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

  Lasker was struck by Mary’s business sense, her self-confidence, and the rarified social circles in which she traveled—in many ways loftier than his own—and her sense of style. When he first visited her penthouse apartment, he was staggered that Mary managed to live so well on what he guessed to be a small income. Lasker later told Mary, in jest, that he had decided to marry her for her money; but he was clearly taken with the idea, and the reality, of a self-made woman.

  By the time Mary Woodard Reinhardt met Albert Lasker, she had been divorced for three years from Paul E. Reinhardt, a New York art dealer. Mary met Reinhardt in the 1920s, after completing postgraduate work in art history at Oxford. She moved to New York City and took a job in Reinhardt’s gallery; the two married in 1926 and emerged as a strong force in the New York art scene. The marriage—under constant pressure because of his alcoholism—was less successful than the gallery, and in 1934, Mary filed for divorce.

  Mary’s resolve to be financially independent was forged early, resulting at least in part from to her parents’ complicated relationship with each other and with money. Her father precipitated wrenching emotional scenes whenever his wife purchased items that he considered to be luxuries, infuriating the young Mary. “I decided,” she later recalled, “that never would I let any man speak to me like that, and that I would earn my own money.”5 When she divorced, therefore, Mary founded a company called Hollywood Patterns, which used Hollywood starlets to advertise dress patterns. The patterns were designed by Vogue, and Mary received a third-of-a-cent commission on every sale.6 Arriving on the fashion scene at the start of the Great Depression—just as women across the country were returning to their sewing machines to save money on their wardrobes—the patterns became hugely popular (and are still highly collectible today).

  Mary augmented her income by steering customers to Raymond Loewy, then emerging as one of America’s most significant industrial designers. She became familiar with Loewy’s work in the early 1930s; with her art and business connections, she was able to open doors for him, for which he paid her commissions. In 1934, for example, she helped Loewy get a commission from Sears, Roebuck and Co. to redesign the Coldspot refrigerator, the success of which catapulted Loewy into the top ranks of industrial designers.7

  A month into the courtship between Albert and Mary—in May 1939—his mental state was worsening. The Manton affair was still unfolding; his divorce was not yet finalized. He wanted to get closer to Mary, but he was paralyzed by the raw memories of his unhappy months with Doris Kenyon. He also wondered if he should be pursuing a woman who was twenty-one years his junior.

  Mary left for London in June, on a business trip that had been planned months earlier. While she was in Europe, Lasker sent her orchids “by the bushel,” dispatched telegrams warning her that the outbreak of war in Europe was imminent—and even overcame his distaste for transatlantic telephone communication to call her once in England. And yet, when she returned to New York, Lasker failed to meet her at the pier. Mary was confused and put off by the mixed signals; but when she saw Lasker that night, she realized that he was in “profound distress.”

  Shortly thereafter, she left for California on another business trip. While at the Golden Gate Fair in San Francisco, she received an urgent call from Lasker. He was in a state of “nervous exhaustion,” he told her, and his friend Merrill (“Babe”) Meigs had sent a plane and a private nurse to take him to a ranch in Arizona for rest and recuperation.

  He remained there for more than two months, in almost complete isolation. (The nearest phone was ninety miles away; once a week, he was driven to the phone so that he could call Mary in New York.) A doctor who examined Lasker concluded that his patient’s adrenal glands were malfunctioning. The diagnosis may have given Lasker some satisfaction—perhaps his problems weren’t “in his head,” after all—but it was misguided. When Lasker returned to New York in November, Mary convinced him to go see a world-renowned internist, Dr. Robert Loeb, at the Presbyterian Medical Center. Loeb, immediately charmed by Lasker, turned his new patient over to colleagues who were specialists in endocrine problems. All the tests came back negative: they could find nothing physically wrong with Lasker.

