The Real Mad Men

by Andrew Cracknell

  At the bottom of the voting paper there was always the slogan “Don’t vote with your mind, vote with your loins.” One year the vote count was overseen by the sober-suited and straight-faced agency auditors who happened to be in the offices that week.

  “No one ever knew who’d voted for whom or even what the count was—all we ever announced was the result. It was all good unclean fun,” Jerry recalls.

  Bob Giraldi, the creative director who succeeded Bob Kuperman (and later moved on to direct Michael Jackson’s “Beat it” video) has said he never even knew it took place. Told of this today, Jerry says, “What?” He calls to a man passing in the corridor, “Neil, Neil, Giraldi says he never knew about the sex parties.”

  A sleepy smile behind long grey hair. This is Neil Drossman, a veteran copywriter of those times. A dreamy gleam shines briefly in his eyes. “He won it one year.”

  “Yeah,” confirms Jerry. “That’s right. Why would he say that? He won it one year.”

  Who to believe? Memories twist and fade, the events themselves contorting the remembrance. They were days of laughter, of hedonism, of sensual indulgence: lotus-eating days.

  AS THE QUALITY of the creative work began to gain recognition and importance within the business, so did the status and prestige of the creative people. This trend was accelerated in 1964 by a small blonde tornado who whirled into their world with an idea and a modus operandi that was as unique as anything they were doing—and just as lucrative.

  Judy Wald had been a photographer’s rep, employed to drum up commissions around town based on the quality of the work in the folio, her sassy attitude, and a forthright approach to potential customers. She had access to the senior creative people that a lot of young creative hopefuls were desperate to contact, but could reach only via a letter to their assistants at best. She realized she could be a bridge between the two, and was in pole position to start a creative employment agency.

  Perhaps her cleverest move, very early on, was her radical fee structure. Normally set between 5 percent and 10 percent of the joining salary, this fee had always been paid by the employee, so the employing company considered, probably rightly, that they held all the cards. But Wald saw two steps ahead of this. If she got the companies to pay, the creative talent would flock to her for her free service. What would they have to lose? And if they flocked to her, then the companies seeking talent would naturally have to deal with her.

  Wald opened her agency early in 1964, but she was not an immediate success. She had no trouble getting creative people on her books but the agencies didn’t want to pay. For nearly a year she held out, valiantly refusing to cave in, but slowly beginning to believe it just wasn’t going to work. Then the agency she least expected decided to play it her way.

  She got a call from Leon Meadows, the creative department manager at DDB, giving her an employment brief and agreeing to pay the commission. She nearly fell off her chair.

  Judy Wald in her office in the late 1960s.

  “I was speechless. I said to him, ‘I don’t want to do myself out of a job—but why you? People are clambering over each other to get in there!’”

  But that was the problem for DDB—folios from hopeful art directors and writers were backing up down the corridors. Said Meadows, “I’ve just come from a meeting where we decided it was probably cheaper to pay your fees than use our time to sift through the books.”

  Wald couldn’t have had a better start and she knew it. With the patronage of DDB, her fame and credibility on both sides of the industry rocketed, and she exploited both ceaselessly. She was a brilliant self-publicist, with the thick skin of a rhino and the chutzpah of her entrepreneurial Russian-Jewish immigrant grandfather. The fact that she was stylish, cute, almost gamine, with a sometimes biting dry wit didn’t do her any harm in this wisecracking, fast-thinking, predominantly male environment.

  She appeared all over Madison Avenue, at parties, dinners, executive lunches, and more parties. And if she didn’t have an influential party to go to in the near future, she’d throw one. Before long, her opinions on creative work got her invited onto awards juries, a rare privilege for someone who didn’t actually work in an agency, let alone a creative department. There was no one in the business who didn’t know her, or of her, and she was indefatigable. Jerry Della Femina once got a call from her at 1:30 AM: “Being Italian, I feared the worst—a call in the middle of the night can only mean family trouble. But it was Judy—and all she said was, ‘Jerry, I can’t talk now’ and hung up.”

  Wald was so embedded in the industry that Della Femina’s agency featured her in a full page ad in an advertising trade magazine, Advertising News of New York, for Tio Pepe sherry. Written by Frank Giacomo, the copy took the form of a phone call to Wald asking her if she would do the endorsement.

  For her reputation to be considered sufficiently influential to endorse a branded aperitif to the advertising elite was yet another step up for Wald. But read the copy and there’s a slightly darker significance. Like an estate agent trying to sell a property she hasn’t even seen, throughout the call she misunderstands Tio Pepe as the name of a new young foreign creative person. The role she plays is one of utter cynicism, careless of Pepe’s talent or experience, she is simply trying to maximize his potential salary in his next job—and, naturally, her fee along with it. Pointing this out to her more than forty years later, she shrugs and laughs; “It was all a bit of fun. I was a controversial character.” But the joke wasn’t appreciated right across the business. In a July 1968 profile in New York magazine, written by a highly respected journalist Julie Baumgold (again a serious accolade for Judy), not everyone was unreservedly flattering.

