Just One Catch (26 page)

… “So go meet your wife,” I said. “Someone else will take me to Park and 82nd.”

“That's not a nice attitude,” he said. “First you don't give me a job. Now you don't let me take you home.”

The “opportunity” in the “publishing field” on which Joe hung his leave from Penn State in the spring of 1952 never materialized. The position with the Army Air Force and Exchange Service was temporary. So one day, he purchased a “gray fedora with a dark band [and] … a new white-on-white shirt with French cuffs” and hit the streets, looking for jobs in advertising, where he felt he could unleash his creativity (and sparkling personality).

Briefly, he worked at the Merrill Anderson Company for sixty dollars a week; there, he drank his “first Gibsons with a copy chief named Gert Conroy and learned to love extra-dry martinis in a chilled glass with a twist of lemon peel”; he spent some time at Benton & Bowles, best known for its work with Proctor & Gamble in launching radio soap operas and the television show
As the World Turns
(at B & B, a fellow copywriter named Art Kramer recalled Joe's typewriter “going when I came into work and still going when I left in the evening. Everyone marveled at this non-stop output. As one writer joked, ‘What, is that guy writing a novel or something?'”); he wrote copy for Remington Rand, the former arms manufacturer turned typewriter and then computer maker, alongside Mary Higgins Clark, who would later publish suspense novels.

In 1955, he became an advertising-promotion copywriter at
Time
magazine, where he received a starting salary of nine thousand dollars a year. For his steady and innovative work, he received one-thousand-dollar raises at the end of each of his first two years there.
Look
magazine offered him a thirteen-thousand-dollar annual salary beginning in 1958, and in 1959, he went to work for
McCall's
as an advertising and promotion manager.

Always, he said the men and women he met in advertising departments were far more creative and intelligent than the people he had worked with in academia. “All the copywriters were writing plays and novels and the people in the art department were interested in serious art,” he recalled. To some degree, at the heart of the academic enterprise lies a conservative impulse, a desire to nurture and pass on traditions of learning, a valuable endeavor; on the other hand, the men and women in American advertising believed
they
were creating the future, and their shared excitement was palpable.

“Even before 1960, the agency world was glued to the new-wave movies by Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut, Godard, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, to Mike Nichols and Elaine May, to the Group Theatre and Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando,” Mary Wells, a prominent former ad executive, has written. “Advertising [was] always part of the [cultural] front line.”

Moreover, as Shirley Polykoff insisted, for many kids, particularly the first-generation children of Eastern European immigrants, advertising was a key to successful assimilation. “[I]t was from the magazine advertisements that we really learned how to be truly American,” she wrote. “How a home should look. How a table should be set. How to dress. How to be well groomed.” Advertising “taught the immigrants that they could achieve a clean complexion by using the soap used by nine out of ten screen stars.” Through advertising, “you could look right into the homes of real people,” Polykoff said. “See how they act. Learn to do as they did.”

These lessons were disseminated from a roughly four-block stretch of Madison Avenue, on Manhattan's East Side. Within a three-block span sat the headquarters of the nation's two largest radio and television networks, the main offices of “national reps” (over sixty of them) selling ad space to the country's newspapers, and the editorial and advertising offices of
Time, Look, Life, McCall's, Vogue, Redbook, Coronet, Esquire, Mademoiselle,
and
The New Yorker,
to name a few. As Martin Mayer wrote in
Madison Avenue, U.S.A.,
one of the first comprehensive studies of the ad world, “On the outside … the new buildings [were] mostly very much alike; on the inside, it [was] every man for himself.”

Many of the city's finest restaurants and bars opened in this area, catering to high-paid executives and their clients, who prided themselves on discriminating taste (after all, they were the people
setting
America's tastes). “[I]t can truthfully be said that the great restaurants of New York are here quite simply to serve lunch to men in the advertising and communications fields,” Mayer wrote. “The company will [always] pick up the tab.”

