The Real Mad Men

by Andrew Cracknell

  His most public vice was the acquisition of corporate aircraft, ridiculed across Madison Avenue as Harper’s Airforce. He capped them all in 1965 with the purchase of a DC7 from KLM. Seating more than 150 people, it was as pointless an acquisition as it was expensive. After several months of conversion, it emerged with a state-of-the-art office and a drawing room with brass standard lamps, gold deep-pile rugs, a sumptuous sofa in glove leather, Eames chairs and silk wall coverings. The bedroom had a full-size bed and tiled shower, while the galley was equipped to prepare and serve full candlelight dinners. Full movie-projection facilities were laid on.

  At least Harper made full use of it. Over one weekend he flew two senior creative people to Paris and back to give them a pep talk. Often the use was entirely personal, like when it was flown to Mexico to pick up antique furniture. And perhaps the one flight that was most symbolic of the impending disaster was when he used it to fly Valerie to France—on the day he was supposed to be in court on alleged tax offences.

  Some of this could perhaps be tolerated if the company was performing, but the figures were ceasing to add up. At one time the organization employed 8,300 people worldwide with global billings of $711 million. But this growth by acquisition was hiding stagnation in trading. Neil Gilliatt, an account man and vice chairman in 1964 could remember “there were years in which the earnings on the Coca-Cola account were two or three times greater than the earnings of the total corporation.”

  Although the separation of the agencies allowed competing clients, there were some who still wouldn’t play. The acquisition of Waseys with its Carnation business cost McCann’s Nestlé, and McCann suffered again when Continental walked because of Jack Tinker taking on Braniff.

  INCREASINGLY, HARPER WAS PUSHING the limits. Spielvogel had by now succeeded Stilson as one of the three trustees of the voting shares, along with Bob Healy and Harper. He remembers consulting a lawyer about an idea for the pension plan Harper had asked him to implement. “You do that Mr. Spielvogel,” said the lawyer evenly, “and you see the stripes you’re wearing on that suit? They’ll be going the other way.”

  Harper wouldn’t be told—he didn’t believe he could fail. It all came to a head in 1967 when Irving Trust, worried by the balance sheet, called in a loan. Spielvogel, however, wasn’t immediately worried. He had been advised by a financial mentor that the last thing banks wanted was to own any company, least of all a big advertising agency.

  “So on that given day, on the fortieth floor of the TimeLife Building, Bob Healy and I were sitting there waiting for these four people from the Irving Trust who came in looking like four morticians and they said, ‘We’ve very bad news for you. We’re calling your loans’, and I said ‘Fine’, and took out this big set of fake keys and put them on the table and we started to walk out. The lead banker said, ‘Woah, where are you going?’ and I said, ‘You now own the largest advertising agency’. And he said, ‘No, no, I’m sure we can work this out.’” They bought time from Irving Trust but with one condition—that Harper be removed from the chief executive position.

  At promptly 10:00 AM on Thursday, November 9, 1967, a board meeting was called to order. Harper didn’t seem to know what was about to hit him. He opened the meeting in the normal way but was quickly interrupted. The position of Irving Trust was outlined and Harper, puzzled but still apparently confident, put it to the vote.

  All six men wordlessly voted against him. He paused for a moment and then, without saying a word, left the room.

  Healy was installed as CEO, with Harper as chairman, but the board knew that their time with Irving Trust was limited. Arrangements were made with Chase Manhattan to refinance the agency but they in turn stipulated that Harper must go altogether. It was over.

  Three clients, Coca-Cola, Heublien and Carnation, advanced $5 million in billings in a warming show of support and confidence. Within six months the business was in good shape.

  Harper himself made two attempts to carry on in the business, the one at Harper, Rosenfeld & Sirowitz as a sort of Jack Tinker reincarnation, and the other as a marketing consultant. Neither worked out and he literally disappeared off the scene. Stories of tax fraud swirled around but nothing ever came to a head.