  Increasingly worried, Mary demanded that Loeb refer Lasker to a psychotherapist. Loeb was a deep skeptic of the psychoanalytic method and responded with scorn: “What! Send that wonderful man to a psychoanalyst?” But Mary—who had undergone some analysis several years earlier—insisted, and Loeb reluctantly came up with the name of a colleague, George Daniels, who (he told Mary) “would at least do [Lasker] no harm,” and was strong enough to stand up to Lasker’s overwhelming personality.

  Mary had far greater ambitions for the treatment. Her experience with psychotherapy had given her insight into her patterns of behavior and, she said, built up her “stamina, persistence, and patience.” Now, she desperately hoped that Lasker could find similar relief.

  First, though, she had to sell psychoanalysis to Lasker. She found her opening in Bacchanale, a Metropolitan Opera production—based on the life of the mad king of Bavaria, Ludwig II—which she and Albert attended. Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí designed the scenery and costumes for the opera, based on a Freudian concept of the subconscious. Mary, who had been interested in Freud for years and had tried unsuccessfully to meet with him during her recent trip to London, explained the concept to Lasker. “It had a profound and dramatic effect on him,” she later recalled: “He hadn’t realized that one’s subconscious played such an enormous part in one’s life. He had been one of these people of action who had really not dared to take the time to look under the surface, under his own surface or anybody else’s, a great deal. He was very intuitive, but he didn’t really know that there was a whole world of the unconscious that you could explore.”8

  Mary built on this interest and eventually broached the idea of Albert going to an analyst.9 (According to Lasker’s daughter Francie, Mary probably made it a precondition to their marriage.10) In December 1940, Lasker paid his first visit to Dr. Daniels. Weary of the emotional rollercoaster of his illness, he was willing to try anything.

  Lasker’s discussions with Daniels touched on his parents, his feelings of guilt about his frustrating relationship with Flora, and how he had treated his children. His father had given him a strong sense of responsibility but had also overshadowed him, which ultimately compelled him to leave home. His mother he remembered as beautiful, passionately neat, and devoted to her children—and yet somehow indistinct, especially in contrast to Morris. Not wanting to re-create the emotional barrenness of his own childhood, Albert had “overwhelmed his kids with love” (as Mary told John Gunther).11 He talked a great deal about his children, regretting that he had made them financially independent by conferring large trusts on them—$5 million each, in those Depression days—and worrying that he had unfairly favored Edward over his sisters.

  The treatment was intensive: four or five sessions a week for six months. Therapist and patient forged a strong bond, and Lasker came to enjoy his meetings with Daniels. Cutting short a lunch with publisher Richard Simon, for example, Lasker explained that he was late for an appointment with his analyst. “I’m not being analyzed for what you probably think,” he told Simon. “I’m doing it to get rid of all the hate the advertising business put into me.” He was learning to think about himself in new ways. “You know what it did for me?” he later said of analysis. “It taught me to forgive myself.”12

  It also helped him begin to cut ties to his troubled past. On January 2, 1940, he donated his beloved Mill Road Farm to the University of Chicago, expressing the hope that the university could find an appropriate educational use for the property.13 Lasker’s biographer John Gunther noted the precipitous nature of this decision; the hurried disposal of the grand estate may well have reflected Lasker’s continuing emotional distress—or it may have reflected progress in his therapy.14 Explaining the move to his children, Lasker joked: “Mill Road is the kind of place that’s go
ing to be surrounded by an angry mob someday. They’ll say, ‘Let’s get the so-and-so who built this place!’ When that happens, I intend to be a member of the mob.”15

  Lasker ended his treatments far short of a complete psychoanalysis, which would have required many years.16 Even so, therapy gave him tremendous relief. He “got relaxed,” according to Mary. His impotence also became less of a problem.

