Once in a Great City

by David Maraniss

  At some point she was confronted by James Jamerson, a bass player, and Benny Benjamin, a drummer, two members of the house band that came to be known as the Funk Brothers. “They were there banging on the door and saying ‘Where in the em in em is Mickey? Who are you?’ ‘My name is Martha Reeves. I don’t know, he said he would be right back.’ And they said they were not going to cut the session across the hall until they got the five dollars they were due for the session they cut yesterday. Five dollars. Before the union came. So I got to meet them. I called the sales department and said, ‘Two gentlemen are here who would like to be compensated for the session they did yesterday.’ ‘Well, we don’t pay until Friday.’ So I put them directly on the phone with her. When they finished, all this foul language and demands, she said to them, ‘Put the A and R secretary back on the phone.’ She made me official on that first day. And I was there three months or so before Berry Gordy even knew I was there.”

  Like so many women before her, Reeves started as a secretary, but soon enough she was helping rhyme lyrics, then providing backup when the female studio singers, the Andantes, were not available. Then she was bringing in some of her old group to help, and then recording a demo of a Mary Wells tune and impressing the Chairman, and finally getting her own shot and picking the name Vandellas and heading out on the road with that first Motortown Revue. And now here she was recording a song that compelled Gordy to exclaim “That’s the sound!”—an assessment with which one of its creators concurred. “I always thought the Motown sound started with ‘Come and Get These Memories,’ ” Lamont Dozier said. On West Grand Boulevard in those first months of 1963, it was a sound that added to the glow from Detroit.

  The song’s live premiere that spring was at the 20 Grand down at West Warren and 14th, on the stage of the Driftwood Lounge, upstairs above the bowling alley. It was a benefit for Beans Bowles, recovering slowly from injuries he had suffered in the early morning crash during the first Motortown Revue that took Eddie McFarland’s life. An overflow crowd at the nightclub included Beans’s wife, Agnes, his mother, Mrs. Molly Bowles, and his two brothers, John Bowles Jr. and Calvin Bowles. The Hitsville Platter, Motown’s in-house newsletter (“It’s What’s in the Grooves That Counts”), noted that Martha and the Vandellas “did a wonderful rendition of Come and Get These Memories, which proved to be quite a fast-moving, Number One rated tune.” The Supremes, Little Stevie, and Marvin Gaye also performed, along with the irrepressible Contours, who ended their frenetic version of “Do You Love Me” with each member of the group “doing an acrobatic flip off the stage onto the dance floor.”

  • • •

  Los Angeles was the common enemy. When the Free Press ran clip-out petitions for readers to send to the U.S. Olympic Committee in support of Detroit’s 1968 bid, more than 400,000 people signed and sent them. When WXYZ radio and WJBK-TV delivered editorials urging listeners and viewers to write to the USOC in New York, the Olympic House on Park Avenue was flooded with mail postmarked Detroit. When Mayor Cavanagh turned for help to the Economic Club of Detroit, it immediately dispatched a telegram of support to every member of the USOC. When Governor Romney told the legislature it needed to act with uncommon speed in figuring out a way to pay for and build a 110,000-seat Olympic stadium out at the Michigan Fairgrounds for $25 million, the lawmakers moved the bill to his desk within two weeks. The University of Michigan’s Bureau of Business Research boosted the local effort by releasing a report that estimated the Olympics would offer the tangible result of $224 million in consumption, construction, and stimulated expenditures over the next five years, along with the intangible promise of “a more favorable impression of Michigan.” Could L.A. possibly steal the bid away from Detroit? The gossip changed day by day inside the walnut-wainscoted walls of the Detroit Athletic Club, hangout of the city’s business elite. Some concern arose eleven days before the vote, when Fred Matthaei received an ambiguous letter from President Brundage. “The imbroglio in which the USOC finds itself is most unfortunate, and the resulting publicity is bound to be harmful to all concerned,” Brundage wrote of the Midwest versus West Coast dispute. “It is not my place to interfere and I have kept strictly out [of] the squabble. I have not forgotten that, while I did vote for Detroit on a previous occasion, I was bitterly and unreasonably assailed by that city’s newspapers. Such is life!”

