What I Remember (5): The Advertising Years

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ad Exec

This is an unedited transcript of my father, George, recalling his life, recorded in 1996-1997.

WHAT I
REMEMBER
Transcript of George Soter’s Memories
As Told to Tom Soter (1997)

I got into advertising because it was preferable to anything else. I had majored in sociology at the University of Chicago and if you major in sociology, about all you can do is teach sociology. I didn’t feel like being a teacher; I didn’t have the interest in it. So, after being at the university for five years, I wanted to get a job. I went to an employment agency and said, maybe I could get a job in advertising, since I had some writing ability and was a little clever. The woman at the agency said, “Well, what you do is you start in the mailroom at an advertising agency,” and that’s what I did. There were a couple of possibilities and the one I accepted and accepted me was at McCann-Erickson, which is a big international agency with an office in Chicago. It was one of the top 10 agencies. The headquarters was in New York, they had branches all over the country. It was one of the main agencies, it had been around for 50 years. And so I went to work in the mailroom, which felt a little demeaning after I’d been in college working on my Master’s.

You delivered letters and delivered packages. You sorted the mail that came in and passed it around to everybody. Got to know everybody and told everybody that you wanted… Everybody knew who you were and that you were personable and smart and got along with people and you were waiting for the first slot to be promoted to the next level. The next level being a traffic operator, who was the person who maintained an account of schedules in the traffic… what was needed by when, you’d go find the account executives that they had to give stuff to the writer and you’d tell the writer. And that’s what happened. After about six months in the mailroom, an opening came up in traffic and I was promoted to the Traffic Department. This was about 1951 or '52, when I was in my late twenties.

I was unprepared for any kind of other job and it seemed to me advertising didn’t require any prerequisites. And that was true; all you had to do was be relatively smart and personable and advertising was a much looser and less competitive, in a way, world at the time. So I got a job at McCann Erickson and after about two or three months in the mailroom I was promoted out of it into what was called the Traffic job. In Traffic you would coordinate the work of the various departments, Creative and Production and account people. You would see that the work got done, it was an organizing, scheduling thing. And there are people that were career traffickers who’ve done it for 20, 30 years. It was just a step up in the hierarchy of agencies.

Then after about six months in the Traffic Department, an opening came up which was called… I think it was called Copy Contact. You dealt with the clients and you also wrote copy. For the Standard Oil Company, that was like industrial trade accounts and things. So there was one person who was account executive, writer, editor. And that was my entry into the world of copywriting and from there I was promoted into the Copy Department. I had told everybody I wanted to be a writer, a copy writer, so they all knew that. And you would work on an industrial or trade account and you would do the account executive’s work. You’d go to meetings with the supervisor sometimes but it’s often alone with the client, determine what had to be done and then go back and do the creative part of it, the writing. So you became sort of like a one-man operation. And the biggest client of McCann Erickson at the time was Standard Oil of Indiana, which eventually became part of Esso. But at that point the Standard oil companies were divided—there was Standard Oil of Indiana and Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of Ohio, there was Standard oil of California; they were all separate companies. And I worked on that for a year or so and that was fairly successful.

The first bit of copy I wrote was some industrial ad for Standard Oil, it was a bunch of them. They were not terrifically creative, because you would be in trade magazines and you were fairly direct in what you did. It had to be clear and a little clever, but not… it didn’t call for any great stuff. But anyway, what happens, it was all kind of word of mouth and networking, although we didn’t use that term at the time. But you got to meet all those people and everybody knew who you were and the writers that you would know knew that you wanted to be a writer and so they kept looking out for you so the next time there was a spot… It was all done by word of mouth. Once you were in an agency and everybody got to know you… So everybody was sort of rooting for you if they liked you, tried to get you moved up, which is what happened.

It was more individual ads, rather than campaigns. The ad work was known with in the agency but it was not anything particularly famous, you just got your stuff done. And that’s where I met Tom Menaugh. I worked with him there—he was an upper level senior account person working on the Standard Oil account. We got along well and he was a big fan, he promoted me and then I got to meet people in the agency and started socializing with them, but we still met with the other people.

