The Real Mad Men (19 page)

Says Amil, describing an internal meeting to discuss the opening salvo, ‘Jim and I had put together a couple of pretty tough layouts… but we couldn't get the first ad right. During a brief moment when the room went silent, John [Carpender, the account supervisor] spoke up. “Hey, what if we say ‘For years Avis has been telling you Hertz is number one'?”

‘Durfee finished the headline, “… now we're going to tell you why”.'

And that's precisely what Durfee and Gargano did. Hertz, aloof for four years, now reminded the customer why they'd got to number one in the first place – more outlets, more and better cars, money-back satisfaction guarantees, a hotline – and all with the sort of fond but crushing put-down from an older brother to a noisy sibling.

It was aggressive – but its good humour alleviated any nastiness. By playing Avis on their own turf, they even admitted to occasional mistakes, like an ad in which the only visual was an open ashtray with a single cigarette butt in it. Underneath there was a candid admission of infrequent failure, but only after a devastatingly precise demolition of Avis's weaknesses. The barrage was relentless – it was always civil but never without the iron fist.

After the initial burst, a TV commercial by Ed McCabe and an elegant young art director, Ralph Ammirati, showed the air slowly leaking out of one of the ubiquitous ‘We try harder' Avis balloons while the voice-over ran through the litany of Avis shortcomings. As the recitation nears its end, so does the air in the balloon, escaping with an increasingly irreverent farting noise. ‘Hertz regrets that we had to do this in public – but it had to be done.'

The same team, under the headline ‘Aha! You were expecting another get tough with Avis ad', showed a smiling Hertz counter assistant patting a happy Avis girl who can't see what the reader can – how cruelly she's
being patronised. Helmut Krone cited that specific ad as the beginning of the end for Avis and DDB. ‘Bernbach came in after McCabe's first ad ran and threw The New York Times down on my desk: “Have you seen this? Don't tell me how bad you think it is. As of today, they are alive – and we just died. What are you going to do about it?”.'

Good question. Hertz and Carl Ally had put them in a difficult position. Nothing that they were saying could be refuted, and retaliating would probably only turn what had been an engaging spectator sport into an undignified public squabble. DDB did try, with a couple of half-hearted ads. Ally replied just once and then, amid some accusation from the industry that it had become more about the two agencies yelling at each other than trying to shift a client's product, Hertz moved on to a more assertive and positive campaign. DDB, too, abandoned ‘We try harder' only 90 days after the Hertz campaign broke. After a change of ownership at Avis, they lost the account.

Oddly, both campaigns can justifiably claim success. For four years DDB had markedly improved Avis's share, but then Hertz's campaign froze their relative positions. Both campaigns had opened new ways in which companies could compete, not just in the market place, but in the media. For Carl Ally, Hertz confirmed the company in the same way that VW had confirmed DDB.

Carl Ally Inc was now properly established, a third front after DDB and PKL in the revolutionary war. It became another aspirational destination for creative people with new ideas. Stories of the wild and often lascivious behaviour of its paunchy, rumpled leader – Gargano can't be certain he ever saw Ally with his shirt properly tucked in, no matter how elevated the occasion – delighted and appalled New York, possibly attracting creatives as much as the work.

HELAYNE SPIVAK
, a secretary turned writer who eventually became creative director of Y&R, remembers being grabbed by Ally who happily ‘rammed his tongue down my throat, right there by my desk. The others must have taken him to one side and said, “Look Carl, you can't go on like this and you've got to go and apologise to Helayne”.'

Carly Ally's hugely successful campaign for Hertz; how to put down your smaller competitors without looking like a bully.

She giggles as she tells it. ‘So he came up to me and by way of apology –
he did it again!
I suppose I should have been upset but somehow, it didn't really offend; it was Carl, I guess, it was just the way he was.'

Another secretary, Pat Sutula (later Langer), who also became a writer, remembers an all-staff memo from Ally announcing yet another party on some puny pretext. ‘It ended “I want you all there – remember, there's still three of you I haven't yet had”, and I thought, Oh my God, I've only been here three weeks, he must mean me!'

This is monstrous by today's standards, but he carried it off. Even though the agency ended in fractiousness in the 1980s, affection for the man was enormous and lasted his lifetime. Marsha Cohen, who worked with him in the eighties, said, ‘He had a very distinctive flat, Midwestern accent, very noticeable to a New Yorker – he did not sound like the rest of us, that's for sure. So even though he said irreverant things and cursed like a sailor… there was a little of the hick in him, which I think probably softened the expletives.'

His huge appetite for fun and adventure (he was never far from a party and never without an aircraft of some sort to fly himself to meetings whenever possible), and his passion for the work and for ‘his people', endeared him to the staff.