  “By this time,” Mary reported, “I realized that I was in love with him, and around this time he realized that he was in love with me.”17 They wed on June 21 at New York’s City Hall, only a little more than a year after their first meeting. The marriage was performed in “great secret” by their friend, Judge Samuel Rosenman; Mary recalled that it was a “very unimportant looking ceremony, with a judge who had left the court and brought his robes down in a newspaper, and he had two very bedraggled clerks who stood up [as witnesses].”18 The newlyweds left on a yacht for a honeymoon on Long Island Sound, ultimately winding up in Philadelphia at the Republican Convention, to which Lasker was an Illinois delegate. In that role, he helped swing his delegation to Wendell Willkie, the long-shot candidate Mary had begun pushing a year earlier.

  The Willkie story can be seen as an early tracing of the pattern of the rest of Lasker’s life. Already, Mary had begun to exert a profound influence on Albert. With her at his side—and more often, several steps ahead of him—Lasker was able to deploy his prodigious talents in the service of new causes. For most of his adult life, he had been searching for a way to make a significant, enduring contribution. Public service had proved a dead-end. Business seemed superficial and was increasingly unsatisfying. The world had responded with indifference to his grand scheme for remaking the American economy. But now, with Mary, he moved forward. Those close to him noticed a profound change. “He was a whole different man,” recalled his daughter Francie, a half-century later. “He became mellow . . . he found a purpose.”19

  Mary initially hoped to retain her financial independence after her marriage to Lasker. “I don’t want to hear anything about money from you or anybody else, and I have my money and you have your money,” she told him. ”I’ll go and live with you wherever you want to live, but I’ll take care of all my expenses and you take care of your expenses, and you can buy the food.”20 Lasker relished Mary’s fierce resolve—deeming it “cute”—and this state of affairs lasted through the first year and a half of their marriage. Eventually, though, Mary found the arrangement awkward when worthy causes came asking for money: opulent as her new lifestyle was, she had no money to give them. Lasker’s son Edward weighed in, strongly objecting to his stepmother having no access to substantial funds. Ultimately, Lasker resolved the matter by writing Mary a check for $1 million.

  Albert and Mary supported many causes. They actively embraced birth control, cancer research, mental health research, a national heart institute and a national dental institute, the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation, and national health care—to cite only a few.

  The first of these causes was birth control, to which Mary had been drawn before their marriage, and in which she soon enlisted Lasker’s help. She first became interested in the movement in 1937 when she read a biography of birth-control activist and crusader Margaret Sanger. She was impressed by Sanger’s courage; she also felt a profound sympathy with “anybody, male or female, any family that didn’t have the right to control the size of their families.”21 Mary made a small donation to Sanger’s organization, the Birth Control Federation, and was soon asked to join the Federation’s board.

  Several months after becoming a director, Mary met Margaret Sanger for the first time at Sanger’s country home near Fishkill, New York, and the two became friends. After Mary grew closer to Albert, she brought him into Sanger’s orbit, as well.

  This was a delicate juncture in the history of reproductive rights. In response to pressure from Sanger and others, the courts had legalized discussion of birth control methods by physicians in 1936. Nevertheless, the topic was still largely taboo, and Mary was considered extremely eccentric for her public support of birth control. So she was thrilled to discover that Albert shared her passion: “Imagine my pleasure and joy when after I met Albert Lasker and told him of my interest in the Birth Control Federation he said that he, too, felt it was one of the most important human and health problems in the United States and in the world. I was really deeply moved by his interest in the area and also by the fact that he was willing to contribute.”22

  In fact, Albert was not the first of the Laskers to get involved with the work of the Birth Control Federation. In the 1920s, his sisters Loula and Florina served as executors of a bequest made by their mother to “help women”—a broad mandate that the Lasker sisters decided to carry out by making a gift in support of Sanger’s work.23

  Albert carried this family tradition forward in the fall of 1939, when (through Lord & Thomas) he gave $10,000 to support the so-called “Negro Project,” which focused on providing family-planning advice to black families in South Carolina, one of the first states in the nation to incorporate contraception in its formal public health program. Although the project was criticized in some quarters as racist—one of its aims being a reduction in the number of babies born to black families on relief—Albert saw it as a high-minded pilot program with important implications for the larger society.24 As he wrote in a July 1942 letter to Sanger: “With you I thoroughly agree ‘that the Negro question is coming to the fore in America.’ For my part, I do not see how we can have the secure democracy for which our men are fighting and dying until we find a place of security and dignity for the Negro in our national life. If one minority is degraded, we are all affected, for we all belong to some minority.”25

