entertainment came thick and fast. Turning a flight into a fashion parade, the stewardesses would change their outfits four times on the longer routes.

  It was, as the launch print ad said, “The End of the Plain Plane.” Created by writer Charlie Moss and art director Phil Parker, the line was printed under a picture of air hostesses and flight crew standing like a flock of brilliantly colored exotic birds on the wing of a vivid blue Braniff 720. The payoff to the copy was perfect, it could have been another headline: “We won’t get you there any faster—but it’ll seem that way.”

  The commercial was a kaleidoscopic view of the preparation for the print ad photo shoot, with the movements of the various people getting into position choreographed for maximum vivacity. Others followed, one announcing the stewardesses’ changes of costume as “The Air Strip.”

  The launch was a wild success. Five Braniff planes—blue, green, yellow, red, and turquoise—flew low and slow past a grandstand at Dallas airport filled with three hundred press from around the world. Acclaim followed from the passengers. To Wells’ delight there were reports of people playing the game, trying to book tickets on the basis of the color of plane they might fly on, going for the full set of seven. Acclaim also followed from the advertising business.

  The campaign was well underway when Wells dropped a bombshell on Tinker and Harper; she resigned in order to set up on her own agency. She had been given her first real taste of authority and autonomy, and Tinker was never going to confine her for long after that—there’s a huge and heady difference between being one of many creative group heads within a large creative department, as she had been, and being the charismatic leader of a “hot” agency, as she’d now experienced.

  How it came about is confused by several differing reports. In her autobiography Wells says she was furious because Harper reneged on a deal to make her president—a deal which curiously she hadn’t previously noted in the book, but if had been made it was presumably offered as a lure to get her to join in the first place. Tinker, on the other hand, says she came to him suggesting they try to buy the agency out of Interpublic. He put a deal to Harper which was refused and, sensing she wouldn’t stay much longer anyway, he agreed that she should set up her own company. Yet another version has Harper offering her the presidency but he was blocked by Hertzog and Myron McDonald, who said they would never work for her, and so she felt she had to leave. What is fact, however, is that through Carl Spielvogel, Harper offered her a contract worth $1 million over ten years, a quite phenomenal deal for 1966.

  ‘The End of the Plain Plane’; in 1965 the Braniff image was completely reinvented by Mary Wells, Alexander Girard and Emilio Pucci.

  Further examples from the Braniff campaign, including the “The Air Strip.” Originally there were eight different colors for the aircraft but lavender when combined with white and black is bad luck in Mexico and South America, so the color scheme was dropped to seven.

  With some courage she refused the offer. With Dick Rich, Stew Greene, and, critically, the Branifff account, and actively encouraged by Harding Lawrence, who she would marry the next year, she set up Wells Rich Greene (WRG) in the Gotham Hotel in April 1966.

  OF THE SUBSEQUENT SUCCESS, just a few figures need to be grasped. She started with the $6 million billing from Braniff, a loan from Chemical Bank and a handful of employees in four rooms at the Gotham, including her mother answering the phone. By the end of the first year her agency, now at 575 Madison Avenue, billed $35 million, and had a hundred employees. Within five years, WRG was billing $100 million with five offices, two of them overseas. Allowing for inflation, no stand alone start-up agency has ever exceeded that rate of growth. By 1969 Wells was paying herself $250,000 per year, a salary higher than anyone else in US advertising, man or woman. And when she took the company public in 1968, she became the first ever female CEO of a quoted company of any sort in US history.

  And to remind ourselves just how far we’ve come in this story, the agency principles were a woman and two Jews—and all three creative people.

  Divorced from Bert Wells as she started at Tinker, she married Harding Lawrence in Paris in 1967, a close marriage that lasted until his death in 2002. Typical of
Wells was the exclusivity and originality of her wedding outfits. In the middle of this phenomenally demanding period she’d had time to spot Halston, a hat designer for Bergdorf Goodman, and asked him to design a green velvet wedding dress—green was a popular color with her. It was the first dress he ever sold. For the night before the wedding she wore a black ruffled and flounced organza creation made for her by Hubert de Givenchy. Style, always style.

