I grew up a difficult kid, fighting in the streets, not taking any crap,” says George Lois, pacing around his Manhattan apartment. When the Irish kids in the Bronx called him greaseball, he broke their noses. When a southern major called him “another Noo Yawk Jew Fag N***** Lover” on his first day in the US Army in 1951, he said: “Go f*** yourself, sir”, (the Army in turn gave him a fortnight’s “company punishment” and a frontline place in the bloody war in Korea). Now Lois is considering his response to the greatest insult of all: the elaborate, beautifully produced and award-winning slur on his character that is the television show Mad Men.
The great ad man had been leading me on a tour of his living room, which contains: a robe worn by a Chinese empress, a spear tip from the army of Alexander the Great, a glass eye from an Egyptian sarcophagus, and artefacts from dozens of other cultures — as if he had hired Joseph Campbell to work as his decorator and supplied him with a key to the British Museum. A model of Spider-Man balances atop a Frank Lloyd Wright window from the Martin House, apparently preparing to swoop through the various cultures and over the Art Deco furniture.
We pause by a photograph of his father in Greek Army uniform below one of Lois, on Army “R&R” in Japan. He remembers the ship that brought 5,000 soldiers to a Japanese dockside, after months of fighting in which he witnessed “a genocide on Asian people”.
The city before them looked beautiful. “The dock workers were women, walking around in those wooden shoes, sensational,” he says. “And 4,900 guys are going: ‘Ah-’” – he pulls up the corners of his eyes – “I realised, boy, we’re a racist country ... That’s always been a big thing for me.”
At some point, in our stroll through Lois’s busy life — he recently turned 80 but still plays full-contact basketball — I mention Mad Men.
Advertisement
“A bunch of fellas shtupping their secretaries,” he says. “No talent. Drinking, womanising, anti-Semitic. And somehow the assumption is that I’m the original Mad Man?”
The show explores the golden age of advertising, when Lois reigned supreme. “I got about 50 phone calls, people saying: ‘The show’s going to be about you’,” he says. The first series was set in 1960, the year he co-founded Papert Koenig Lois to lead his image-making and copywriting comrades into the “creative revolution”.
Just as Lois was the first art director to have his name on an agency masthead, the lead character in Mad Men is a hot young advertising creative who becomes a partner. Jon Hamm, the actor who plays Don Draper, vaguely resembles the young Lois who blazed a trail through Madison Avenue, overturning conventions and the desks of people with whom he didn’t agree.
Yet instead of revolution, Lois sees Mad Men as a portrait of the “guys who probably got their business by playing golf or whatever they did. No excitement for their work at all.”
In his new book, Damn Good Advice (For People With Talent!), he has taken the time to work on his insults. “F*** you Mad Men,” he writes. “You phony, ‘Gray Flannel Suit’, male chauvinist, no-talent, WASP, white-shirted, racist, anti-Semitic, Republican SOBs.”
Advertisement
Isn’t he being a little bit harsh? What about those splendid outfits? “The dress was. I guess. right,” he says. “The women and the secretaries always dressed very beautifully. With high heels. I didn’t mind checking them out, looking at their legs — a man is a man. But I didn’t do it to their face.”
Surely there was Scotch in his top drawer? “I worked with a lot of Irish guys and boy could they drink,” he says. “But they did their drinking at the end of the day. We were working our arses off. We worked with such enjoyment and excitement.”
He will allow that his head of production married a proof reader. “There had to be some action between some people at the agency, but what else is new?”
Lois has been happily married to the woman who walked past his desk on his first day as a student at the Pratt Institute, where he studied graphic design. “I checked out her legs. I said to my friends, that’s my woman,” he says. A photograph of the two of them, taken ten minutes later, hangs in the living room, not far from a 7,000-year-old sculpture of a ram’s head.
He is smiling; she is too, but her arms are folded. He had just told her he was walking her home. “I said: ‘This is my town, me Tarzan, you Jane.’ She said: ‘Me Rosemary, you arrogant.’ I swear!” he says, gripping my arm, still delighted, “I said I got to have this woman!”
