Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  * * *

  The triumvirate of Gallagher, Austrian and Honig worked well initially. They liked and respected one another—no “asshole syndrome” in their relationship. And they tackled some of the most egregious problems fast.

  Late work, for instance. It would be hard to measure how much client goodwill had been worn down by cliffhanger due dates. Young creatives thrilled to Helmut Krone’s dictum, “I don’t care about the air date, we’re going to get this right,” but clients got heartburn. Too often young creatives struck the attitude, without compensating with a great late ad. Honig made the creative trains run on time.

  Another source of client aggravation was DDB’s unique stand against back-up advertising—campaigns ready to replace running campaigns, just in case. The agency’s point: Why use talent and time and money for such an exercise before a real need arose? Circumstances change. By the time a real need arose, the back-up campaign might not be the answer. Yes, but clients felt safer with that insurance. And Doyle Dane Bernbach was no longer the only game in town. Bright young agencies were happy to do back-ups. The mainstream agencies had always done them. And there was a recession going on, enabling clients to turn the screws of demands tighter. Under Gallagher-Austrian-Honig, DDB moved decisively into the world of back-up campaigns.

  But Honig, like Gallagher, ruled over only part of Gaul. The old greats—Gage, Krone and Jack Dillon among them—had the clout to refuse to report to Honig, who, at 38, had only 10 years at the agency. His persona ranged somewhere between street smart and smart-ass—a cigarillo-smoking copywriter who looked and sounded like a skinny Dead End kid, convulsing the troops with his deadpan delivery of irreverent remarks.

  Joe Daly lost no time worrying about the implications of the anarchic creative set-up. Ingeniously, he devised the term “floating stars,” creating an image of a firmament afire with famous talents, available to any client. The striking concept served for a time as the centerpiece of his new business pitch.

  The battle of egos had its nasty moments. At an Art Directors Awards luncheon in the Hilton Hotel, Old Greats sat at one table, Honig and his cohorts at another. The latter included Mike Mangano, Jack Mariucci, Jim Scalfone, John Caggiano. Helmut Krone paid a waiter to send over to Honig’s table, with his compliments, a bottle of “dago red.”

  * * *

  Bernbach came down to Honig’s office a few months into the team’s tenure and said, “You’re doing a great job, Marvin. And I want you to know that I picked you.” (Actually, Heekin had, in his “book.”)

  “So I knew he had to be happy with the job I was doing,” Honig said later, “because if anybody knows Bill, that’s the way he would say it.”

  Honig recalled his first two years in the job as “pretty clean. Then somewhere along the line . . . I think Bill was very disturbed through the early ’70s. He’d had such great years, in the ’50s and ’60s. Something was going wrong, and he didn’t really know what was going wrong. And it began going right again, in 1975, slowly but surely. And he was happy with that. Then he . . . I’m just guessing . . . wanted to get more involved in the agency, and I couldn’t let him get that involved. It’s very hard to put it that way. But he was a very intimidating man. It was his agency and he was Bill Bernbach.

  “One of the problems the agency had in the early ’70s and the reason they lost so many accounts is they didn’t react to clients’ requests, and the work was late. To get work out of there on time, I had to make decisions. And then to take it to Bill after . . . it wasn’t just an ad, it was a TV campaign, maybe four or five storyboards. And if he saw it the week before it was supposed to go to the client, and said he didn’t like it, that put us in a very difficult position. He’d say, ‘It’s up to you, though, Marvin.’ And I would tell the account guy to take it over there. But the account guy felt very uncomfortable about it now. Bill Bernbach isn’t one hundred percent behind it. So to have two people involved as creative director wasn’t good, wasn’t the solution to anything.”

  Times had changed. Bernbach “used to sit at his round desk and people would bring in mostly print,” said Honig. “He’d change it, and make suggestions, and they’d come back in a couple of days with the new work. That’s the way the agency ran for fifteen, twenty years. You can’t do that with television. And Bill was never that comfortable with TV story-boards. After he saw the commercial, he was very accurate. He knew what was good about it and what was bad about it. But that’s not helpful when it comes to TV commercials. You’ve got to know before you spend the hundred thousand dollars.”

  Ned Doyle’s short version attributed Honig’s undoing to his failure to spend a couple of hours with Bernbach each week, bringing him into the picture.

  Bernbach in time began referring to Honig contemptuously as “the jokester,” and quoting Daly on Honig as a “shit presenter.”

  “One of the problems at DDB,” reflected Honig, “is that when you get in a high position, on the account side or the creative side, you’re competing with the people who run the agency.”

  * * *

  “I knew he drank, but I didn’t think he was a drunk,” Joe Daly maintained about the hiring of Gallagher.

  Honig did not perceive Gallagher as a drunk when he arrived from London. “But he came into this complete surprise,” said Honig, referring to Daly’s refusal to let Gallagher near his “own” accounts. “After all, they called him and asked him to come. They went over to England to get him. He had no idea about the personalities. He was very surprised by what happened.”

  Another surprise awaited Gallagher—that the power of the purse, for raises and such, went to, and stayed with, Neil Austrian.

  Drinking perhaps didn’t seem such a bad alternative.