Favorite spots for lengthy business meals included “21,” with its collection of large wooden Negro jockeys, La Reine, dark and intimate, and Romeo Salta. Tom Messner, cofounder of the prominent ad agency Messner Vetere Berger Carey, recalls, “There was a steam table bar run by a World War II vet, Irving Bloom, called Kilroy's on Sixth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets. Copywriters and Art Directors went there and often worked at the bar. The Tehran on 44th Street—a Persian restaurant and bar—was more upscale: free hors d'oeuvres between five and eight. Generally, account people did all the wining and dining [of clients].”

Mayer reported that “[s]urprsingly often … the business lunch really [was] for business purposes, part of a selling venture which may [have seemed] more certain of success after it [was] washed a few times in alcohol.” (Some agencies installed in-house bars, open for cocktails each day at the close of business. A former employee at BBDO recalls the only client who ever showed up at
their
bar, Central Filing, was Pepsi's advertising director.)

Despite growing public perceptions, even in the immediate postwar period, that ad men caroused and drank more than they worked, the best people in the field spent brutal hours of hard concentration and constant pressure. According to
Advertising Age,
in 1956, the average age at which prominent people in the business died was 57.9, ten years under the national average for men.

Nor was the image of the man in the gray flannel suit ever really accurate—Sloan Wilson notwithstanding. In the fifties, many advertising executives lived in Westchester, Locust Valley, or other suburbs, and dressed modestly for their long subway rides into the city. “I thought it bizarre that people of such means should live where they did when they could easily have afforded to live where I did … and get to the office or back as quickly as I could,” Joe wrote in
Now and Then.
He'd had enough subway rides as a kid shuttling to Times Square from Coney Island.

But many people thought the commute was worth it to jettison stress at the end of the day—the stress of handling multimillion dollar accounts (in 1956, seventy-three companies spent over ten million dollars each to advertise their products: soft drinks, cars, soaps, drugs, liquor, tobacco, and electrical supplies; Miles Laboratories spent nine million to push Alka-Seltzer; General Motors budgeted $162,499,248 to promote Cadillacs and Chevys; and Seagram's shelled out $31,547,043 to convince people their lives were poorer without Chivas Regal, Four Roses, and Wolfschmidt).

Stress also came from the hierarchical nature of most ad agencies. Someone was always fiercely watching your work. Mayer quotes a research company officer's account of a typical meeting: “The media people come first, usually about ten minutes early. Then about the time the meeting is supposed to start, the agency people show up and start kicking the media people around. The advertisers come about fifteen minutes late and for the rest of the meeting they kick the agency people around. Then everybody goes out for a drink.”

The original Time-Life Building overlooked Rockefeller Center. From his office, Joe could watch ice-skaters in the rink below. In 1957, Marilyn Monroe detonated a block of dynamite to signal the construction-start of a new home for Henry Luce's empire, closer to the Avenue of the Americas. The new building would be distinguished by its column-free interior space and the brushed stainless-steel paneling of its elevator banks. Eames chairs graced many of the offices.

Time
was a “man's world,” according to Jane Maas, who worked there briefly around the time Joe was there. “The lines were clearly drawn” in the editorial department, she said: “[W]omen researched the stories, men wrote them.” More than this, the organization was built around belief in the possibility of a “Great Man”—and the resident Great Man was Henry Luce (the Man of the Year,
every
year, to his employees). He had coined the phrase “The American Century,” and he saw himself at the center of the era, shaping politics, minds, and culture. “[E]verybody was aware of the … biases that flowed from Luce,” Maas said. “While I worked there,
Time
helped to defeat the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson when he ran for President in 1956.”

One morning, in the old Time-Life Building, Maas accidentally rushed into Luce's private elevator and stood there staring at his “beetle brows” as he made his way to his thirty-second-floor penthouse. Luce was a devout Presbyterian, and he used his elevator time to pray. The sudden presence of a woman in the midst of his sacred ritual merely confirmed his greatness, for it is to the Great Man that the severest temptations appear.

