The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century

by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank

  A related strain was riding herd on his resident genius: “I had been working overwhelmingly, establishing this copy department. And this man Kennedy! If I had nothing else, just managing him was a man-breaking job, because you just had to sit on top of him to get the work out. He had very long lapses when he couldn’t work at all.”43

  Kennedy turned out to be a basketful of contradictions. On first blush appearing to be an extrovert, he was in fact bashful, sensitive, and introverted—“hard to know, hard to talk to,” according to Lasker.44 Lord & Thomas’s half-time genius lived a life of extremely productive highs and miserably lows. He lost interest in accounts almost as soon as he had solved their initial challenge, leaving Lasker to struggle with the client, whose expectations now had been elevated by Kennedy’s talent. “He was like a bee,” Lasker complained. “He went and sipped the pollen out of a flower, and if he got it, his interest was gone. He wanted to try another flower.”45

  As with many aspects of the Lasker story, alcohol played a prominent role. Kennedy was “pickled in liquor,” Lasker recalled—a “champion drinker.”46 He would work almost nonstop several days running, then disappear on a binge for weeks on end. Caring little about money but enamored of sailboats and other expensive luxuries, Kennedy often required advances even on his princely salary.

  Alcohol fueled Kennedy’s eccentricities. One time, Lasker went looking for his troubled and inebriated genius, finally tracking him down at a shooting gallery on South State Street. Kennedy agreed to return to work, but first insisted on demonstrating his sharpshooting prowess to his boss. Right-handed, he hefted a rifle in his left hand, turned one eye away from the metal pigeon targets that were rolling by on a track—and picked off every one of them.47

  Finally, Kennedy was suspicious and paranoid—“a man whom it was impossible to get along with,” as Lasker put it. In fact, Lasker believed that he was the only person who ever got along with Kennedy. “But that was my business—to get along with him,” added Lasker. “And it was worth the price to me.”48

  The price eventually became too high. When Lasker most needed a reliable ally, bulwark, and stand-in, Kennedy proved to be fundamentally unreliable. He “couldn’t be managed,” Lasker concluded. Sometime in 1906, Kennedy and Lord & Thomas parted company. Given the enormous impact Kennedy had had on Lasker, it is remarkable how little time he actually spent at the firm. He arrived in Chicago in mid-1904, cut himself back to half-time in 1905, and left in 1906 to take a position with the advertising firm of Ethridge-Kennedy in New York.

  The parting appears to have been reasonably amicable. When Lasker opened a Lord & Thomas office in New York in 1910, Kennedy rejoined the payroll there—a “re-recruitment” coup that Lasker later boasted about. But Lasker sensed that Kennedy had peaked and the magic was gone: “He had one big message to give, and from the day he left, he retrogressed steadily. He had done his big work. It is like some animals you read about who reproduce themselves . . . and then lie down and die.”49

  Kennedy, Lasker concluded, was not a “born advertising man.” That was one reason why he had to work so hard at his copywriting. Of course, not being born into the business gave Kennedy advantages, as well. It forced him to articulate the business for himself and, by extension, for Lasker, Lord & Thomas, and the larger advertising community. It fell to others to extend Kennedy’s powerful concepts, and put them to their fullest use.

  Kennedy eventually relocated to Los Angeles, where he became involved in real estate. He died in 1926, long forgotten by most people in the advertising industry. But he was not forgotten by Lasker, who for the rest of his life referred to Kennedy as the “father of modern advertising”—a title that he could reasonably have claimed for himself.

  Chapter Five

  Growing Up, Breaking Down

  ALBERT LASKER arrived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, late on a blustery November night in 1900. Although only twenty years old, he was already a highly successful advertising salesman—making $3,600 per year, and on a productive day placing $800 worth of ads.1

  He had spent the day with a manufacturer out in the country, and didn’t get back to his hotel until after 10 p.m. In those days, most travel was done by train and horse-drawn wagons. As soon as the streets in the northern reaches of the Midwest acquired their five-month mantle of snow, the wheels were removed from horse-drawn vehicles and replaced with runners. Travel that was already slow got slower, and the life of a salesman got harder.

