The Real Mad Men by Andrew Cracknell

asked Bernbach to write him a letter justifying why he should be chosen. The letter did the trick.
    BY HAPPY ACCIDENT Bernbach was assigned to work with Paul Rand, one of the greatest figures in US commercial art and on his way to becoming a godfather of American graphic design. Rand believed that design should have ‘the utmost simplicity and restraint’, andhe applied his modernist, European philosophy across his body of work for book publishing, advertising and branding, including logos as familiar and famed as IBM, ABC, UPS and Enron.
    It was the next great influence on Bernbach’s career, not just Rand hinself but the fact that they worked together. At Weintraub, the separation between copywriter and art director was not as rigidly applied as elsewhere. The two men, just three years apart in age, were free to create in tandem, working on ads from the start of the assignment with no primacy of writer over art director. Their collaboration developed over free-flowing conversations that included lunches and roaming round galleries, all informing and illuminating Bernbach’s development as a communicator.
    To Bernbach, this fusion of writer and art director became so natural as to be unquestionably the only way for creative people to work and for advertising ideas to be developed. It was the only way of producing complete ideas that are born from thinking of the way that words can most effectively combine with, and compliment, pictures.
    His stay at Weintraub and his relationship with Rand was upended in 1941 by Pearl Harbour. Bernbach spent just two months in the Army, a pulse rate of up to 148 making him unfit for duty. He came back to New York and after a short stint as Director of Post-war Planning at Coty Inc, the cosmetics marketer, rejoined advertising at Grey. Like Weintraub, Grey was a ‘Seventh Avenue’ agency, a predominantly Jewish firm. The sobriquet derived from so much of the garment business – traditionally the client base of Jewish agencies – being located on Seventh Avenue.
    By 1945 Bernbach was copy chief, familiar to clients and agency management alike and clearly hitting his stride. But he didn’t like the way things were run at Grey, a regimented, unprogressive place with little imagination or room for creativity. And within two years he’d written his famous letter.
    But at Grey, his letter and his views were ignored; the agency’s Board was happy with the way things were, and didn’t want his troubling new ideas on management structures and company philosophy.
    Amongst the Grey client roster was a budget department store that sold mainly women’s apparel and accessories. This was Ohrbach’s – ‘A business in millions, a profit in pennies’ – and Bernbach had worked on the account personally, again in direct collaboration with an art director he’d hired, Bob Gage. Their work had caught the eye of Nathan Ohrbach, the owner,and he urged Bernbach to leave and set up his own business with the store as his first client. Initially Bernbach demurred, but when a few months later Ohrbach came back and said he was pulling the business out of Grey anyway, Bernbach took the plunge and started his own agency.
    NED DOYLE , then a Grey account director, was at face value a curious choice of partner. He was ten years older than Bernbach, a fighting Irish ex-marine, physically imposing, with an active service record in the Pacific and almost a parody of the type; hard smoking, hard drinking and hard swearing. Bernbach was soft spoken, quietly mannered, 5 foot 7, nonsmoking, abstemious with alcohol and unremarkable to look at.
    When he first met Bernbach, Doyle described him as a ‘nice little guy, very creative with gold-rimmed glasses, and on the scared side’. But then, perhaps most people he met for the first time appeared to be a little on the scared side – they probably were. This is Doyle several years later on the phone