Nobody’s Perfect
Bill Bernbach and the Golden Age of Advertising
Also by Doris Willens
Lonesome Traveler—The Life of Lee Hays
Piano Bar (book and lyrics)
Spent (book and lyrics)
Copyright © 2009 by Doris Willens
ISBN 1442135263 & EAN-13 9781442135260
Nobody’s Perfect
Bill Bernbach and the Golden Age of Advertising
by
Doris Willens
For the next generation
Ben, Liz, Kimmy, Jenny, Andrea and Nico
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Bernbach’s Way
2. The Private Sector
3. The Golden Age of Advertising
4. Past Imperfect
5. Cashing In
6. Talking about Writing
7. The Guy with the Bulging Muscles
8. Bernbach’s Book
9. New Faces
10. Family Interlude
11. The Revolting Creatives
12. The Basic Stump Speech
13. The Guy from Ogilvy
14. William and Mary
15. Once More, from the Top
16. Fathers and Sons
17. The Guy from Compton
18. What’s in a Name?
19. Out in the Wash
20. Passages
21. Now What?
22. Tobacco Road
23. Return of the Native
24. Monkey Business
25. Things Fall Apart
26. Dead in the Water
Epilogue
Introduction
“Well, what do you expect? The Renaissance lasted only 20 years.”
—Orson Welles
This is the story of the single most influential advertising agency of the 20th century, and the single most influential advertising man, William Bernbach.
It is a story that he could not bring himself to write.
“Do it different” was his theme—a theme that later Apple Computer borrowed for its “Think different” campaign.
How he did it, how he helped his writers and art directors produce great advertising, runs through these pages.
But so too does a kind of Greek drama, a fable of profound human emotions—the wrenching relationships of fathers and sons, fears of betrayal and abandonment, and a promethian defiance of time and succession, the myth of the golden bough.
* * *
Nothing holds still. A company grows, or shrivels, or self-destructs, or is taken over, or takes over others. On Madison Avenue, another week, another merger. So what?
But the entire advertising profession felt an unparalleled sense of loss when, on a day in 1986, the name Bernbach was chipped off his agency’s door—replaced by impersonal initials and new ownership. Since its birth in June 1949 and its exhilarating first ads for Ohrbach’s apparel stores, Doyle Dane Bernbach had stood for challenging assumptions, breaking barriers, scorning the comfortable “dull but safe” approach of traditional advertising agencies.
This was the agency that rode to unprecedented glory, slaying the oppressive dragon of “hucksterism,” and bringing back the grail of pride to advertising practitioners. The agency that proved that great work was what it was all about—not old school ties, or family connections, or country clubs, or bowing to every client whim, or shaving prices.
Its influence was anything but small and parochial. On the contrary, Bernbach and his agency changed the way America regarded the selling messages bombarding them daily. Where advertising had previously caused irritation, boredom, and even disgust, Bernbachian advertising touched and moved people in a whole new way. Unexpectedly, America entered into a love affair with advertising, which helped to fuel the unprecedented prosperity of the post-World War II decades.
The advertising created under Bernbach’s great editorial eye influenced more than economics; it influenced cultural attitudes as well. “Think small” for Volkswagen helped change a generation’s ideas about acquisitiveness. The Avis theme, “We’re only Number 2. So we try harder,” went into the language, a new way of looking at America’s obsession with strivers and winners. And the poster campaign that started in the New York subways and became pin-ups on dorm and den walls across the country, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s bread,” in the words of one observer, “helped people feel comfortable with America’s ethnic diversity in a way that any number of human relations commissions could not.” All this while selling cars and rent-a-car service and rye bread.
The agency’s influence was perhaps never more momentously registered than with a single commercial created for Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign. A little girl plucks the petals of a daisy, innocently counting to ten. A military voice picks up, counting backwards from ten to the detonation of an atomic bomb. Although it ran as a paid spot only once, that anti-Goldwater commercial launched negative political advertising which, alas, has been with us ever since.
For better and occasionally for worse, Doyle Dane Bernbach made history. Its name remains a touchstone. The agencies that dominated the pre-Doyle Dane Bernbach industry—J. Walter Thompson and BBDO and Young & Rubicam and McCann-Erickson—underwent crises of their own, but all, eventually, took up the banner of creativity, and opened wide their doors to “ethnics” (meaning, then, to Madison Avenue, Jews and Italians), looking for the kind of talent Doyle Dane Bernbach had. New agencies would announce their philosophy to be that of Bill Bernbach, and their goal to become the Doyle Dane Bernbach of their time.