  Out in Los Angeles that March, the newspapers steered clear of Brundage criticism and ran stories day after day about hapless Detroit. “Financial Woes Hurt Detroit’s Olympic Bid,” ran a headline in the Los Angeles Times on March 10. The story raised questions about Detroit’s ability to pay off the debts it would incur building the stadium. It pointed out that the state of Michigan carried a debt and the city of Detroit had just enacted an income tax to get out of the red itself. Los Angeles had the hotel rooms, the stadium, the weather, all waiting, and offered the Olympic movement a guaranteed payoff of $2 million to $5 million to boot. “On the basis of these facts,” the piece concluded, “who would you vote for between Los Angeles and Detroit if you were a member of the USOC board of directors, seeking to bring the 1968 Olympics to the best city in the United States?”

  The Michigan delegation arrived in New York on Sunday morning, March 18. Mayor Cavanagh hosted a cocktail party at four that afternoon at his suite in the Hotel Commodore and then continued the festivities later that night at Toots Shor’s. If he could charm birds out of trees, how might he do with stuffy old Olympic owls? The vote came on Monday, after a long day of proposals and pictures and promises and pleas. Detroit’s four most prominent public relations firms had packaged the city’s presentation under the title “The Detroit You’ve Never Met.” Matthaei opened, Cavanagh and Romney closed. Whatever questions had been raised in the past were irrelevant now, Cavanagh said. “We are now financially and spiritually ready.” The final decision was a blowout: Detroit 32, Los Angeles 4.

  Paul Zimmerman, sports editor of the Los Angeles Times, avoided any pretense of objectivity with his lead: “The United States Olympic Committee ‘bought a pig in a poke’ Monday.”

  Romney, the car guy, toasted the Detroit public relations and ad men who helped make it possible. “Now I know why Chevrolet sells so many cars,” he told Tom Adams, president of the Campbell-Ewald agency. Cavanagh suggested the new stadium be named in honor of the industrialist and sportsman who had carried the dream through the decades: Matthaei Olympic Stadium. Since that January day when she escorted her husband out of Providence Hospital, Mary Helen Cavanagh had not had much luck tamping down his frenetic schedule. He remained, for her and their brood, a challenging man. But now she offered him a personal victory present: their seventh child, another son.

  Aides suggested the boy’s middle name be Olympic.

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  MOTOR CITY MAD MEN

  FOUR AGENCY MEN FROM J. WALTER THOMPSON slipped into Dearborn early that spring to meet secretly with Lee Iacocca and his Ford Division design team for a first look at what would become Ford’s 1964 lineup of new cars. J. Walter Thompson was the largest advertising agency in the world, and Ford was its most important client. It had been that way since old man Henry Ford decided during World War II that he needed outside help to promote the cars he would start making when the war ended and auto plants returned to business as usual after turning out tanks and trucks and matériel in the Arsenal of Democracy. J. Walter Thompson was the answer, Ford’s aides told him, and starting back then with the There’s a Ford in Your Future campaign, the car company and the ad agency had developed a symbiotic bond through the years. The top people at Ford, especially Iacocca, a natural-born salesman, were always thinking about marketing, and the top people at JWT needed to have more than a passing understanding of the automobile business. The relationship was fluid and sensitive, and although disputes inevitably arose over costs and results, both sides realized that success depended on shared planning and inherent trust.

