The Real Mad Men (28 page)

With some courage she refused the offer. With Dick Rich, Stew Greene, and, critically, the Branifff account, and actively encouraged by Harding Lawrence, who she would marry the next year, she set up Wells Rich Greene (WRG) in the Gotham Hotel in April 1966.

OF THE SUBSEQUENT SUCCESS
, just a few figures need to be grasped. She started with the $6 million billing from Braniff, a loan from Chemical Bank and a handful of employees in four rooms at the Gotham, including her mother answering the phone. By the end of the first year her agency, now at 575 Madison Avenue, billed $35 million, and had a hundred employees. Within five years, WRG was billing $100 million with five offices, two of them overseas. Allowing for inflation, no stand alone start-up agency has ever exceeded that rate of growth. By 1969 Wells was paying herself $250,000 per year, a salary higher than anyone else in US advertising, man or woman. And when she took the company public in 1968, she became the first ever female CEO of a quoted company of any sort in US history.

And to remind ourselves just how far we've come in this story, the agency principles were a woman and two Jews—and all three creative people.

Divorced from Bert Wells as she started at Tinker, she married Harding Lawrence in Paris in 1967, a close marriage that lasted until his death in 2002. Typical of Wells was the exclusivity and originality of her wedding outfits. In the middle of this phenomenally demanding period she'd had time to spot Halston, a hat designer for Bergdorf Goodman, and asked him to design a green velvet wedding dress—green was a popular color with her. It was the first dress he ever sold. For the night before the wedding she wore a black ruffled and flounced organza creation made for her by Hubert de Givenchy. Style, always style.

Contributing to the agency's growth was the win of American Motors, some P&G business, and TWA, which she won after agreeing with her husband to drop Braniff. That account went to George Lois's new agency, Lois Holland Calloway, where he created the campaign “If you've got it, flaunt it,” featuring amongst other commercials Andy Warhol explaining the finer points of his art to an impassive Sony Liston seated next to him on a Braniff flight.

Wells' first successful account was the return of an old friend, Alka Seltzer, which also boosted the billings. They had moved to DDB shortly after Wells, Rich, and Greene's breakaway from Tinker, triggering its sad implosion. DDB had given Alka Seltzer more wonderfully entertaining and memorable advertising but in the view of Miles Laboratories it was ineffective and too costly; DDB was insisting on sixty-second spots and the client wanted thirty seconds to double their exposure. They called Mary, and she gave them the thirty-second media schedule they wanted. She also gave them yet another string of memorable commercials: “Try it, you'll like it” and “I can't believe I ate the whole thing,” both of which slogans passed into the national vernacular.

One of the earliest WRG gains was in the increasingly controversial category of tobacco. The advertising business had the same problem as government with what was now confirmed as a killer product; there was just too much money in it to walk away. And money brought exposure and thus possible fame for the agency's work. The Marlboro Cowboy, first run in 1955, had helped put Chicago's Leo Burnett on the national map. While some, like DDB and Carl Ally, refused to work on the deadly weed, Wells took the view that if it was permissible to sell it, it should be permissible to advertise it. Anything else was hypocrisy, “un-American” as she put it.

Philip Morris offered them Benson and Hedges 100s, a cigarette that was longer than king-size. They were expecting something cool and image-based, probably visual metaphors to do with longer slimmer objects—aircraft, skyscrapers, or, as they put it, long legs accentuated by mini skirts.

Once in front of their layout pads Rich and Greene agreed the brief was drivel and came up with an idea that couldn't have been sweeter or further away from Philip Morris' expectations: the disadvantages of the Benson and Hedges 100s. Like the Alka Seltzer “Stomachs” it was a series of close-ups, this time of people failing to come to grips with the extra length of the cigarette while smoking it. One man gets his jammed in an elevator door; another sets fire to the beard of the man he's talking to; one tries to light his two thirds of the way up; and in yet another we see a man's face obscured by the newspaper he's reading—a hole is slowly burnt in the page as his cigarette smolders its way through. By making them uncool, WRG made them—and themselves, as the brightest new agency on Madison Avenue—uber cool.

In a 2002 interview with USA today she said of her decision to handle tobacco accounts, “I wouldn't do it now. Based on the knowledge we have today, we'd make a different decision.” She adds, “I don't feel I owe anyone an apology.” Harding Lawrence, a heavy smoker, had died of emphysema and lung cancer a few months before.

NOT EVERYONE FOUND
the agency and the act so captivating. There were of course the envious, the reactionary, and the mysoginistic. But there were also more serious critics who simply disliked Wells' perspective of the job of an advertising agency.

Says Amil Gargano, “The mention of her name would send Carl Ally into an unbridled rage. He thought she was a complete charlatan. He resented the fact that her best work was for a cigarette. Hated what she did for Braniff, the epitome of everything he loathed about her approach. Described her agency as ‘The School of Fashion and Theatrics.'”

Well, yes, it was. She'd come to New York as an actress and theater was never far from her ideas. But she understood that there was no rule stating that the public shall respond only to the purity of a double page spread or the simplicity of a well-argued TV spot. They respond to theatrics too, and Wells' idea was to create spectacles and let them be the advertisement.

No one in her professional life knew her better than Charlie Moss. They first met at DDB, and he then worked with her from the Jack Tinker days until the absorption of WRG into another Harper-style consortium in 1998. His first impression of Mary, as it is for so many, had been of her style.

“DDB was linoleum floors, offices painted a drab white, steel desks in every office, and two directors chairs with the canvas backs, and a chair for the person who had the office. A typewriter if you were a writer, an art board if you were an art director, and one big, BIG cork board on your wall.… Now when I first met Mary, I was shocked because her inner sanctum was very different from the rest of the agency. It was the only office that was decorated. It had an orange floor, and a French provincial credenza [desk], it was actually civilized-looking. It was the only office like that in the entire agency as far as I knew apart from maybe Bernbach's upstairs.”