  Contributing to the agency’s growth was the win of American Motors, some P&G business, and TWA, which she won after agreeing with her husband to drop Braniff. That account went to George Lois’s new agency, Lois Holland Calloway, where he created the campaign “If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” featuring amongst other commercials Andy Warhol explaining the finer points of his art to an impassive Sony Liston seated next to him on a Braniff flight.

  Wells’ first successful account was the return of an old friend, Alka Seltzer, which also boosted the billings. They had moved to DDB shortly after Wells, Rich, and Greene’s breakaway from Tinker, triggering its sad implosion. DDB had given Alka Seltzer more wonderfully entertaining and memorable advertising but in the view of Miles Laboratories it was ineffective and too costly; DDB was insisting on sixty-second spots and the client wanted thirty seconds to double their exposure. They called Mary, and she gave them the thirty-second media schedule they wanted. She also gave them yet another string of memorable commercials: “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” both of which slogans passed into the national vernacular.

  One of the earliest WRG gains was in the increasingly controversial category of tobacco. The advertising business had the same problem as government with what was now confirmed as a killer product; there was just too much money in it to walk away. And money brought exposure and thus possible fame for the agency’s work. The Marlboro Cowboy, first run in 1955, had helped put Chicago’s Leo Burnett on the national map. While some, like DDB and Carl Ally, refused to work on the deadly weed, Wells took the view that if it was permissible to sell it, it should be permissible to advertise it. Anything else was hypocrisy, “un-American” as she put it.

  Philip Morris offered them Benson and Hedges 100s, a cigarette that was longer than king-size. They were expecting something cool and image-based, probably visual metaphors to do with longer slimmer objects—aircraft, skyscrapers, or, as they put it, long legs accentuated by mini skirts.

  Once in front of their layout pads Rich and Greene agreed the brief was drivel and came up with an idea that couldn’t have been sweeter or further away from Philip Morris’ expectations: the disadvantages of the Benson and Hedges 100s. Like the Alka Seltzer “Stomachs” it was a series of close-ups, this time of people failing to come to grips with the extra length of the cigarette while smoking it. One man gets his jammed in an elevator door; another sets fire to the beard of the man he’s talking to; one tries to light his two thirds of the way up; and in yet another we see a man’s face obscured by the newspaper he’s reading—a hole is slowly burnt in the page as his cigarette smolders its way through. By making them uncool, WRG made them—and themselves, as the brightest new agency on Madison Avenue—uber cool.

  In a 2002 interview with USA today she said of her decision to handle tobacco accounts, “I wouldn’t do it now. Based on the knowledge we have today, we’d make a different decision.” She adds, “I don’t feel I owe anyone an apology.” Harding Lawrence, a heavy smoker, had died of emphysema and lung cancer a few months before.

  NOT EVERYONE FOUND the agency and the act so captivating. There were of course the envious, the reactionary, and the mysoginistic. But there were also more serious critics who simply disliked Wells’ perspective of the job of an advertising agency.

  Says Amil Gargano, “The mention of her name would send Carl Ally into an unbridled rage. He thought she was a complete charlatan. He resented the fact that her best work was for a cigarette. Hated what she did for Braniff, the epitome of everything he loathed about her approach. Described her agency as ‘The School of Fashion and Theatrics.’”

  Well, yes, it was. She’d come to New York as an actress and theater was never far from her ideas. But she understood that there was no rule stating that the public shall respond only to the purity of a double page spread or the simplicity of a well-argued TV spot. They respond to theatrics too, and Wells’ idea was to create spectacles and let them be the advertisement.

  No one in her professional life knew her better than Charlie Moss. They first met at DDB, and he then worked with her from the Jack Tinker days until the absorption of WRG into another Harper-style consortium in 1998. His first impression of Mary, as it is for so many, had been of her style.