  J. Walter Thompson was one year shor
t of its hundredth anniversary in 1963. It was the leading agency of Madison Avenue during the advertising heyday of the early sixties, so recognized in a Time magazine cover story a year earlier, although its headquarters was not precisely on Madison Avenue, the street that came to emblematize the industry, but several blocks away on Lexington near Grand Central Station. The top corporate and creative work was done there in Manhattan, because that is where corporate heads and creative people wanted to be, but the day-to-day handling of the crucial Ford account was the responsibility of the field office in Detroit. It could be said of J. Walter Thompson—as of so much else in America—that Detroit was the economic engine. In a client list that included Eastman Kodak, Seven-Up, Pan Am, Singer, Lever Bros., Kraft Foods, Scott Papers, Liggett & Myers, and Chesebrough-Pond’s, the Ford account stood apart, bringing in by far the most money and requiring the largest staff. It was no accident that JWT’s chairman, Norman Strouse, rose to his eleventh-floor corner suite on West Wing South at 420 Lex after managing the Detroit office for a decade.

  Strouse brought vast experience dealing with Ford to his meeting with Iacocca. A self-taught farm boy from rural Washington State who began his advertising career at nineteen by answering a want ad in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer seeking an assistant ad director, he eventually landed with J. Walter Thompson’s San Francisco office and was transferred to Detroit in the final days of 1945, after service in the navy. His arrival there coincided with the transformation of Ford Motor Company under Henry Ford II and his stable of Whiz Kids, the young managers including Robert McNamara, JFK’s secretary of defense, who applied statistical analysis they had learned as military officers to the operation of a manufacturing company. “I observed from the sidelines one of the great management case histories of all time: the conversion of Ford from an antiquated organization to a modern one,” Strouse said later. The mission for Ford then was one it would face repeatedly: to overcome an image of being old-fashioned, behind the times, unhip, and colorless, a perception that began with the late-life Model T and Henry Ford’s belief that consumers could have whatever color car they wanted so long as it was black. The There’s a Ford in Your Future theme had about run its course when Strouse arrived, since Ford cars were being made and sold again, and his first campaign launched with a new motto: Ford’s Out Front. Just as HF2 and the Whiz Kids were changing management on the inside, Strouse and JWT tried to do something similar on the outside. “We were trying to take the Ford name, the Ford image that had existed as an old conservative company, and bring it into modern times.”

  Over the ensuing years, Strouse worked from the notion that there were four basic appeals in selling cars, and only two of the four were “subject to statistical or factual measurement, the other two were subjective in the mind of the buyer.” The first two he labeled Transportation and Investment. Transportation was mileage, speed, dependability, pickup, capacity, and freedom from annoyance. Investment was price, cost of operation, and resale or trade value. The subjective aspects he called Enjoyment and Applause. Enjoyment included driving ease, comfort, beauty, gadgets, and feel. Applause involved “approval of experts, envy of neighbors, opinion of best girl, the thing to do etc.” In a repetitive cycle, whatever gains Ford made in Transportation and Investment were minimized over the years by its lagging behind in the subjective areas of Enjoyment and Applause. Even when it came out with a breakthrough car exuding excitement, like the Thunderbird, it was seen as trying to copy or catch up with Chevrolet and its Corvette. What was true in the late 1940s was true again in 1963.

  In developing its advertising plan for Ford that year, Strouse’s team at JWT conducted an exhaustive study of research data from its own shop to determine how Ford was viewed by the public, what it called “not just Ford’s share of market but Ford’s share of mind in the market place.” According to an internal memo, the study determined that Ford retained its traditional image of low-cost transportation, “but as valuable as that image may be, it is becoming something of an albatross. Ford is strong among the low income, blue collar groups, but when we move into the areas of young people, people on the way up, the performance minded, the college educated, the professional groups, people in prestige occupations, the Ford image has faded.”

  That conclusion, the JWT team understood, coincided with the long-term plans Iacocca had for change. His stated goal over the sixties was to build Ford Division cars that were both fun to drive and free of maintenance problems, with an emphasis on imagination, flair, performance, reliability, and sound engineering. The new models were already moving in that direction. But how could Ford’s marketing and JWT’s advertising persuade the public of this reality? “It is one of the obvious but often not really understood facts of life that there can be no share of market without share of mind—and moving minds to Ford is the life blood of continuing success and profits,” the JWT memo stated. “The things people believe in are as real to them as facts.”