We got to be friendly, I was a little younger than he but we were about the same age level. He was an account executive, account supervisor. He was about maybe four or five years older than me. But we socialized, we went out to his house, and we met Lynn and their daughters. That’s when I met him. I did some pretty good work there and one of the writers from… a woman, Olive Lilihai, who moved on to another agency. She moved on to Needham and she promoted me at Needham… the creative director there was a smart guy, and pretty soon I had a job offer at Needham and that’s where I went.

There was no formal training, just learning as you went. In my experience, most of the people… Art directors go to art school. Writers usually are people who may have taken English or writing courses. People who take advertising courses don’t usually go to advertising agencies. I don’t know what happens, but very few… There’s not much of… There wasn’t and still isn’t much of an academic orientation. Now you might take things like marketing. Actually, what I learned in school, the thinking ability, the analytical stuff at Chicago and sociology was very good on analyzing. Looking at research and being analytical and trying to read stuff into statistics. I mean, I was comfortable with all of that and I guess my strength was analytical.

A Morton Salt ad, for Needham, written and drawn by George.

I was good at analyzing things. I can’t think of any more specifically… And also what you’ve got to do when you’re in advertising, you have to try to… There are certain standards within a given… Like if you’re dealing with cars, everybody’s doing certain things that are the car standards for the moment. And if you can find ways that are outside the mainstream of the way everybody’s talking, do things differently but still pertinently… You can do things differently that are in-pertinent, that aren’t relevant… But if you can do things that are different but pertinent to the given product then you sort of make breakthroughs when you change the standard of what’s being done. In any field there’s a certain standard of how things are being done at the moment and then they change at some point when some breakthrough advertiser does things completely differently. And then pretty soon everybody… It’s like Hollywood or any place else; when anybody breaks the pattern and succeeds, everybody tries to follow that new pattern. Until somebody breaks it again.

When I went over to Needham, oh, I worked on various things. Morton Salt, dog food, and a wide variety of stuff. Bell and Howell Cameras… and then the Cummins Diesel Company. I mean, it was funny, I wasn’t particularly mechanically inclined but I ended up doing a lot of mechanical stuff. Cummins Diesel was an interesting company. They’re sort of famous in America. The man who ran the company—I forget his name… It was in a town in Indiana that the company was there, it was a company town. Columbus, Indiana, or something like that. And he was very aesthetically oriented as far as his factories and everything; he was very avant-garde. He built beautiful factories architecturally and he influenced all the architecture in the town, the banks and everything. He hired the best well known architect to do avant-garde work and he wanted his advertisers to be unconventional because he was unconventional. He was sort of famous. We did some nice stuff for Cummins Diesel. They supplied diesel engines to other manufacturers, truck builders, marine uses. At any rate, after I was at Needham for a couple of years This is all print stuff.

It wasn’t difficult at all, it was interesting. And the way I’ve always gotten jobs in advertising is by word of mouth of someone I’d worked with who moves on to another place and suggests, “Why don’t you talk to George Soter?” And that’s the way it happened. And so there was an older copy writer woman who had been a mentor at McCann Erickson and she moved on to another agency in Needham and she talked to her boss and said, “There’s this young kid, George Soter, he’s a comer,” and so forth. So I got a call and I went and talked to them and I accepted a job at this other agency, Needham, which was… McCann Erickson was an international agency with a branch in Chicago and Needham had its home office in Chicago and was somewhat of an uncharacteristic agency because there were only two of three that were based in Chicago and may have had branch offices abroad… I mean, in other cities, not abroad. So after I was there for about a year, my boss said that they had an office in New York, it was small and they wanted to beef it up and make it grow and would I be willing to go to New York? My boss at that time felt that I was sophisticated and would do well in New York. And I of course said, “Certainly.” Effie was a little reluctant to make a move because she doesn’t like new, untried things and she kept worrying, how can she be in New York and go out in blue jeans? Thinking that if you’re in New York you live at the St. Moritz.

