Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  Nor was the image of the man in the gray flannel suit ever really accurate—Sloan Wilson notwithstanding. In the fifties, many advertising executives lived in Westchester, Locust Valley, or other suburbs, and dressed modestly for their long subway rides into the city. “I thought it bizarre that people of such means should live where they did when they could easily have afforded to live where I did … and get to the office or back as quickly as I could,” Joe wrote in Now and Then. He’d had enough subway rides as a kid shuttling to Times Square from Coney Island.

  But many people thought the commute was worth it to jettison stress at the end of the day—the stress of handling multimillion dollar accounts (in 1956, seventy-three companies spent over ten million dollars each to advertise their products: soft drinks, cars, soaps, drugs, liquor, tobacco, and electrical supplies; Miles Laboratories spent nine million to push Alka-Seltzer; General Motors budgeted $162,499,248 to promote Cadillacs and Chevys; and Seagram’s shelled out $31,547,043 to convince people their lives were poorer without Chivas Regal, Four Roses, and Wolfschmidt).

  Stress also came from the hierarchical nature of most ad agencies. Someone was always fiercely watching your work. Mayer quotes a research company officer’s account of a typical meeting: “The media people come first, usually about ten minutes early. Then about the time the meeting is supposed to start, the agency people show up and start kicking the media people around. The advertisers come about fifteen minutes late and for the rest of the meeting they kick the agency people around. Then everybody goes out for a drink.”

  The original Time-Life Building overlooked Rockefeller Center. From his office, Joe could watch ice-skaters in the rink below. In 1957, Marilyn Monroe detonated a block of dynamite to signal the construction-start of a new home for Henry Luce’s empire, closer to the Avenue of the Americas. The new building would be distinguished by its column-free interior space and the brushed stainless-steel paneling of its elevator banks. Eames chairs graced many of the offices.

  Time was a “man’s world,” according to Jane Maas, who worked there briefly around the time Joe was there. “The lines were clearly drawn” in the editorial department, she said: “[W]omen researched the stories, men wrote them.” More than this, the organization was built around belief in the possibility of a “Great Man”—and the resident Great Man was Henry Luce (the Man of the Year, every year, to his employees). He had coined the phrase “The American Century,” and he saw himself at the center of the era, shaping politics, minds, and culture. “[E]verybody was aware of the … biases that flowed from Luce,” Maas said. “While I worked there, Time helped to defeat the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson when he ran for President in 1956.”

  One morning, in the old Time-Life Building, Maas accidentally rushed into Luce’s private elevator and stood there staring at his “beetle brows” as he made his way to his thirty-second-floor penthouse. Luce was a devout Presbyterian, and he used his elevator time to pray. The sudden presence of a woman in the midst of his sacred ritual merely confirmed his greatness, for it is to the Great Man that the severest temptations appear.

  In spite of hard work and stress, Joe recalled his stint at Time as one long party. Autumn’s World Series hoopla gave way to Thanksgiving and holiday celebrations, and then to the rites of spring. Each fall, “during the World Series there were personal table radios brought in and installed for the duration” in most offices, he wrote. This enabled people “to go on listening to every game at work when they could no longer do so at the bars in the nearby restaurants in which they had spent their long lunches.” Joie de vivre always “prevailed during business hours in [the] corridors in those days. The liquor would flow, the canapes would appear, the socializing would spill over after business hours into small groups in one nearby bar after another. Small wonder we were often reluctant to hurry home,” Joe said. “The women at work there were lively, educated, and bright.”

  Meanwhile, Shirley was back at the Apthorp, tending two kids now: On May 11, 1956, at French Hospital, a son, Theodore Michael, had arrived. “We were pregnant together,” Shirley’s cousin Audrey Chestney said, “she with Teddy, me with my son Peter. We had lunch every day at Schrafft’s, and then went to the same doctor on Park Avenue. Shirley was very kind and fun to be with,” but the meetings at Schrafft’s were among her few outings. Chestney felt sorry for her: “Joe didn’t like to go to other people’s houses—I guess it was boring for him.”