  By the time Albert made his 1939 gift, Sanger had reduced her role to honorary chair of the organization and was spending much of her time in Arizona with her ailing husband. As Albert’s growing knowledge about the subject began to overlap with his own business experience, he developed strong opinions about how the federation should present itself to the world. He saw a Big Idea that was being undersold, and he set out to change that. “The main reaction I got from the [1940 annual] meeting,” Lasker wrote to Sanger, “was . . . that the Birth Control movement is something far beyond the implications of its name.”26 In that spirit, Lasker suggested a new name for the organization—Planned Parenthood—arguing that it “sounded more constructive and would meet with less public opposition.”27 Sanger resented what she perceived as a semantic retreat from the fray and made her displeasure known to the Laskers and the board.28

  But the name change stuck. No doubt the board was predisposed to side with Lasker because of his growing financial support of the organization: In February 1940, he made a commitment of $25,000 a year for three years, and at the same time, convinced several friends to contribute similar sums. Ever the pragmatist, Lasker knew that his financial support would mean far more if the organization broadened its base of support—and if that happened, he would be even more helpful. “I shall be glad,” he promised Sanger, “if the movement is financed for a larger operation, to give such of my time and experience in the carrying out of the plan as I might be called on to give.”29

  Mary, too, was doing her part to steer and strengthen Planned Parenthood. She raised funds for the organization and began using her political connections on its behalf. In 1941, for example, she asked Eleanor Roosevelt—whom she had met through her close friend, Anna Rosenberg (later to be named assistant Secretary of Defense)—to arrange a meeting with Surgeon General Thomas Parran Jr. Although Parran pushed her off on his assistant, Warren Draper, Mary was able to win a critical concession from Draper. While the Public Health Service (PHS) did not feel it could initiate or promote Planned Parenthood programs, Draper told Mary that the PHS would look favorably on states that asked for money for this purpose. Mary asked him to confirm this statement in a letter, which he did. It was the first time the PHS committed itself in writing to the concept of “
child spacing”—that is, having children several years apart, according to a family plan—and this constituted a major step on the part of the federal government.

  That night, Mary went to dinner at the White House, where she mentioned the day’s activities to President Roosevelt. Roosevelt replied that the subject was a political “hot potato,” and admitted that he had done little on the subject except in Puerto Rico, where he had convinced local Catholic authorities to accept the practice under the bland banner of “adult sex hygiene.”30 Eleanor Roosevelt arranged another White House lunch for Mary, allowing her to invite anyone she wanted to come talk about birth control. Unfortunately, the lunch took place on December 8, 1941—the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—and the participants were too distracted to focus on anything but war.

  Mary also found ways to manipulate the media for her purposes. She established an annual dinner for Planned Parenthood, and gave citations to those who had contributed to the movement. She arranged to have a radio broadcast about Planned Parenthood on the same night as the first awards ceremony—a coup that she owed mainly to the behind-the-scenes interventions of her husband. “It was [done] with great trepidation on the part of [David] Sarnoff and Niles [Trammell] of the NBC,” she later explained, “and really only the enormous influence that Albert Lasker had on them made them do this.”31

  In the fall of 1940, when Look magazine agreed to run an article on birth control, leading companies to cancel three full pages of advertisements, Albert agreed to buy the canceled space for Lord & Thomas house ads, thereby helping Look avoid a financial drubbing.

  Planned Parenthood gave Mary her first sustained exposure to a nonprofit organization. She found the experience of working with an all-volunteer group—many of whom took their responsibilities lightly—difficult and frustrating. “The people interested in [Planned Parenthood],” she later admitted, “were not used to organization or to thinking on any large scale about fundraising or of action of any kind.”32