  Still, Gallagher did what he could to help clients feel good about coming into, and staying at, Doyle Dane Bernbach.

  “Not a team player,” a Harris survey of advertising agencies reported in the early ’70s as a strong opinion among advertisers about the agency. All such polls showed DDB tops in creativity, but only in creativity. Clients expected more.

  Bernbach loved the creation of the advertising, and had no patience for the rest of it. There’s a problem on an account? Do better advertising. “If your advertising goes unnoticed,” he often said, “everything else is irrelevant.”

  Gallagher turned to “the rest of it,” bringing media and research into strong focus for the first time. With Mike Drexler heading media and Ruth Ziff recruited by Gallagher to head research, the emphasis, in presentations and interviews, shifted to client services. It worked. Drexler and Ziff were heavyweights in their fields and helped alter the perception that DDB too often shot from the hip.

  At the same time, Gallagher never took his eye off the creative ball. “Even the greatest marketing plan needs a great creative idea to bring it to life,” Gallagher said, and intensely believed.

  He worried about the agency’s lack of organization and apparent lack of interest in organization. As account man Bill Wardell said about working there, “The fun was, that management didn’t manage.”

  “That’s what everyone cherished,” said Mike Drexler. “You’re given a job, and it’s your job; nobody looks over your shoulder, it’s really up to you. They give you the freedom to do it your way, and they support you. On the other hand, that can lead to things getting out of hand.” And things did.

  Gallagher tried to show the difference between “freedom to” and “freedom from.” Every account group ran on its own rules and systems and history. Great for long-time and well-run accounts; devastatingly chaotic for others.

  Gallagher codified, bringing into one huge book everything an account person needed to know to run an account at the agency. Honig, introducing the book to the account staff, each of whom would receive a copy, hefted it once or twice, and let it drop with a great thud on the speaker’s table.

  “This is the kind of book,” he deadpanned, “that once you put it down, you can’t pick it up.”

&n
bsp; * * *

  An infallible indicator of power at the agency was who signed the letter to shareholders in the annual report. (I wrote it.) From the year he became president, in 1968, Daly signed along with Bernbach. Doyle and Dane signed, too, until their retirements. Since 1971, only Bernbach and Daly had signed.

  Gallagher should have signed the 1975 report as president. But Daly said no, not yet. Surely, then, the 1976 report. After all, the agency’s claim to “new strengths in the top management structure” lost credibility when the annual report kept featuring the same old management twosome. By the time of the ’76 report, Daly had won the title of CEO, on Bernbach’s reaching the age of 65. He promised Gallagher that he would sign that year.

  But in mid-February of 1977, with the boards for the ’76 annual report almost ready for the printer and Gallagher out of town, Daly called me into his office and asked me to strip out Gallagher’s photograph and signature. I knew what that meant.

  When Gallagher returned, he called and asked to see the boards. I brought them to his office with a heavy heart, sure that Daly had failed to inform him of the ominous change. Right. Gallagher’s expression didn’t alter as he studied the pages. Nor did the pitch of his voice as he asked why the change. I muttered lamely that Daly needed to be the sole signer of his first annual report as CEO. I felt sad for Gallagher and furious with Daly for ducking the first blow. Gallagher rose, and strode to Daly’s office to argue for restoration of photo and signature. He was back in ten minutes, the wind quite out of him.

  “I’ll sign next year’s,” he said, in almost sheepish tones.

  But before next year’s report went to the printer’s, a press release had announced that Gallagher would “step down” as president of the agency “for personal and family reasons.” He would remain a member of the board.

  By that time, the entire industry knew Gallagher as “a drunk.” Daly cheerfully related stories about clients who unfavorably compared Gallagher’s drinking habits with his own. (“They could talk business with me, but all Gallagher keeps saying is, ‘Bring this man another drink.’”)

  Gallagher couldn’t fight Daly. He withdrew, and sought solace elsewhere. His office was often empty. So was the desk of his secretary, a lovely young Englishwoman whom he later married. Bernbach’s secretary, commenting on their frequent absence, said, “We ought to mail them their checks.”

  But it was too embarrassing to admit the agency had blown it with yet another president. Thus the face-saving gesture of keeping Gallagher on the board. Thus Daly’s statement for official consumption: “Tom will be part of DDB for many years. He’s done a great job in helping us build up this agency. We are deeply grateful to him.”

  And so Tom Gallagher didn’t sign the next annual report. Neil Austrian did.

  * * *

  Austrian dazzled from the day of his arrival, at age 34, at Doyle Dane Bernbach. He was our St. George, slaying with one mighty stroke the dragon that was mysteriously sucking the life blood out of the agency.

  Before Austrian, DDB’s board was paralyzed by its inability to deal with the monster its “under-marketed properties” acquisition program had become. How, other than selling the whole kit and caboodle to Mary Wells, could the agency rid itself of Trade Mart and Snark, and keep secret the humiliating losses?

  Fear not, said Austrian, fresh from Wall Street. Everybody makes mistakes. The sin is to keep holding on to those mistakes. Bite the bullet. Wall Street understands and respects that. And so he cleared the decks with one gigantic multi-million-dollar write-off, and once again, he proved to be right.

