MAN WITH A BLACK BAG

by

Greg Taubeneck

THE CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB

22 January 2007

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Man With A Black Bag

I read an anecdote once about a town that loses its power. A complete outage.

Nobody can figure out how to repair the power apparatus until someone remembers an old, old electrical engineer who had installed the system many years before. The town fathers go out and find him and he walks into the plant, takes out a little mallet, finds a certain switch, goes tap-tap-tap, and the lights go back on all over town.

The old gent sends the town a bill for a thousand dollars and two cents, itemized as follows: tapping, 2 cents.

Knowing where to tap, $1,000.

If for that unreliable power plant we substitute our vast, unreliable consumer nation, then I propose that the foremost tapper of the 20^th century was the Chicago advertising man, Leo Burnett.

When Leo tapped, cash registers resounded, mighty brands were born, client companies got rich, and extraordinary value – cultural as well as monetary – was created for some of mankind’s most mundane goods and services.

The products for which Leo and his company did their tapping were commonplace and often generic: canned peas, breakfast cereals, cake and cookie dough, cat food, canned tuna, washing machines, auto insurance, soap, cigarettes. But the transformation of those products, through words and pictures, into famous and hugely profitable brands was unmatched, collectively, by any other advertising agency in the world.

The Jolly Green Giant, Tony the Tiger, Snap-Crackle-and-Pop, The Pillsbury Doughboy, Morris the Cat, Charlie the Tuna, The Lonely Maytag Repairman, The Good Hands of Allstate, the friendly skies of United and, most successfully of all, The Marlboro Man all emerged from the large black bags that were often so overstuffed the wonder was that Leo could lift them.

In December of 1998, Time magazine cleared its throat importantly and declared its choices for the most influential business geniuses of the century: Henry Ford, David Sarnoff, Akia Morita, Bill Gates and ninety-six others. Only one advertising man made the list, and it was Leo.

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There were two runners-up to Leo on Time’s list, David Ogilvy and William Bernbach, and apparently the race was close and contentious. Certainly Ogilvy, Bernbach and Burnett were the big three of advertising in the second half of the century and they could not have been more different, one from the other.

David Ogilvy was the tweedy, donnish, rather snooty product of British boarding schools, who arrived in the U.S. in 1938 with ten dollars in his pocket, having washed dishes in a Paris hotel kitchen and sold cooking stoves door-to-door in Scotland. However, also in his pocket was a letter of introduction from his cousin, Rebecca West, to the famed columnist Alexander Woollcott -- not a bad counterweight to that ten-spot.

Ogilvy considered himself an “advertising classisist.” He created the Man In The Hathaway Shirt, Commander Whitehead, for Schweppes tonic water, and wrote the quintessential car headline, “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock.” (Incidentally, Ogilvy once said that when he presented the headline the chief engineer of Rolls Royce fussed, “We really must do something about that clock.”)

Bill Bernbach was a product of the Bronx, a subway commuter to NYU and, in fact, a subway rider far into his career as founder and face of the legendary Doyle Dane Bernbach agency, not of Madison Avenue but of West 43^rd.

From Bernbach’s outfit, mainly, came the glorious creative revolution of advertising in the 1960s, propelled by Avis’s “We Try Harder,” Life cereal’s

“Hey Mikey,” and above all, by Doyle Dane’s work for the Volkswagen Beetle,

which turned auto advertising on its head with headlines like, “Think Small,” and, “Lemon,” and achieved the remarkable feat of making a Nazi automobile the drive of choice among New York Jewish intellectuals.

In the early sixties Ogilvy wrote a best-seller, Confessions of an Advertising Man, and became famous outside the business. Bernbach attained god-like stature among writers and art directors within the business. And then there was Leo, the plain-speaking, self-effacing small-town boy of the Midwest.

In some ways, Leo had less in common with his fellow titans of advertising than with that other Midwestern small-town boy who made good on a grander scale, Walt Disney. Reviewing Neal Gabler’s new biography of Disney,

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New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani describes Disney as “an ambitious workaholic, driven more by perfectionism than by dreams of entrepreneurial power.” That sounds a lot like Leo, who said, “ Whatever success I have enjoyed, I attribute to a deep personal sense of responsibility to…the job at hand, with a passion for thoroughness, often at considerable personal sacrifice, and an unyielding intolerance of sloppy thinking, sloppy work and almost-good-enough jobs.”

