The Real Mad Men (22 page)

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 done 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.”

Hayes did everything a good client of any creative endeavor should do: he shortened the lines of communication and approval (to just him), simplified the briefing and, having chosen Lois, backed his ideas. Time and again he went out on a limb for controversial concepts. He was rewarded with a 400 percent sales increase over the ten years. Not all of that can be attributed to the covers, but there can be no doubt that they helped enormously.

Hayes approached Lois in the summer of 1962 simply for advice on how better to present the magazine. The more Lois got into the convoluted and byzantine ways in which a committee of people would decide what went on the cover and then stumble to the approval of whatever ideas were presented (“group grope” as Lois contemptuously dismisses it), the itchier
he became to get involved. It wasn't a job for PKL and Lois didn't approve of freelance, but he offered to do a couple of covers on spec.

Although not strictly an advertising project, Lois's idea was to approach it as such. Demonstrating the difference between a designer and an advertising art director, he went beyond simply laying out graphic elements in an eye-catching fashion, making the cover a narrative idea. “It helps to sell the magazine. If you do a cover correctly,… it almost crystallizes what the magazines want to say. And in fact there have been times when I've done covers that have crystallized that point, with a change of direction inside.”

Other than the photograph and a short pithy line, there was nothing on the front apart from the date and
Esquire
masthead. Not only did this help the magazine stand out against the visual tumult of the news stands, but their domination on the page enhanced the explosive nature of the ideas.

THE COVERS WERE
frequently controversial. With the quietly set line “The Passion of Muhammad Ali,” one showed Ali in boxing gear pierced by arrows, in the style of St. Sebastian. Another featured a Norman Rockwell-esque child, complete with coke and hamburger, looking in shock at a TV set showing Jack Ruby killing Lee Oswald. Although the story is about the background to the killing, the picture takes it onto a further plane, the loss of American innocence.

On another cover, Andy Warhol falls backward into a can of Campbell's tomato soup to signify the end of pop art. Warhol was excited; he thought they were going to make a giant can and fill it with soup. Fischer shot the picture in two parts, dropping a marble into a can of thinned soup to make the splash and then stripping in a separate shot of Warhol.

As Fischer remembers it, “We had a green room where we stuck people with pastries while they were waiting for the [shoot]. My daughter who was maybe ten at the time went down there and saw Warhol and he said. ‘I'm bored, I'm bored', and she said, ‘I just got a homework assignment—let me bring it down'. It was a map of the United States and she was supposed to color it in—and Andy Warhol colored it in for her. She didn't know who he was. But he didn't go over the lines. She was very happy with it”.

“Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.”

GEORGE LOIS

Fischer and Lois worked well together. At the time Lois said of Fischer, “He understands what I'm trying to do. I explain the ad and I don't explain the picture. He understands the advertising. He's a good art director himself. I'd rather talk to Carl than talk to a technician because he understands it all.”

Yet another controversial cover showed Nixon's face, beset by four hands holding makeup, including lipstick, to the caption, “Nixon's last chance—this time he'd better look right.” It's a reference to the terrible impression he made on the TV debates against Kennedy in 1960, pale, sweating, with a heavy jowl shadow, that supposedly cost him the election. Lois says he got a phone call from an incensed White House aide: “We know what you're trying to do. You're trying to make him look like a faggot!”

ONE OF LOIS' FAVORITE
covers, and one of the most ambiguous images imaginable, was taken by Fischer for the November 1970 issue. On March 16, 1968, between 350 and 500 Vietnamese (mainly women and children, some of whom had been sexually abused and tortured) were massacred in the hamlets of My Lai and My Khe by a unit of the US Army under the command of Lieutenant “Rusty” Calley. Just before Calley's trial,
Esquire
decided to publish extracts from a book about him and this became the subject for the cover.

Fischer's photograph shows a seated Calley, surrounded by trusting Asian children, smiling broadly like an indulgent older brother. It was shot in Fischer's East Eighty-third Street studio.

“It was very straightforward to do.” He thinks for a moment. “One of the things that amazes me is why people let their pictures be taken in such compromising situations.… I had observed in all the years of working only one or two people ever refuse to do something on the cover on the magazine. It's important promotion for people.… I mean, did he understand what was happening? I mean, how stupid can you be?”

A selection of the most scintillating and shocking
Esquire
covers created by George Lois in the 1960s.

When asked if Calley may have thought it was expiation, Fischer says, “I really don't know what he thought. Expiation would be the last thing I would think of. I think he would think, ‘Look, I'm friendly with kids', but who knows what he thought? The fact that he did it at all was extraordinary.”

He parodies Lois' brief: ‘This fucking fuck is going to sit around these fucking kids and we're going to take a crazy picture.”

Lois had him pose unsmiling and then smiling, and decided the smiling one was the one he wanted. He is ambiguous even about its ambiguity. “It meant different things to different people. A lot of people who thought the war was terrific looked at it and said ‘Calley, he said he didn't do anything wrong. Maybe he killed… but he fought for this country, he doesn't look guilty.' Other people looked at it and were shocked, saying, ‘That son of a bitch, killer, sitting there with children he killed.'”