Campaign / MARCH 2012

What do the real mad men think of Mad Men ?

“The more I think and write about Mad Men, the more I take the show as a personal insult.  So f*ck you, Mad Men, you phony gray-flannel-suit, male-chauvinist, no-talent, WASP, white-shirted, racist, anti-Semitic Republican SOBs!’”

George Lois is angry. Mind you, George Lois – brilliant art director, agency owner, author, designer, and as central as anyone to the real story of New York advertising in the 1960s – has always been angry. From his days bare-knuckle fighting the Irish kids as the only Greek boy in his part of the South Bronx, to later in the 1950s at Lennen and Newell when he overturned his boss’s desk because he was dismissive of George’s ads, or later still when he climbed out onto the windowsill of his matzos client’s office window and threatened to jump unless he bought his ad, George has never held back.

But this time, he’s quietly angry, a controlled fury, fuelled by contempt. And this time it’s aimed at the people behind Mad Men. He hands me a wodge of typewritten paper. “Here” he growls – he really does, I know it’s a cliché, but he actually growls, in his 80-year-old but still heavy Bronx accent – “I’ve written this for August (2010) Playboy. Take it.”

By now I’d spent around six hours talking to Lois and come to realise that with George there’s no such word as ‘maybe’ and no such mood as temperate. But even by his standards, this is explosive stuff. I start to giggle as I read it. “The producers went the whole hog to depict the scum of the industry rather than the upbeat world of culture busting creativity …”

If less profanely expressed, this is the predominant view amongst those who worked in New York agencies in the 50s and 60s that I talked to in the 18 months of researching my book. Some put it quite movingly; Richard Gilbert, who ran his own agency from the mid-50s onwards, never a big outfit but usually a presence in the awards shows – a huge accolade in those days in New York as the competition was so hot – puts it very personally. Now in his 80s, still passionate, he says “I don’t want my grandchildren looking at this and looking at me and thinking ‘so that’s what you did is it?’” 

It’s not just the shagging and the drinking and the smoking and the sybaritic excess they object to – we’ll come to that later – it’s the lack of principle. There’s an intensely proud group recollection of a more honest code, of an integrity in professional and personal dealings during that era that they feel the show betrays.

For this initial antipathy the makers of Mad Men have only themselves to blame. They claimed “Mad Men explores the Golden Age of Advertising” and indeed the period it covers was a Golden Age – perhaps THE Golden Age. But it was only so because it was the period at the birth of what was subsequently dubbed the ‘Creative Revolution’, it was the era when not so much a new generation but a new demographic of advertising people took over from their tired and burnt-out forebears and turned advertising on its head.

They did it through a new pact with consumers, a more respectful and congenial understanding that the public recognised the advertisers’ well-worn tricks and tools and were sick of them. The new creativity, pioneered at the then ten-year-old Doyle Dane Bernbach ended material and social aspiration as the hook and replaced it with an appeal to wit and intelligence. A VW or a Volvo, a holiday in Jamaica, drinking Wolfschmitd or Chivas Regal, eating at a Horn and Hardart automat or renting a car from Avis no longer made you look richer or socially successful, it made you look cleverer.

They were an unstoppable force. Bill Bernbach had rightly realised that the pool in which agencies had traditionally fished for copywriters – WASP Ivy League graduates – was woefully limited, and he employed a new army of New Americans, principally Jews and Italians. They were fuelled by one of the biggest local explosions in culture the world has ever seen, the New York art, music, theatre and literary scene of the 1950s, which in turn was given nourishment and oxygen by an equally massive urban economic expansion. Building and redeveloping New York in the 1950s doubled the entire world’s office space. And further, this was the decade of the rise of the suburbs and the suburban dream; all creating a huge demand for the product of the agencies – advertising.

Bernbach also elevated the power of the creative people. Almost without exception, until he left his position as Creative Director of Grey and started his agency in 1949, creative people including the creative directors were sad and cowed people, powerless against the whim of the account people, then exclusively male. I was repeatedly told how it was routine for them to change copy, even rewrite completely, without any consultation with the copywriter. As for the art directors – usually known as visualisers – they were just invisible peons, often on a separate floor, sitting at easels waiting for the copywriter’s ‘idea’ and copy to turn up in the internal mail for him – invariably a him – to execute.

Bernbach put them together and made them the powerplant of the agency. And vibrant, committed, intelligent and supremely talented, they seized the moment and blazed an incandescent trail through the decade with utterly original campaigns. It was witty, honest, and intelligent work, produced from a whole string of new and entirely radical agencies, for almost the first time in history creatively led. When George Lois, with two copywriters, Fred Papert and Julian Koenig opened PKL on January 1st 1960, it was the first time an art director had ever had his name over the door of an agency. Within six years, with the opening of Wells Rich Greene, what had been unthinkable only a decade previously had come about; not only 3 creative people, but this time 2 Jews and a woman, had started an agency! Within 2 years when she took that business public Mary Wells became the first woman to become the CEO of a quoted company in any field in the US.

Of course, much of advertising went on as before; the big old agencies and most packaged goods clients took no notice and carried on harrying and insulting the intelligence of the consumer, even more annoyingly on the new medium of television. But the major story of the decade was the creative revolution and the makers of Mad Men have so far missed it. Sterling Cooper is not a creative agency – of the first VW ad Draper says, “I don’t know what I hate about it most” - and Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce sets up with no art director on the payroll, unthinkable by 1964. And above all else, Don Draper in the eyes of the Creative Revolutionaries is a phony.