Within a few months I was in New York. This was 1955. I can’t remember what time of year it was, but what

George with clients, 1960s

.happened was I moved out to New York to find a place for us to live and to work. I lived in a hotel near… The agency was at 57th and 5th, a very nice location, right across from Tiffany’s. I was put up in a hotel somewhere in the 50s, 54th… for a couple of months and I started to work at the agency there. And I also spent a good deal of time looking for an apartment. And I decided after looking, where I wanted to live was on Riverside Drive because it reminded me of Chicago. We lived in a neighborhood that was reminiscent… It was the same style of buildings in Chicago. And it was right next to the University of Chicago and I liked Columbia, which was near Riverside Drive.

But when I’m looking for an apartment… apartments, as always, in New York, are very scarce. You look in the want ads on Sunday, by the time you got to anything, there were usually 10 people looking at it. So I decided I was going to look into every apartment building on Riverside Drive. I started on 72nd and I spent a couple of weeks and I walked into every building and asked the super or the doorman if there were any apartments and I gave my name to a couple of people. But I got all the way up to 122nd Street, I think and then I got a call from the super at a building at 114th, said he was going to have a vacancy. So I rushed over to look at it, it was on the 1st floor. The same apartment, but it was just one less bedroom. The bedroom that my parents lived in in 7c where we ended up having we didn’t have downstairs. But it was a nice apartment, big dining room, big living room and the rent was amazing, it was $375 a month. And in Chicago we were paying $135 a month for a three-bedroom apartment. Effie was a little worried about, could we afford this rent?

We moved to New York City in 1955. One of the things about Effie was she was concerned because for her, New York meant – she used to come to New York often with Xanthe – sort of shopping, and fancy weekends. They’d go to restaurants, and clubs, and Uncle John would take them to night clubs. And they stayed at the St. Moritz. So, for her, New York was Central Park South and Fifth Avenue. And in those days people didn’t wander around Central Park South and Fifth Avenue in blue jeans. And that was her concern. If it was a more formal place in her experience than which she had been living in Chicago.

A year before in Chicago – we had moved to a new apartment. And the office I was working at changed into new offices and they sold a lot of carpeting and things. I had just put down wall-to-wall carpeting in our Chicago apartment. It was like used carpeting, but it cost something to put it down and get it all. It was like the hype of doing something. And, as they got it down, two months later I was told that they wanted me to move to New York.

The main office was in Chicago. This was Needham, Louis, and Brorby who which then became later on Needham, Harper, and Steers, and then something else. But at that point, it was the second largest and most prestigious agency in Chicago. There were two agencies that were national. One was Leo Burnett, and the other was Needham, Louis, and Brorby. And Needham had opened a New York office a few years before because they had the Monsanto account for their detergents. Monsanto was a St. Louis company. They had the agency in Chicago. But Monsanto also had a plastics division in the East, and they wanted an agency in the East, and so Needham decided to open an office to service Monsanto and to try to get other accounts. Needhams were considered a prestige outfit. They were upscale and gentlemanly and correct. And they got a lot of referrals from David Ogilvy who, when there was something he couldn’t handle, he would tell them to try Needham.

David Ogilvy respected the agency and he would steer clients to Needham which was a nice position to be in. At one point – and after I moved here, I moved here to be just a writer. That was my title. Senior Writer, you know, just copywriter. Bill Bager was the copy chief. He was like an old time employee of Needham and had been transferred to New York when the office opened. And he was like a senior employee, but unfortunately he was a drunk. He didn’t drink during the day. I think he was a drunk, and he was also probably a closet homosexual. And he had a twin brother. And the twin brother lived in Chicago I think. Bill was the guy in – he must’ve been in his fifties or sixties when I was there – and he was a bachelor. The pattern of his life was, he was a workaholic during the day, he was very serious to a fault. And then at five or six o’clock, he’d go out and get sauced. And he always liked to have someone with him.

