by Bruce McCall
This appeal to common sense could hardly have hit the American luxury-car market at a more vulnerable moment. Postwar prosperity had created a binge mentality. Detroit luxury cars had gradually departed from the notion of automotive excellence. At their zenith they sported tail fins, became bloated and heavy, and morphed into status symbols that celebrated affluence. By the late fifties, styling was the selling point. Technology had stagnated. Innovation had all but disappeared. The novelty of the American road yacht was fading fast. Just in time for a visit to your local authorized Mercedes-Benz dealer.
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Meanwhile, in faraway Stuttgart, the pace of technical progress hadn’t slackened since 1886, when the company’s founder, Gottlieb Daimler, unveiled the world’s first practical automobile, twenty-one years before the Model T. That lead helped ensure that most important innovations in passenger car technology would appear first in the cars of Mercedes-Benz. The risk that American car buyers, allergic to technology, might blink and turn the page was real. The advertising challenge was to convert this Swabian book of Genesis into all the benefits of owning and driving a Mercedes-Benz that could fit on one page.
David Ogilvy had created a prototype with his now-legendary Rolls-Royce ads. He pioneered the counterintuitive technique of long copy—not for one or two ads but an entire campaign that limned the product’s benefits in such vivid prose that the reader was left in a daze of admiration. The long-copy format looked like important news and dramatically introduced Mercedes-Benz to America. Only long copy could do justice to the story of one engineering landmark after another and their benefits. Moreover, it sharply differentiated Mercedes-Benz at a glance from all American car ads. And all American cars. It was expected that not everyone who saw these ads read through to the end. The impression told a story in itself. Even casual notice paid dividends, i.e., “If they have that much to say, it must be a damn good car.”
I wrote and rewrote Mercedes-Benz copy night and day, seven days a week, and it hardly mattered if it was a small-space dealer ad or a two-page magazine ad or a full-page ad to run in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I suspect that my deficient formal education and my viscerally insecure place in the world goaded me. I also craved the approval of my mentors, Messrs. Davis and the soon-to-be-introduced Hank Bernhard, who could validate me. And David Ogilvy, who only had to be David Ogilvy.
I thought and worked myself into an Ogilvist, while also serving as the moral guardian of the oldest and most respected manufacturer of automobiles on earth. There were the names on the list of owners of the Grand Mercedes 600 limousine, including Mao Tse-tung, Marshal Tito, and His Holiness the Pope. Not to mention Elvis Presley. I saw my job as more than a prestigious slot in adbiz; it was a higher calling. I concentrated on following D.O.’s inimitable copywriting style, achieving a result somewhere between imitation and plagiarism.
This was an absorbing mission, the focus of every hour I spent at the agency. Nobody else seemed as zealous about it. So, more or less by default, I was soon not only the seniormost Mercedes-Benz writer but also the creative head. I proceeded to blunt or starve the career of every writer under me by doing all the writing myself and keeping the poor bastards at a distance. Had any of them shown the potential to grow, or given a damn about cars or advertising, I’d have groomed them. But then and later, in similar situations, I couldn’t trust any other copywriter to think like D.O. or generate perfect forgeries of that singular, sublime style. I freely admit to being probably the worst copywriting teacher who ever lived.
I was proud of the fact that the Ogilvy & Mather philosophy disdained the gaudy ritual of annual creative awards. These curious galas celebrate creativity for its own sake. The winning ads are brilliantly imaginative and beautiful and often witty as hell, but these awards have no connection to what advertising is for: to sell things. Selling is irrelevant to the major awards shows. They substitute for the personal fame so many advertising practitioners lust after but are denied by advertising’s tradition of creative anonymity. A gold medal from the One Show trumps a sales leap traceable to sound but unflashy advertising. The annual Effie Awards, honoring sales success in various categories, enjoy scant success or meaning within the industry. Sic transit gloria bullshit.