Later, when interviewing for an art director at Tinker, she and Dick Rich had been impressed by a trade campaign for Rheingold beer in the book of DDB art director Phil Parker, who had been working with Moss. Moss takes up the story:

“The idea entailed telling people that Rheingold sponsored the Mets. The Mets were, at that time, a joke, they hadn't won a game in months, they were pathetic. And we came up with this idea that if the Mets won the pennant, we would buy everybody in NYC a beer. Then we changed it to buying everyone a beer if they won six games straight because the pennant would be out of the question. A beer party at Shea Stadium, everybody was invited, and Rheingold would sponsor it. But the Mets would not allow it to run. They felt it was making fun of them. It was withdrawn. The client loved it, everybody loved it. Anyways, it was what got me my job at Tinker. What it had in it inherently was a promotional aspect and that's what Mary was about. Take the French Tourist Bureau at DDB. She created [a new] French tourist industry by insisting that they turn chateaus into hotels, and really market what they had so that Americans would appreciate it. Her advertising was secondary to the product that she helped to create.”

Most agencies when given the Braniff brief would have tried to find a persuasive argument to convince the traveler that the current Braniff was a better airline. Wells took it further; she took the airline apart, recreated it with fireworks, noise, and fun, and advertised that.

Advertising, and thus the advertising agency, is no longer about merely ads. Agencies have to be prepared to be about ideas that are above and beyond simple advertising. And as Mary Moore said of Mary Wells, with whom she worked in the seventies, “Her ideas were simply vast.”

In that respect, she was an indicator of things to come. As with the revolutionaries at the start of the decade who had done so much to kickstart the upheaval and move on from the past, it was Mary Wells who was now bringing in the fresh thinking.

She was the embodiment of the advertising creative person to come. The pointer to the future.

Epilogue

DON DRAPER TO PEGGY OLSEN MAD MEN

I
t had to be that particular period in which all this happened, mainly for economic and social reasons but also for one rather more joyful factor: in that decade there was an attitude of “anything goes,” and so anything went, including a gigantic beneficent canvas across which to experiment, explore, and sometimes gloriously fail. Optimism, energy, creativity, and hope were so abundant that circumstances that in any other era would have triggered gloom and despair, inspired instead capricious defiant laughter and scintillating new ideas. But these circumstances changed as a darkness began to fall on the end of the sixties.

On the morning of March 6, 1970, a series of explosions ripped through the bare branches of the trees on West Eleventh Street, just off Fifth Avenue. As the smoke and dust cleared, it revealed No 18, one of the elegant town houses lining the street, as a burning ruin. Shortly after, two stunned young women, one naked, the other barely clothed and both covered in dust and debris, asked at a neighbor's house for help. They were given coffee and clothes and then, while firemen and police were going through the rubble next door, they disappeared. The two women were Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson—and neither was seen again for ten years.

Over the next few days the scattered body parts of two men and a woman were gathered from the wreckage and the story begun to emerge. The five
were members of the Weathermen, a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, and the basement kitchen had been turned into a bomb factory. They'd stockpiled a massive supply of dynamite, preparing bombs that were to be detonated in a Vietnam war protest at an officer cadet dance at Fort Dix that evening, but someone made a mistake.

The event is tragically symbolic of the end of the bubbly, sun-dappled decade. The house belonged to Wilkerson's father, and was empty because he had been away on business. He was the European Head of Y&R.

While their fathers were still gambolling happily in advertising's rich pasture, the coming generation was increasingly disaffected, “down in the basement, mixing up the medicine… you don't need a Weatherman to see the way the wind blows,” as Dylan had prophetically written five years earlier. The bombing was one of an accelerating list of menacing events, big and small, ushering in the seventies.

The Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention, which erupted in vicious riots and bloodshed with a mayor and a police force out of control, had brought mainstream political life to a corrupt and homicidal low, a sickening contrast to the high on which the decade had started with the election of a new young president.

Any validity the hippy and drug-oriented alternative society could have claimed was disintegrating fast. The deranged August 1969 Manson family killings and the escalating violence at the Altamont concert in December 1969, which ended with the murder of a fan by the Hell's Angels “security force” at the feet of the Rolling Stones, had eclipsed the dreamy peace and love of Woodstock only four months earlier.

The simultaneous realization of the futility, the disgrace, and the horror of the Vietnam war, with the apocalyptic escalation of US casualties in 1967 and 1968 was creating endless antagonisms and self-doubt throughout American society. And right on Madison Avenue's own doorstep, New York City itself was becoming drug-ridden, dangerous, filthy, and desperately broke.

US business entered a mini depression, and advertisers began to cut back. So the renegades were beginning to have a tougher time in a harder, more cynical environment. And if following a revolution there is no counterrevolution, the new state becomes the status quo. It wasn't quite like that with the Creative Revolution, for although the new ways of
thinking and working took hold across the business, the old ways weren't by any means vanquished.

So here, at 1970, with the initial skirmishes over and no clear winner, it would seem to be a good time to take stock of the situation.

FROM AMONGST THE CAST
of Madison Avenue, the previous twenty years had thrown up plenty of huge characters; acclaimed for bringing a very high standard to existing roles. But those roles were redefined by Bill Bernbach and the framework within which they were performed was redesigned by Marion Harper. It's therefore no surprise that in their “1999 Review of the Advertising Century,”
Advertising Age
cited these two as the most influential figures of the entire twentieth century. They put Bernbach first. But—and as a lifelong copywriter who has just about worshipped Bernbach since the day I first became aware of what he stood for, this is not easy to say—I'm not so sure.