  Gratefully ducking into the lobby of his Grand Rapids hotel to escape the blizzard outside, Lasker wore his Elks pin prominently displayed on his lapel. He had no interest in the Elks, but he had discovered that a surprising number of hotel clerks were Elks. Wearing his pin often got him better accommodations than he could secure otherwise.

  Tonight the lobby was crowded, with scores of men seated in lounge chairs, smoking and talking, making the steamy air even more stale than usual. A short, chubby young man spotted Lasker’s pin and enthusiastically gave him the Elks handshake. The young man introduced himself as Arthur Warner. He was a salesman from Buffalo, and wanted to have a drink with his fellow Elk. Lasker could tell that Warner—like himself, little more than a teenager—had already had a drink or two. He declined, saying that he was tired and wanted to go to bed, but Warner persisted.

  “I thought that I would teach him a lesson,” Lasker later recalled. “Not that it was my business to teach him a lesson.”

  Off the lobby was a poolroom with a huge bar, which on this wintry night was doing a booming business. Lasker walked Warner up to the bar, and said he would drink with him if Warner would match him drink for drink. Warner agreed. Lasker then called for two beer glasses and a bottle of whiskey. Filling his own glass with whiskey—eight ounces’ worth—he challenged Warner to fill the other glass and drink it “bottoms up.”

  “I figured he wouldn’t do it,” Lasker admitted, “and I would be rid of him.”

  The challenge attracted the attention of many of the bar’s patrons. The pool players put down their cues, crowding around the two Elks at the bar. Warner lifted his beer glass and chugged its entire contents. Lasker, now remembering that he hadn’t eaten anything in many hours, did the same.

  The huge slugs of alcohol soon swamped their brains, and what followed was a long night of half-remembered antics. “We Elked all night long,” Lasker recalled ruefully.

  They staggered outside and ran into an elderly cabman, and soon both Lasker and Warner were reduced to weeping at the realization that this poor old fellow had to wait outside in the subzero temperatures while they sat inside drinking. Lasker pressed a few dollars on the cab driver—a large sum, in those days—then took the reins of the carriage, the better to show Grand Rapids to his fellow Elk.

  At one point deciding that they needed another drink, Lasker spied a bar that looked promising. Like many saloons of that era, this one had two sets of doors—one a pair of swinging shutters, and behind them, a pair of glass doors. Sending Warner ahead on foot to open the inner doors, Lasker then attempted to drive the carriage into the bar: “I do distinctly remember getting the horse through the swinging doors, by golly, and the fellow who was running the place threw a knife at us, and we went away.”

  The two Elks stumbled back into their hotel as the sun was coming up. Lasker was fine, but Warner felt deathly ill. Lasker concluded that his suffering companion needed food, and ordered two enormous breakfasts: fruit, bacon and eggs, toast, and coffee. When the food arrived, Warner became violently ill—“the sickest boy I ever saw in my whole life,” Lasker later remembered. “I never saw a man that ill.”

  Lasker ate both breakfasts and went off to his nine o’clock appointment. For the rest of the day, whenever he had a free moment, he checked in on the ailing Warner. This solicitude—as well as his cast-iron stomach—earned Lasker the lifelong admiration of Arthur Warner: “He kept writing me letters, and he would write me at great length. Sometimes I wouldn’t answer the letters, or sometimes I would jus
t drop him a few lines. But the fact that I could eat that breakfast always made him think that I was the greatest living male in America.”

  Everything about the experience seemed to relegate it to the closet of embarrassing tales from the road. To Lasker’s surprise, that proved not to be the case.

  About a month later, on the Saturday night between Christmas and New Year’s Eve of 1900, Lasker was seated in the Munro Baths in Cincinnati, a city he often visited to service the Rheinstrom account. In a Turkish bath, travelers rented rooms without separate bathing facilities, and met downstairs in the common baths for the steam and the male camaraderie. Lasker had gotten to know a number of the young single men who frequented the Munro Baths fairly well. Many were Jewish, like himself. They called each other by nicknames, and engaged in easy banter.

