The Real Mad Men

by Andrew Cracknell

  This was heady renegade stuff. This was an agency with a major success on its hands desecrating the altar at which Madison Avenue worshipped, laughing at research. The effect on the rest of the business, particularly the new young creative people, was explosive. At last they had a champion who proved that agencies didn’t have to be run (and ads didn’t have to be done) in the old tired way, and that a creatively-oriented agency could credibly be held up as not just a creative but a business success.

  There were other small pockets of creative endeavour around New York. CBS under Bill Golden at TV and Lou Dorfsman at Radio had acted as a sort of graphics finishing-school, with a stream of future first-class designers and art directors passing through in the mid to late 1950s. Herb Lubalin, a lifelong friend of Dorfsman, who gained notoriety in 1963 as the designer of the eventually banned avant-garde erotic magazine Eros, was Creative Director at Sudler & Hennesey. A noted experimenter with type, Lubalin, like Golden and Dorfsman, attracted a greater share of future creative award winners than this small, mainly pharmaceutical agency should logically have had. Bob Kuperman, later to head the VW group at DDB, Carl Fischer, one of New York’s leading advertising photographers for four decades, and George Lois were just three of them.

  But none of them had the critical mass and national fame of DDB – John Kennedy, anticipating his 1964 presidential campaign, was said to have asked his staff about ‘the VW agency’. And critically, in the eyes of the young iconoclastic creative people pushing their way upwards, it was recognised to be ‘Bernbach’s place’, an agency led by a copywriter, as opposed to an account man.

  Jack Dillon explains the implications of this when describing life at DDB as a writer later in the sixties: ‘There are a lot of writers and art directors in other agencies who, I’m sure, are very creative and able. But they are not working for agencies run by a writer or an art director. They are working for agencies run by businessmen.’

  Referencing the early days of advertising agencies, he continues, ‘Writing ads was offered as an extra service by a businessman, not as the main thing that an agency did… its status had already been established. Creative people were and are usually under non-creative people. Bill Bernbach changed this. Bernbach was a copywriter and… he knew what good and bad advertising were.’

  Many times since, creative leadership has proved to be less than dazzling. But Bernbach, with Mac Dane and Ned Doyle, was building a glittering business, both financially and creatively. And the thinking amongst the new creative community was if he can do it, so can I.

  One person who had already tried was Fred Papert. He had written his first copy in the 1940s for Woolf Brothers men’s clothing store in Kansas City while working there as a salesman to pay his way through a journalism course at the University of Missouri.

  He had a series of jobs as a ‘ragamuffin copywriter’ at Benton and Bowles and Y&R, and then became creative director at Kenyon and Eckhart. He was fired from that company while working on the Pepsi account, for which he had wanted to do experimental photography at the agency’s expense. Joan Crawford, the wife of the Pepsi President, vetoed his request. Papert objected, and summoned by his boss told him no matter who they were, clients shouldn’t tell the agency what to do with its own money. His boss said ‘You’re right. You’re also fired.’

  At his next agency, Sudler & Hennessey, he met and briefly worked with the young George Lois, but he had already started to formulate the idea of having his own place. The line-up for his new outfit was a little eccentric; the four partners were two married couples, Fred and Diane Papert, both writers, Bill Free, an art director, and his wife Marcella, another writer. Sadly it didn’t last; within a year Papert was on the phone to George Lois at DDB, offering him his name over the door if he would take Free’s place.

  LOIS WAS, AND STILL IS, a hugely energetic man, with so much going on in his head he often struggles to get it all out. He talks fast, in a thick Bronx accent, with frequent expletives emphasising his absolute views. Things – any things – are either sensational or a piece of shit, an idea will either knock you off your ass or it’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen. The phrase George Lois is least likely ever to use? ‘It’ll do.’

  He was born in 1931 and brought up in an almost exclusively Irish area of the Bronx. ‘The discrimination against my family from another immigrant population, the Irish, sure didn’t bother me, I literally had 25 to 30 fist fights with kids in my neighbourhood. I won all of my fights, then wound up being friends with everybody.

  George Lois. One way or another, he’ll knock you off your ass.