Let’s push the Disney-Burnett comparison further. Disney created a magic kingdom. Leo Burnett created many. The cultural historian, James Twitchell, has written of advertising as a magical culture, the source of mythic powers that reside not on Mount Olympus but in ordinary manufactured products, from the Jolly Green Giant to the Nike swoosh. In his provocative book, Adcult USA, Twitchell quotes Leo addressing a convention of colleagues in 1955: “After all the meetings are over, the phones have stopped ringing and the vocalizing has died down, somebody finally has to get out an ad, often after hours. Somebody has to stare at a blank piece of paper. This is probably the very height of lonesomeness. Out of the recesses of his mind must come words which interest, words which persuade, words which inspire, words which sell. Magic words.”

A few years after that speech just one of Leo’s lonely men wrote two of the most magical sets of advertising words ever: “Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.” And, “Fly the friendly skies of United.” Both were conjured by Tom Laughlin, a copywriter superb, modest, and anonymous, as most advertising writers and art directors are.

Leo believed in magic words, but he also understood the power of magic imagery. In its heyday, Leo’s agency was often called Disney East in the trade for its menagerie of advertising critters. But the magic wasn’t just put in service to the clients. Unlike his fellow titans of the trade, Leo Burnett also created a vivid environment of imagination within his own company.

In the late summer of 1972, I walked up Randolph Street just east of Michigan Avenue and into the sweeping lobby of the Prudential Building, took the elevator to fourteen, and entered Leo’s world for the first time.

All around me were objects rich with totemic meaning: bowls of fat red apples on every reception desk, thick black Alpha 245 pencils with soft and

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smudgy lead and, irritatingly, no erasers. In the hallways were oversized black portfolio cases by the dozen, heavy with the agency’s output and lugged to out-of-town client meetings by hapless junior account men. On desks were hospital wall green memo paper bearing the logo of a hand extending upward toward six stars, below which was the inscrutable warning, “Do not give or receive oral instructions.”

The apples had been present from the agency’s opening day in August, 1935, set out as a gesture of welcome and quickly mocked by a Chicago newspaper columnist who predicted, “It won’t be long before Leo Burnett is selling apples on the street corner instead of giving them away.” By the time I arrived the apples were on reception desks of every Burnett office around the world. Almost a half-million of them were being devoured every year. It was said that Burnett bought more apples than Jewel and Dominick’s combined.

The big black pencils were on every conference table, lined up next to pads of blank paper. Leo’s father had used these Alpha 245’s to lay out ads for his dry goods store. After dinner, Noble Burnett spread big sheets of wrapping paper over the dining room table and went to work with pencil and yardstick, Leo at his side. Leo used those Alphas the rest of his life, and we Burnetters followed suit.

The black bags contained the most important thing in Leo’s world – the ads.

Most every evening, Leo would stuff an oversized bag with layouts, memos, reports and surveys and carry it home. Jack O’Keiffe, an agency co-founder, remembered the sight: “Because he was short, the cases almost dragged to the ground. Yet until his very latest years he was miffed if anyone even offered to give him a hand to help carry the load downstairs and into a cab. On seeing him walk out of his office with the old beat-up gray hat on his head, usually pulled down on his ears, wearing a light raincoat that was slightly askew, and carrying his bag, one couldn’t help wondering, ‘where is that big black bag going with that little man?’”

Of course, other agencies used portfolio bags, but to imagine David Ogilvy himself hauling a big black bag boggles the mind.

The star-reaching symbol was also there at the beginning. O’Keiffe had gotten the idea after finding a passage in the Aeneid: “So man scales the stars.”

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(Who knows, Virgil might have made it big in advertising). Leo said the intention was to evoke an enterprise “working harder and aspiring higher than all other advertising agencies in the world had ever worked or aspired.” Later, he added this thought: “When you reach for the stars, you may not get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud, either.” The final drawing was done by Leo’s friend, Walter Dorwin Teague, the great industrial designer of Kodak cameras and the storied Marmon automobile.

Sadly, on that hot August day in 1972 as I took in the wonders of Leo’s world, its creator was present in spirit only. Leo had passed from living legend to just plain legend fourteen months earlier. The 79-year-old workaholic had come into the office as usual on Monday, June 7^th, 1971, and mentioned to his old partner O’Keiffe that he planned to cut back to three days a week downtown, still working at home, of course. Back home that evening on his Lake Zurich farm, he fixed a drink, sat down with his wife, had a heart attack and died on the spot.