Phoniness. You hear the word, time and again, contemptuously applied to their predecessors and less blessed rivals from art directors and writers like Ed McCabe and Amil Gargano, Jerry Della Femina and Bob Giraldi. It was one of the aspects of the business the new breed of creatives hated when they started their own agencies or assumed power within the existing ones, along with the lies and paucity of thought in the advertising itself. There was a new candour. Often it was the centre of the appeal, with VW urging you to ‘Think Small’ or Avis making a virtue out of being only number 2, and this candour permeated not just the advertising but the way the agencies behaved. But with Draper’s slick presentations and Roger Sterling’s quite open contempt and cynicism (“Well, I gotta go learn a bunch of people's names before I fire them”) the Creative Revolutionaries are reminded of all they fought to change, and they resent the fact that the lay viewer will learn nothing of their struggle and the work that they produced.

But I think they’re being a little unfair. Sterling Cooper doesn’t claim to be a creative agency, although Draper at times likes to think it is. And while some events are overly dramatic, we’re always overcritical of fictional portrayals of subjects we think we know well. Maybe all these things don’t happen in one week, but in the course of 2 years? Rick Wakeman says in his time he has seen every single event portrayed in the gloriously unlikely rock band satire This is Spinal Tap, including their drummer having to be released with oxyacetylene equipment from a pod on stage.

(And if you don’t believe that senior management can be maimed in the office by a runaway lawn mower, bear in mind that a potential client walked into PKL’s trendy offices in the Seagram building in 1961 to find staff wobbling around on mopeds. It was the result of a misunderstanding whereby, for a brief and error-strewn period, PKL became not just the advertising agents but the importers of a brand of French motorised bicycles.)

One thing everyone faults is the portrayal of prodigious drinking on the premises. Many agencies were actually dry, with no alcohol at any time, although Fred Danzig, an AdAge reporter from 1962 who retired as editor in the 90s, remembers executives smuggling drinks into Ogilvy and Mather from Ratazzis, a favourite Madison Avenue restaurant and bar opposite O&M’s offices. Dave Trott, an Englishman who’d studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the training ground for so many of the era’s very best art directors, experienced an even more censorious atmosphere. At the end of the first week in a new job in 1968 in which every day he’d gone for a quiet pint at lunch time, as he would in London, he was taken on one side and asked if he’d like to discuss his “problem”.

Many of its alumni recall DDB as being a heads-down, earnest sort of place, a strong work ethic in deeply unglamorous offices, although Bob Kuperman, a contemporaneous art director, while in general agreeing, says “At the same time, it wasn’t a monastery, there were plenty of shenanigans going on, people screwing on their desks … ”

There was always the womanising; in that Mad Men is probably spot on. There was less respect and no political correctness. Carl Ally, an enormously colourful Turkish/Italian ex-WW2 and Korean fighter pilot who started one of the very best agencies of all time once sent an all-staff memo urging everyone to be at yet another staff party, ending with “And I want you all there – remember, there’s 3 of you I haven’t yet had.”

Today when you talk of the casual daily sexism, harassment and exploitation, most of the men will nod, some a little sheepishly, and the women just shrug, sometimes with a little gleam in the eye. Joy Golden, a BBDO writer from 1955 onwards describes it as '“a little ‘nonsense’ at the office” and one secretary of the time said, without resentment, “it’s just the way it was”. Mary Moore remembers going to an interview for an art directors’s job in the mid 60s and being asked to stand up and “do a twirl”, rightly actionable today. “I thought it was a bit much – but I didn’t go home in tears or anything”.

Jerry Della Femina still talks with enormous pride of the annual all-agency vote to see which male and which female employee the staff of Della Femina Travisano most wanted to sleep with; “They’d campaign – one otherwise demure account woman put up posters around the place saying ‘Vote for me – like Bloomingdales I’m open after 9 every night’. The first prize was a weekend for the happy couple at the Plaza. I can’t remember what the second prize was but the third was the offer of Ron Travisano’s couch.”

This was the 60s, women’s consciousness movements were in their infancy, the brand new contraceptive pill was making sex uncomplicated and this wasn’t peculiar to advertising, everyone was at it. The ultimate story of the hitting on secretaries and abuse of staff in the pursuit of sex was told in Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacClaine’s 1960 film The Apartment. It was set in a life insurance office.

Peggy’s professional story too is pretty accurate although perhaps she wasn’t quite as alone in the business as may be suggested. There were plenty of women copywriters, going right back to the 19th century; in the first few years of DDB there were more women writers than men and some commanded good salaries and garnered industry fame for their work. Their route to agency writer was either through a job in-house with a retail advertiser, writing on a women’s magazine or, as with Peggy, converting from secretary. But the iron ceiling and the appalling pay differential, though resented and quietly discussed, were rarely challenged. Mary Moore discussed leaving the agency at which she worked with her then boyfriend, another art director. “Yeah”, he said, “I should be getting $14000 and you’re terrific, you should be getting $12000.” But there was little she could do about it.

These smaller accuracies and the intriguing nature of the agency story, with well-portrayed events like the loss of the Lucky Strike business and the formation of the new agency in a couple of hotel rooms – utterly authentic – has begun to warm a few of the initial sceptics. Mike Tesch, an art director who worked at Carl Ally Inc, said “I hated it – and now I love it”.

But for Lois, its original sin can never be eradicated. “A soap opera placed in the setting of a glamorous office, where stylish fools hump their appreciative, coiffured secretaries, suck up martinis and smoke themselves to death as they produce dumb lifeless advertising … ”

Phew! And then the killer, his very last line:

“Besides. When I was in my 30s I was better looking than Jon Hamm.”