The Real Mad Men (25 page)

BORN IN PITTSBURGH
, Tinker had made his way up through the ranks as an art director until the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He tried to enlist, saying in a 1982 interview: “I sat there for two days in my underwear and eventually somebody examined me and I passed and the last question was ‘Where did you go to college?', and I said, ‘Well, I didn't go to college. I went to this art school.' As soon as I said that the noncommissioned officer, whoever he was, said, ‘That's all. Put your pants on and get out.'”

Tinker went briefly to JWT but McCann got him back as creative director. In the latter years of the fifties he'd been somewhat sidelined—one curious feature of Harper's casting for Jack Tinker & Partners was that all four of the partners had been left out of the mainstream of agency operations.

The agency started off in the Waldorf Towers in 1964 but they didn't last long there—the comings and goings of clients, messenger boys, deliveries and all the noisy circus of office life alerted their classy neighbors—General Douglas MacArthur on the floor below, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor above. The terms of the lease forbidding use of the premises for business were enforced and they were out on their collective ear. They moved to a suite in the Dorset Hotel, previously owned by Martin Revson, the owner of Revlon cosmetics. They weren't exactly slumming it. Charlie Moss, a young writer who'd been hired by Tinker from DDB on more than double his previous salary, describes the scene:

“It was really a
Mad Men
set—the main room was two stories high with a kind of a balcony round the top, everything was white, the furniture was white with a white baby grand piano in the middle of the room. Around this big central conference room and living room place were other offices, which were hotel suites/rooms. When we came in they said they didn't have any more room on that floor, so they put us on a different floor. They gave us a suite of a living room and two bedrooms that were our office, no furniture, just a carpet. The first three weeks we did everything on the floor.”

Who did what is not clear, but judged against Harper's initial brief there was some success. “The first piece of business we had was [from] the Bulova Watch Company… although when we got it, it was a piece of machinery that had been a spin off from the Space Program,” recalls Jack Tinker. The agency helped Bulova decide how to use it, then designed and
named it—The Accutron Watch—and helped them get it into shops like Abercrombie & Fitch, a very different sort of store from the A&F of today.

Next they helped with the design, naming, and styling of the Buick Riviera, followed by projects for Coca-Cola, Exxon, product design for Westinghouse, and providing input for Interpublic new business presentations. Then they took on a project for their first direct client, Miles Laboratories, and their success with it changed the nature of the organization completely.

The Alka Seltzer account had been won in comical circumstances; Miles didn't want it known that their account was loose, and Harper and his team had flown to their headquarters at Elkhart, Indiana, in his eccentric corporate aeroplane, a converted bomber. While the meeting was underway the plane was backed into fresh concrete at a dispersal area at the airport. Their attempt at discretion was blown as the local newspaper the next day ran the story of the Interpublic plane conspicuously sunk in cement.

The advertising idea could not have been simpler: as the male voice-over says, “No matter what shape your stomach's in… when it gets out of shape… take Alka Seltzer,” and accompanying it we see a series of stomachs—flat, fat, and flabby—shown in close-up in everyday use: a road digger, a ballet dancer, a fat man having his stomach jabbed by another man with whom he is in urgent conversation, and a mechanic easing himself under a car. Under Howard Zieff's sympathetic direction the campaign was warm, affectionate and infectious, and the jaunty tune written by Sascha Burland, which reached number thirteen in the Billboard chart, helped delight the United States and revitalize Alka Seltzer.

The campaign was so unlike anything ever seen for a pharmaceutical product before. The follow-up was animated, a cartoon man berated by his stomach (played by Gene Wilder), complaining about the rich food he eats. The dialogue is fast and witty, like a Woody Allen exchange. And with the strap line “When you and your stomach don't agree” the viewer was again charmed by a commercial in a category in which they were more used to being bullied by Rosser Reeves' doctors in lab coats and crashing hammers in animated heads.

The industry acclaim for the campaign changed the perception of Jack Tinker & Partners from an experimental creative think tank to that of a
full-fledged creative hot shop. Indeed, history now portrays Harper's motive as being much like those agencies that Della Femina lambasted in his article, setting it up as a satellite for more adventurous clients who may have thought of leaving the unadventurous McCann. But Harper came to regret letting Tinker take the business as their own client, rather than continuing to work on a project basis only: “I should have continued some immediate provision for experimental creative principles. Because what happened was that the client began to eat up the people.”

In the same interview he credited Dr. Herzog (the model for Dr. Greta Guttman, the European research director at Sterling Cooper who enraged Draper with her recommendations for Lucky Strike advertising) with the simple suggestion that two rather than one Alka Seltzer tablets was required. The result? Double the sales!

TINKER WAS PROVING
to be yet another successful addition to Harper's new and burgeoning group. The first acquisition had been Marschalk and Pratt in 1954, an agency with which McCann shared the Standard Oil—Exxon—business. Amongst others added to the mix over the coming years were the New York and London offices of Pritchard Wood, a British agency, and Erwin Wasey. Initially the agencies and ancillary companies were owned by McCann but operated entirely autonomously. The final move was to take the name of a public relations company McCann owned in Germany, Interpublic—easy to say, spell and understand in any country—and incorporate it as the holding company for Harper's empire in 1961. Flotation wasn't to happen for another ten years but meanwhile, all was going well for the “emperor”—except that increasingly his courtiers were beginning to wonder whether he was wearing any clothes.