  He was often on the road. Time held sales conferences at deluxe resorts in Florida, Bermuda, and Nassau. In the hotels, Bloody Mary and brandy Alexander mixes were provided for the men’s breakfasts. On the golf course, where most of the men spent their afternoons, barrels of ice filled with beer stood next to the ball washers and tee boxes at each hole. Joe did not enjoy golf. He spent his days reading and writing. Executives jockeyed for the honor of giving keynote speeches at these conventions; generally, Joe skipped the ceremonies.

  During his tenure at Time, the company reached a paid circulation of two million. A few executive officers discovered they were alcoholic (“[There] was a rumor … that the company maintained an ongoing arrangement with the Payne Whitney Clinic at New York Hospital for the discreet admission and treatment of important employees,” Joe wrote), and a few men, like Joe, kept getting promoted. He drew the attention of his competitors.

  It was his job to provide a “platform” or “campaign theme” for a “purchase proposition.” Magazine ad space—at Time’s level—sold for approximately $24,000 for a black-and-white page, $30,000 for a two-color page, and $35,000 for a four-color page. One day, working with a colleague named Pete Haddon, Joe kicked off a sales presentation to a stubborn client by setting up an easel in a boardroom. On the easel, he placed an illustration of the Red Queen from an old edition of Through the Looking-Glass. The queen was dragging Alice on the ground, shouting, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place!”

  Word got around that Joe had thoroughly charmed his clients. Soon thereafter, a colleague asked to borrow the Red Queen. He was trying to persuade the Simmons mattress company to buy ad space in Time in order to reach motel and hotel owners (who subscribed to the magazine in large numbers). A second colleague wanted the Red Queen to help him sway the H. J. Heinz Company to purchase ads, thereby interesting coffee shop managers in its products. Joe got his first raise.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, IN THE VILLAGE, George Mandel “slept little and gamboled much,” he said, even though “seizures common to brain injury … harassed [his] every gesture.” The Village, with its “distinctive taverns and cafeterias swarming with bogus artists and drug addicts,” was “lucky” for him. In these environs, he found friendship and “romance,” especially with a woman named Miki, who became his wife, and of whom Joe was terribly fond.

  Mandel had grown disillusioned with comic-book work. He wanted to be a fine artist, but the exploitive nature of the business also wore him down. Before the war, he had done most of his work with Funnies, Inc., a “packager” operating out of a small office on West Forty-third Street, near Times Square. A packager created comics on demand for various publishers. Lloyd Jacquet, Funnies, Inc.’s founder, couldn’t afford to be a publisher, so he hired writers and artists to sell the products to others. He made his first sale to Martin Goodman, a pulp magazine mogul: a spectacular package featuring the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. It was called Marvel Comics #1.

  For Jacquet and a handful of companies—Better Publications, Timely Comics, Novelty, Hillman, and Fox—Mandel worked on “Doc Strange,” “The Black Marvel,” “The Woman in Red,” “The Patriot,” “Voodoo Man,” “The Angel,” and “Sons of the Gods.” These were some of the projects Joe had seen him prepare for back at the Club Alteo.

  Other gifted young men in Jacquet’s stable included Mickey Spillane, Carl Burgos, and Bill Everett. Spillane said Jacquet, a Douglas MacArthur look-alike (right down to the corncob pipe), “never could understand artists a
nd writers.” He was a pure businessman; when Mandel, Spillane, and others went off to war, he replaced them with the cheapest labor he could find. “They had a bunch of creeps come in there … and they took over all our stuff,” Spillane told an interviewer. “They’d formed a union, that’s what the problem was, and we were going to kill that union. Because these guys, they didn’t have the talent … we had, I’ll tell you that!”

  After the war, Mandel worked his way back into freelance drawing (at smaller wages than before), but he was itching to be “literary”—that is, serious, in comics, painting, or writing. Plus, he had discovered his injury made it harder for him to visualize, but easier to talk, write—torrents of language poured from him. Each time Joe visited him, he marveled at how much his friend had improved. He had come a long way from the days when restaurant noise unnerved him to the point that he’d slap at a waitress with his menu and shout that nothing pleased him, nothing, nothing.