Leo was gone but pictures of him were everywhere, looking – there is no better word for it – gnomish.

What is your prototype of the slick, glad-handing advertising man? Perhaps it’s Clark Gable in the 1946 movie, The Hucksters. Or Tony Randall in any number of 1950s films set in the ad biz. Or more recently, Mel Gibson, oozing charm from every pore in What Women Want. But surely it is not Leo Burnett. A quite suitable description of Leo the physical specimen appears in The Mirror Makers, Stephen Fox’s invaluable history of American advertising:

“He was short and pear-shaped, with sloping shoulders and a comfortable paunch. Every morning, it was said, he would don a freshly rumpled suit that would soon attract cigarette ashes and other debris. Seen head-on, his face looked lopsided, with the right ear askew; his hair was combed straight back, accentuating the pate. He had prominent lips, a jowly chin, and heavy glasses in a dark frame. Observers agreed that nobody would take him for an advertising man – but perhaps a bank teller, or a…librarian, or a prosperous Rotarian in town for a convention, or a tractor dealer from the plains states.”

How could a man once described by a colleague as looking – in profile – like a white sturgeon, America’s largest freshwater fish, become so successful

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in a business so reliant on flash and style. I think of an old tagline not created at Burnett: “With a name like Smuckers, you’ve got to be good.” With a face like Leo’s, he had to be good.

What Leo had, unshakably, was absolute devotion to the work and to the clients and to the belief that advertising was profoundly important work.

Leo radiated not charm and good looks but that rarest of qualities in the business: sincerity. Speaking of show business, George Burns declared, “The most important thing you need to succeed is sincerity. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” In The Hucksters, Clark Gable strides into a men’s store in Manhattan and asks to see a “sincere tie,” that is, a tie that will make him look sincere.

Leo needed no sincere ties or fakery. He once actually said, “I regard a great ad as the most beautiful thing in the world.” “Whoa!” as a present day copywriter or brand manager might say. And from all reports, Leo lived in an irony-free zone.

The statement is all the more astonishing in that most people will tell you they hate advertising, especially those who consider themselves well-educated. Even those of us who made our living in the business made excuses for what we did.

When people asked me what line of work I was in, I’d say: “I commit advertising.” Ha, ha!

A half century ago, Martin Mayer plunged in the dagger eloquently in his bestseller, Madison Avenue U.S.A., although the dagger wounded both advertising and those who despise it:

“There seems to be only one civilized cultural opinion on advertising and most of its work: a rousing, roaring thumbs-down. The great bulk of advertising is culturally repulsive to anyone with any developed sensitivity. So, of course, are most movies and television shows, most popular music and a surprisingly high proportion of published books. When you come right down to it, there is not a hell of a lot to be said for most of what appears in the magazines. A sensitive person can easily avoid cheap movies, cheap books and cheap art, but there is scarcely anyone…who can avoid all contact with advertising. By presenting the intellectual with a more or less true image of the popular culture, advertising earns his enmity and calumny. It hits him where it hurts worst: in his

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politically liberal and socially generous outlook, partly nourished by his avoidance of actual contact with popular taste.”

Leo enjoyed baiting advertising haters. In a 1961 speech he quoted the British economist, Walter Taplin: “You can either rejoice that human beings have wants, and that other human beings are trying to satisfy them and be paid for their trouble,” wrote Taplin, “or you can deplore the nature of humanity.”

Long before he started his own company, Leo’s career had taken him through a lurching, twisting cultural response to his chosen field. In the 1920s, as Frederick Lewis Allen noted in his great chronicle, Only Yesterday, salesmen and advertising men were the “agents and [evangelists]” of Coolidge prosperity. Wrote Allen: “A wise man of the nineteen-twenties might have said that he cared not who made the laws of the country if only he might write its national advertising. For here were the sagas of the age, romances and tragedies depicting characters who became more familiar to the populace than those in any novel.”

By 1935, as Leo spread out plans for the future company on the ping-pong table in his Glencoe home, a climate of blame had enveloped the business. After all, hadn’t rapacious businessmen and their advertising agents caused the horrendous depression?

1935 wasn’t a good time to start anything, although history records two foundings that year of great importance to the advertising profession: The Leo Burnett Company and Alcoholics Anonymous.