In spite of hard work and stress, Joe recalled his stint at
Time
as one long party. Autumn's World Series hoopla gave way to Thanksgiving and holiday celebrations, and then to the rites of spring. Each fall, “during the World Series there were personal table radios brought in and installed for the duration” in most offices, he wrote. This enabled people “to go on listening to every game at work when they could no longer do so at the bars in the nearby restaurants in which they had spent their long lunches.” Joie de vivre always “prevailed during business hours in [the] corridors in those days. The liquor would flow, the canapes would appear, the socializing would spill over after business hours into small groups in one nearby bar after another. Small wonder we were often reluctant to hurry home,” Joe said. “The women at work there were lively, educated, and bright.”

Meanwhile, Shirley was back at the Apthorp, tending two kids now: On May 11, 1956, at French Hospital, a son, Theodore Michael, had arrived. “We were pregnant together,” Shirley's cousin Audrey Chestney said, “she with Teddy, me with my son Peter. We had lunch every day at Schrafft's, and then went to the same doctor on Park Avenue. Shirley was very kind and fun to be with,” but the meetings at Schrafft's were among her few outings. Chestney felt sorry for her: “Joe didn't like to go to other people's houses—I guess it was boring for him.”

He was often on the road.
Time
held sales conferences at deluxe resorts in Florida, Bermuda, and Nassau. In the hotels, Bloody Mary and brandy Alexander mixes were provided for the men's breakfasts. On the golf course, where most of the men spent their afternoons, barrels of ice filled with beer stood next to the ball washers and tee boxes at each hole. Joe did not enjoy golf. He spent his days reading and writing. Executives jockeyed for the honor of giving keynote speeches at these conventions; generally, Joe skipped the ceremonies.

During his tenure at
Time,
the company reached a paid circulation of two million. A few executive officers discovered they were alcoholic (“[There] was a rumor … that the company maintained an ongoing arrangement with the Payne Whitney Clinic at New York Hospital for the discreet admission and treatment of important employees,” Joe wrote), and a few men, like Joe, kept getting promoted. He drew the attention of his competitors.

It was his job to provide a “platform” or “campaign theme” for a “purchase proposition.” Magazine ad space—at
Time's
level—sold for approximately $24,000 for a black-and-white page, $30,000 for a two-color page, and $35,000 for a four-color page. One day, working with a colleague named Pete Haddon, Joe kicked off a sales presentation to a stubborn client by setting up an easel in a boardroom. On the easel, he placed an illustration of the Red Queen from an old edition of
Through the Looking-Glass.
The queen was dragging Alice on the ground, shouting, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place!”

Word got around that Joe had thoroughly charmed his clients. Soon thereafter, a colleague asked to borrow the Red Queen. He was trying to persuade the Simmons mattress company to buy ad space in
Time
in order to reach motel and hotel owners (who subscribed to the magazine in large numbers). A second colleague wanted the Red Queen to help him sway the H. J. Heinz Company to purchase ads, thereby interesting coffee shop managers in its products. Joe got his first raise.

*   *   *

MEANWHILE, IN THE VILLAGE
, George Mandel “slept little and gamboled much,” he said, even though “seizures common to brain injury … harassed [his] every gesture.” The Village, with its “distinctive taverns and cafeterias swarming with bogus artists and drug addicts,” was “lucky” for him. In these environs, he found friendship and “romance,” especially with a woman named Miki, who became his wife, and of whom Joe was terribly fond.

Mandel had grown disillusioned with comic-book work. He wanted to be a fine artist, but the exploitive nature of the business also wore him down. Before the war, he had done most of his work with Funnies, Inc., a “packager” operating out of a small office on West Forty-third Street, near Times Square. A packager created comics on demand for various publishers. Lloyd Jacquet, Funnies, Inc.'s founder, couldn't afford to be a publisher, so he hired writers and artists to sell the products to others. He made his first sale to Martin Goodman, a pulp magazine mogul: a spectacular package featuring the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. It was called
Marvel Comics #1.