  In the previous few weeks, Lasker had been doing some serious soul-searching. He had been at Lord & Thomas for two years. He no longer dreamed of leaving for New York to become a reporter; now he aimed to “conquer advertising,” make a lot of money, and then go buy a newspaper.

  But there were at least two obstacles. The first was that by his own estimation—perhaps tinged with some fresh guilt—he was reckless and irresponsible. The antics in Grand Rapids weren’t an isolated incident but part of a recurring pattern. “I wasn’t getting rid of them,” Lasker admitted.

  The second problem was that he was terribly lonely in Chicago. During the Thanksgiving holiday a little more than a year earlier, he had acted on his loneliness in an almost desperate way:

  I remember going to my room and crying in a paroxysm of tears. Within an hour, I went down to the station and took the train for Galveston, which at that time was a 48-hour trip from Chicago. I wrote a note to Mr. Thomas, and just told him that my homesickness had grown so nostalgic that I couldn’t resist it. Maybe he’d understand it, and maybe he wouldn’t. Would he send me a wire whether or not I could come back to work?

  Thomas reassured his troubled young colleague that he was welcome to come back to work. But the isolation that Lasker felt in Chicago soon closed in around him again and reinforced his tendency toward obsessive thinking: “I was very introspective on certain things. And I made up my mind that what was the matter with me was that I was just sheer lonesome, and if I had a home, I could get ahead, and I would settle down.”

  On this particular night, downstairs in the Turkish baths, Lasker and his cronies were playing poker and drinking. The members of the group were between half a decade and a decade older than Lasker, and regarded him as a precocious teenager. It was now 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning: an hour when troubled young men are sometimes given to startling confessions. On this night, Lasker didn’t disappoint: “I said, ‘This is all foolishness—my staying up like this. I am only going to be young once, and every day counts. I want to make my youth accumulate experience, and this thing that I am doing isn’t good for me, and anyway, I have done it enough . . . If I could meet the right type of girl, I’d get married.’”

  His companions egged him on. What kind of girl, Lasker? What would she look like? Lasker obliged with a detailed description of his ideal woman. Well, we know just the type of girl you described, they responded. She’s visiting here at Elsie Bernard’s, and we can take you over there this afternoon. But this unexpected opportunity confronted Lasker with another problem. Although he was nearly twenty-one years old, he was insecure with women: “I wasn’t much for going socially with girls, and I was always self-conscious that I wouldn’t know how to conduct myself. It was all right with the males, but I didn’t know how to sell a female, and I guess my lack of confidence telegraphed itself to them.”

  Lasker may have known more about women than these comments suggest. Photographs of him in his late teens and early twenties show an intense, handsome young man with wavy black hair and deep-set, expressive eyes—certainly attractive enough, especially considering his sparkling wit and ready cash. During his theater-reviewing days in Galveston, for example, Lasker happily caroused with the choruses of touring theater companies, including the actresses. “I’d party with them,” Lasker recalled, “which no boy in Galveston had ever done.”2 But this kind of experience hardly prepared him to court a socially appropriate woman.

  To make matters worse, Elsie Bernard—a prominent young socialite in Cincinnati’s affluent German-Jewish community—had met the awkward Lasker on one of his previous trips to town and made it clear that she didn’t much like him. Lasker decided that, if only to aggravate Bernard, he would go meet the out-of-town visitor staying at her house.

  Later that afternoon, Lasker’s cohort of gregarious young companions arrived at the Bernard house. Lasker, still feeling the effects of the previous night’s carousing, now had second thoughts about this adventure. Those misgivings vanished, however, the moment he was introduced to Elsie Bernard’s guest. He promptly forgot her name, but he didn’t forget much else about her:

  She weighed about 108 pounds, just as thin and straight, with that boyish figure that later came into popularity, but at that time you were supposed to be considerably plumper. She had the biggest eyes I had ever seen, before or since, coal black, and coal-black hair, and I remember she had on a blue dress with white dots, and coral beads, and her hair hung in a loop on the back of her head.