One of the more radical ideas was the all-year-round four-day week, designed to give the staff longer leisure breaks. To reassure clients that their agency wasn't slacking, it was policed vigorously and Ally insisted that people worked 36 hours minimum each week.

It started as an experiment, and when it was confirmed a T-shirt for the staff was produced featuring a sketch of Ally and the words, ‘First, Fridays Off. Now, Free Underwear'.

It's difficult to imagine Reeves, Ogilvy or Bernbach doing that, or their staff being anything other than embarrassed by it. But it was so different at Carl Ally Inc.

 

‘I've got a friend at an agency – I can't say which one – all they do all day long is sit around and smoke mary jane.'

PAUL KINSEY TO PEGGY OLSEN MAD MEN

I
n a recollection of his days at the New York office of Campbell Ewald, Amil Gargano noted the gulf between the Old and the New. Their offices at 488 Madison Avenue were one floor above the establishment Norman, Craig & Kummel agency.

“I would see Norman B. Norman, wearing a Chesterfield topcoat, fedora, a long-stemmed pipe tightly gripped in his jaw, moving in long strides through the lobby to enter his vintage Rolls Royce, his driver dutifully standing at kerb side with his hand on the open rear door. I remember thinking how out of touch one of us must have been.”

Creative people were still dressing smartly for business but the preppy style was retreating before the sharper elegance that was flooding into the business with the younger, less reverential breed. In a 1964 ad in an advertising trade magazine, a stock photo library service, ran an ad showing sixteen smartly-attired art directors—none of them had dressed in a particularly special style for the shoot. They are all of Italian origin, the “Graphic Mafia” as photographer Carl Fischer called them. By today's standards the ad is breathtakingly politically incorrect. Under the headline “Are Italian art directors more creative?”, came the offer “This week only, special discount for Italian art directors on Wide World's file of 50 million photos.”

There was, of course, uproar from every non-Italian. Staged or real, the upshot was that after a complaint by Lou Dorfsman at CBS on behalf of Jewish art directors, the offer was extended to all. Although the flags of neither Helmut Krone nor George Lois had been represented in this global bunfight, one way or another the ethnics had arrived and were hogging the spotlight.

DDB was very much still the beacon on the hill for all creative people, but internally it was a dull, almost dowdy environment where the staff largely kept their heads down and got on with the job. “But at the same time, it wasn't a monastery; there were shenanigans going on, screwing on desks and people being sick in their waste baskets,” says Kuperman reassuringly.

JOE DALY
, the head of account management, was in some ways a clone of Ned Doyle: Irish, charismatic, hard drinking, and hard living. After Fordham University and war service as a much decorated fighter pilot at Guadalcanal and Midway on the USS
Enterprise
, he joined DDB in 1959 just a few months after it was founded. He made his mark, becoming president in 1968 and CEO in 1976. As the lead executive on the Polaroid and Avis accounts he was one of the most colorful leaders the agency ever had, and he was utterly dedicated to his clients. A colleague once said that if Daly ever became president of the United States, his first loyalty would still be to Polaroid.

He was also a womanizer, another thing he had in common with Doyle. According to Doris Willens, “Stewardesses of American Airlines, one of Daly's major accounts, and the scrubbed blonde demonstrators at Polaroid conventions were among Daly's favorite targets.… Daly's wife vented her anger one night by piling all his suits into a bathtub and running steaming hot water until they shrank beyond salvation.”

But in this area of expertise even Daly was outplayed by the older Doyle, as Daly himself once acknowledged: “He'd go up to a women and say, ‘Hey, you' and pop! I tell you, that guy was very, very wicked with women.” Both men slowly lost the respect of the morally-grounded Bernbach, but Daly would regularly redeem himself at early morning meetings even after a long night of licentious excess.

At every level there has always been a certain amount of what Joy Golden, a writer who started at BBDO in 1952, calls “a little nonsense at the office” but, she adds, “nothing like as bad as in
Mad Men
.” One of the key factors influencing social behavior in that era was the 1960 legalization of the contraceptive pill and the resulting sexual liberation, although the more libidinous behavior was not the province of ad people alone. This was also the year of Billy Wilder's
The Apartment
, in which a clerk climbs the corporate ladder in exchange for allowing senior executives the use of his apartment to take their girlfriends. It could have been Sterling Cooper—but it was set in a life insurance office.

DRINKING ON AGENCY
premises was comparatively rare, although not unknown. It was rumored that some OB&M executives would smuggle lunchtime drinks into the office from Rattazzi's, across the road. They did so to liven up the bland fare served in the cafeteria, installed by Ogilvy himself in the clearly futile attempt to stop his employees drinking alcohol at lunchtime.