  Miki helped him. She typed the expanding manuscript of the novel he had told Joe about on his visit to Penn State. Initially, it was called “The Hook and the Tower,” but it was retitled, at an editor’s suggestion, Flee the Angry Strangers. Bobbs-Merrill brought out a hardcover edition of the book in 1952. The following year, with the appearance of a Bantam mass-market paperback edition (featuring a Harry Schaare cover, like that of a comic book: a woman shooting heroin), the novel got noticed by journals and prominent critics. “All [his friends] were ecstatically astonished when the paperback reprint rights … sold for a price of $25,000,” Joe wrote. “His share of half that seemed a fortune. And … was indeed a fortune to someone living largely on disability payments for his war wound, and to someone like me … [working] as an advertising copywriter.”

  In time, critics saw Flee the Angry Strangers as a proto-Beat novel, capturing, before Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, and others, what Thomas Newhouse called the cultural “transition between … [a] wail of hopelessness” after the war and a “freedom to choose dissolution” rather than middle-class life.

  Mandel’s protagonist, eighteen-year-old Diane Lattimer, a drug-hazed habitué of the jazz clubs on Bleecker and MacDougal streets, hustles by day and is, despite her self-destructiveness, a rare feminist heroine in the fiction of the time. Mandel’s comic-book training showed in the larger-than-life appetites of his characters, in their heroic embrace of instantaneous pleasure (a kind of personalized justice for all) and their rejection of society’s straight-and-narrow paths. These qualities would characterize all of Beat writing; the Beats’ link to the comic-book ethos of the time—through figures like George Mandel—is not accidental.

  Flee the Angry Strangers uncovered other crosscurrents swirling through American popular writing in the early 1950s—for, just as Mickey Spillane smuggled comic-book action into the hard-boiled detective genre, the values of proletarian fiction had stiffened comic heroes’ spines. Mandel’s characters encompassed each of these strains; they were amalgams of the Human Torch, Mike Hammer, and Nelson Algren’s Frankie Machine. The combination sowed a path for the Beats, who, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, would change America’s popular vocabulary.

  Mandel’s people spoke “jive”: jazz talk. They didn’t provide their partners with sexual delight; they sent them. They didn’t smoke marijuana; they indulged in pod, a term that degraded into pot after many “engorged [mis]pronunciations [by] its consumers,” Mandel said. The novel’s language was so strange, his publishers asked him to include a lexicon in the back of the book. Later, he regretted he didn’t accede to this request, because soon, “Madison Avenue” began to “spoil” the “flavor” of jive’s “perceptive music.”

  Other crosscurrents began to flow: Underground hip became a rich source for mainstream advertising.

  Since the days of Charles Ward Apthorpe, and even before, America had been a scene of clashing images, but now the country was getting really good at producing these images, and presenting them in easy-to-get, inexpensive formats. The big books coming out of Manhattan’s midtown publishers in handy paperback form—The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity—showcased an America where values rooted in land still held sway over human destinies; the comic books, genre stories, and early Beat poetry—in throwaway tabloid formats—emerging from artists and writers, several of whom lived in the Village, pictured urban alleyways as free zones where the individual could be an outlaw hero; while the ads, many created by aspiring novelists and painters, packaged in East Side offices and sent to magazines and television stations, offered the accumulation of goods as the secret to bliss and America’s world dominance.

  From his perch above the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, Joe kept an eye on all this. The culture’s variety impressed him, as well as the darker patterns he saw, like scratches in the ice below, in the city’s (and perhaps the nation’s) mood.

  For example, he understood that, for a segment of middle-class American women who wanted to be valued for their “natural” looks, but to whom businessmen were banking on selling millions of dollars’ worth of hair dye, the catch phrase “Does she … or doesn’t she?” was irresistible because it was titillating without being too naughty. He also understood that a whole other group of American women whose lives had been junked by the war and its family upheavals had no truck with such cuteness. For them, the only thing that mattered was “Nembutal goofballs and pod.” Sad, absurd, diverse—what American novelist had successfully gathered the country’s currents, like a Coney Island hawker snagging all the cotton candy and wrapping it around a single cardboard stick? In his spare time, he reread Kafka and Céline, as well as Evelyn Waugh. He wrote no fiction.