  “DDB was linoleum floors, offices painted a drab white, steel desks in every office, and two directors chairs with the canvas backs, and a chair for the person who had the office. A typewriter if you were a writer, an art board if you were an art director, and one big, BIG cork board on your wall.… Now when I first met Mary, I was shocked because her inner sanctum was very different from the rest of the agency. It was the only office that was decorated. It had an orange floor, and a French provincial credenza [desk], it was actually civilized-looking. It was the only office like that in the entire agency as far as I knew apart from maybe Bernbach’s upstairs.”

  Later, when interviewing for an art director at Tinker, she and Dick Rich had been impressed by a trade campaign for Rheingold beer in the book of DDB art director Phil Parker, who had been working with Moss. Moss takes up the story:

  “The idea entailed telling people that Rheingold sponsored the Mets. The Mets were, at that time, a joke, they hadn’t won a game in months, they were pathetic. And we came up with this idea that if the Mets won the pennant, we would buy everybody in NYC a beer. Then we changed it to buying everyone a beer if they won six games straight because the pennant would be out of the question. A beer party at Shea Stadium, everybody was invited, and Rheingold would sponsor it. But the Mets would not allow it to run. They felt it was making fun of them. It was withdrawn. The client loved it, everybody loved it. Anyways, it was what got me my job at Tinker. What it had in it inherently was a promotional aspect and that’s what Mary was about. Take the French Tourist Bureau at DDB. She created [a new] French tourist industry by insisting that they turn chateaus into hotels, and really market what they had so that Americans would appreciate it. Her advertising was secondary to the product that she helped to create.”

  Most agencies when given the Braniff brief would have tried to find a persuasive argument to convince the traveler that the current Braniff was a better airline. Wells took it further; she took the airline apart, recreated it with fireworks, noise, and fun, and advertised that.

  Advertising, and thus the advertising agency, is no longer about merely ads. Agencies have to be prepared to be about ideas that are above and beyond simple advertising. And as Mary Moore said of Mary Wells, with whom she worked in the seventies, “Her ideas were simply vast.”

  In that respect, she was an indicator of things to come. As with the revolutionaries at the start of the decade who had done so much to kickstart the upheaval and move on from the past, it was Mary Wells who was now bringing in the fresh thinking.

  She was the embodiment of the advertising creative person to come. The pointer to the future.

  Epilogue

  “We’re creative. The least important, most important thing.”

  DON DRAPER TO PEGGY OLSEN MAD MEN

  It had to be that particular period in which all this happened, mainly for economic and social reasons but also for one rather more joyful factor: in that decade there was an attitude of “anything goes,” and so anything went, including a gigantic beneficent canvas across which to experiment, explore, and sometimes gloriously fail. Optimism, energy, creativity, and hope were so abundant that circumstances that in any other era would have triggered gloom and despair, inspired instead capricious defiant laughter and scintillating new ideas. But these cir
cumstances changed as a darkness began to fall on the end of the sixties.

  On the morning of March 6, 1970, a series of explosions ripped through the bare branches of the trees on West Eleventh Street, just off Fifth Avenue. As the smoke and dust cleared, it revealed No 18, one of the elegant town houses lining the street, as a burning ruin. Shortly after, two stunned young women, one naked, the other barely clothed and both covered in dust and debris, asked at a neighbor’s house for help. They were given coffee and clothes and then, while firemen and police were going through the rubble next door, they disappeared. The two women were Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson—and neither was seen again for ten years.

  Over the next few days the scattered body parts of two men and a woman were gathered from the wreckage and the story begun to emerge. The five were members of the Weathermen, a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, and the basement kitchen had been turned into a bomb factory. They’d stockpiled a massive supply of dynamite, preparing bombs that were to be detonated in a Vietnam war protest at an officer cadet dance at Fort Dix that evening, but someone made a mistake.

  The event is tragically symbolic of the end of the bubbly, sun-dappled decade. The house belonged to Wilkerson’s father, and was empty because he had been away on business. He was the European Head of Y&R.

  While their fathers were still gambolling happily in advertising’s rich pasture, the coming generation was increasingly disaffected, “down in the basement, mixing up the medicine… you don’t need a Weatherman to see the way the wind blows,” as Dylan had prophetically written five years earlier. The bombing was one of an accelerating list of menacing events, big and small, ushering in the seventies.