Advertisement
To be fair to Steve Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, the show is not really about Lois but the men Lois and his generation of Jews, Italians, Greeks and women would supplant. “George Lois is a legend, and the process he is talking about is exactly what the show is about, but it hasn’t happened yet,” he said in an interview in 2008.
Yet after four series (with a fifth series starting here on Sunday) and several fresh rounds of shtupping, it still hasn’t happened.
“Do you feel bad about what you do?” Don Draper’s second mistress inquires, from her sweaty pillow. She is a teacher, busy helping children to look at the world with fresh eyes, while Mr Draper, the mass communicator, is busy pandering to the way people would like to see the world. He can only respond: “No one feels as good about what they do as you do.”
Mr Draper should meet Mr Lois. Damn Good Advice casts the ad man as a descendant of Michelangelo, a superhuman artist whose patrons are Jiffy Lube or Stouffer’s. Tommy Hilfiger is his Cosimo de Medici and his Sistine Chapel is an MTV billboard over Times Square.
“At every opportunity, I have attempted to speak truth to power,” Lois writes. “To fight the ‘authorities’, unjust courts, police harassment, the consistent loss of our civil liberties, a government that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor and powerless, and America’s unending wars — by creating graphic imagery and organising battles against ethnic, religious and racial injustice.”
Advertisement
If you don’t know Lois’s work, you may choke on your Maypo oats (the subject of his acclaimed “I want my Maypo!” campaign, in which sports stars cried like children for the sake of maple-infused oatmeal — a campaign later revisited as ‘I want my MTV’). Now that corporations appear as powerful as governments, the idea that a man who advertises cereal could be a “cultural provocateur” seems at best preposterous, at worst naive. Yet Lois believed passionately in the products and ideas he sold. “We watch ads on TV now, and I say to my wife, Rosie: ‘What the f*** was that product?’ And she’ll say, ‘I don’t know’,” he says.
“They are ashamed of selling. I’m enthralled with selling. I can’t do advertising for a shitty product. I can’t do advertising for a Republican. But I can get excited about almost any product and the thrill of having it.”
His campaigns helped to launch MTV and the sports channel ESPN. His small advert in The New York Times fomented a campaign to overturn the conviction of the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter: he even persuaded Bob Dylan to write a song about the case, to perform it in prison and then in Madison Square Garden.
His series of covers for Esquire magazine railed against Vietnam, portrayed Muhammad Ali as Saint Sebastian and heralded the end of the avant-garde with an image of Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup.
Sometimes they ran counter to the content of the magazine. His first — which made what seemed an outrageous prediction about a boxing match — was publically disavowed by the publisher, yet Lois proved correct and the magazine sold out. “They had to go into a fast reprint,” he says. “Based on nothing inside the magazine.”
Advertisement
Nor does Lois ever appear to have felt unable to tell the truth as he saw it. During his campaign to free Carter, he was summoned by the chief executive of Cutty Sark whisky, a major client of his ad agency.
“He says, ‘Lois, stop working for the n*****’.”
“I didn’t say f*** you right off the bat,” says Lois says, who remembers this as an extraordinary act of diplomacy. “I said, ‘I’m going to keep working for Carter’,” he says. Lois was fired from the Cutty Sark account the next day.
Another client, Bobby Kennedy, argued ferociously with Lois about Vietnam. “I said you and your f****** brother with that goddamn war you left us with,” he says. “You read all the books about JFK and they all contend that if Jack hadn’t been assassinated he would have ended the war. But I was working for Bobby in 1964 and he was defending it 110 per cent. It was the same Cold War bullshit, domino theory.”
He says he received a call four years later, in the spring of 1968. “His secretary says, ‘I got Senator Kennedy on the line’. Bobby says: ‘George, quiet, just be quiet.’ I say ‘Yeah?’ He says: ‘Listen, I’m going downstairs to give a press conference to come out against the Vietnam War, so go f*** yourself.’ Then he hung up.”
Lois is not the sort of man to leave anything unsaid. His publisher got an earful when she asked him to write a self-help book, teaching us how we can be more like him. We, the readers, also get an earful on the first page. Those not worthy of his teachings should stop reading immediately.