  There is a strange Howard Hughes-like postscript to this story. In 1979, an Advertising Age reporter, John Revett, went down to Oklahoma City to see Harper’s mother in an attempt to locate and possibly interview him. They were chatting away when a tall man walked into the room, asked who the interloper was and identified himself.

  “I’m Marion Harper.”

  He didn’t want to discuss the past.

  10 Women of the Avenue

  “Be a woman. It’s a powerful business when done correctly.”

  BOBBIE BARRETT TO PEGGY OLSEN MAD MEN

  Twenty-four-year-old Mary Moore, “all hair, and legs for miles,” keen and fresh from a night course at the School of Visual Arts, sat in front of a senior art director who was looking for an assistant. She’d borrowed clothes for the interview from a colleague at the bank where she worked but had tried them on only that morning: “They were so tight. It was salacious. Every curve. And I had a nice coat so I thought I’m not going to take it off. I had a little rehearsal: ‘Would you like to take your coat off?’ ‘No I’m a little chilly, I’ll keep it on.’ So that’s what I did. And then he said, ‘I wanna see what you look like. Stand up, do a twirl.’ It was a strange feeling. I didn’t know any better. I hadn’t heard the drill—you don’t do that. I knew this wasn’t exactly right, but I couldn’t imagine saying no. I figured maybe he was entitled to look at his employees.”

  It’s a common story, right across the business—nothing physical but a casual sexism, low key harassment. Carl Ally openly encouraged intra-office flirting and relationships in the belief that it kept up interest levels in life at the agency—and thus attendance. Jerry Della Femina later shared that view, running his agency like a frat house with a lot of lusty males running around in lewd good humor.

  “The men in those days took a lot of liberties with women: ‘Look at the buns on that one,’ ‘Look at the chest on that one,’ very blatant,” says Mary Leigh Weiss who worked at the Hooper Research organization. “You weren’t offended, you were flattered. That’s how it was in those days. Everyone wanted to be noticed by men, and they noticed you and you were flattered.”

  Not every woman would have agreed with that, but at the same time there’s less rancor or bitterness about the gender attitudes than may be expected. According to Della Femina, the women were just as enthusiastic about the annual Sex Contest as the men. As Mary Moore says of what would now be seen as her utter humiliation that day, “I didn’t go home in tears about it.” It wasn’t until 1963 that Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique was published and the awakening of consciousness amongst women started the long push for change.

  When you talk about it now, most of the men will grin, albeit a little sheepishly, and the women just shrug, both sexes sometimes with a little gleam in the eye. Mary Moore remembers, “As I know, nobody nailed you in the ladies’ room but there was a lot of talk about it and you constantly had to giggle.” As one former secretary said, “It was just the way it was.”

  The overwhelming majority of the females available for flirtation were support staff, secretaries, and admin people. As with any minority group in advertising, no matter how enlightened the employment policy of any agency, it could move only at the pace of its clients, some of whom in the sixties were still specifying no Jews. And despite more than 50 percent of advertising always having been aimed at women, with a conservative, male-dominated client community it’s difficult to find many reports of women account executives before 1960. Fashion and cosmetic accounts may have had the occasional female client and so occasionally an agency would employ a woman to work with her.

  EVEN IN THE 1960s female account executives were few and far between, and it probably wasn’t an appealing job for women anyway, the prevailing service cultur
e generally involving hard drinking and racy entertainment. But this affected the creative people less as the clients didn’t have to meet them or socialize with them.

  There had always been female copywriters, even back in the nineteenth century; their three regular routes into the copy department were through a job writing for the vast number and variety of women’s magazines, through an in-house writing job at a retail store, or starting as an agency secretary and transferring.

  Even back in 1910 JWT had a women’s unit, staffed by women copywriters headed by Helen Landsdowne. She had formidable talents, in writing, in business, and socially. In 1911 she wrote an ad for Woodbury’s facial soap that both shocked and thrilled and is generally reckoned to represent the beginning of sex appeal in selling, with its visual of a man and a woman in close proximity, and the line “The skin you love to touch.” She was a prominent suffragette and having married Stanley Resor, with whom she bought JWT from Commodore Thompson himself, became energetic in furthering the interests of women in business from a powerful position at the very top of the largest agency in the United States.