But let’s make a quick montage now, to bring Leo forward to 1935 from his birth in 1891, in the small town of St. Johns, Michigan. His first job was printer’s devil, three dollars a week. He went to college in Ann Arbor, became a police reporter for the Peoria Journal, advertising manager for Cadillac cars, married a Detroit girl, Naomi Geddes, and took her on a honeymoon…..to Toledo, Ohio. Leo didn’t want the hotel staff there to think he was a country rube, so at breakfast the first morning he waved away the menu and ordered cherries jubilee.

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By 1931, Leo was creative chief of Erwin, Wasey’s Chicago office. Wasey was the largest agency of the day, with a client roster that included General Foods, Philco, Camel cigarettes, Goodyear, and Buick. Three clients followed Leo out Wasey’s door in 1935: Hoover vacuum cleaners, Real Silk Hosiery, and the Minnesota Valley Canning Co., which eventually would take the name of its star Burnett critter: Green Giant. Six men and two women also followed Leo out of Wasey and into his new shop. Leo later delighted in claiming there wasn’t a businessman in the bunch, only creative people. The lowly office boy, at a salary of $65 a month, was a 23-year-old named Strother Cary, Jr. Thirty-seven years later he stopped by a small cubicle to greet a new hire: me. He told me he was interested in the newcomers. It was his final year at the company, from which he retired as Executive Vice President and Treasurer.

Leo had hocked everything he had, and on August 5^th, 1935, everyone moved into a suite at the Palmer House. A month later, everyone packed up again and moved into a few small offices at 360 North Michigan Avenue, the London Guarantee Building, 15^th floor, telephone: Central 5959. There was almost enough money to pay the rent.

By then, the advertising business, which had flourished in Chicago in the decades before, had increasingly become a nonstop train between the coasts.

As Clark Gable says to his fellow Super Chief club car companions in The Hucksters: “What’s America to us? A blank space between New York and Hollywood where people buy soap.” Leo set up shop physically, mentally, emotionally, in that blank space. And as the New York ad man, Jerry Della Femina would observe a couple generations later: “Leo Burnett talks to all those people we fly over.”

As Leo went after new business for his young agency, he soon acquired a few businessmen to go with his beloved creatives. By far the most important was an ex-sportswriter and Ladies Home Journal space rep, Dick Heath. The charismatic Heath went after new business like a bulldog and helped bring in some prestigious accounts, Like Pure Oil (now Unocal) and Brown Shoe of St. Louis. (Remember Smilin’ Ed McConnell and his Buster Brown Gang – Squeaky the Mouse, Midnight the Cat – and the immortal words: “That’s my dog, Tighe, he lives in a shoe. I’m Buster Brown. Look for me in there, too!”)

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But in 1940 came the account that really put Burnett on the national map, The American Meat Institute. The little shop in Chicago beat out some top New York agencies; annual billings were over $1,000,000. And the final presentation was such a success that it went on the road. Meat men in more than fifty cities got a preview of the groundbreaking ads with their startling images of raw meat and a new graphic treatment, called, “bleeding,” meaning live visual material extending to the very edges of the page.

Dick Heath coined a phrase to describe the work: the inherent drama of the product. This became holy writ at the agency, a mantra for the Burnett approach to creative development. What exactly was inherent drama?

Leo explained in a later speech: “I mean putting a piece of red meat against a red background to express the virility of meat. I mean a red-headed kid wondering what happened to his corn flakes. I mean peas harvested in the moonlight.” Leo also meant the snap, crackle and pop of Rice Krispies, the loneliness of a Maytag repairman whose services are seldom needed, and a cowboy to dramatize flavor and the masculinity of smoking a cigarette with a feminine-seeming filter tip.

The quest for inherent drama resulted in campaigns for Burnett clients that were markedly different, particularly during the 1950s and 60s, from work created at other agencies with other mantras. At Ted Bates, for example, the hugely influential Rosser Reeves was formulating hard-sell litanies based on his USP concept – the Unique Selling Proposition. USP brought America such trip-hammer harpings as: “What’s new in Colgate Dental Cream that’s missing, missing, missing in every other leading toothpaste?”