Lesson 111 of the book according to George tells us to make our surroundings a metaphor for who we are, which does at least explain his living room. We are also told to be prepared to threaten to throw ourselves out of a window (as he threatened to do) if a client won’t run our campaign.
And what of Lesson 115, which boldly asserts that advertising, at least the stuff Lois does, is art? It seems plausible, given how much of modern art has become about the act of flogging an idea — dominated by artists who cannot draw or paint but are brilliant salesmen.
Warhol asked Lois for his soup-can Esquire cover in exchange for one of his own works, but Lois refused, insisting that all his covers would be exhibited one day at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. In 2008 they were. “It was a tremendously successful exhibition,” says Paola Antonelli, MOMA’s senior curator of architecture and design. As for the rest of his oeuvre, which helped to sell Maypo and Braniff International Airways and Levy’s Rye Bread and Aunt Jemima Syrup, it may be Lois’s fate, unlike Michelangelo, to go unacknowledged in his own lifetime.
He recalls being introduced to Martin Scorsese at a memorial service for the designer Saul Bass, amid a crowd of art directors. “He says: ‘You’re George Lois?’ And he goes into a ten-minute talk about my covers ... there’s George Foreman as Santa Claus, and ‘Oh my God — we hit a little girl,’ and 300 people, and you could hear them saying, wow! He’s genuflecting in front of George Lois. And all of a sudden ... he says, ‘Well, then what happened? Where did you go?’ I said, ‘Well ... I had an ad agency. I’m an advertising guy’. Scorsese says: ‘Advertising? Oh ... ‘It was like a giant balloon full of air went shusssshhhh.
He was kind of saying, you sold out.
You went into advertising. He obviously didn’t understand the work I did. My advertising, is, good shit, you know what I mean?”
Damn Good Advice (For People With Talent!) by George Lois is available for £5.95. To buy a copy for £5.65, go to thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
George’s Damn Good Advice
Tell the Devil’s Advocate in the room to go to Hell
A self-appointed Devil’s Advocate lurks in every meeting and, at the moment a decision is about to be finalised, says with a furrowed brow, “Let me be the Devil’s Advocate”. They always take the exact opposite and argue ad nauseam. That person suffocates and smothers any original idea, all in the name of careful conservative thinking.
Even a brilliant idea won’t sell itself
Always do three things when you sell a Big Idea.
1. Tell them what they are going to see 2. Show it to them 3. Tell them, dramatically, what they just saw
Don’t sleep your life away
If you sleep eight hours a day, sleep seven! If you sleep seven hours a day, sleep six! If you’re like me, sleep only three hours a day. (I’ve been awake more hours than any human being alive.)
If you’re a man, and you still think a woman can’t compete with you, she’s about to blindside you, pal.
If you’re reading this and you’re approaching 50 years of age, remember that oak trees do not produce acorns until they are 50 years old
Charles Darwin was 50 when he wrote On the Origin of Species. At 52, Ray Kroc, a milkshake-machine salesman, turned McDonald’s from a small chain of restaurants into a humongous fast-food empire. Colonel Sanders was in his 60s when he started KFC.
Present your problems without saying “y’know”, “like” and “umm” every other sentence.
Umm, I mean, y’know, like I said, if you wrote the way millions of people talk these days, you’d be considered a dummy — like, umm, know what I mean?
Never act cocky (but you’d better be cocksure). Big difference.
If you’re cocky, you’re a big-mouth. If you’re cocksure, you’re a confident creative! As a creative, you must have the talent and confidence to be cocksure that your concepts are memorable — with the power to produce cause and effect change. If you’re a business entrepreneur, you must exude confidence. And if you’re in a creative industry, you must be dead certain what your work can accomplish for your client and promise it will do just that. (If you don’t have the balls to promise, you’ll never be great.)
Never eat s***
If you’re in a relationship (with your boss, supervisor, partner, or client) and you suspect that you are continually being used and/or abused, admit it — you’re eating shit. Without the courage to put an end to it, you’ll never create great work. Put an end to it.
If you present an entrepreneurial idea, if it takes more than three sentences to explain it to the money guys, it’s not a Big Idea!
After three sentences of explanation, people’s eyes glaze over.