  Bernice Fitzgibbon worked at Macy’s from 1926 until 1940, when she moved to Gimbels where she ran their advertising department until 1954, with a significant number of female agency writers of the fifties and sixties passing through her department. Shirley Polyakoff at FCB, one of a growing group of female copy chiefs and creative directors, gained national fame as the writer of “Does she or doesn’t she?”, the phenomenally successful Clairol hair colorant ad that raised eyebrows because of its sexual innuendo. Jane Trahey, a copywriter, started her own agency in 1960, a business and financial, if not high-profile, success. And for a while the DDB creative department under Phyllis Robinson had more women than men.

  Women were particularly well represented in research departments but, apart from copywriting and the traditional areas of secretarial and clerical roles, there were very few other posts held by women. Even in art direction, a job for which gender should have been no more an issue than copywriting, women were almost nonexistent. As he recalls waiting for his interview at Benton & Bowles reception in 1961, Amil Gargano describes, “A young woman with long dark hair and brown eyes passed in front of me without glancing up from the paper she was reading. She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.” She was Elaine Parfundi and he’s seen her more or less every day since as they married in December 1963. She was then the only female art director at Benton & Bowles and when she left six years later there was still only one other there.

  The advertisement for Clairol by Shirley Polyakoff at Foote, Cone & Belding, created in 1957.

  In the mid–1950s, Joy Golden was in the steno pool at BBDO with forty other girls, on $40 a week, with a supervisor walking up and down and all the typing you could handle. But in her lunchtime, just like Bill Bernbach years before at Schenley’s, she decided to have a go at improving the ads she saw in The Ladies’ Home Journal.

  She wandered around the management floor with a sheaf of her ideas, looking for someone to show them to. Eventually she found Jean Rindlaub, a copy chief who liked what she saw and took Joy on as a copywriter. It was her first step on a lifetime career in the business, culminating with her own radio production company in the 1980s. Peggy Olsen’s path in Mad Men had been trodden many times before by women like Joy.

  HOWEVER GOOD THEY WERE at their jobs, women in any discipline at any level couldn’t escape unequal treatment, some of it bizarre. According to advertising columnist Barbara Lippert, up until the sixties women working at BBDO weren’t allowed in the executive dining room—a couple of senior female copywriters enjoyed the regal privilege of being served the meal at their desks from a silver cart by a maid in full uniform.

  Attitudes to clothing and appearance too were still often deeply conservative. Joelle Anderson, in the research department at Grey, found it a pretty relaxed atmosphere but people were shocked, “even agog about it” when her group leader turned up in a pant suit one day. Even at Carl Ally, liberated and modish as it was, Ally saw fit to send an all staff memo after one of his female staff wore pants to the office, saying, “I look askance, at girls who wear pants.” Three days later he cheerfully rescinded it when, as Pat Langer says, “He realized you could see more of a slim woman’s shape in tight fitting pants than in a skirt.”

  The worst inequalities were in both prospects and salary. There was an automatic assumption, discussed but rarely fought against, that women would get less money than their male equivalents. Mary Moore had a boyfriend, an art director, working at the same agency as her: “We used to talk about how we wanted to leave and get better jobs. He said, ‘You’re terrific, you ought to be making $12,000, and I ought to be making $14,000.’”

  As for promotion to senior executive level, again apart from copywriting or research, the glass ceiling was so obvious it might as well have been iron. By 1960, McCann-Erickson, led by a comparatively woman friendly Marion Harper, had only six female vice presidents out of a total of a hundred. No agency was led by a woman unless it was started by her. And JWT, once prominent in promoting women, didn’t appoint their first female senior vice president until 1973.