  * * *

  “AN OLD LINE,” Tom Messner says. “In the fifties, everyone wanted to write a novel; in the seventies, a screenplay; in the nineties, a business plan. Ad men—to wildly generalize—seek fame and fortune. And the novel [in the 1950s] they view[ed] as the quickest way. I don’t think many reflect[ed] on the art of the novel.” For one thing, it was too easy to be seduced by corporate perks—the long lunches, the bottles of scotch stashed in file drawers.

  Messner recalls a book called Advertising Man, by Jack Dillon, and a review of the book by Israel Horowitz. In the review, Horowitz said copywriters were men who did things well that were not worth doing.

  But this view undersold the business. The business “sought people who were funny, who could make things out of nothing when there was nothing unique to say, who understood TV, which the old guys didn’t, who could find some notion or manner of expression that could guarantee rapid success,” Messner says. The children of the well-to-do went into finance or medicine or law. Many ad writers prided themselves on the fact that they were the “sons and daughters of a lot of working-class people (Italians, Jews, Irish),” people “who could think.”

  “It took … the Jews with their great imaginations and dramatic writing skills and the powerhouse Italian artists to join up, take over, and make advertising the [country’s] preferred entertainment,” Mary Wells insists, unapologetic about her cultural generalizations.

  Messner notes, “World War II vets were naturally the drivers of the business in that era. [In later years,] one that I worked for—Carl Ally—even imagined he was Yossarian.”

  Genuinely heroic figures: Joe Daly, Bill Bernbach, David Ogilvy.

  So the ad people earned their perks. You couldn’t blame them for straying into temptation. It wasn’t unusual or surprising to find older men having dinner with younger women in Madison Avenue restaurants, especially on Thursday nights, says one old copywriter. He called Thursdays “Cheater’s Night,” figuring men were having dinner with their girlfriends prior to spending weekends locked away in the suburbs with children, pets, and wives.

  In those days, there were no direct-dial phones in the offices. This aided and abetted nocturnal meanderings. At 5:30, when the company switchboard closed, a person could call out, but no one could call in. It was hard for a wife to check on her husban
d’s whereabouts, or to be certain he was not working late.

  In contrast to this, the sexual culture blocks away, at Columbia and Barnard, was characterized by frustration, ignorance, and tentative rebellion—true across much of the country, if the national reaction to the first Kinsey Report was any indication. In the early 1950s, police had to be summoned to Barnard to quell panty raids that had gotten out of hand. Mobs of boys, tanked up on testosterone and alcohol, moved up Broadway, stopping traffic, and planted themselves outside Barnard dormitories, shouting to see women’s underwear. In his memoir New York in the Fifties, Dan Wakefield, who joined a mob one night, recalled that “girls came to the windows of the dorms, some of them tossing down tokens of intimate apparel, like morsels of meat to a pack of baying hounds.” Compared to these desperate rituals—which spread across U.S. college campuses in 1952 and 1953—clandestine dinners seemed the height of civilization to the women and men of Madison Avenue.

  The backlash against panty raids in newspapers and political speeches reflected the generally repressive national mood Joe McCarthy and others had been able to exploit. “Why aren’t [the panty raiders] in the Army if they have so little to do?” asked U.S. News & World Report. College kids, unable to control their sexual urges, were blamed for giving the nation’s enemies comfort and undermining U.S. efforts in Korea.

  But students weren’t the only ones challenging conventional attitudes. The January-February 1954 issue of Partisan Review featured a short story by Mary McCarthy entitled “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself.” In it, the characters spoke openly about diaphragms, “female contraceptive[s], a plug.” Such words, in pages that conveyed the deepest thinking of the day, from Lionel Trilling, William Phillips, and Irving Howe!

  Then there was Trilling himself, discoursing on the Kinsey Report—again, in Partisan Review—calling its appearance “an event of great importance in our culture,” a balm whose “permissive effect” might overcome the “sexual ignorance which exists among us” and create the possibility of a healthy “community of sexuality” in the country.