The Real Mad Men (20 page)

Dick Rattazzi, the former
maître d'
at the showbiz restaurant Sardis, had opened his dimly lit two-floored restaurant at 9 East Forty-eighth Street in May 1956. It became such a noisy media haunt in the sixties that a group of ad agency people who practically lived there had a plaque erected outside the premises, in celebration of its notoriety as a Madison Avenue joint.

On West Fifty-second Street, in the former speakeasy 21, Rosser Reeves would be at his regular table eating his habitual corned beef hash, the surrounding tables packed with ad people. They thronged the pavements of Forty-sixth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenue, “Restaurant Row” as it became known, while Tehran was a popular hang-out for the DDB crowd. Ted Shaine, a DDB art director, remembers noisy gatherings in the Mens Bar at the long-gone Biltmore Hotel at Grand Central Station. “It was like a club. There was a room there where you could actually mix your own martinis and I guess after one or two things could get a little sloppy. You could get food there but no one went there to eat. I ordered a salad once and everyone stood round, poking it—‘what's that?' It was a great institution.”

He also recalls a bar called Cheetah, a forerunner of the legendary Studio 54 of the seventies and eighties. “It was right near the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. It was phenomenal, there was a house band, not DJs like now, but there was music and dancing. I'm talking '64 to '67. We'd work very hard all day and then go out all night. It was an amazing time.”

ONE MAN WHO LIVED THE LIFE
was Jerry Della Femina, a Brooklyn-born college dropout. While he was working as a messenger boy in the late 1950s delivering to advertising agencies, he was attracted to the job of copywriter as “they didn't look like they were working.” After several years hawking his book of sample ads he had created in his spare time, he finally got a job in 1961 at Daniel & Charles, a small Jewish run agency.

Within a year he was fired. He had set up a freelance creative consultancy using Daniel & Charles' address on his letterhead, and in error sent a soliciation to one of their clients. But this was a time of full employment, jobs were plentiful, and he quickly found another at DK&G, one of the agencies attempting to follow in DDB's creative footsteps.

Here he gained his first piece of notoriety when he managed to feature a nude woman—in an ad for a foot ointment. Next he won several awards for work on Talon Zippers. Although he himself would admit the campaign had been running for some years before he was assigned to it, his executions were noticeably witty, fun, and daring—not unlike the fellow himself.

Outrageous behavior, good-natured controversy, and ribald laughter accompanied this bald bear of a man wherever he went. His next move, to Bates along with three other creative people from DK&G, was one of those controversies. Bates was still at the opposite end of the prevailing creative mood and represented the worst of the stuff-shirted old world that Jerry and his ilk were fast shucking off. But there was a scheming method in this seeming madness. He knew they would pay him good money because they valued him as an energetic high-profile Italian writer who could help them appear sexier. And he knew he could learn from them.

The Achilles heel of the new creative agencies—and even, to a certain extent, of Ogilvy—was creating advertising for packaged goods, those low-priced, fast-moving grocery items that are the backbone of everyday
marketing. The newer agencies were terrific at communicating the values of luxury goods or items with a more considered purchase, like cars or clothing, but a “creative” answer to the challenge of selling a soap powder or a cake mix had so far largely eluded them. Della Femina figured that if he could combine the Bates USP style of work for products like M&Ms and Anacin with the new, more street wise approaches, he could mold a new way of advertising for even the most mundane of products.

But he also used Bates as a publicity platform for the next step in his career, upping his profile further by making speeches and writing articles that were often unapproved, and sometimes even in contradiction of views held by the Bates management. After one such speech, he phoned Fred Danzig, a reporter at
Advertising Age
from 1962 until his retirement as Editor in 1994, and told him that he was in deep trouble with Archie Forster, the head of Bates, and was going to be fired.

“So that Monday in
Ad Age
, [he ran the] headline, ‘Della Femina to be fired'. I got called down by Forster. He was an old Southerner and he said, ‘What are we going to do with you, boy?' And I said, ‘Well, Archie, if you read
Ad Age
today you are probably going to fire me.' He said, ‘I can't fire you when you say you are going to be fired!… You bought yourself some time didn't you, boy?' I said, ‘Yeah, I guess I did.' I knew I was going to start my own agency anyway. I just needed that time. I did a lot of work for Bates on Panasonic and I learned a lot there. It was a great education.”

IT WAS WHILE WORKING
on Panasonic that he came up with one of the most famous lines in advertising history, more so even than “Think Small” or “Lemon.” His suggestion was unveiled to an internal meeting of senior Bates executives who were struggling to find a solution to selling Japanese electronics products less than twenty years after the end of the war in the Pacific. They all leaned forward eagerly when their expensive new star copywriter solemnly announced, “Gentlemen, I have it.” There was a gasp of horror as he unveiled: “From those wonderful folks who brought you Pearl Harbor.”