  As the secret meeting in Dearborn with Ford’s design team neared an end, Iacocca motioned to Strouse and his three companions to follow him. They were Dan Seymour, second in command as JWT president in New York, and the two leaders of the Detroit office, Bill Laurie and Franklyn R. Thomas. “When Iacocca signaled us away, we were understandably a bit puzzled,” Thomas wrote later in a document housed at the J. Walter Thompson archive at Duke University’s John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History. “There’s more than one reason why an important client wants to talk with you privately. We were ushered along strange corridors, through bulky fire doors, past innumerable security guards. At one point, we were asked to exchange our ordinary security badges for extraordinary ones.”

  When they reached their destination, “somewhere deep in the bowels of Ford styling studios,” Thomas recalled, “we saw against the far wall a vague outline of a car under a stained canvas shroud.” Soon the cover was stripped away, and there in front of the ad men stood a full-scale clay mockup of a top-secret car that was then known only by its code name, T-5. It was a white beauty, the JWT men agreed, jaunty and sleek with a stub tail and long hood, unlike any automobile they had seen before. “Iacocca and the other Ford people explained the car, pointed out features and objectives, and watched our enthusiasm catch fire,” Thomas wrote. “We now had our official assignment plus an unforgettable taste of the exciting thing this car would be.” The T-5 was not in the lineup of 1964 cars, which, in the normal industry way of doing business, were to reach the public in fall 1963, but instead was to be unveiled on its own in spring 1964, the target date coinciding with the opening of the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The ad men left Dearborn with three goals: first, find a way to convey the excitement they felt when they saw the mockup; second, come up with a name for the car; and third, figure out how to position it in the market. Here might be the answer Ford and its ad agency had been desperately seeking: a car that merged appearance and reality, fantasy and fact—a car that could move minds. Transportation, Investment, Enjoyment, and Applause all in one package.

  • • •

  The Detroit offices of J. Walter Thompson were on floors 21 and 22 of the Buhl Building at 535 Griswold Street downtown, across the street from the Penobscot tower. When Strouse first showed up for work there after the war, he was one of fewer than thirty JWT employees in Detroit. By the time he left to take charge in New York not quite a decade later, the Ford account was bringing in nearly 25 percent of the agency’s domestic revenue, and the Detroit staff grew proportionately, eventually reaching 285 in 1963, with another 29 in satellite offices to handle a companion account representing Ford dealers across the country. During his first months there after the war, Strouse had discovered that few in Detroit knew JWT was in the city and that it was essential for him to learn the ground rules. Campbell-Ewald, the Detroit agency that kept the massive Chevy account, was known as a solid corporate citizen; JWT, not so much. The ground rules were simple: engage in Detroit socially and understand the rhythms o
f a company town. Detroit, Strouse came to realize, was “intensely an automotive community—everybody lives, breathes, and sleeps automobiles. It’s like a feudal city.” He liked it, thought it was interesting, “but it was narrow, there’s no doubt about it. And you had to work at getting out of the narrow confinement of the automobile business, into other things that had no relation to it.”

  Strouse did this as best he could. He became a collector, specializing in esoteric printings of folios and rare books, anything to do with Robert Louis Stevenson, and an accumulation of owl effigies, the owl being the trademark of J. Walter Thompson. He escaped to a summer home in Harbor Springs on Little Traverse Bay in the northern tip of lower Michigan, where he could lose himself in a wild blackberry patch and tool around in a Falcon station wagon supplied by Ford. And he plotted a retirement in the Napa Valley wine country of Northern California. Anything to ease the stress of the ad business, a notorious killer. All you had to do was read the obituaries in Advertising Age, the bible of the industry, to see that ad men were dying at an average age of sixty-one, compared to sixty-eight for other related professions. The mortality rate was one reason Strouse habitually studied his workforce for the next man up, instituting a system where he could watch people who might succeed him. “You see people dropping dead of a heart attack at 46 or 35 for that matter,” he once wrote. “So this is a fact of life you have to recognize and be prepared for.”