Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  So? This wasn’t about profitability; this was about ego.

  On December 18, Doyle Dane Bernbach announced a new account, Detroit’s Bank of the Commonwealth. Daly collected his $100 from Doyle. Doyle knew he’d been snookered. He didn’t care about the $100, but he did care about what the new account said about the state of the agency’s new business efforts. The incident added to Doyle’s growing perception that Daly wasn’t the leader Doyle Dane Bernbach needed.

  * * *

  Daly kept getting “all kinds of hollers about Oscar from all around.” When Lubow’s contract ran out, he “resigned to pursue other business interests.” Daly’s staff memo said Lubow had “completed his assignment.” Management was “pleased that he will continue to be available to DDB for consultation in the months ahead.”

  The troops shook their heads and wondered, as did Factor, about “the cost, both in dollars and esprit.”

  * * *

  Of far greater financial consequence was the impulsive hiring, late in 1970, of Ross MacLennan as successor-in-residence to Maxwell Dane.

  “When we hire someone for the mailroom,” personnel head Dick Kane wearily told Dane on learning the news, “we do a more thorough job of searching out, and referencing, than with this person who could well be the next president of the agency.”

  “I know,” said Dane, “but Daly wants him.”

  The agency had, in fact, commissioned the prestigious management consulting firm of Booz, Allen & Hamilton to do a top-level search for Dane’s successor. But Daly had jumped to hire MacLennan on reading in the morning New York Times that he was leaving Ted Bates after 20 years because he’d lost out on the presidency. Booz, Allen rolled its corporate eyes, filed its carefully-screened candidate list, and collected its $50,000 fee.

  MacLennan’s experience at Bates covered finance, international, and acquisitions. What better could Booz, Allen find? MacLennan even looked good, apart from teeth that didn’t quite seem to fit his mouth. A kind of middle-age, heavying-up Clark Kent. Pleasant, mannerly, unflappable . . . a gentleman. Certainly nice, and maybe even talented.

  But different, too. He decreed the removal of the agency’s client list from the quarterly report to stockholders. “I don’t want Wall Street to think of Doyle Dane Bernbach as an advertising agency,” he said, as though that made perfect sense.

  He was breathtakingly honest about his conviction that “one had to use people and organizations for one’s personal ends.” His own goal, he told a colleague, was to amass $4 million by a date certain.

  He came up with ideas for management compensation that had never been imagined. One inventive proposal would have had the agency pay college tuition for children of key executives. (A big thumbs down from Internal Revenue on that one.)

  He could be disarmingly, and fatally, casual on business decisions. Thus, he rejected the need for a CPA audit before buying an Oklahoma group of double discount stores, Trade Mart, later described as “garbage on shelves.” Said MacLennan, “If you can’t trust a person you’re doing business with, you shouldn’t be doing business with them.”

  MacLennan’s trust ranged far and wide; important acquisitions received little or no supervision. (See chapter titled “William and Mary.”) This, as time went by, would prove disastrous to the agency, resulting in the loss of millions of dollars, which led to the loss of many jobs.

  When at last MacLennan “resigned” from Doyle Dane Bernbach, with generous and grossly undeserved severance pay, he joined the actuarial firm he’d given the agency’s pension business to. Perhaps in gratitude, the firm gave him the title of president, a good salary, and all the time he wanted to manage his international real-estate holdings.

  Joe Daly thanked MacLennan in a staff memo “for his wholehearted commitment to DDB during his years with us.”

  DDBers who knew the real story gagged.

  10

  Family Interlude

  “For creative people, rules can be prisons”—Bill Bernbach

  Spring of 1972 brought forth a new honor for Bernbach and his agency. A full-scale retrospective of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s work, sponsored by the Parsons School of Design, opened in the Time-Life Exhibition Center, the first time that one agency’s work had been the subject of an art show in New York. Large blow-ups of Bernbach aphorisms were juxtaposed dramatically with austerely-mounted ads, the whole radiating importance and beauty.

  Bernbach himself received Parsons’ Diamond Jubilee award “for his creative contributions to the graphics communications industry and for his influence on the development of so many outstanding talents in the industry.”

  All through the preparations and to-do related to the tribute, Bernbach seemed distracted, fidgety. Something other than business problems was bothering him.

  * * *

  More important to Bernbach than any tribute was a family event that took place in the spring of ’72. John, Bernbach’s 28-year-old son, spirited his two children from the Park Avenue apartment of his wife Robin, flew them to France, and refused to bring them back to her.

  The aftermath unfolded in sensational coverage in the New York Post.

  Robin tried to get the children back. She sued John for divorce, charging adultery. John sued Robin for divorce, charging adultery. French private detectives, hired by Robin, testified that John had spent overnights in a Paris apartment with Jane Bush, co-respondent in Robin’s suit. Jane, British and beautiful, was the divorced wife of a former friend of the young Bernbachs, and mother of two children.