Since I was here alone, he’s say like on a Tuesday morning -- he’s say, “How about dinner tonight?” And he was my boss and I’d say, “Okay.” And then we would – his favorite place was a place on 53rd street called “Mercurio’s”. It was an Italian restaurant. And his favorite thing was linguini with clam sauce which we of course didn’t have in Chicago and that’s where I was introduced to it. But the pattern which was – I didn’t drink much, I would have a scotch maybe – but he drank about three or four martinis before dinner arrived. By the time the dinner came, he was inarticulate and it was just very painful cause there was no conversation, it was just sort of blubber, slobbery talk about nothing.

Effie hadn't moved to New York yet. The first three or four months I was here looking for an apartment she was here, but it became this, this guy became a nemesis for me and these drunken dinners. And, you know, after dinner he could hardly walk and he’d say, “Well, let’s go have a stinger or something someplace else.” And half the time I’d say no, but under the circumstances I couldn’t be absolutely rude, and I would end up having another drink and taking him in a taxi at some point so he’d go to his apartment. Anyway, that was very painful. I dreaded him coming in. He would be like – two or three times a week he’d come in and say, “How about dinner?” And sometimes I’d say, “I can’t make it tonight. We’ll have to do it the next time.”

George and Effie, early 1960s.

You know, he was very dependent on somebody because he was lonely. He didn’t know many people in New York and he was mid-western. Anyway, so that was very – trying to escape going to dinner with him was the bane of my existence. God, it was terrible. And as a footnote to that, a few years later, he went back to Chicago. He was fairly well off -- in fact they used to complain at the home office that he would get his pay checks and forget to cash them. You know, his secretary would find three or four pay checks in the back of his drawers. So he was not dependent on his salary – I mean, he was, but I mean he had enough money where he didn’t have to think about salary.

But the footnote part was that a few years later he moved back to Chicago. And then once a year he and his twin brother would come to New York to see theater and go to restaurants. They would have a New York week or something. And at that time, when they would come, he’d let us know, he’d call and say, “We’re gonna be here.” And I’d say, “We’ll have you for dinner one night.” And so one year they’d come to our house for dinner and the next year he’d ask me to pick out the newest, best restaurant. So there was Lutece. That had opened around that time and it got rave reviews. It was considered the ultimate in New York dining. So I told him about it. He said, “Well let’s go there.” And we were gonna be his guests for this. So, we went there. I, I called and made the reservation in my name. So the four of us went there and we got the menus. And some very fancy restaurants, only the host gets the menu with prices on it, the rest of them get the blank menu without prices so that people aren’t influenced by price. They should order just what they want.

So we get the menus, and because I had made the reservations, and I was Mr. Soter, I got the menu with the prices. And I made a little joke at the time which fell flat because none of them had prices. As I looked at the menu, I said, “Hey, this is a menu you have to read from right to left,” because the prices were extraordinary. And they all looked at me blank. They didn’t know they didn’t have – you know, and Effie looked at and she said, “Well I’ll have,” and she went through every one of the things, “I’ll have the so and so soup, and then I’ll have the such and such appetizer, and then I’ll have this, and I’ll have that.” And she ran through the whole thing. And Neil and his brother said, “Well, that looks good. I’ll have the so and so.” I was looking at the prices, adding them up in my mind and it looked like $100 per person.

At any rate, so I said, “What the hell?” So I ordered soup, and an appetizer, and salad, and the whole thing. And then we all had dessert and coffee. So when the bill came, and it was before the era of credit cards, Bill who was sort of a – he was a skinny waftish sort of a guy – turned pale. He didn’t have enough money. He and his brother were whispering. And I said, “Do you need some money?” And they had to borrow money from me. To take us to this fancy restaurant, which is must’ve been like $400 or $500 for the four of us. That’s in the fifties you realize, that’s huge. But I thought that was sort of funny. I don’t think we went to a restaurant with them again, though.