  “She’s a people farmer,” says one of Judy’s golden boys. “She looks at a big agency like a field of wheat. Sometimes she stands looking up at an agency thinking, ‘Here’s a ripe copywriter, polish him up a little and send him over to Wells Rich Greene.’ She can sell her harvest, the $15,000–$20,000 guy who moves a lot, again and again. In this business you hate to be on the bad side of Judy Wald if you’re out of a job. She’s the headhunter and you’re the head.”

  When she offered exclusive contracts to agencies in return for an undertaking not to poach their staff (a move interpreted by many as only slightly short of protectionism), she further irritated the business. At Carl Ally Inc., Jim Durfee banned her from the premises.

  But it bothered her little. Judy set up offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Paris, Milan, and Dusseldorf and soon became the dominant force in creative recruitment in all those places as well—again, not always without annoying the locals. A British commercials company owner, who had helped her set up in London, banned her from his parties at Cannes. She had threatened to ruin his business in New York because he had helped a young creative person in London get a job for free. Judy felt that London was now her territory and told him so, in typically blunt New York terms.

  Wald and the creative people were in a definite symbiosis and, despite the rumor and disapprobation swirling around her diminutive blonde head, her success was ongoing. It was a further indication of the growing importance of creative people.

  IT WAS NOTHING LIKE AS EXCITING for the African-Americans. When Roger Sterling says to Don Draper, “BBDO have just employed their first negro—what do you think of that?,” Don Draper replies sardonically, “I think I wouldn’t want to be that negro.”

  Doug Alligood was that negro and forty-nine years later he’s still at BBDO. He wasn’t the first—Clarence Holte had been employed in 1952 in their “special markets” unit—but he was the next. And few have been employed since.

  He was born in St. Louis in 1934. His father was a private handyman in rich homes, and would bring home discarded copies of magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Life, publications that no black child would normally have seen back then. Doug couldn’t understand why there were no black people portrayed in the advertising other than stereotypes like Aunt Jemima and the I.W. Harper whisky
waiter. “I wanted people in advertising who look like MY family—I had a couple of aunts who are nice-looking women, my mother was a nice-looking woman, my father was a good-looking guy, sure he was a handyman but so what? And I decided I wanted to get involved to change that.”

  Prevented from going to the whites-only Washington University in St. Louis, he studied Art at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois (where he was barred from the Western Tap, the student hangout), and started work in a black-owned Detroit agency in 1956. After time in Korea he joined WCHB, a black-owned radio station, doing a little bit of everything—merchandising director, salesman, on the air. One of his clients was Bob Anderson, a BBDO executive working on the Pepsi business. He took a shine to Alligood and offered him a job as an account executive.

  Whether he was enlightened or just appreciated which way the wind was blowing, Anderson was a great boss for the young Alligood. The Friday before he started, Anderson got the executives together and told them, “On Monday there will be a negro starting at BBDO. Now I don’t want anybody to go out of their way to be good or bad, I want everybody to give the guy a fair shake. And by the way, if anybody can’t abide by what I just said please step down to my office and we’ll discuss your severance. And I mean anybody!”

  Alligood was aware he had to be better than everyone else just to stand still, and although he was granted no favors nor leeway, he considers that he was never singled out or poorly treated. But he was lonely. As he says of the offices of Sterling Cooper, “Let off a shotgun around there and you’re not going to hurt any black people!” He remembers playing in an agency softball league in a Detroit park one evening and seeing another African-American in the JWT team. “We embraced like we were long-lost brothers: ‘I sure am glad to see you!’”

  In 1964, he was transferred to New York. Since then, to his knowledge his color has been little handicap to any activity or work opportunity. If anything, his teetotal status was as much a barrier to a social life within the agency as the color of his skin.

  His position in the company was not without its comic moments. Watching the expressions of space or time sales reps as they realized that the cultured Mr Alligood, with whom they’d made their appointment on the phone, was black was always entertaining. On another occasion the elevator in which he was traveling with an account executive of similar age and status stopped at the management floor. Just outside in the lobby was Charlie Brower, Chairman of BBDO, deep in conversation with another top executive. “Hi Doug,” they both said before returning to their huddle. Doug waved casually, “Hi Charlie.” The doors closed and the account man was awestruck. “They knew you, they knew your name, they knew you!”

  “No big deal,” said Alligood, “they’ve got hundreds of you—they only got one of me.”

  THAT THERE WERE SO FEW other blacks in the business was partly due to a lack of applicants. According to Stephen Forster in The Mirror Makers, David McCall at O&M interviewed hopeful copywriters every day for five years, and in that period he saw just three African-Americans. Black agencies existed, servicing clients aimed at the black market, but beyond that a job in an advertising agency just wasn’t something the average black kid thought was available to them, janitor or elevator operator aside. As Alligood had seen in the white magazines, the world portrayed by advertising, based as it was on a white style and white imagery, seemed irrelevant, other-worldly.

  There was plenty of agitation, and not just from outside the business, to get more black people into advertisements. Statistics were even published showing which agencies had employed how many black actors in their commercials—5 percent of all ads by 1967. Within a few years, some agencies had at least one African-American executive, but here Alligood suspected a rather sinister practice. He is convinced the agencies had a pact that whilst poaching of each other’s staff was regular and accepted, that same poaching would not extend to black staff. Nobody wanted them to get above their station. By August 1967, a New York Commission on Human Rights survey of 40 agencies found only 3.5 of their staff were black—and the majority of those were in the lower paid jobs.