  To substantiate his charges of Robin’s adultery, John’s lawyer called a young clothing store executive who told the court about a night he’d spent with Robin. He also said, according to the New York Post, that he and John were currently getting along “very well, and we’re considering going into business together.” The judge concluded that his testimony was “unworthy of belief,” and Robin won her suit.

  None of this, at the time, appeared to have anything to do with John’s father’s advertising agency.

  But it turned out to have everything to do with John’s going onto the payroll of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s Paris office. He’d been there for four months before Joe Daly heard about it.

  * * *

  Among the observations that Bill Bernbach wrote onto his 3x5" file cards was this: “What makes a man successful—single-mindedness, an energy, an ego that makes him dominate—is so often the very thing that makes for a tragic relationship with his own family, especially a son brought into the business.”

  I came upon the card after Bernbach’s death, when, working part-time at the agency, I was putting together a booklet titled “Bill Bernbach said . . . .” I could find no reference to the card’s origin, nor any trace of its use in Bernbach’s speeches or articles. Yet he kept it until the end, and the cards that he kept were those that had resonance for him.

  The possibility is that Bernbach, in writing down those words, was thinking of some of his old clients—colorful, strong-willed entrepreneurs from the old country, whose sons never had the same gut feeling for advertising as had their fathers. It may never have occurred to him that John’s unexpected emergence within Doyle Dane Bernbach struck others with similar force. Bernbach had that capacity: to exempt himself from an unpleasant concept, or from a policy that no longer suited pressing problems.

  “To take care of one’s own.” How often Bernbach referred to this basic, unchanging instinct, this “obsessive drive.”

  So there was John, fled to Paris, living with the divorced wife of his old friend, trying to keep his children out of reach of the United States domestic law. But the French government limited foreigners to visits of four months, unless they could prove they had “good reason to remain.” What better reason than a job?

  John needed help.

  Bernbach considered the agency policy against nepotism. He remembered his own father’s refusal to help him, because of the “shame” of his intermarriage. How did that shame compare with the embarrassm
ent of lurid headlines in the New York Post? He could wish they’d never happened, but they wouldn’t alter his feelings about his son. Without family loyalty, the world would spin out of control. John loved Jane. John loved and wanted his children. Bernbach’s own grandchildren! What good was an agency policy (his agency) that stood in the way of his family’s well-being?

  And so Bernbach scrapped the rule, picked up the phone, and called the head of the Paris office. John went onto the payroll. Bernbach neglected to mention his action to his colleagues in top management.

  * * *

  Doyle Dane Bernbach’s founders staunchly believed in the policy of no nepotism. Their sons—Bernbach’s two, Doyle’s two, Dane’s one—grew up understanding that they could not expect to find jobs, even summer jobs, at the agency.

  “We always knew that we couldn’t go into Doyle Dane Bernbach,” Paul Bernbach recalled many years later, when his brother had risen to president of the mega-merged DDB Needham Worldwide. Paul, who went into law and real estate, had never considered advertising as a profession. “I suspect that on an unconscious level I would not have wanted to expose myself to comparisons with my father,” he reflected.

  Not so John, who clearly reveled in being a Bernbach in the European offices of Doyle Dane Bernbach. Watching him in action during international meetings, high-level agency people soon dubbed John “the playboy of the Western world.”

  “You’d go to a meeting, all the general managers,” recalled one. “John would be there. He was sort of a secretary—he’d take notes. At the end of the meeting, everybody would have something to do, to follow up on. Everyone except John. John would say, I can’t do that because I’ve got to have lunch with somebody in Paris, or in Rome tomorrow, and dinner in Athens the night after that, and then I’m going to Cannes. It began to rub people a bit.”

  John tooling around Europe in his Ferrari, John at Orly airport with a deck of Concorde tickets in his jacket, John never still long enough to return phone calls—the portrait built.

  * * *

  Inevitably, word of John’s hiring reached Advertising Age. What made the report interesting to Don Grant, the reporter who covered the agency, was DDB’s widely-known and esteemed anti-nepotism policy.

  Grant called me, and I called Bernbach, to work out some “language” to respond in the most favorable possible way. Instead, Bernbach said firmly that he would telephone Grant and talk to him “to try to keep the story out” of the publication.

  The story stayed out. Years went by before John’s name finally appeared in the trade press, and by then he’d been with the agency for so long that reporters simply shrugged and ran the news of his promotion in Europe without comment.

  I never learned what Bernbach said to Grant to keep the story out. But Grant, and Advertising Age, were responsive to the argument that personal news didn’t belong in the trade press. Perhaps Bernbach convinced Grant that John would remain on the payroll only until the lawsuits were resolved. Perhaps Bernbach actually intended to go that route when he chose to ignore years of agency policy and take care of his own.