“Marion was always more interested in the top line than the bottom line,” says Spielvogel. Harper had employed him personally in 1960 from writing his daily advertising column for the
New York Times
as his executive assistant, specifically to work on the establishment of Interpublic. He did well, and by 1967 was vice president and on the main board of Interpublic, handling the Miller Beer account and responsible for new business acquisition and press relations.

Part of the famous Alka Seltzer campaign in the sixties, by Jack Tinker & Partners.

Looking back, he says of Harper, “When he was building the company he was a brilliant business conceptualist and then he became enamored with growth at any price. And there was a big price to pay.”

Harper's operating style, both professional and personal, was becoming increasingly grand and expansive. His emphasis on internal training and education for his staff in the latest techniques and procedures cost huge sums in the enormous and elaborate global meetings that he would stage. The chase for new business was relentless and he had no interest in keeping down the costs for pitches.

In less than four days in 1965, for a $10 million piece of GM business, he had fifty copies of a detailed presentation written and printed in full quality hard back book form. Says Russ Johnston, “The cost… must have been enormous. The craftsmen were union workers and the plate making, typesetting, printing and binding were done on a weekend overtime basis.” Johnston estimates the cost of an equally unsuccessful pitch for TWA in 1967 at more than $200,000.

The balances that had kept him in check had fallen away; Harry McCann, the man who had employed and guided him in his early years, had long since retired and subsequently been killed in a car crash. And the long-term chief financial officer Burt Stilson, suffered a heart attack and retired to Florida to play golf.

“A lot of people who reach a certain point start to smell the roses,” said one contemporary observer. Harper's personal life, too, was becoming stratospherically high octane. Bizarrely, he invested heavily and unwisely in prize cattle, and for his second wife, Valerie Feit (“long legged, radiant, beautiful,” according to Russ Johnston), he set up a fashion consultancy in Paris under the Interpublic banner. It was a loss maker.

His most public vice was the acquisition of corporate aircraft, ridiculed across Madison Avenue as Harper's Airforce. He capped them all in 1965 with the purchase of a DC7 from KLM. Seating more than 150 people, it was as pointless an acquisition as it was expensive. After several months of conversion, it emerged with a state-of-the-art office and a drawing room with brass standard lamps, gold deep-pile rugs, a sumptuous sofa in glove leather, Eames chairs and silk wall coverings. The bedroom had a full-size bed and tiled shower, while the galley was equipped to prepare and serve full candlelight dinners. Full movie-projection facilities were laid on.

At least Harper made full use of it. Over one weekend he flew two senior creative people to Paris and back to give them a pep talk. Often the use was entirely personal, like when it was flown to Mexico to pick up antique furniture. And perhaps the one flight that was most symbolic of the impending disaster was when he used it to fly Valerie to France—on the day he was supposed to be in court on alleged tax offences.

Some of this could perhaps be tolerated if the company was performing, but the figures were ceasing to add up. At one time the organization employed 8,300 people worldwide with global billings of $711 million. But this growth by acquisition was hiding stagnation in trading. Neil Gilliatt, an account man and vice chairman in 1964 could remember “there were years in which the earnings on the Coca-Cola account were two or three times greater than the earnings of the total corporation.”

Although the separation of the agencies allowed competing clients, there were some who still wouldn't play. The acquisition of Waseys with its Carnation business cost McCann's Nestlé, and McCann suffered again when Continental walked because of Jack Tinker taking on Braniff.

INCREASINGLY, HARPER WAS PUSHING
the limits. Spielvogel had by now succeeded Stilson as one of the three trustees of the voting shares, along with Bob Healy and Harper. He remembers consulting a lawyer about an idea for the pension plan Harper had asked him to implement. “You do that Mr. Spielvogel,” said the lawyer evenly, “and you see the stripes you're wearing on that suit? They'll be going the other way.”

Harper wouldn't be told—he didn't believe he could fail. It all came to a head in 1967 when Irving Trust, worried by the balance sheet, called in a loan. Spielvogel, however, wasn't immediately worried. He had been advised by a financial mentor that the last thing banks wanted was to own any company, least of all a big advertising agency.

“So on that given day, on the fortieth floor of the TimeLife Building, Bob Healy and I were sitting there waiting for these four people from the Irving Trust who came in looking like four morticians and they said, ‘We've very bad news for you. We're calling your loans', and I said ‘Fine', and took out this big set of fake keys and put them on the table and we
started to walk out. The lead banker said, ‘Woah, where are you going?' and I said, ‘You now own the largest advertising agency'. And he said, ‘No, no, I'm sure we can work this out.'” They bought time from Irving Trust but with one condition—that Harper be removed from the chief executive position.

At promptly 10:00
AM
on Thursday, November 9, 1967, a board meeting was called to order. Harper didn't seem to know what was about to hit him. He opened the meeting in the normal way but was quickly interrupted. The position of Irving Trust was outlined and Harper, puzzled but still apparently confident, put it to the vote.

All six men wordlessly voted against him. He paused for a moment and then, without saying a word, left the room.

Healy was installed as CEO, with Harper as chairman, but the board knew that their time with Irving Trust was limited. Arrangements were made with Chase Manhattan to refinance the agency but they in turn stipulated that Harper must go altogether. It was over.