  ‘I went to the greatest high school in the world, a place called Music & Art in New York. It was the greatest institution of learning since Alexander sat at the feet of Aristotle. I got this incredible education, it was kind of a Bauhaus education, 1945 to 1949. And I then didn’t know quite what to do, but I figured I better go to another art school because I was aged 17 and a half and I didn’t know where to get a job because it wasn’t a field where people were looking for talent. I mean, there weren’t many places you wanted to work at – you’d love to work for Paul Rand. You could try to do record album covers or book jackets, etc. So I went to Pratt Institute, paid for by tips I got delivering flowers for my father since I was a kid, because he expected me to be a florist.’

  From Pratt he was taken on by Reba Sochis as the first employee in her rapidly expanding studio. ‘In just one day working for Reba, you could learn more than in four years at Pratt or Cooper Union. She was the toughest boss in the world, but she was also the sweetest woman you could hope to know.’ She was one of the biggest influences on his life, a genuine pioneer; while female copywriters were comparatively plentiful, female designers were almost unheard of, let alone one running her own studio.

  After military service in Korea Lois returned to New York, first to CBS, briefly to Lennen and Newell, where he overturned the agency chief’s desk because he’d been rude about his work and then to Sudler & Hennessy, where David Herzbrun first met him: ‘George Lois was a tall Greek kid with a big nose and a big lopsided grin. He looked as if he’d been nailed together from scrap building materials’. He described ‘the loose limbed way he walked and the way he talked with his hands, his shoulders hunched over’.

  Herzbrun may be being a little harsh; a contemporary picture reveals strong-jawed matinee idol looks, and in Lois’s own words, ‘I was far better looking than Don Draper’. He and Herzbrun were teamed together, while Fred Papert, who was metamorphosing into an account man, was busy trying to get business for the agency. But it wasn’t easy, as Herzbrun recalls:

  ‘George had a way of making clients nervous. If they appeared to have any doubts about our work, he could be counted on to say something like “You fuckin’ crazy? This is the best fuckin’ campaign you saw in your fuckin’ life”. This speech was usually delivered in a tone of mixed fury and contempt while George loomed over the clients with fists clenched.’ His street-fighting days were certainly not finished; it’s possible they’re still not over, as he claims to have been in a fight during a recent basketball game in which he was playing – at the age of 79.

  BY 1959, Lois had already done noticeable enough work to breeze into a job at DDB, leaving Papert and Herzbrun behind. His first year was sensational; by his own admission he managed to upset just about everyone at DDB, from Phyllis Robinson and Helmut Krone down, and win more major awards than anyone else. It’s possible the two were connected; his lips are never far from his own trumpet and no set of rules was ever going to constrain George.

  It may seem counter-intuitive to find that within an organisation as radical as DDB there were already rigid mores and inflexible cultural tics. But you’ll frequently find that creative people within advertising agencies are amongst the most conservative – and tribal – on earth, and they don’t like their boat being rocked.

  George’s first mistake was to spend the weekend before he joined painting his office and moving in his own
furniture. Cutting edge though their advertising may have been, DDB’s offices were grey and almost dowdy, and George’s brilliant white walls and Eames chair stood out as a belligerent style challenge from the new boy. Then his energy, bellicosity and irrepressible confidence irritated enough people that eventually a deposition of creatives went to see Bernbach to complain about him. Bernbach listened to them and said (and bear in mind this is George’s story), ‘You don’t understand – George Lois is a combination of Bob Gage and Paul Rand’. Could there be higher praise?

  Robinson had already called Lois in to admonish him for rudeness to Judy Protas over an idea he’d had for the news broadcasts for CBS television, then a DDB client: ‘I broke it down into 24 small space ads all throughout the newspaper that said 1 PM, 2 PM, 3 PM and each ad was an ad that said every hour on the hour, so when you looked through the paper you saw 24 ads, dominating the paper. It was a sensationally brilliant way to do something… and the writer comes in… and she says, “No, no, no, no George, you don’t understand, we at Doyle Dane don’t do small space ads, we only do big ads”, at which point I said “Get the fuck out of my room.” In fact I told four or five writers to get the fuck out of my room. Until Phyllis Robinson called me in and tried to chew me out, we wound up being great friends afterwards, but instead of her chewing me out I chewed her out and told her that she’d got constipated writers.’

