Thinking Small (49 page)

When feisty young George Lois
came on board at DDB in the 1950s, Helmut Krone was not thrilled. Here was a young man who was Helmut’s opposite in nearly every way. George was a Greek boy who had grown up in the Bronx. He spoke loudly and forcefully; he was rowdy and extroverted, and supremely confident about his work. In the film
American Graffiti,
George would have been one of the tough guys in a
white shirt, sleeves rolled up and a motorcycle between his scuffed leather boots. Helmut didn’t like him. “What’s wrong with that kid?”
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he asked.

George didn’t like Helmut much either: “He’s nasty to everybody,”
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George would say, “except Bernbach. He kisses Bernbach’s ass.” George had a dirty mouth. He grew up in a rough neighborhood, a place “racist to the point of vulgarity,” where
on the night of a big boxing match,
there’d be “500 radios screaming into the night.” In those days, according to George, Irish guys in the Bronx didn’t have much tolerance for tough-guy Greeks. He had his nose broken more than once, and everything about him said he was a fighter—his voice, his swagger, his uninhibited use of the word f*ck—screamed troublemaker. And yet, he was also a Son of Pericles and a loyal son, happy to work long hours in his father’s florist shop
after school. George also had a love of art; even as a boy, he used to get up in the middle of the night to draw: “It was the only time I had to do it,” he said. Those same nights, he pored over Paul Rand’s work published for the first time in magazines like
Esquire, Direction,
and
Apparel Art
: “It was the first time I realized you could be part of that glamorous fast-moving media world but still be doing art.”

His parents didn’t quite get their son’s obsession, but Mrs. Engle, one of his teachers at school, certainly did. It was her prodding that convinced him to apply to the prestigious High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. She even gave him the dime for the round-trip subway fare, sending him off to apply in 1945, just as the war was coming to an end. George took the school’s entrance exam and passed.

In school, his art teachers were both frustrated and awed. Once, during an end-of-the-year exam, the students were given a white sheet of paper and told to make something “using a rectangle as their form.” George thought for a moment, then put his pencil down on the desk without drawing so much as a single mark. He just sat there quietly, an amused look in his eye, while the rest of the class scribbled furiously. Their teacher scowled at George, seeing the
boy’s calm as an attempt to provoke him. Just before the bell rang, as the teacher reached for George’s empty sheet of white paper, George stopped him. Hold on a minute, he said; picking up his paper, he signed his name in the lower right corner, as though it were a work of art. And in many ways, it was. The paper was a simple white rectangle after all, about as Bauhaus or Constructivist and precise as one could get, and the teacher soon couldn’t help but smile
at what George had done.
“In that moment, I began to understand that everything you do has to be a surprise,” George later said. “Everything I do should be seemingly outrageous, I thought. It should have that feeling of ‘hey, you can’t do that!’ but in the next moment the realization of ‘hey, that’s really great.’ ” George was looking to give people something that would resonate, that
would make them think.

Clearly George had a rollicking ride ahead of him, and a few years later, he broke the news to his dad: He wouldn’t be working with him in the florist shop anymore; he was going to college. He’d been accepted into art school at the prestigious Pratt Institute. A little bit later, he had some shocking news to break to his mother too: He’d gotten married on the sly, and the girl wasn’t Greek. His mom gave him a hug. Times change, she said. And
indeed they did. Not too long after, George’s artistic career was interrupted by the Korean War and he was sent overseas and wounded by a piece of flying shrapnel. He’d be fine though, recovering well enough to remain a major headache for the officers who had him under their command.

When he returned to the States, he had less patience than ever for the slow road. He had ideas, energy, and a surplus of ego to spend. He saw what was happening with Ohrbach’s and Levy’s, saw the other ads flowing out of DDB, and he knew that’s where he wanted to be. He told his father that Bernbach was “the maestro” and that once he was ready, DDB would be the place for him. In the meantime, George flew around town at lightning speed,
working with some of the biggest names in media: Herb Lubalin at Sudler & Hennessey, William Golden at CBS. He also managed to turn a few desks over in a rage when he didn’t get his way. People loved George. His energy was undeniable. But he was a challenge, containing a plethora of ideas that could explode from him at any angle, any time; he shot ads out like darts.

Needless to say, the prickly and prim Helmut Krone
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simply didn’t know what to make of such an aggressive young man. Helmut had come on board at DDB in 1954 when he was
twenty-nine years old. Now he was nearly thirty-five and his apprenticeship to Robert Gage was ending. In campaigns such as Polaroid, as an art director, he was
beginning to come into his own, and the younger George looked like competition. Lois walked DDB’s halls like a bully ruling a high school, and he was indefatigable: By the time Helmut arrived at work in the morning, George would have already been there for hours, working furiously, ads covering his office floor. Helmut would take the long way around just to avoid George’s door. George liked to work on six or seven ads at once; Helmut, according to George, “would
do an account every two years.” That was an exaggeration, but no one would have argued with George if he said Helmut worked slowly. Still, George wasn’t just fast; he was manic. Copywriters complained to Bill. They found George and his ads a bit too vulgar, a bit too obvious. One such ad, for example, showed a giant ear with toothpicks, bent paper clips, and all kinds of other gruesome sharp objects sticking out of it: it was for a Q-tip product, of course. But Bill
dismissed the complaints. He liked George. George was a curiosity, Bill thought, and that was a good thing.