I was a copywriter. And it wasn’t terribly interesting. Joe LaRosa was there. He was a young art director and there were other – another art director there was a guy named Ken Hack who recently died, but who made sort of a name for himself doing picture books that were basically they were arty photos of men. You could find oversized books. And he became sort of well known doing that. That was many years later. In fact, he had designed I think, he designed our first Christmas card. But then, at one point, after I was there a year or so, we got – through a man that had been hired there that had a connection – a chance to pitch for the Renault account. And the people in Chicago, Mr. Needham was sort of a mid-western isolationist. He was the head of his company and fairly well read and sophisticated and he had never been to Europe. And, did I ever tell you this story? –

I’m jumping around a little bit, Mr. Needham, a couple years later and his wife were gonna go to Europe. They were gonna do sort of an old fashioned grand tour. And he was no longer very active in the business and they’d never been to Europe. They were gonna go to England, they were gonna go to Paris, Rome, and he wanted to go to Greece because as far as he was concerned that was sort of the start of things. So, they contacted me and I said, “Oh, yeah, my uncle there will be delighted to squire you around and what have you.” And I wrote to – they said they would go on such and such a date. And I wrote to Costa, and I said, “This guy who is the president of the agency is coming to Greece with his wife, and they’re gonna be there whatever time it is and it would be nice if you could take them out some night.” And also I said, “Mr. Needham likes young girls around. So, if you might have a young girl.” And Costa wired me back in Greek, “Is he supposed to fuck her?” That was Uncle Costa. The upshot was that when the Needham’s, they went there, and then they came back and they were very delighted with their trip. And they had me for dinner one night. And I thought it was a funny story. And so I told it to him to my chagrin because he was absolutely shocked.

He didn’t have a sense of humor about it because at that point, people didn’t go around saying “fuck” as easily as they do nowadays -- you know -- or as compulsively as they do nowadays. So he grew red in the face and was very unhappy. I think I sort of lost him at that point. That might have affected my career. I don’t know. But, at any rate, I thought that was, I thought it was funny to get a telegram with just those four words in it was funny. And Costa didn’t mean it – he meant it because it’s a joke. It’s funny. You know, to get a letter from your nephew in America saying, “My boss is coming and he likes young girls.” You’d think that’s very cosmopolitan literally. And I meant it quite innocently. So, we got this chance to pitch the Renault account. And, what happened when we pitched it was the French people that we pitched to had -- the man who ran Renault in this country, who was a very sort of -- had been a charming man, and what have you – had just been killed in an airplane crash. And the company was in deep mourning. And they moved up some guy who had no experience with advertising, or marketing, or anything to be the president. But the first thing they had to do was to get an agency. They had a little agency which was not very good. In fact, Harry Steinfield had been the art director at this little agency that had the Renault account.

We did some work and pitched it and sort of by accident by my demeanor and just the way I performed, all the French people related to me because I was sort of excitable, and passionate and what have you, as opposed to these hard to read mid-western wasp types, you know, who were very cold blooded. And for a Frenchman, they didn’t know what to think of them. So suddenly, I became the big star on this thing. And we did one. We did our first campaign which was terrifically wonderful. But they liked it. It introduced the car with the balloons. It wasn’t the one with all the type. It introduced the line, “Driving is fun again.”

George's first big campaign: his award-winning Renault campaign, "Le Car Hot."

The funny thing was I was working on my first car campaign and I didn’t know how to drive. And the agencies, all these waspy middle westerners were very anxious since I’d became kind of a key on it not to let the client know that I didn’t drive. In fact they very quickly signed me up for driving lessons. But I didn’t have much interest in cars. That helped my take on the campaign. I had a lot of interest in France, but no interest in cars per say. That doesn’t make any difference. What you have to do is sort of analyze what everybody else is doing, where you are, where you’d like to end. A person who’s really into cars will be use more car lingo. That sometimes is an error because people who buy cars are people who aren’t necessarily into car lingo. You get that from the minority. That’s a nice market. The general population has other interests for buying a car. But at any rate, that’s a whole other philosophy.

It was a moment that was good for the agency and the car industry because of suddenly it became very in to have a little foreign car. This was the era when Volkswagen and Renault were at the same time competing, and they were being introduced at the same time, and here they were very un-American cars. They were tiny, and not gas guzzlers, and they were just a new fad that hit the country – the little foreign cars. And they were, pretty soon there were VWs, there were Renaults, and Fiats, and Saabs, and Volvos, and all this little, little car market hit the country at the same time in the early sixties and was a phenomenon because they sold very well and did very well.