  * * *

  John married Jane. The court gave Robin custody of the children—though when they grew up, they favored spending time with John and Jane. John took on new responsibilities at the agency. He worked to live down the playboy image. When he met the agency’s new worldwide management team in 1974, he offered to resign, realizing that the situation was “delicate.”

  “If my presence is an embarrassment to you, I’ll get out,” he volunteered. His offer was not accepted, unsurprisingly. The new managers would hardly have wanted to start their reign by letting the owner’s son go.

  In the years that followed, John’s role in Europe grew in importance and effectiveness. Reports of John’s accomplishments muted some of the grumbling back in New York. Not all. Doyle and Dane had no interest in agency slots for their sons, but found it nonetheless galling that Bernbach should sweep aside long-standing principles to rescue his high-living son.

  Well, didn’t Bernbach always say that rules are meant to be broken?

  In:

  Avis Rent a Car

  Bank of the Commonwealth

  Celanese

  Hammond Organ

  Madison Labs

  Ponderosa System

  Procter & Gamble

  Ralston Purina

  Tropicana

  Out:

  British Tourist Association

  Cool-Ray

  Cracker Jack

  Kitchens of Sara Lee

  Korvettes

  Lees Carpets

  Lever Brothers

  National Liberty Corp.

  Transamerica

  Warner Lambert

  Whirlpool

  11

  The Revolting Creatives

  “The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not at the end.”

  —Adlai Stevenson

  “The second creative revolution,” a wag called the uprising of November 15, 1972. It was an event soon forgotten, worth recalling chiefly as a reminder of how different Doyle Dane Bernbach was from all other advertising agencies.

  Just a week earlier, Richard Nixon had won his second term as President of the United States in a crushing landslide that seemed to bury America’s tolerance for youthful rebellion. That didn’t upset DDB’s hairy young creatives nearly as much as the news, on the morning of the 15th, that creative stars Roy Grace and Evan Stark were leaving to become partners in a small, existing agency of little consequence.

  Work stopped cold. Copywriters and art directors gathered in small groups in hallways, offices, screening rooms. Roy and Evan now! They ticked off the names of creatives who had previously left—lured by the glamour (and higher salaries) at Wells, Rich, Greene; by the potential of power (and higher salaries) at mainstream agencies; by the ego satisfaction (and higher salaries) of joining smaller agencies as name partners. Once upon a time, DDB creatives routinely rejected offers of more money to remain at Camelot. Was it still Camelot?

  Ah, that was the real question. The gathered groups swapped perceptions of leaks and cracks that could bring down the walls of this legendary place. The agitation level rose with every hour. A bad time for department head Bob Levenson to be in London on business.

  Unhappy workers in every company huddle and gossip. But they do it out of management’s sight. At Doyle Dane Bernbach, the creatives flocked to a “town meeting,” called by an anonymous memo, right there in the company cafeteria, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

  What did they think an advertising agency was, anyhow? Athens in Fifth Century BC? The Berkeley campus?

  * * *

  In his 26th floor office, Bill Bernbach, a copy of the anonymous memo in hand, placed a transatlantic call to Levenson.

  “You’d better come back here and look after your department,” warned Bernbach in icy tones, “because you’ve got trouble.”

  How to deal with the unruly event? The natural response of a company leader would presumably be to turn up at the meeting, take questions, offer reassurance—especially in the absence of the department head. Bernbach, doing that, would have disarmed them at once. He knew well how they worked for his approbation. He’d clipped a comic strip in which the hero, Pogo, expresses what Bernbach did every day of the year: “They come in and I give them a pat on the head and they go out happy.”

  But that was one team at a time. Master and disciples. Guru and acolytes. Father and sons. Long ago, he’d walked the halls and popped into creative offices, shepherding works in progress. As the agency grew, he’d withdrawn into his office, still guiding much of the work, but now the acolytes made the pilgrimage to his sanctum. They’d slip into the black leather armchairs around his circular wooden table. Five chairs were alike. The sixth had a higher, throne-like back. That was Bernbach’s.

  With his keen visual sense, Bernbach had found furniture that symbolized a perfect combination of authority and Camelot. Here he felt in control. For all
his fame and honors, he never grew comfortable speaking to large groups, even of his own people. Even in good times.

  And now, the creative department was going off half cocked. If Bernbach felt betrayed when one of his “children” abandoned him for another agency, what did he feel on learning of this mass disturbance?

  He could not bring himself to acknowledge the appalling event, to validate it by his presence. This was Levenson’s department, Levenson’s responsibility, Levenson’s problem. Bernbach remained in his office, brooding.

  * * *

  The 19th floor Eatery, a place with all the ambiance of an Iron Curtain country cafeteria, filled up with sober-faced creatives. In typical DDB style, the doors remained open and employees from other departments wandered in and out, buying coffee and snacks, wondering what the hell was going on, some staying to find out, since no one was in charge to ask them to leave. That ensured agency-wide dissemination of whatever was said at the meeting.