  None of this was the slightest deterrent to Mary Wells, a determined, stylish, brown-eyed, female writer who, as George Lois said, “You could tell would never end up with wrinkles in a writer’s tower.”

  Her 1967 response to suggestions of discrimination was typically robust; despite the blatant evidence all around her, she pronounced, “The idea about American men trying to keep women down in business is a bunch of hogwash. I’ve never been discriminated against in my life, and I think the women who have experienced it would have anyway—no matter if they were men, or cows, or what have you. Only the ‘nuts and the kooks’ are screaming like babies.”

  While successful women are under no compulsion to campaign on behalf of their fellow women, it’s also probably not necessary to dump on them quite so heavily. Amelia Bassin, formerly advertising director of Fabergé, hit back in the speech she made as the American Advertising Federation’s newly elected Advertising Woman of the Year in 1970: “I can well believe Miss Mary never got discriminated against. There is no privileged class in the world to compare with that of the beautiful woman.… It’s difficult to tell if success has spoiled Mary Wells; but boy, is she ever spoiling success.”

  But what success. No advertising woman, before or since, has ever gone so far and traveled so fast as Mary Wells Lawrence.

  SHE CAME TO NEW YORK as eighteen-year-old Mary Berg from her native Youngstown, Ohio, in 1947 with hopes of being an actress. She didn’t get anywhere and slipped into advertising through the traditional route for female writers—a job in the publicity department at a store, in her case Macy’s. From there she was briefly at McCann-Erickson and then Lennen & Newell where she coincided briefly for the first time with Lois. By now she was Mary Wells—but more usually Bunny Wells—married to an art director at OB&M, Bert Wells.

  With her knowledge of the fashion industry and her exquisite sense of style, an asset which was to be of immeasurable use to her later and shaped much of what she achieved, she was hired by Phyllis Robinson at DDB on fashion business. Diligence and determination got her to group head status and she also earned respect as a writer. It was she who was largely responsible for the evocative French tourism campaign for which she’d been on extensive visits to France, starting a love affair with Europe that’s lasted throughout her life.

  She was completely at home at the creative Mecca of DDB when, in 1963, a call came out of the blue from Jack Tinker to join her at his think tank. Wells arrived before the Alka Seltzer win, when the agency was performing well as an ideas generator but with an unspectacular reputation and image. Tinker and Harper felt that she was the person to liven it up.

  Tinker had already hired an art director, Stewart Green, who Wells linked up with a writer she brought from DDB, Dick Rich, and it was these two she led in the Alka Seltzer project.
With its immediate and enormous success, Harper and Tinker’s appointment of Wells had quickly been vindicated.

  There is no question that she was a terrific choice; unphased by traditional ways of doing business, she set about regenerating the agency, hiring a stream of A-list creative people and paying them well over the rate to get the place buzzing and talked about.

  One of Wells’ many insights was the recognition that there were more impactful ways of gaining publicity than schmoozing the trade press at 21. As Mad Men’s Don Draper said, “If you don’t like the conversation, change it.” She had a fantastic talent on behalf of her clients, her agency, and herself of getting people to talk about the things she wanted talked about.

  It helped that she was petite, highly attractive, witty, and articulate. Both men and women when describing her will almost inevitably refer to her “great legs.” Her style for that time was more European than American, she dressed with French chic and to English ears there is a slight Englishness to her accent—not the ersatz English of someone trying too hard but the refined, cultured note reminiscent of Grace Kelly, a woman with whom, coincidentally, she was to become great friends.

  Mary Wells Lawrence in 1970, the founder of Wells Rich Greene, the largest agency run by a woman at the time.

  Ken Roman recalls a speech she gave at the Harvard Business School Club when she had become president of her own agency. “We’d never seen a president, a female president of an agency. So there’s all these MBAs sitting there and she gets up, she’s in a smartly tailored suit and she looked so sophisticated. And they’re waiting to see what happens. And she had a scarf on, and she slowly took off the scarf, smiled, and said, ‘And that’s all I’m going to take off’. It was so perfect. She had show business.”