One of the problems was the servicing of them. There wasn’t quite enough, you know, it wasn’t on a national basis that people had brought them – the Germans, and the French, and the Swedes weren’t used to the American area, the size of America. And that you had to have dealers all over the country and all that. Any rate, but the second campaign we did became a very noted phenomenon, the one with all the type.

It was – instead of – at that point, most American cars either used flatwork illustration. There was a cliché of car advertising, how they did it. And this went against the cliché. The art director in fact, instead of using the conventional car photographer – there were car photographers that knew how to photograph cars – he used a fashion photographer and very often photographed a car in a studio rather than out on the street. Actually, the other cars didn’t do them on the street.

The campaign gave me a reputation. Because we won prizes, it was a high profile account. It won the Art Directors Club gold medal of Campaign of the Year, which was like the outstanding campaign of all advertising, from the Art Directors Club. It was different than most car advertisements at the time. The other big breakthrough account at the time was Volkswagen, which also was very different. Volkswagen advertising was done by Doyle Dane Bernbach and it’s still famous to this day, that campaign, sort of a breakthrough kind of an intellectual, smartass, unconventional advertisement. Up until then most car ads showed beautiful pictures of the cars. Very often they were paintings instead of photography. And they were essentially very boring, they all said pretty much the same thing and the Volkswagen ads were very different and our ads were very different than the Volkswagen ads.

The "Le Car Hot" campaign was so popular that it was parodied in Mad magazine.

The big selling thing about this car was that it was French, which was the positive thing and the negative thing. Americans generally don’t like industrial products, mechanical products that come from France or the Latin countries. They trust cars and engines and egg beaters and anything that’s mechanical that comes from the Scandinavian or the Nordic countries, Germany. They consider them the engineer experts. The Latin countries, France and Italy—primarily France—really are considered style leaders, fashion leaders and fragrance… They deal mostly in food but not so much for mechanical parts. That’s the stereotypical American response. So our thing was to try to take advantage of the stereotypes that people had about France, that it was entertaining, it was fun to be in France, that it was fashionable, that it was in and sort of talk about the mechanical features but not make your ads look very engineering or mechanical. And that’s what we did, they were fairly successful.

Most people who were car buffs looked at cars like car buffs—they spoke to other car buffs about car features. Horse power and engines. Tires. And I wasn’t interested in that. So that was mentioned but it wasn’t the focus. And it was also true of the Volkswagen ads. Their focus was economy but they did it in a way that was different from anybody else. We were the two different car… And our big competitor was Volkswagen. Not only were we different from other cars, but we had to be very different from Volkswagen. And what we were doing, it worked. It worked for a number of years, so that the budget went up from… When we started, it was $500,000 a year and a few years later they were spending $5 million a year. So it was a very big budget chunk.

At any rate, it was unconventional and it broke the mold. It was very sophisticated and it won the key advertising award of 1961 which was New York Art Director’s Club Gold Medal, which meant it was the best campaign of the year. And it got a lot of notoriety. And the agency was kind of nervous because from being the writer, I was suddenly the controlling force on this account. The people at Renault wouldn’t do anything unless they checked with me first whether, “Is life all right,” or is “Look better.” Or things like that. Those really weren’t my department, but they still wanted to know – have my opinion because I was always forthcoming and I would argue with them. I was not a cold presenter like the other people.

In fact, I guess it was the second year or so – what Renault did, because they were a national company and the ocean liners were owned by France national, they would plan a trip for all the dealers in America, and the agency staff, and personnel to Renault, to go to France in September when the International Auto Show took place in Paris. And they would put everybody on an ocean liner, and have meetings for five days aboard the ocean liner. And then you’d go to the car show in Paris. And then you’d do like a five day bus tour with everybody down to the Riviera and stops in between. So it was a terrific thing. And they invited me to go, but they didn’t want anybody else. Meaning, they didn’t want the head of the agency who was a jerk named Mitchell, and they didn’t want, they didn’t want the account man, or anybody else, they just wanted me.

