The Real Mad Men (27 page)

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.”

She had massive energy. While cool and sophisticated, she was not above masculine rough-and-tumble and was surrounded by a praetorian guard of young, male creative people who were dazzled by her. It's unquestionable she hypnotized people, male and female. There are colleagues from the 1960s who are still enthralled by her, and have massive respect and admiration for her—although affection is a little less evident. There's even a little whiff of fear. Getting people to talk about her even now is a little like asking around for information on a mafia Don: John will speak if Jill goes first. “Tell me what Jack says and I'll tell you if I agree with him.” “Don't ask me about that, ask Joan.”

Rumors of both random kindness and random ruthlessness circulate equally. One story, unconfirmed, placed her in her office late one afternoon, where she had summoned a creative team, while her make-up artist prepared her for an evening function. With her back to the team, she fired them through the reflection in her mirror.

Time and again you're told she was a marketing genius, that she had the most extraordinary insights into the minds of the consumer, no matter who or for what product. When later she won American Motors, the male creative staff couldn't wait to get their hands oily, believing that a car, and a fairly downmarket car at that, was not something Mary would understand. But within days of getting the assignment, she'd given them a detailed rundown of every model and its potential role in possible buyers' lives. Apparently, she was spot on.

NEXT FOR WELLS
at Jack Tinker was another of those lucky bounces that seem to preface so many great breakthroughs. In a trip to the west coast to court Continental airlines, their executive vice president, Harding Lawrence, confided to Wells that he was about to leave to head
up a little-known Texas airline, Braniff, and he'd rather Tinker saved themselves for that account. This led to one of the most famous airline campaigns of all time—and certainly the making of Mary Wells, in both creative and business terms.

Braniff had plenty of lucrative routes, particularly to Central and South America, but almost no awareness. And Lawrence had big ideas, including immediate investment in a new fleet, and thus an urgent need to sell seats, which could only be brought about by instant fame.

This is where Wells' superlative sense of not just style but the application of style came in. An airline is an airline—they fly the same planes, seat you in the same seats, serve the same food. And, as she noticed, they did it in a utilitarian, almost military style. These were the early days of the jet age, before flying became packagable as romantic. Indeed, as DDB had noted with El Al, most airline advertising tended to be little more than timetable publication—there wasn't much else to say. Y&R hadn't even started their emotional Wings of Man campaign for Eastern Airlines.

In her 2002 autobiography
A Big Life (in Advertising)
, Wells described her epiphany one morning when standing in a check-in line at Chicago airport. “Airlines had developed out of the military… planes were metallic or white with a stripe painted down the middle to make them look as if they could get up and fly. The terminals were greige. They had off-white walls, cheap stone or linoleum floors, grey metal benches, there were tacky signs stuck into walls… Stewardesses, as they were called, were dressed to look like nurses.… There were no interesting ideas, no place for your eyes to rest, nothing smart anywhere.”

Color. That was the answer. Vibrant, raging, scintillating, Braniff planes would be like brilliant flying jewels, like no planes you'd ever seen before, each painted in a different vivid color. The fabrics would dazzle and the stewardesses would dress in the most outrageous outfits. Alexander Girard was hired to design the interiors, Emilio Pucci to create the outfits for the stewardesses—or hostesses as Braniff now called them. A flight on Braniff was to be a party. Ideas on ticketing, seating, and entertainment came thick and fast. Turning a flight into a fashion parade, the stewardesses would change their outfits four times on the longer routes.

It was, as the launch print ad said, “The End of the Plain Plane.” Created by writer Charlie Moss and art director Phil Parker, the line was printed
under a picture of air hostesses and flight crew standing like a flock of brilliantly colored exotic birds on the wing of a vivid blue Braniff 720. The payoff to the copy was perfect, it could have been another headline: “We won't get you there any faster—but it'll seem that way.”

The commercial was a kaleidoscopic view of the preparation for the print ad photo shoot, with the movements of the various people getting into position choreographed for maximum vivacity. Others followed, one announcing the stewardesses' changes of costume as “The Air Strip.”

The launch was a wild success. Five Braniff planes—blue, green, yellow, red, and turquoise—flew low and slow past a grandstand at Dallas airport filled with three hundred press from around the world. Acclaim followed from the passengers. To Wells' delight there were reports of people playing the game, trying to book tickets on the basis of the color of plane they might fly on, going for the full set of seven. Acclaim also followed from the advertising business.

The campaign was well underway when Wells dropped a bombshell on Tinker and Harper; she resigned in order to set up on her own agency. She had been given her first real taste of authority and autonomy, and Tinker was never going to confine her for long after that—there's a huge and heady difference between being one of many creative group heads within a large creative department, as she had been, and being the charismatic leader of a “hot” agency, as she'd now experienced.

How it came about is confused by several differing reports. In her autobiography Wells says she was furious because Harper reneged on a deal to make her president—a deal which curiously she hadn't previously noted in the book, but if had been made it was presumably offered as a lure to get her to join in the first place. Tinker, on the other hand, says she came to him suggesting they try to buy the agency out of Interpublic. He put a deal to Harper which was refused and, sensing she wouldn't stay much longer anyway, he agreed that she should set up her own company. Yet another version has Harper offering her the presidency but he was blocked by Hertzog and Myron McDonald, who said they would never work for her, and so she felt she had to leave. What is fact, however, is that through Carl Spielvogel, Harper offered her a contract worth $1 million over ten years, a quite phenomenal deal for 1966.

‘The End of the Plain Plane'; in 1965 the Braniff image was completely reinvented by Mary Wells, Alexander Girard and Emilio Pucci.

Further examples from the Braniff campaign, including the “The Air Strip.” Originally there were eight different colors for the aircraft but lavender when combined with white and black is bad luck in Mexico and South America, so the color scheme was dropped to seven.