  Woman or no woman, gentleman or no gentleman, you don’t tell George Lois what is and isn’t ‘done’ without running the risk of a stream of profanity, or worse. This doesn’t make him an animal; it makes him passionate about his work. Ron Holland, a copywriter who worked with him for many years, says he is ‘almost Edwardian in his politeness with people’ and he will indeed treat you with a quiet, warm courtesy. Just don’t tell him what to do on his layout pad.

  When he got Papert’s call, Lois didn’t linger long. Although being part of the DDB creative department was, as art director Len Sirowitz later said, ‘like being a team member for the 1927 New York Yankees’, the only logical next step was his own shop. And it hadn’t escaped his notice that no agency had ever set up with an art director as a partner – he would be the first. He had no doubt they could improve on what Bernbach was doing. His only condition was that he bring his own writer.

  LOIS’S FIRST CHOICE was Julian Koenig, white-hot from his almost public fame as the writer of the VW ads. He immediately agreed, for two reasons. First, he’d been knocking around advertising for ten years and he, too, was curious about branching out, to see if he could do it on his own. It was one of those ‘will I spend the rest of my life wondering?’ moments. Second, he had recently experienced an aspect of Bernbach’s character that had irritated and annoyed him.

  ‘I wrote an ad for Ancient Age bourbon. Bill went down to the client – copywriters didn’t but the account people and Bill went. He came back and stood in the middle of the art department and said, “They loved my line”. And I said, “That’s my line, not yours”. And he said, “No, it’s my line.” So I called over Bert Steinhauser who I’d done the advert with and said, “Whose line is this?” and in true heroic form he said, “I forget”.’

  It wasn’t an isolated incident. Three years before, in March of 1957, Time magazine had published a brief piece on the agency, specifically mentioning Judy Protas as the writer of the Ohrbachs ‘Cat’ ad. Bernbach immediately leant on the magazine and two weeks later a very similar piece ran which, without direct reference to the issue, made it clear that Bernbach was the author. Although Protas had written the body copy, which is superb, the idea was Bernbach and Gage’s. So some of the credit was justified – but was the effort to capture it?

  The indignation of the creative people was leavened by the fact that they accepted that as the creator of the environment, Bernbach could claim partial involvement in all their work. (Don Draper makes the same point to Peggy Olson when she complains that he has taken an award for an ad that she wrote.) Even Koenig, irritated as he was, could see Bernbach’s position: ‘Everything in the agency was his. I realise that he thought it was his ad, in the sense that it would not have existed if it had not been for him.’ But Koenig had also had a run-in over a tyre commercial with Joe Daly (the Head of Accounts), and was in a truculent mood.

  He went to meet Papert and they immediately recognised each other from the racetrack – four decades later they were still going to the races together – and to a mixture of incredulity and ridicule on the part of the rest of the DDB creative department, the deal was announced.

  PAPERT KOENIG LOIS (PKL) opened its doors on the 36th floor of the Seagram Building on 1 January 1960. The offices had previously been those of Papert & Free which, coincidentally, Lois had helped them secure a year earlier. Edgar Bronfman of Seagrams had been having trouble letting whole floors as he wanted, and Lois got a tip through Bronfman’s son-in-law, a friend of his, that a deal could be struck.

  Five people occupied the office on that first day. Says Lois, ‘I felt off-the-wall excited – and nervous and apprehensive. I didn’t know if it was going to work out.’ Their first client was The Ladies Home Journal, inherited from Papert & Free, quickly followed by Dilly Beans. For these two clients, one staid, one small, they managed to create eye-catching work and they were off and running.

  The offices were stylish and hip, the organisation cool but chaotic. A visitor once found staff wobbling aimlessly around the office on French Solex motorised bicycles. It looked like a time-and-motion-inspired efficiency initiative; in reality they’d taken on the account and then discovered the bike had no retail outlets in New York. So they decided to become not just advertising agent but dealership as well. It was not a success – no one had bothered to find out that a licence was necessary to ride them on the streets, and the surplus stock ended up in the office.