Such overt table-pounding was not Leo’s way, though many a business man fully bought into the hit-‘em-over-the head school of advertising, and many still do. But note briefly that identifying the creative foundation of Burnett work, inherent drama, was the bright idea not of Leo but of Dick Heath, the business man and jack-of-all-trades except that of actually creating the ads.

If the company had taken on a second name, surely it would have been re-titled Burnett and Heath. Like law firms, most advertising agencies have at least two names on the door: Ogilvy and Mather. Weiden and Kennedy. Or

three: Foote Cone and Belding. Or even four:

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Batten, Barten, Durstine & Osborn, which Fred Allen once described

as sounding like a piano falling down a flight of stairs. But The Leo Burnett Co. stayed with just one name, which says something about both Leo and the remarkably loyal admakers who worked with him. I’ll come back to that.

Out of inherent drama, then, came the parade of critters and concepts I mentioned earlier that propelled Burnett into the big time and kept it there. Any one of these classic campaigns contains a back story worth telling, but for tonight, let’s just consider the elephant in the room. (Not the Republican elephant, although Burnett did create, “In your heart you know he’s right” for Barry Goldwater.) Perhaps I should say, the smokestack in the room.

The Marlboro story has been told many times, many ways, but for this telling I am most indebted to Joan Kufrin’s illuminating biography of Leo, Star Reacher, and to Bernice Kanner, former advertising columnist for New York magazine, who gets the chronology just right in her marvelous survey, The 100 Best TV Commercials.

First, cigarettes. We curse them now as weapons of mass destruction. But Leo lived in a different world – a smokers’ world. According to Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple’s coffee table history of American advertising, “In the 1940s, more money was being spent on advertising cigarettes than on any other product in America.” Remembering his Navy days, Bill Cosby recalls guys smoking cigarettes while they showered. He remembers a sign over a urinal: “Please do not throw cigarette butts into the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light.”

Smokers knew cigarettes were nasty – though obviously not how nasty – and they smoked anyway. My father called them coffin nails and he was a three-pack-a-day man. Goodrum and Dalrymple offer a verse written for the Penn State humor magazine in 1915:

Tobacco is a dirty weed, I like it.

It satisfies no normal need. I like it.

It makes you thin, it makes you lean,

It takes the hair right off your bean.

It’s the worst darn stuff I’ve ever seen. I like it.

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In Leo’s day the smoking imperative extended from the cultural basement to the stars. Try to imagine Bogart or Bacall without a cigarette. Troy Donahue, the 50s movie idol, recalled meeting his teenage fans: “They’d ask me to light a cigarette, and when I did, they screamed and fell down.” Smoking signified both Hollywood glamour and New York sophistication. Think Leonard Bernstein, Edward R. Murrow, Norman Mailer. A classic Life magazine photograph of 1949 taken by the late Martha Holmes shows Jackson Pollock in his studio drizzling black paint onto a canvas, cigarette jutting prominently from the left side of his mouth. Iconic! When the image was copied for a 33-cent stamp in 1999, the illustrator was told to leave out the cigarette in the interest of public health.

Within that half-century span flourished the most dominant campaign ever created for a brand: advertising that built Marlboro cigarettes into what The New York Times called “quite possibly the most successful packaged good ever.”

The story begins in the fall of 1954. Leo receives a cold call from Joseph Cullman, 3^rd, executive vice president, marketing, for Philip Morris. Cullman likes the print work Burnett’s been doing for Pillsbury -- the big, mouthwatering layer cake ads -- and for Kellogg’s, the charming Norman Rockwell children’s faces on Corn Flakes boxes.

Cullman wonders what Leo would think of a bit of a marketing challenge:

A little-known women’s cigarette (less than a one-quarter of one percent share of market) with a red-tipped filter to keep cigarette paper from sticking to lipstick and the slogan, “Mild as May.” Brand name, Marlboro.

Filter tips are beginning to catch on with men because of growing health concerns and Reynolds has a runaway success with Winston. Reynolds is then the biggest of the six major U.S. cigarette makers. Philip Morris is in last place.

Cullman tells Leo that they’ve boosted the flavor, tweaked the tip to make it more masculine, and come up with a hard pack and a top that flips open.

Can Leo and his Midwestern mavericks come up with an idea that turns Marlboro into a man’s smoke?