It was never seriously intended; there's a tradition in advertising of writing outrageous ads that could never run. Often, they're the first flights of fancy by a creative team when they initially get the brief—they get all of the cynicism and the ribaldry out of the way before they knuckle down to the task. Bob Olsen got a copywriter job from Phyllis Robinson on the strength of a campaign that never ran. The line was, “If it isn't Wolfschmidt's Vodka, it isn't breakfast.” David Herzbrun, with George Lois, wrote a headline for Lanteen Diaphragms and Vaginal Gel: “Lanteen: Fecund to None.” Both Della Femina and Carl Ally lay claim to the unsurprisingly never-used line for Preparation H, a haemorrhoids treatment: “Up yours with ours—and kiss your piles goodbye.” The Pearl Harbor line was used, and to great effect, although not to sell televisions or stereos. Della Femina made it the title of his memoir and it sold many thousands of copies.

Jerry Della Femina gained attention and awards for his work on Talon Zippers ads while at DK&G.

DELLA FEMINA WAS
thirty-one, and his partner Ron Travisano twenty-nine, when they opened their eponymous agency in 1967. From day one it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. Jerry himself said in a
Fortune
interview in April 1987, “My management skills aren't as good as they should be. Heaven knows what's happening on my watch.”

What was happening was, in the words of art director Ted Shaine, “like Woodstock—without the mud. It was a party the whole time.” Bob Kuperman, who went there as creative director in 1968, said, “We did do some work but it was limited. Most of it was either at night or on your own. There was a lot of dart throwing, a lot of card games. It was the least business-like place I worked.” As an art director who once worked with Della Femina says, “Before I met him I thought he was all smoke and mirrors. But at least then I thought it was real smoke and real mirrors.” It's a quote that Jerry still finds hilarious.

He's very proud of the atmosphere. “We work very late,” he said at the time. “We work until one, two in the morning every night almost. We start very early, we spend a lot of time together and we like each other. It's a nice feeling. There's music going on in the agency almost all the time. People are enjoying themselves, there's a lot of fun.”

There was also a lot of boozing, marijuana, and sex. Jerry says, “We had a cleaning lady, Virginia, who swore when she wrote her book she'd make more money than anyone else. Because she caught every couple.”

He expresses regret at the passing of their lascivious annual event, the agency Sex Contest. He claims it started when they first opened, and lasted for as long as thirty years:

“Everyone voted for the person they most wanted to go to bed with. There was a gay vote and
ménage-a-trois
vote, too. It was solemn vote counting, with poll watchers and everything. Talk about a well-kept secret; if it had come out, it would have destroyed us. It was the wildest thing, and good sophomoric fun. We'd do it around Christmas season. The winning couple would win a weekend at the Plaza Hotel. We don't know if anyone ever used it. I can't remember the second prize, but third place was offering Ron Travisano's couch. There were people who campaigned. One woman, an account person, had posters: ‘Like Bloomingdale's, I'm open after 9 every night.'”

One year a prospective client, known to be a devout churchgoer, made a surprise visit to the agency a few days before the vote. Staff were rushing round the agency tearing down the more lewd posters as he was coming up in the elevator. They thought they'd got them all until he asked for the men's room. It was then that someone remembered one of the female staff had stuck little signs just above the urinal bowls: “Want any help with that? Vote for me!” They managed to keep him engaged in small talk just long enough to get the signs removed.

At the bottom of the voting paper there was always the slogan “Don't vote with your mind, vote with your loins.” One year the vote count was overseen by the sober-suited and straight-faced agency auditors who happened to be in the offices that week.

“No one ever knew who'd voted for whom or even what the count was—all we ever announced was the result. It was all good unclean fun,” Jerry recalls.

Bob Giraldi, the creative director who succeeded Bob Kuperman (and later moved on to direct Michael Jackson's “Beat it” video) has said he never even knew it took place. Told of this today, Jerry says, “What?” He calls to a man passing in the corridor, “Neil, Neil, Giraldi says he never knew about the sex parties.”

A sleepy smile behind long grey hair. This is Neil Drossman, a veteran copywriter of those times. A dreamy gleam shines briefly in his eyes. “He won it one year.”

“Yeah,” confirms Jerry. “That's right. Why would he say that? He won it one year.”

Who to believe? Memories twist and fade, the events themselves contorting the remembrance. They were days of laughter, of hedonism, of sensual indulgence: lotus-eating days.