* * *
Every copywriter and art director in the business longed to work there. Sometimes it seems that half of them did. Some called it the University of Bernbach—the training ground for generations of creative talent.
One needed only to walk through its corridors to sense the high spirits, the joy, the creative excitement, the passionate commitment to breakthrough work. In time, that would diminish; the same corridors filling with whispers about how the agency was changing, and with those whispers, a smell of fear and insecurity.
It was the good years that people remembered, before Doyle Dane Bernbach fell from grace, and disappeared into a new entity called DDB Needham Worldwide, Inc.
The industry mourned, and wondered how it had happened.
All the questions remained unanswered.
Books were promised. Seven, that I heard about from the DDBers who meant to write them. Others, perhaps, that I didn’t hear about.
I had been in charge of the agency’s public relations from 1966 through 1981, and remained on the payroll working half-time through 1984. I’d come to Madison Avenue via journalism—reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune, copy editor on the Washington Post, advertising news columnist on the New York Journal-American. The latter job gave me a kind of celebrity on the New York ad scene, and after four years of covering the news of the business, I moved into agency public relations. I stayed until my children grew up; then it was time to take risks. To work on theater projects, and perhaps books. I was commissioned to write a biography of a musician, and quit the agency.
I’d turned in my manuscript just two weeks before Doyle Dane Bernbach’s eclipse. Then, ready to tackle another book, I decided to work on a biography of the agency, or of Bernbach himself—however many others might be planning to do the same.
Several of those others were copywriters; two had worked on the account management side of the agency. But one by one, the prospective authors dropped out of the run. The reasons they gave were varied. But as my own research went on, I began to wonder if there was something about the Bernbach/Doyle Dane Bernbach story that defeated all attempts at telling it—starting with Bernbach himself, who accepted a p
ublisher’s advance, and never produced the proposed book.
That something, I eventually concluded, had to do with images and reality. I came to believe that many a sleepless night troubled the lives of those who planned to write about Bernbach and his agency. Starting with Bernbach himself.
* * *
Maxwell Dane, who achieved national fame as Number Four on President Nixon’s “enemies list,” thoughtfully answered all questions posed by the stream of journalists who interviewed him over the years. But he never stopped worrying that one day a Doyle Dane Bernbach book would be published that contained “all the gossip.”
Such a book hasn’t appeared and becomes less likely with the passage of time. Some of the gossip, however, does reflect the history of the agency’s developing problems. Only those bits confirmed by two or more sources made their way into the story that follows.
* * *
“Tell me, kid, tell me what happened?” Ned Doyle, agency founder, 83 years old and frail with emphysema, asked the question again and again on the day that his name, with Dane’s and Bernbach’s, came off the door. His mind, lawyer-sharp, pondered the pieces of the story as he knew it—and nobody knew more about the goings-on of the agency than did Doyle.
After that, he lived in the hope that a book would be written, perhaps not so much about “what happened” as about the legend itself. Its title, he often told me, should be “Once there was a Doyle Dane Bernbach.” The reference to Camelot was unmistakeable. And in that context, he wanted history to remember that the agency’s name was Doyle Dane Bernbach. That Ned Doyle and Mac Dane were essential to the spirit, the philosophy, and the success of the company. That a biography of Bernbach alone would be misleading and incomplete.
In the last year of his life, Doyle unburdened himself of a story he hadn’t told me before. That on the day of Doyle’s retirement, in 1969, Bernbach exuberantly exclaimed to a trusted colleague, “Now, at last, it’s MY agency.”
Doyle told the story with a touch of irony and a dash of bitters. A man of flinty self-assurance, he tended to date the decline of the agency to his retirement.
He believed from the beginning that the heart and soul of an advertising agency is its creative work. So the fame of Doyle Dane Bernbach would inevitably rest with Bernbach. He just didn’t believe that Bernbach could ever have made it without him.
* * *
From the beginning, Bernbach spoke, not of advertising, but of the art of persuasion. To persuade the consumer, the creators of ads needed to touch people’s basic, unchanging instincts—their “obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of their own.”
His disciples absorbed the lesson and produced unforgettable advertising. Because Bernbach kept so much of himself private, few realized how close to the bone his instructive and revealing words were. If they were at the heart of the art of persuasion, and the source of his agency’s fabled rise, they also encompass the dark side, the primeval drives that would lead to the end of the Golden Age of Advertising.
* * *
“We walked in on the Monday after Bill died and we didn’t see any change,” one of Bernbach’s associates recalled. Bernbach had died early on a Saturday morning, October 2, 1982, at New York Hospital, after a defiantly-secret, five-year battle with leukemia.