  She had an infinite amount of charm, of gentility, of kindness, of breeding. You could tell that she was beautifully reared, and well educated, sensitive, and artistic. And, my! I hadn’t seen her one minute that I fell like a thousand.

  The young woman soon was whisked off, and Lasker now felt excruciatingly out of place. In his oddly sheltered life, he had never before been in a social setting anything like this. He couldn’t bring himself to say a word to anyone: “Just everything I had in me closed up.”

  He sat down on a piano bench, and to his surprise, the beautiful young woman with the enormous eyes sat down next to him. She again told him her name—Flora Warner—and said that she was nineteen years old; this was her first trip away from Buffalo. Remembering his escapade in Grand Rapids, and startled by the unlikely juxtaposition of “Warner” and “Buffalo,” Lasker found his tongue. He asked if she was related to Arthur Warner.

  Why, yes, she replied, surprised. Arthur was her first cousin, and lived next door to her in Buffalo. They had grown up together since birth, and were virtually brother and sister. When she finally excused herself to rejoin her friends, Lasker sat there dumbfounded:

  The minute she was called away, that whole place was empty for me. I was just a lovesick calf . . .

  All I knew, from that second, I knew I loved that girl. I had never had a girl, but I knew I loved that girl, and I knew that girl could supply what I lacked.

  He sought out his friends and told them that he was ready to leave. When they asked what he had thought of the visiting socialite from Buffalo, he told them, “I am going to marry that girl.”

  Aside from the fact that Flora had no notion of marrying him, there were some major impediments to this New Year’s resolution. First, he needed to get his father’s consent to court a young woman. (He could no more get married without his father’s permission, he explained, than he could go out and commit a robbery.) That night, in his cramped quarters at the Munro Baths, he wrote Morris a long letter, explaining his intentions and asking for Morris’s blessing.

  The letter he received in response—on January 4, 1901—brought an unwelcome message. There was nothing Morris wanted more than to see his son happily married. At the same time, certain facts weighed heavily on his mind. He knew his son had been drinking a great deal and, in his opinion, Albert had no right to ask a decent girl to marry him. Therefore, he would withhold his blessing until his son had abstained from alcohol for six months.

  Albert wrote back immediately, agreeing to the terms. He then began taking steps to increase his chances of success in the larger campaign. First, he resumed his correspondence with Arthur Warner. Concurrently, he also approached Ambrose Thomas with a proposit
ion. The Pan-American Exposition—the World’s Fair—was then under way in Buffalo. It was a celebration of industry and commerce, with awards of all sorts being passed out to exhibitors. At the Frankfurt World’s Fair in 1891, Lord & Thomas had come up with a plan whereby, for a modest fee, the agency would help award-winning U.S. manufacturers trumpet their successes by sending press releases to selected newspapers. Lasker proposed to revive this program for the Buffalo exposition—only this time, for a much bigger profit. Instead of the $1,200 or $1,500 that Lord & Thomas had charged for the service previously—a fee that already had included a “big profit”—now the firm would charge between $3,000 and $4,000. Thomas readily agreed. And even though Buffalo was not in his territory, Lasker got himself assigned the Exposition job, which would give him ample reason to visit Buffalo at the firm’s expense.

  Lasker kept his promise to his father, refraining from taking a drink for the entire first half of 1901. It was probably a difficult challenge. Lasker once admitted that he “drank heavily for years.” He owned up to getting drunk with the hard-bitten newspaper reporters back in Galveston; he also commented that during his early days in Chicago, “all advertising men drank a great deal.” He was constantly surrounded by alcohol and alcoholics, and life on the road was often lonely.

  In June, Lasker wrote Arthur Warner to say that he was coming to Buffalo on Wednesday evening, July 3. He would be staying until Sunday night, and hoped to spend the evenings and the holiday with him. Arthur wired back that he would be delighted to host his friend.

  Lasker took a train up to Buffalo from Cleveland, arriving at around 9:00 p.m. Warner met him at the train station, and exclaimed excitedly that they were going to have a “great time tonight.”