What happened was that the agency was a little bit nervous about… The client was directing everyone towards me, I was… They considered me Mr. Agency, even though there were people above me, but they didn’t like to deal with the people above me. So they would direct media questions to me, we had a good rapport. The French people responded to the fact that I was more… more what? More passionate, more visceral as opposed to the Midwestern types who were a bunch of George Bushes with very measured, calculated thought. And the French people didn’t understand them, couldn’t relate to them. Through the years there were all sorts of things—there’d be a sales meeting in France and normally it wouldn’t be the creative guys who would go to this stuff, it would be the account executives and account supervisors. So the client wanted me to go and they didn’t want the other guys. They’d invite me, which meant that they would pay the expenses. So the other guys, they had to go too and they’d pay their own expenses. Anyway, so there was this constant nervousness about this important account being in the hands of this volatile kid.

Yeah. The agency was a little hysterical, “How could they send this now getting to be important account with just this kid writer?” So they said, “Well, Mitchell,” who was the head of the agency, and another man who was the account executive would go on the trip too and they’d pay their own expenses.

And then at some point the people at the client, at Renault, changed and then after a few years, even though the car was selling very well initially, it developed some problems, sales problems. And also, the big thing about cars is that you have to have dealerships which take care of repairs. That was the big… If you’re going to be a national car thing, you’ve got to have… If you were somewhere in Arkansas, you needed to have a dealer nearby where you could go get your car fixed that you didn’t have to drive 600 miles for. So that was one of the big… The dealer network was one of the big drawbacks. And then the cars, although handsome and good, were really not made for the kind of hard driving that they got in America. So there were things wrong with them.

There was a lot of rising very quickly in the ranks. That’s the way that stuff goes if you get an account that deals – at that point, Renault came in with a bunch of first year of a half-a-million dollars, and within three years they were doing five million dollars. And it was a significant jump and it made the agency in New York -- that was the first account that they had that was over a million dollars. All the others were little trade accounts. One of them, as I’m pouring it out to you, was a little company in Connecticut I think called Worthingon. They made air conditioners and heavy equipment. And the campaign we did for them used Harvey Schmidt who was the man who at that point – he was an illustrator, but he was with his partner from Texas writing The Fantasticks and that was when that connection was made. Joe LaRosa had hired him. But at any rate, so we had contact for about a year while he was doing the artwork which was very nice – like oil paintings, industrial things, you know, that style. At any rate, so, that was it. That was my first big campaign.

I left the agency in 1962. I had always thought that I was hot. And I was shocked because I was fired after a presentation. We had an intern agency and each year the Chicago people would come and present what had happened at the agency in Chicago, what their, and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, here’s where we are, and this is what we’ve done. And then we’d make a presentation about the New York agency – what we did. In the meanwhile, we get the Standard Oil account at the time we had Renault too which came from Ogilvy And we did a very nice, nice work for them too. I made a speech and I guess I was a little sarcastic about – I don’t know – about the agency not having done certain things, I don’t remember the details of it now. The one guy, Mel Brorby, who was sort of the silent partner, and he was perhaps the most narrow-minded of all of them, apparently took great offense at what I said and wanted me fired. And so, it became a big to do and a week or so later I was told that I was fired. So that, that really shocked me.

The agency was run from Chicago and we had to keep reporting to Chicago. I had other accounts here; Standard Oil, other things. And every year we would do… There would be an annual meeting where Chicago would come and tell us what they did, what had happened in the past year January now and then I would… we would tell them what was going on in the New York, what we had done and show things. It was like an annual presentation. And I was a little snippy at this presentation of what we had done. I complained about what we could have done better and so Brorby from Chicago didn’t like my attitude and what I was saying. It was a little kind of revolutionary, I guess. Not violent, just… and so they fired me. This guy did.