His colleagues saw no change because, they reassured themselves and one another, Bernbach had been only marginally involved in the agency’s affairs for the past few years. He’d come to his office almost every day, despite the pain of his advancing (but never mentioned) disease, fastidious as ever in his impeccably conservative clothes, sitting alone at the round table that served as his desk, wasting away, consulted about very little, trying to ignore the worried huddles of executives that quickly broke up as he approached.
How much change, then, would his death bring about? Neil Austrian, the agency’s chief executive officer, saw one immediate problem. The few clients who still asked, “Has Bill seen this?” were sometimes told “yes” when in fact Bill hadn’t. His approval sealed their approval. What would happen now? For there wasn’t another Bill in the wings. And in time, as one manager put it, “because the father that everybody was working for, seeking approval from, wasn’t there, everybody began to push and shove,” setting off tremors that would bring the temple down.
Might it have gone another way? Management authority Peter F. Drucker proclaims that “[an effective leader] knows that the gravest indictment of a leader is for the organization to collapse as soon as he leaves or dies. . . .”
In fact, nearly four years elapsed between Bernbach’s death and the “big bang” mega-merger of 1986, the end of the old Doyle Dane Bernbach. One astonishing thing after another happened between the two events, obscuring the line that linked them. DDBers picked their favorite villains in those demoralized post-Bernbach years, but never stopped hoping the agency would regenerate. Finally, when it was all over, one heard the question, “Why didn’t Bill anoint a creative successor before he died?”
The question was asked, again and again, by those I interviewed. Sometimes it had a ring of genuine bafflement. Sometimes it sounded like a prod in a direction I hadn’t thought to explore. Eventually I saw the emerging outline of an answer, and it kept me awake nights.
* * *
I had expected to concentrate on the post-Bernbach years when I set out to research the story of the agency’s fate. As Doyle Dane Bernbach’s long-time PR head, I knew—or thought I knew—the territory. The drama that climaxed in the engulfing mega-merger had built after I’d loosened, then cut, my ties to the agency. My loyalties and friendships belonged to the “old” Doyle Dane Bernbach. The story I envisioned would require professional reporting and writing—and that was my training.
Everybody involved—past and present—wanted to talk about what had happened and their own theories of why. Especially to an old insider. It was a time of white hot fury that could not long be sustained. I tried to catch it on tape, at its peak, over the weeks that followed.
As I gathered material on the collapse, my Bernbach file folders grew fatter, and split into subdivisions, which in turn pushed out into new folders.
The story I had set out to research, for all its sensational disclosures, began to seem less compelling than the portrait building in my files. Who, in a year or two, would care about those last few years of betrayals and money grabs? The players in the final act would not long be remembered.
On the other hand, the advertising world would always remember Bill Bernbach. I began to mull the implications of that. Sleep became more elusive.
* * *
Ned Doyle to the contrary, everything pointed to a biography of Bernbach. Everything except my heart. I copied out the words of Katherine Anne Porter’s biographer, who wrote of being emotionally disconcerted by “the uneasy sense, inhibiting rigorous investigation, that the revelations about her life constituted some cruel kind of exposure.”
I supposed that Bernbach’s spirit rested content with the final portrait of his legendary self. No one knew better than I how watchful he had been of his image. He kept its care entirely in his own hands. He dealt with the press as he chose. I handled the agency’s public relations, not his, and my efforts to coordinate the two were not encouraged. He would pick up the phone and call the New York Times or Advertising Age and speak his mind on a sticky agency story, whatever strategy we’d hammered out with clients and lawyers. So, messy moments resulted for the agency posture. (The press, flattered by his calls, admired him more than ever.) So, we pulled our hair. It was his agency. And wasn’t he the master in the art of communication?
And it was his image. And he was firm about what that should, and should not, encompass. He would talk to an interviewer with joyous excitement about advertising, about the art of persuasion. But an icy blue stare would cut off any attempts by the writer to get behind the ideas, to the man himself. Even a question about his work habits was over the line to Bernbach. If such rea
ctions struck me as excessive, I quickly learned to accept them. He’d attained legendary status long before I came on the scene. He’d achieved that while relentlessly guarding his privacy. I might dare to “take him on” in some areas, but not in his determination to keep the “personal” from spilling into the press.
Yet one could never be sure just where Bernbach drew his lines. For example: as his 65th birthday approached, I proposed a gathering of all of Bernbach’s creative offspring, past and present, the most remarkable collection of talent in advertising history. I could imagine no greater tribute. Nor a more powerful visualization of Bernbach’s dominant impact on the industry.
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