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On the Saturday following Cullman’s call and subsequent Chicago visit, Leo convenes a skull-session at his Lake Zurich farm, fully equipped with

all the accoutrements of downtown: black pencils, white pads, apples, hospital-wall-green memo paper and the rest. And…a fully stocked bar. The participants gather, some grouchy about sacrificing their tee time but honored, as always, to be among the elect invited to these weekend farm work sessions. From his overstuffed files of magazine images Leo produces a Life cover from 1933. It shows a grizzled, weathered cowboy with wrinkles around the eyes, smoking a cigarette. Says Leo to the group: “Do you know anything more masculine than a cowboy?” As one of those present later said, the question seemed to have its own answer. Take that, Bogey, Mailer, Pollock!

The following Monday Cullman and his Philip Morris advertising director meet in Leo’s office and behold a complete Marlboro makeover.

The ad shows a rugged wrangler smoking a Marlboro, accompanied by the words, “You get a lot to like: filter, flavor, flip-top box.” The ad is dubbed, “The Sheriff,” The Leo Burnett Company is hired, and the campaign breaks in newspapers in a handful of markets. New York City is one of them. Marlboro becomes the number one brand in greater New York 30 days later.

There is a new sheriff in town and Joe Cullman gives him all the credit.

In the year following, Marlboro sales post a 3,241 percent increase over 1954. Other men’s men puff on Marlboros in the ads: race car drivers, military officers, airline pilots (lots of airline pilots: their eyes have just the right wrinkles). All of them, cowboys included, sport tattoos on hand or wrist. Leo believes the tattoo would “say to many men that here is a successful man who used to work with his hands. To many women it will suggest a romantic past.”

Three years later, a Reader’s Digest article directly connects smoking to lung cancer and Marlboro is hurt by low tar smokes like Kent. The many Marlboro men are sent to the showers in favor of sultry Julie London, on television, crooning, “Where there’s a man, there’s a Marlboro.”

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But the cowboy alone remains an indelible image for smokers and by 1964 he is back as the master of a mythic realm, Marlboro Country. Tom

Laughlin’s line, “Come to where the flavor is,” and Elmer Bernstein’s music, appropriated from the movie, The Magnificent Seven, power the

campaign. The print ads, outdoor boards, and television commercials are shot on the vast Four Sixes ranch in Guthrie, Texas, and this time the cowboys are real.

In 1971, cigarettes are snuffed out on television. Only the strong of image survive in print, Marlboro far above all. A year later, Marlboro becomes the world’s best-selling cigarette, and it keeps growing. The stats are staggering: By 1995 Marlboro outsells the cigarette brands ranked second through sixth combined. Marlboro has become arguably a more valuable global trademark than Coca Cola. And as for the last place tobacco company that had come calling on Leo 41 years earlier, it has been in first place for 13 years.

The mountains of money Philip Morris has made on cigarettes are used to diversify. The acquisitions include Miller Brewing and Kraft General Foods. Philip Morris becomes the largest consumer products company in the world, due in no small measure to the work of the Chicago ad man with the big black bag.

In late May, 1971, Leo, 79 years old and in failing health, took his last trip to 100 Park Avenue, New York City – Philip Morris headquarters. He was accompanied by a young account man, Cap Adams, who would later become CEO of The Leo Burnett Company. Leo and Joe Cullman had stayed close and still worked together on corporate projects. Cullman was now CEO of Philip Morris. The meeting concluded and Cullman sent his car around to take Leo and Cap to LaGuardia for the flight back to Chicago. Cap Adams continues the story in a later interview:

“Leo asks me would I mind if we stopped at Sulka. Naomi wants him to get a new bathrobe. I tell the driver, stop here, we’re going to run in and pick up a bathrobe. That’s what I thought we were going to do. We go in

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there and Leo starts trying on all these bathrobes. He’s asking me, how do I look? He looks shitty in all of them because he’s a dumpy little guy.

I’m in charge of getting us on an airplane so I say, can I make a suggestion? These guys obviously know you and your size. Why don’t we take some of this material home and Mrs. Burnett can pick out the bathrobe.

That is what we did. Took all that material home.”

Two weeks later, Leo died, leaving behind the new bathrobe, the Marlboro Man, the whole panoply of priceless corporate critters and concepts, and world’s fifth largest advertising agency.

