Thinking Small (37 page)

But now he left again, driving forty miles out of the Alps, Lecomte still in tow. And the British finally took interest in the situation, though it was not quite in the manner Ghislaine had hoped. While Lecomte was eventually banished from Germany, Ghislaine himself was also arrested and handed over to intelligence officers, where he was questioned constantly for nearly a week and then placed in an internment camp. Once again, the British wondered at his excellent English, and they were also suspicious about what was really taking place between Porsche and the French. Karl Rabe, Aloisia, and Louise waited back in Austria, still with no word or idea of what was happening. Now
four Porsche men were in prison and under examination, and all of it was over the plans for one little car.

Meanwhile,
back in the Grey Advertising offices in New York, there had been little response to the memo Bill had sent, his version of
The Things We Think and Do Not Say.
Bill was realizing that there were simply a lot of people in the advertising business who were not ready for his ideas, and there was a reason that people think things they are afraid to say: Taking such a risk can be potentially alienating.
After the memo he sent about “blazing new trails,” there was no outpouring of agreement, no collective sigh of relief; if he’d thought his memo was going to change anything at Grey, he was wrong. Nevertheless, there were a few who understood what he wrote. They came to him quietly over the next few months, and they came up with a plan. If they couldn’t change things at Grey, they probably wouldn’t have much luck anywhere else: It was doubtful any
big agency would have given Bill’s memo a serious look. The more they talked about it, the more they realized that if they really wanted to change things, they’d have to strike out on their own.

One of the first people to express solidarity with Bill was the calm and cool Phyllis Robinson.
¹
She’d originally been in the fashion promotion section, but Bill had noticed her creative work and brought her into copywriting with him. Robinson was talented, young, and confident; she didn’t have to search for ideas, they just came. She’d
graduated from Barnard College in 1942 and began her career writing plays and musicals around Broadway. She had poise, a no-nonsense but elegant approach, evident in the colorful silk scarves she would wear to complement a simple gray dress, evident in the way she listened neutrally but completely and then gave an honest opinion of what
she’d heard. Advertising felt simple to her. She was just good at it. Becoming part of the senior management at DDB seemed
a natural step: The fact that she was a woman didn’t matter at all. It might have been unusual at the time, but it didn’t feel unusual to the unique team that was slowly forming.

Robert Gage was a warm exceptionally talented young man who also strongly identified with what Bill had written, and he too had found great inspiration in the work of Paul Rand. If Rand had introduced Bill to the idea of collaboration and given him the desire to write copy in a way that could aspire to be artistic, then it was Gage, in his white shirts and simple ties, his hair neatly parted and combed but still unable to resist a curl, often taking pensive drags of a
cigarette, that made Bill’s ideas come to life. It’s likely that Bill knew Gage would agree with the memo before he even sent it: His respect for Gage, and the interaction the two had at Grey, was one of the things that had given Bill his confidence in the first place.

Phyllis could write. Gage had the artistic instinct. Bill had the guiding inspiration and energy. But they needed partners, and preferably ones who could understand and generate capital. They needed someone with a strong mind for the practical side, someone who understood the business from an accounting point of view. And they needed someone experienced in dealing with clients, someone older, wiser; someone with contacts, someone who knew the field.

Ned Doyle had already realized Bill Bernbach had potential. While his first impression of Bill was of “a nice little guy, very creative, with gold-rimmed glasses, a little on the scared side,”
²
working with him at Grey and watching him rise through the ranks, Doyle couldn’t deny Bill’s unusual outlook and growing confidence. Like
Bill, Doyle’s path to advertising hadn’t been clear-cut. He was the vice president of business accounts at Grey, but before that he’d been a captain in the Marine Corps and fought in the Pacific Rim during the Second World War. He’d played quarterback for his high school football team, and had gone to Fordham and studied law while juggling a job selling
magazine space. He passed the bar in 1931, but stayed with selling magazine space
because, oddly enough, he could make much more money there. Women were always attracted to Doyle, and he was attracted right back. The guys around the industry might say he was a player, a joker, but there was no one else they’d rather hear a story from, and when it came down to it, they always knew his word was word they could trust. Doyle seemed to know just about everybody in town, and nearly everyone was happy to take his call. He was good company, and genuine too. He
didn’t like flattery, and he didn’t say things just to please. He knew he went overboard with the drinking and the flirting at times, and he’d admit as much.

Bill looked up to Doyle in those years. Doyle was heroic, large in both physical stature and self-assurance. At Grey, Bill would often drop in and sit with Doyle in his office, learning from Doyle but also sharing his own ideas, using Doyle as a sounding board. And as Doyle listened, he began to realize that this “nice little guy” wasn’t so timid after all, that he could really identify with this man. So when Bill approached him about the new
agency, Doyle was more than ready to go in as a partner. They now had Doyle and Bernbach for the masthead, but there would also be one more name.