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Into my office and my life one August afternoon charged my next mentor/father figure/hero—a big, blond bull in a china shop, a passionate workaholic supercharged with a kind of dynamism that frightened the meek and lazy. Hank Bernhard was titularly the Mercedes-Benz account director. Account executives were the suits, business school grads who liaised with the client, looked after the budget, and coordinated the media, research, and creative departments. An unofficial cordon sanitaire traditionally barred the account types from meddling in creative work; their job was selling our work to the client and never presuming to dictate how it looked or read. Hank blithely ignored this tradition, infuriating—among many others—my group copy supervisor. However, it failed to piss me off. Hank’s ear was more acutely tuned to copy—to the rhythms, wordplay, and power of written language—than that of nine out of ten copywriters. He cared and often knew more about typography, photography, media, the science of advertising, Mercedes-Benz, the company and its cars, than anybody.
Strong polymathic tendencies were evident in him, and sometimes exhausting. You either loved Hank’s blend of passion, brains, compulsive work habits, and fierce loyalty to the client or you hated his guts. He lacked, shall we say, communication skills: he bored audiences, who nodded off after the first half hour of his stiff, clunky style of speaking, a style punctuated by spontaneous segues into lengthy anecdotes sans punch lines. Hank was frequently impatient, a tyrant and a bully. Withal, he was that rare creature who changed a room simply by entering it. Maybe it was his almost visible energy flow charging the air.
Hank and I bonded within our first hour of meeting. I was as eager as he was to alert America to Mercedes-Benz and its cars. He trusted my dedication to David Ogilvy’s advertising crusade and my familiarity with the automobile world. We functioned in tandem: I’d hand in the pages of the next ad and wait. Before the end of the day my phone rang, a memo came in the office mail, or Hank in person thundered into my office with my typed ad, heavily splattered with notations in pencil and ink. The two of us—well, Hank—edited, moved lines and paragraphs around, changed a flat-sounding word to an active one. I transcribed his handiwork and added gems of my own. Far from resenting Hank’s intrusion, I welcomed it. He couldn’t abide sloppiness or carelessness, and he drove me to think deeper, work harder, and do it better in the fourth revision and better yet in the fifth.
Henry Paul Bernhard never relaxed. I learned from him that brutally hard work is the secret of great writing, that if you’re patient, there is always a better way to say it. I also learned the importance—so true of Mercedes-Benz—of learning everything you can about a car or a lawn mower or a pair of shoes, because buried in those mountains of tedious facts could be diamonds that become extra selling points.
Those first six months on Mercedes-Benz at O&M would be my happiest, most fulfilling time in advertising. I was made a vice president. No corner office, no more money, no say in agency affairs, yet it did look good on a business card, and it let me sit back and savor having further escaped my dismal past. (The world didn’t really need to know that an advertising agency vice president was the equivalent of rear admiral of the Swiss navy.) Our little gang of zealots, abetted by a typographic angel, the Danish freelancer Ingeborg Baton, stayed late on many nights. Lavishing half-insane care on every line of type, removing ugly “widows” to gain extra lines. Rewriting a caption to delete nine characters so it would fit on a single line. Hunting down typos at the very last minute. Having the fun, feeling the fizz known only to people in love with their work. Our introductory campaign was financed by a modest budget, but it sparked a sales jump that surp
rised even Hank and had our U.S. client dancing with joy.
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Outside of the office, the stubborn hobgoblins that had made me more an observer than a participant in life kept me isolated from wherever I should have been. I dated girls, but lost interest before anything happened. Work was my number one priority, and a bulletproof alibi for limited social activities. Maybe my job did leave nothing in the tank . . . but come on. My social life stank because my social skills remained stagnant. It would take a lot more than a mere resolve to change.
I finally abandoned a squat I had rented on the East Side, dragged the crummy furniture brought with me from Detroit downtown to Greenwich Village, and settled into a space below street level in a brownstone in an effort to feel the vibes and get groovy. A feeble hiccup of rebelliousness had drawn me to that gloriously seedy area, long a bohemian capital and now the epicenter of East Coast mid-sixties upheavals. The deepest I dared probe into what was now officially known as the counterculture was to wear a macho work shirt and clomp about in L.L. Bean boots on weekends.