In his essay for Time’s business genius issue, Stuart Ewen, a film professor at Hunter College, writes of Leo’s moving “the image to center stage” from

“mere decoration of the [advertising] argument.” Burnett was convinced, says Ewen, that “visual eloquence was far more persuasive, more poignant…than verbose logic or empty promises. Visuals appealed to the ‘basic emotion and primitive instincts’ of consumers. Advertising does its best work, [Burnett] argued, by impression, and he spent much of his career encouraging his staff to identify those symbols, those visual archetypes, that would leave consumers with a ‘brand picture engraved on their consiousness.’”

Might Leo have been slyly tweaking his own brand picture -- no-nonsense Midwestern Rotarian -- there in the sumptuous aisles of Sulka as he modeled silk bathrobes for a befuddled junior executive?

Gradually, during my years at Burnett, most of those who had worked with Leo retired and many passed away. Within the agency Leo became less flesh-and-blood and more like a folk-tale character, almost the official company critter, endlessly caricatured at company anniversaries, though often solemnized, too, with the replaying of his “When To Take My Name Off The Door” speech, delivered at the annual Burnett Breakfast four years before he died.

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In the speech, Leo threatens to “materialize” someday, after he is gone from the world, to rub out his name on the door, paint out the

star-reaching symbol, and “throw every goddamned apple down the elevator shafts” if certain conditions exist at his agency, among them: “you spend more time making money and less time making advertising…you stoop to convenient expediency and rationalize yourselves into acts of opportunism – for the sake of a fast buck…you lose your humility and become big-shot weisenheimers.”

To some, Leo’s fears appeared to come true in March of 2002, when the company he hoped would always remain privately held was sold to the French advertising holding company, Publicis. A former Burnett chairman and chief creative officer, Norman Muse, sent a furious letter to the trade paper, Advertising Age, denouncing the sale: “Leo believed an agency’s profits were secondary to a client’s success,” wrote Muse, “while the most recent Burnett management, with little understanding of, or faith in, its creative product, made ‘agency profit,’ closely tied to personal compensation, priority No. l…there was one unifying urge – greed.”

Muse was one of those remaining who had worked alongside Leo.

I searched for writings and memories of others of them, trying to uncover just what it was about the man that made so many of ample talent and ego stay with him so long and so willingly.

“Actually, I don’t consider myself a very smart advertising man, and recognize that there are lots of people in our business ten times more brilliant.” That’s Leo himself, in a 1960 year-end letter to the agency.

He continues: “Whatever personal loyalty I have built with important clients cannot be attributed to my personality or my social charm, but only to the attitude which I have reflected, which, through experience, they have come to recognize is for real; and through complete candor rather than politics or devious diplomacy.”

In the early 70s, Len Matthews, then president of the company, quoted an anonymous Burnetter of the day:

“Leo Burnett…built himself quite an agency. It wasn’t easy.

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“He was neither rich nor powerful nor silver-tongued. His was not a

commanding presence. Instead, he worked…he worked for the client as

as though he were a dedicated employee rather than the head of a large

organization of his own.

“ He was different from most of us in advertising. He never, never

thought he knew it all. He was forever taking notes at meetings and

speeches, always eager to learn more. Not too proud to spend an

evening writing copy for dealer mat drop-ins when the need arose.

“ That was his secret. He differed from you and me in that he wasn’t

in advertising just to learn it all as fast as he could, so that he could make

the transition from learner to sage in a few short years. So many of us

feel the purpose of learning is to become an authority rather than to

become knowledgeable…

“That wasn’t Leo’s idea. He felt he was put on earth to keep constantly

improving his talents, sharpening his skills, and he never became a

pontifical authority. He remained the worker, the learner, the tryer of

the new…Luckily for him, it turned out that clients found this refreshing

in an agency head. And enough of it rubbed off on the people who

worked for him to give the agency an edge.”

The advertising business did not rub off on Leo and Naomi’s three children. One son became an engineer, the other, an architect. Leo’s daughter, Phoebe did, however, inherit her dad’s passion for thoroughness.

Phoebe Snetsinger was one of the world’s leading birders. In 1994 she was placed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having seen more species of bird worldwide than anyone in recorded history. She was a terminal melanoma survivor for nineteen years and died on a birding trip to Madagascar in 1999 when the van she was riding in overturned and killed her instantly. Her final bird was a Red-shouldered Vanga which had been described as new to science just two years earlier.

Phoebe’s children became bird researchers. What they thought of one of their grandfather Leo’s prize critters, Toucan Sam, is unknown.

17.

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