Ned Doyle had once worked with Maxwell Dane at
Look
magazine. Dane was a bit of a bore in some people’s eyes—George Lois would describe him as “the agency bean counter”
³
—but his sober business sense and disciplined ideas about work and money would prove essential to any success the agency might have. Dane knew
something about media and mass communication: he’d been the retail promotion manager at the
New York Evening Post
and he’d help to arrange the first “top of the hour” news bulletins during the war. Not too long before Bill sent his memo, Dane had opened up his own advertising agency, a small office in an attic room off Madison Avenue. But while Dane had the business sense, he didn’t seem to have the creativity or the drive to make his
agency a success. Doyle knew Dane was looking for some help, and he called him up and talked with him
about Bill. Soon, Dane was ready to go in as a partner too. He even offered the use of his office space—so long as they didn’t mind that it was a floor and a half up from the last elevator stop! Bill was lucky to have found Doyle and Dane, and he knew it. In a later interview, he would admit one of his biggest advantages was “having with me
partners who did what I didn’t do well,”
⁴
going on to say DDB would’ve been “a bankrupt agency” if he’d been running it himself. But the success was yet to come; in 1947 they were still looking for their first account, and Bill had an idea. Maybe, just maybe, he could get Ohrbach to go with them.

Bill hadn’t seen his father in years. His brothers and sisters had tried to bring the two back together again, but his mother simply refused to acknowledge her youngest son, and his father—so independent in all other areas of his life—found it too hard to go against his wife’s wishes when it came to this. It was no doubt a crushing situation for them all. As a child, Bill had loved his mother immensely. She’d filled the house with
music and books, memories he still carried with him. He’d been an exceptional piano student when he was young—his mother
had never ceased to brag about him—and though he rarely played the piano anymore, he was always quick to quote Beethoven or Thelonius Monk. True to their estrangement, though, Bill never uttered a word about his parents or his personal past. It was one subject that would draw only a blank and icy stare, even from his own
sons.

Nathan Ohrbach probably reminded Bill a little bit of his father. Ohrbach was a first-generation American, a Jewish businessman whose presence filled a room both literally and figuratively. He was a self-made success story, the owner of a flourishing clothing store in New York that he’d opened in 1923 under his own name. He was used to getting what he wanted, and he’d learned how to play it hard and smart. But he was also, like so many in Bill’s
life, a man who was not afraid to take a well-thought-out chance. Especially on someone he liked.

Ohrbach was a client at Grey, and he’d already worked with Robert Gage and Bill. The Ohrbach’s campaign had originally been in the hands of Bill and Paul Rand at Weintraub. Ohrbach liked the way Bill was ready and willing to listen and learn. But part of the reason he said he’d go with DDB was probably because he liked the idea of being their most important customer. For Bill, this was an essential account, the only way to pay the first
month’s rent, and Ohrbach knew it. So he went with them. As the years passed, Bill’s relationship with him would come to mean as much as any other in his professional life. In fact, one piece of advice that sprang from Ohrbach’s lips was to become the keystone to DDB’s approach: At one meeting, as the men were discussing the “angle” from which to develop their next ad, Ohrbach quieted the room:
I’ve got a great gimmick,
he
said.
Let’s tell the truth.

On paper, Bill knew starting his own advertising agency did not look like the best move, but he felt he had to trust his intuition. “Only true intuition, jumping from knowledge to an idea, is yours and yours alone,” he’d later say. Bill had an idea, and he was ready to take responsibility for it. Come what may, he was ready to follow through. Perhaps he remembered something
Rand had once told him, about there being no exception
to the impulse of creation. Or maybe it was something he’d heard Einstein say about how the only real and valuable asset we have is our intuition. But then again, maybe Bill simply recalled that advice Grover Whalen had given him all those years ago when Bill and Evelyn had first fallen in love:
Follow your heart.
It hadn’t been easy, but so far he had no regrets.

In 1947,
the “democracy versus communism” question was beginning to burn. In a speech by Harry Truman, given around the same time Bill sent his memo out at Grey, the American president compared these two worldviews: “One way of life is based upon the will of the majority,
¹
and is
distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.” The debate raged around politics and economics, but both those things
were inherently dependent on another aspect that went less noticed at the time: education. Not necessarily education in schools or universities—though that too—but rather education as
access to ideas
and
fostering the conditions whereby people can learn.
In practice, a very real difference in the Red Army–style Communism and the American-style democracy was the freedom of access to new information and new ideas, i.e., the freedom to be curious.
Stalin’s method of Communism wanted to squelch curiosity and ideas—seeing them as threats—while American-style democracy wanted to embrace them as assets. The American administration had the understanding that in the
long run a country is only as strong as its ideas, and ideas only flourish with freedom. The administration might not always live up to that bar, but at least the bar had been set.