It was the Summer of Love, 1967, young America churning and burning with a sometimes violent antiestablishment energy, wallowing in a spontaneously messy new subculture. The social and sexual freedoms—it was about freedoms of every kind—both lured me and scared me. Viewing it all from a fourth-floor window in an office building on Fifth Avenue at Forty-Eighth Street, a straight-arrow conformist with a brush cut in a three-piece suit, I brooded on which fork in the road I should take. I lacked the confidence born of self-knowledge that could furnish an unambiguous answer. I wasn’t ready to make such a critical decision. So here I was, at thirty-two, still a guy without a fucking clue.
Steve Smith was my one close friend. Like most people I knew, he worked for David E. ’s car magazine as a kind of utility man. His unpredictable mood swings terrified me at times, but mood swings didn’t account for everything; even when coasting along in normal range, Steve could be a hostile prick. The attraction was his blazing intelligence. I don’t think he believed in anything, which left him free to argue both sides of any subject. He’d read everything I’d read, and more. He sharpened my wits, caught me out on my sophistries. He kept me honest. An exhausting, annoying, off-putting, worthwhile friend.
By this time Hank Bernhard was no longer my mentor and partner in making Mercedes-Benz an American success story. In early 1968, as the first acquisition of an advertising agency that would ultimately see Ogilvy & Mather buy, merge, and otherwise grow into an international giant with offices worldwide, the William Heumann agency became Ogilvy & Mather in Frankfurt. Hank was sent over to run it.
He had his hands full. Advertising—Reklame in German—was still in its early stages. Prewar advertising hadn’t gone beyond the poster stage, and politics had blocked the importation of American know-how. Postwar Germany, still reeling from complete ruin and not at all eager to be a clone of Madison Avenue, fostered its own advertising culture. American luxuries such as consumer research were unknown. Heumann rated no better or worse than other agencies, but its client roster serendipitously matched up with important ones on O&M’s list, including Mercedes-Benz and Shell Oil, so Heumann it was.
Hank’s advertising savvy, herculean energy, and the fact that he spoke passable German commended him to the task of turning Heumann around and making of it a solid O&M agency. Meanwhile, I was pondering how to give life to my life. Whereupon I stumbled straight into the ursine embrace of Hank Bernhard. On one of his frequent trips back to the New York office, he descended on me like a famished grizzly. The Bernhardian barrage of flattery, persuasion, and the limning of vast, exciting new horizons was music—loud, stirring, brassy march music—to my ears. A couple of hours of it and I had agreed to join Hank in Frankfurt, in a nebulously defined creative role. This was my opportunity to live abroad, to work in a congenial environment, to get back to feeling again those hectic, heady days working with Hank.
I wasn’t a shrewd bargainer, for lack of experience and, truth to tell, because I was a born patsy. I couldn’t even think of conditions to set. What, me worry? Hank had arranged my Frankfurt life on the most cushiony possible terms. From a salary bump, to a company Mercedes, to a rent-free flat, to the Putzfrau who’d clean up after me and do the laundry. The exchange rate was pegged at four deutsche marks to the dollar, which rendered it difficult not to live hedonistically.
On a gray day in mid-November, I took a cab to Kennedy Airport and forsook New York for an indefinite time. Ahead waited the adventure of living and working in the heart of Europe. Pushed aside, for the nonce, was the matter of how to solve the life I was running away from.
A Mercedes-Benz copywriter job dropped into my lap. With luck like this, who needed initiative or savvy? I’m on the far right.
Chapter 7
A Thousand Moods, All of Them Somber
Growing up during the Second World War had ingrained in me an image of Germany as an ugly land, dark, harsh, and sullen. What the country had been before it stumbled into the totalitarian Third Reich interested me. History had always fascinated me. Now, in 1968, German history focused my attention on the Weimar Republic and the bumpy downhill slide into war and horror. The hackneyed question, asked but never satisfactorily answered—How could this cradle of culture and science have stooped so morally low, so fast?—was for wise men to determine. My curiosity focused on what the war had blotted out. A non-martial Germany must have existed, but I in my ignorance had made it a mystery. To explore its history seemed akin to breaking into a sealed room.