It’s a matter of hubris. I felt like I was king of the roost, you know, nobody could fire me cause I was doing so well. Some of them probably resented that, too. The thing was, in the meanwhile, at some point before that, the guy named Mitchell that I said came on this trip to France, so there was a second trip the following year, and then the agency was doing very well. And apparently everybody felt in Chicago, the powers that be, that this guy Mitchell – who was a bit of an oaf – had lost control of the agency cause there was me sort of running things and being hot shit. So they replaced him with a guy that I knew from Chicago who was a hateful type. His name was Steinhoff – was German too, and a youngish man, a little older than me, but nevertheless, but a very by the numbers kind of a guy. And there’s a funny story – because he came in and his agenda was to take over control of the account, the key accounts and of the agency. But here I was still the top man on the Renault account.

I’ve got to back track a little bit. When I was in Berlin during the War, that’s where I met Tom Wellington, and we used to have – we didn’t have much work to do, we had some work – but we used to have party nights. We lived in apartments in places like Queens in Berlin. It’s sort of four, five story large apartment buildings. And we’d have parties and what have you, and the parties weren’t just – this is all a fairly intellectual crowd that was there then – and they weren’t just Americans. There were a few Russians, or other allied forces. And one night, there were a couple of French guys and one of them was – I don’t know, Tom worked with him I guess – a man, a very nice man named Claude Harp from Paris. And we had been at parties several times together and knew each other.

At any rate, back in Chicago, Steinhoff was supposed to take charge of the agency. And at some point, we got the news that the man that was running Renault was being transferred back to Paris and a new man was being sent over to run the office. And this meant that my key relationship was disappearing, and there’d be a new man, and he could then relate to him more directly. So we went. We had a meeting scheduled with Renault for me, and the art director, and Steinhoff, and a couple of other people to meet the new man from Paris. And, so Steinhoff who now – he was the head of the agency – we went in and he was gonna run the meeting and I was gonna be sort of like relegated to the copywriter. So, the guy who was leaving thanked the agency and he gave the credentials of the new guy and he said, “I’d like to introduce you to him.” And the guy came in and I looked at him and he looked at me and he said, “George!” And I said, “Claude!” And we were the guys that had been together in Berlin five or six years ago. And you should’ve seen Steinhoff’s face. This whole plot of taking over from this kid was suddenly erupted because here now were two old war buddies that were gonna be –

Isn’t that funny? And so Claude and I continued. Claude continued to call me, and we saw him, and we had social doings. He’s visit at our house, we visited his. He had a terrific wife. And then after a few years he was transferred back to Paris to be in charge of their Renault Marine Division. Unfortunately, he and his son were killed in a boating accident off Normandy. And I saw his wife a couple of times. But he was young, like in his late thirties, or early forties. He was a very nice man. So, that brought me to being unemployed. And the agency was really drippy, too, because I was fired on February 14th. On Valentine’s Day, and my mother had – and they all knew this because the agency was sort of tight – was in her final days. She was in the hospital and she died a couple of days later. So here I was unemployed, a dying mother – dead mother, a couple of kids – what am I gonna do? And that’s when I said, “I think we’ll go to Greece.”

I decided to go to Greece for the summer and take the family and the kids. Because I had accrued a little money, and I convinced myself that the summer was the worst time to be looking for a job. Then, I got a call in Greece in September from Kurt Barion, a man that I had who had hired me at Needham in Chicago had moved to New York and he was looking for some writers. Barion was a well known creative guy, a director, he was hired to work at Lennon & Newell and he needed some help and he called me in Greece and I said I’d be back after Labor Day and I’d start work. I never looked for another job. So that worked out very well; I didn’t have to look for a job and I got a job offered to me while I was in Greece.

When I came back I worked for Lennon & Newell. That’s where Leo Kelmenson was working. And then when he moved down to Kenyon & Eckhart, he wanted me to follow, so I followed him there.

A SELECTION OF GEORGE'S ADS

Renault, 1961

Needham house ad, 1950s

Yale Record parody of "Le Car Hot"

Green Spot Sprinklers, 1950s

Cavafy book reading, 2008