  But within a few months, to give them gravity, they hired an experienced marketing man, Norman Grulich. The agency’s work was terrific – possibly even more concentrated than DDB, the ballsy innovative campaigns streamed out and the cream of New York creative talent had a new path to beat. ‘People wanted to come to us because we were free spirits’, says Papert. An ice cream truck driver named Ron Holland decided to switch to a career in advertising based on an ad he saw for Dilly Beans – he wanted to work with people who could write a line as subversive as ‘If your dealer doesn’t stock Dilly Beans, knock something off the shelf as you walk out’.

  Through Bronfman’s company, Seagrams, PKL picked up Wolfschmidt vodka. New Yorkers were startled by a campaign that personified the bottle as a man promiscuously picking his partners from suitable ingredients for a vodka-based cocktail. A vodka bottle flirting with an orange was a long way from the tuxedoed and evening-gowned stiffs that were usually featured in classy alcohol advertisements. It was also, on the threshold of the sixties, deemed a little risqué – The New Yorker refused to run the ‘Who was that tomato I saw you with last night?’ version.

  Of course, having an ad banned for being risqué, with the notoriety that brought, was meat and drink for the renegade agency. And not all their work was edgy; Koenig was still ever the elegant writer, and Harvey Probber Chairs got the velvety persuasive treatment in an ad whose authorship is still to this day in vigorous dispute between Lois and Koenig.

  THE WORK THAT ANNOUNCED their arrival as a fully fledged, grown-up agency capable of handling national brands came about by a succession of lucky bounces.

  One Saturday morning after a major snow storm, Fred Papert decided to walk to the office to retrieve the gloves he’d left there the previous evening, towing his kids on a sled behind him. In the brief time they were in the office the phone rang. It was Xerox asking if they’d like to pitch for the launch of their new photocopier, not a difficult question for Fred to answer. He later learnt that one of the reasons they won the business was that Xerox were impressed he was working on such an inclement Saturday morning.

  The disputed Harvey Probber Chair advertisement, created by Geo
rge Lois and Julian Koenig.

  1960 PKL advertisements for Wolfschmidts, by George Lois and Julian Koenig.

  The call itself was also due to fortuitous circumstances. DDB had been offered the business but they couldn’t handle it because of conflict with Polaroid – clients have always been hyper paranoid about having their business with an agency that is simultaneously handling a company who could even remotely be considered a rival.

  According to Julian Koenig, ‘Ned Doyle called me up and sotto voce told me about an account we might be able to get and says “but don’t tell Bill”.’ Xerox had asked Bernbach to give them a list of agencies he would recommend and ‘he made a list of ten including some quite lugubrious ones, but he omitted us… Bill was an old friend and he would embrace me but he did everything he could not to help. He was offended that we (a) left and (b) succeeded.’

  Bernbach did have an agenda. Referring to PKL, Bernbach had told Edgar Bronfman, ‘There’s a difference between being smart and smart alec’. Bernbach didn’t like his children growing up and leaving; when George Gomes, a DDB art director setting out on his own as a commercials director, went to see him to say goodbye, all Bernbach said before he turned his back and walked away was, ‘Yes, I heard you were leaving’. Gomes later heard through former colleagues in the agency that Bernbach had forbidden the department to use him.

  There is always the possibility that he genuinely didn’t think PKL was right for the job, but if so, in this instance his famed creative radar was out of tune. PKL, and specifically art director Sam Scali and copywriter Michael Chappell, turned in a demonstration commercial about as perfect as can be made. But even in this, fate took a hand.

  To illustrate how simple it was to use, they had a small girl make copies on the machine, in real time. It was straightforward, direct, carefully written and impressive enough to irritate competitors into complaining to the networks that the complexity of operating the machine was being understated. PKL’s answer was a typical mixture of belligerence and brilliance; not only did they reshoot the whole commercial, in front of TV executives, but instead of the girl they used a chimpanzee.