  Despite its glossy image and apparent location at the cutting edge of style, advertising never really leads. It can only reflect back to society what society has already decided to do. It can’t afford to set trends because if no one follows, it fails. It is subordinate to the state of the market and the whim of its clients. The severely limited spending power of black people—the 1960 US census showed median family annual income for whites to be $6,138, while the figure for nonwhites was just $3,351—made them largely irrelevant as targets for advertising.

  As to the clients’ whim, some of them in the sixties were still specifying “no Jews” on their business, let alone blacks, and it was a courageous agency that defied those client stipulations. By 1964, with the signing of the Civil Rights Act, the African-American was making progress in Washington but, despite the fact that the prevailing political posture of the new young creative people was liberal and Democratic, not on Madison Avenue.

  IN THE MEANTIME Madison Avenue, was making progress of its own in Washington, or at least with the political parties there. The interest in DDB that had been expressed by Kennedy had been passed on to Johnson, and the agency was hired by the Democratic National Committee for his 1964 re-election campaign. Sid Myers and Stan Lee were assigned to the business.

  Lee, the copywriter, was delighted. “I was very anti-Goldwater. I was also doing the advertising for a dog food at that time. Dog food, I had found out, doesn’t excite me. But I could very easily get excited about beating Goldwater.”

  Their commercial, “Daisy,” was electrifying. They showed an innocent little girl picking the petals off a daisy in a field of flowers. As she slowly counts them, a male voice, echoing from a PA, takes over. It becomes a sinister countdown. We slowly zoom into the girl’s eyes as she looks up anxiously. As the countdown hits zero, the screen goes to a searing white, which we see is an expanding nuclear fireball. Johnson’s voice says:

  The “Daisy” advertisement, the prototype political TV commercial, created for Johnson’s presidential campaign and aired only once, on September 7, 1964.

  “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all God’s children can live. Or go into the dark. We must either love each other or we must die.” And then another male voice-over: “Vote for President Johnson on November third. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

  It’s a remarkably moving thirty seconds. Watching it, you do feel involved and you don’t want her to die. It’s a reflex reaction to a simple visceral appeal. It clearly rattled the chairman of the Republican National Committee because he complained about it to his Democrat opponent in a news conference and got it taken off the air.

  Lee takes up the story: “This immediately made what might have gone unseen, nationally famous. The commercial had run at the end of a very long, dull movie and not too many people had seen it.… And it appeared that night on the six o’clock news program as a news item. I could not have been happier.”

  It’s the forerunner of much contemporary political advertising, featuring no politician, no policy statement, no statistics or happy citizens—simply a bold idea that insidiously casts the opponent as the bad guy and your man as the good guy, just by innuendo and without a single accusation.

  It’s also the forerunner of a technique much used since, particularly in political advertising: the ad as media event. You see a variation every year in the commercials in the half-time breaks at the Superbowl—make a controversial, expensive, or celebrity-soaked extravaganza and wait for the media to pick up on it and give you millions of dollars of free publicity.

  One odd postscript to this campaign came after the release of papers in connection with the Watergate investigation, which included Nixon’s somewhat paranoid “Most wanted list.” Number four out of more than eight hundred names was the quiet and unassuming Mac Dane, down on the list as the representative of the agency that had d
one such devastating work for the Democrats. Why Doyle and Bernbach escaped the honor is not recorded.

  CONTROVERSY—SHOCK EVEN—rapidly became the handmaiden of advertising, often misused and misplaced. But throughout the 1960s, on one specific project, George Lois used shocking impact time and again with pinpoint accuracy.

  In September 1962, just before the Liston-Patterson World Heavyweight title fight, an edition of Esquire magazine had appeared on the bookstands with a photograph of a boxer who looked identical to Floyd Patterson, spread-eagled on the canvas under the lights of a totally deserted auditorium. The line under the masthead read, “Last man in the ring. Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson talk about being tough and scared.”

  This was the first of nearly a hundred Esquire covers that Lois conceived and designed in a run stretching until 1972. It was highly risky for several reasons: first, it was unlike most magazine covers because it distilled the contents down to just one lead story; second, the execution was pointed and controversial. Liston had a conviction for armed robbery, suspected mob connections, and was in constant trouble with the police. So unsavory was his image that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) urged Patterson not to fight for fear of the backlash a Liston win might bring; third, in portraying not so much a Liston win as a Patterson defeat, Lois was sticking his neck out against a number of fight pundits who were calling a Patterson victory.

  He would be first to admit that if he was taking a risk, it was nothing compared to that taken by his client, Managing Editor Harold Hayes. “He was a gem,” says Carl Fischer, the photographer Lois used on the overwhelming majority of executions. “He was a southern gentleman. He wanted to do great work at Esquire. They didn’t have a lot of money but he managed to entice a lot of people to work for him. Because he would give them their head, ask for their opinions.”