On George’s first day, when Bill came over to welcome the young man, he couldn’t help but notice George’s office had a shine uncharacteristic of the place. “They really fixed you up good,” he said. George sheepishly told him that he’d actually snuck in over the weekend and repainted the room: “It was too dingy,” he said. “Uh-huh,” said Bill. “And look at that chair! Did Gage give you that
chair?” “It’s my chair,” George said, “I brought it from home.” The chair was a sleek Mies Brno, the product of a Bauhaus star.

George’s arrival was a sign that a new generation was drifting into DDB—the agency was ten years old by now, successful enough to have moved out of its early cramped quarters and into a larger space just off Madison Avenue, on 42nd Street. And it was on the cutting edge of a still-unarticulated shift that was taking place, rearranging the face of the city itself. New styles of architecture were springing up, and not surprisingly, that was
tied to the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivist mix that was also affecting magazines and art at the time. In 1958, the same year George started at DDB, one of the Bauhaus movement’s leaders and stars, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (the same man who’d designed George’s office chair) was hired to design a new building for Seagram. The Seagram Building was like nothing the New York City skyline had ever displayed before: In Bauhaus terms, the functional utility of
the building was also supposed to be its beauty. That meant all the building’s structural elements were visible—everything was obvious and transparent, and there was no ornamentation. It looked so unfinished, people said, so raw. George loved it. Bill did too.

There was another powerful presence slinking in and out of the DDB offices around dusk at this time. Julian Koenig was tall, witty, and charming. Hired around the same time as George, the two young men fell into an instant friendship. George called Julian “the writer from Aqueduct,” “the Columbia beatnik,” the man in “horn-rims and rumpled suits.” Julian was indeed an Ivy League combination of sharp and smooth; he wore narrow
ties and oxford shirts with button-down collars. He was articulate, mischievous, but with a deliquescent voice.

Born in 1921, Julian grew up in an intellectual, sophisticated home, the kind Helmut Krone would later admit he’d always admired. Julian had been brought up in New York City and had
gone to grade school at P.S. 6. During his undergraduate years, he was considered one of the brightest and funniest in his class. He wrote for his college paper, and he dated beautiful blond women with names like Aquila. He loved baseball. And movies. And he loved
the film persona Groucho Marx. He even looked a little bit like him, and maybe wrote in a style reminiscent of him too, gravitating toward the witty, the enlightened, the playful but suggestive phrase. Like Groucho, Julian
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seemed to always know just a bit more than he would ever let on, and yet, as many have attested over the years, he wasn’t afraid to call his
colleagues out if they said something imprecise. He was (usually) piercingly honest, but he wasn’t sentimental. In fact, if he hadn’t been so sophisticated and articulate, he might have come across as rude.

Julian’s father was a judge in the Court of General Sessions and a well-respected man around town. For a while it looked as if Julian might follow in his father’s footsteps. He attended law school at Columbia and did well there, until he realized that he didn’t agree with his professors, or the rules. It all seemed so constrictive and false. At the time, Julian was reading authors like Hegel and Karl Marx, and their ideas didn’t blend so
well with the teachings of law school. He eventually dropped out and started hanging around art museums, trying his hand at writing radio scripts. He ended up writing advertising at an agency named Morton Freund for $20.50 a week, and soon started trying to unionize the place. That was how he first met Bill. It was back when Bill was still at Grey, head of the copywriting department and also the editor of an agency publication called
Grey Matter.
Julian’s attempts to
unionize the advertising business sparked quite a controversy in the pages of Grey’s newsletter.

Unionizing was not so popular with company heads in 1947. For some, even traditional workers unions seemed “too collectivist” or too much of a threat, given the Red Scare. In such an environment, Julian soon found himself out of a job for voicing his ideas. But while Julian did indeed think of himself as a
Marxist, it had nothing to do with the Soviet Union: He had no respect for Stalin and his politics. What he liked about Marx was
best summed up in the statement, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” He thought that was a “splendid way to build a society,”
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but the only problem was that “the instinct for power always corrupts.” That’s how the world ended up with men like Hitler and Stalin, he’d later say; they were
the very antithesis of the Marxist ideas he liked.

After a few more attempts to make it in the advertising business, the dissatisfied Julian packed up and went for an extended trip to Europe to try to get a bit of perspective. He lived in France mostly, but he ventured into Germany as well. His new wife Aquila was with him. They’d gotten married in 1951, and a young photographer named Richard Avedon (a name not yet known at the time) had taken their wedding pictures. When Julian and Aquila finally made their way
back to New York City, Julian resumed his career in advertising. He still wasn’t satisfied, though. He was looking for something else, so he started working on “the book.” The gambling book, that is.

In 1955, Julian had discovered horse racing. He’d been raised to think nobody could beat the horses, and that it was immoral to even try. The young Julian certainly had a rebellious streak in him, though, and when he came across the formula for a “secret system” in the pages of a magazine one day, he couldn’t help but try. He went to the horse races with high hopes. In three days, he was bankrupt. But he’d been bitten by the gambling
bug, and he couldn’t stop. Sure he was on to something, he went to his boss at the advertising firm and said he’d like to take leave “to work on a book.” Everyone had always expected Julian to become a writer, so he let that image hold. And, in the end, he hit it big. In 1957 alone, he made more money at the racetrack than he’d ever made in advertising. In the flush of the win, he quit his old job. He would work only because he wanted to work now,
and there was only one place he really wanted to be: DDB.