My interest evolved as I followed this history through the centuries. I was shocked that the state known as Germany had existed only since 1871. The Great War divided its history into Before and After. Under Kaiser Wilhelm, the nation had achieved wealth and power, all of it blasted to smithereens in the 1914–18 conflict. The crippled country was forced to try reinventing itself, a process thwarted by the culture’s scant familiarity with democracy and the vengeful terms dictated by the Versailles peace treaty of 1919 that gutted Germany’s already wobbly economy with monstrous debt repayments, spectacular inflation, and worldwide depression. Aggravated by bitter political turmoil and the myth that Germany had been “stabbed in the back” by domestic sabotage that cost it the war, serial crises ultimately ushered National Socialism, like the fox in the henhouse, into position to wreck all hopes for a decent national polity.
The Weimar Republic fascinated me as no political or cultural entity ever had. From 1919 to its collapse in 1933, Weimar—so called in reference to the small city serving as the seat of a feckless series of weak governments—burns in memory as the symbolic, frantic last binge of interwar freedom. Weimar’s dancing on the edge of the abyss brought forth the bitter, haunting music of Kurt Weill, in “Mack the Knife” and Mahagonny, piercing my imagination as Gershwin, Piaf, and Noël Coward could not. A quasi-symphonic piece of that time, composed for radio by the now-forgotten Eduard Künneke, was the Weimar Zeitgeist captured in music. It had lain in the back of my mind since I heard it on CBC radio in the mid-fifties. The Tänzerische Suite sounded exactly like the Weimar of my imaginings: alternately desperately jolly and carefree, sagging into melancholy, then suddenly wailing with what was—to me—the despair of lost hope. It seemed to have trapped the soul of Weimar in the very ether, sensing tragedy in the wings.
Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel did on film for Weimar what the Tänzerische Suite did for music. The stage production of Cabaret, borrowed from the play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten after Christopher Isherwood’s book The Berlin Stories, lifted Weimar into the imaginations of a new generation.* Tänzerische Suite sank my emotional intensity so deeply into the grooves of the record that I felt myself transported to Weimar circa 1929. It dramatically demonstrated the power of music to convey atmosphere. Result: Germany, from the moment I first stepped on its soil, looked, smelled, sounded, and moved exactly as I’d im
agined. It was déjà vu in a place I’d never been.
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My first week in Germany, I stood shivering in the November chill in a pastoral Swabian landscape near Waldorf, supervising the photo shoot for the 1968 American Mercedes-Benz brochure. The image was burnished by posing new ’68 models with classics from the rich Mercedes-Benz past, each pristine machine fetched from the Daimler-Benz Museum in Bad Cannstatt: the big, hulking 1936 260D, the world’s first diesel sedan, backgrounding the 1968 200D; the immortal 300SL “Gullwing” racing sports car supporting the new 230SL roadster. By the time I arrived in Frankfurt I was more beguiled than ever by the glory of Mercedes-Benz.
Glory didn’t characterize Frankfurt am Main, city of a thousand moods, all of them somber. In 1967 it was a banking and business center that shut down by six every evening, its executives having returned to their suburban homes, leaving downtown to clusters of homesick Poles and Turks and Serbians, Gastarbeiters hanging out in cheap ethnic cafés. The few “decent” restaurants were stuffy old hives with waiters in tailcoats serving stuffy old couples traditional, stuffy German food. Frankfurt’s once prominent Jewish population had all but vanished. There also went much of its cultural impetus.
The Frankfurt that greeted me was a gray place exuding a gray spirit. The aircraft of the RCAF, RAF, and USAAF had left the city a smoking pyre. A huge chunk of its character was lost when the lovingly curated medieval Sachsenhausen section of the city fell victim to British bombs. Aesthetics had subsequently been sacrificed to the pressure for immediate covered space. Frankfurt had been hastily rebuilt with low-lying structures ready to be torn down when commercial prosperity returned. The once celebrated opera house in the middle of the city had been left a broken ruin, an unsubtle reminder of the recent past. It would be another twenty years before Germany’s postwar Wirtschaftswunder, the economic boom, bathed Frankfurt in money and caused a glut of silvery office towers to rise: thereafter and probably forever, Frankfurt am Main functioned under the sobriquet of Mainhattan.