  Out from under the “under-marketed properties,” Austrian proceeded to strengthen DDB worldwide by acquiring foreign agencies. He initiated studies of entrepreneurial ways to make profitable use of agency capabilities. He wasn’t an advertising man, but he was a quick study, and determined to learn. Shirt tail flying, one sleeve rolled up, tie askew, Austrian strode the agency halls, halloing everybody by name, from mailroom kids on up, learning in record time what everybody did.

  He initiated five-year plans, ten-year plans, baseball teams, Friday night parties. He yanked the agency out of its dreary old offices at 11 West 43rd Street, raising morale by moving to spiffy space in a fabulous location—the block running from 49th to 50th streets on Madison Avenue. He let the money flow for a series of glamorous housewarming parties, for clients and media, on the marble-and-glass executive floor, an expanse that Marvin Honig referred to as “the egomaniac hall of fame.”

  Austrian loved his job, loved the agency, loved its people. Some saw in this athletic, energetic young leader a mix of the best of Doyle and Dane. A big heart, a joyous playfulness, empathy for the underdog, a willingness to risk, a deeply-rooted self confidence, and a gentle fearlessness. Moreover, he was immune from the Bernbach-Daly competitions. Neither could begin to understand his financial wizardry. The agency’s stock would rise, split, split again. Why challenge him, when he made them richer and richer?

  Some noted that he “wasn’t an advertising man.” But he propelled DDB onto a non-stop energy high. He handed out bonuses and established incentive plans to hold good people. He brought new technologies to every department.

  Even the alcoholic downfall of Gallagher didn’t cause much of a blip among the staff. Austrian absorbed Gallagher’s job, too, and helped bring in important new clients whose language he spoke—IBM and Citibank. He won the Atari account by scoring three points in a computer game of “Tank” with founder Nolan Bushnell.

  Billings surged. Morale surged. These were the great new days, Harvard Business School style.

  Only later, when the place was a shambles, did the phrase return to haunt: “But he wasn’t an advertising man.”

  Account Gains and Losses—1975-78

  In:

  Atari

  CBS Broadcast Group

  Diamond-Sunsweet

  Hershey Foods

  Intergold

  Publishers Clearing House

  Shaeffer Pen

  Standard Brands (Blue Bonnet)

  Sterling Drug (Bayer aspirin)

  Twentieth-Century Fox

  Wrangler jeans

  Out:

  Bank of the Commonwealth

  Hills Brothers coffee

  Jamaica Tourist Board

  Madison Laboratories

  Sony

  Sterling Drug (Bayer aspirin)

  16

  Fathers and Sons

  “You would not believe, my dear, how we long for parents, or their substitutes, to acknowledge our importance.”

  —Amanda Cross, Sweet Death, Kind Death.

  Helmut Krone, one of the greatest art directors in the history of the agency, and perhaps of advertising, left DDB in 1969 to open his own shop, Case & Krone. Bernbach dealt with the blow his way, by insisting to his colleagues that he was “glad, because while Helmut was a great talent, he had dried up.”

  Three years later, Krone returned to the agency with the comment that Bernbach was the only person, other than himself, that he could work for. Bernbach was elated. Helmut, he told the same colleagues, “was still one of the great talents in advertising.”

  In the mid-’60s, co-copy chief Ron Rosenfeld left Doyle Dane Bernbach for a high-paying job at J. Walter Thompson. Bernbach took three agency copy stars to a festive lunch at the Algonquin. He expressed relief at the departure of someone who underwent as much psychoanalysis as did Rosenfeld. And Ron’s leaving, added Bernbach, resolved the thorny problem of co-chiefs.

  Almost as soon as he arrived at JWT, Rosenfeld rued his move. He called Bernbach.He’d made a terrible mistake—could he come back? Of course he could come back, replied an ecstatic Bernbach. Could he have his old title back? Of course he could have his old title back. And so he did. (He would later leave again, to open his own agency.)

  People come and go in business—in the ad business, notoriously so. But the reactions of Bernbach to such comings and goings were out of the ordinary. As one listened
to his colleagues remembering Bernbach, that emerged as a defining characteristic

  Bernbach’s son John put it this way:

  “Very often when he was disturbed about certain things in the business, whether it was somebody leaving the agency, or a piece of business going, there was an element of . . . outrage is the wrong word, because he didn’t express himself that way . . . incomprehension at the injustice of what was going on. Or the personal rejection that was taking place when somebody would leave.”

  Not just anybody, of course. His children—the creative talent he’d nurtured and brought to maturity. But children grow up and leave home, to find their own strengths. Sons are driven by an almost primeval need to show ’em, if not to beat ’em. To prove themselves worthy of the golden bough of succession.

  “Every boss is a daddy,” said Phyllis Robinson. “And you know how people feel about their daddies.”

  Bernbach knew, having tirelessly preached the importance of “insight into human nature [as] the key to the communicator’s skill.” Such insight led to the understanding that “your brain, your intellect, works for your genes and instincts, and never was there a more ruthless boss. . . . The basic instincts dominate.” Motivations “lie deep in the realm of passions.”