Off the Wall on Madison Avenue : Jay Chiat Took His California Ways Inside New York’s Advertising Establishment--and His Radical Move Is Paying Off

THE NIKE BILLBOARDS ARE nearly ancient history now, measured by the attention span of the advertising business, a business dedicated to divining what consumers are thinking and feeling and projecting about themselves in the ever-present. The year, in any case, was 1984, and it was a very good one for Jay Chiat and his Los Angeles-based advertising agency Chiat/Day, whose billboard campaign for Nike athletic shoes during that Olympic summer decorated Los Angeles and 10 other cities with painterly images of Carl Lewis, Joan Benoit, John McEnroe and other stars of sweat and field. The billboards were perhaps most notable for what they lacked: They brandished no overt sales pitch to obscure the majestic figures of the athletes, save for the quiet splash of the Nike logo in one corner.

The billboards were in keeping with the spirit of Nike, a young Oregon company started by athletes who were said to be wary of media hype. And the campaign’s unorthodox style was also what people in the ad business had come to expect from Chiat/Day. The award-winning creative agency specializes in the “big hit,” or what chairman Chiat likes to describe as “crashing through the rubble,” a reference to the 20,000 advertising messages that he estimates the average American is subjected to every week.

The billboards indeed crashed through the rubble for Nike. When the Olympics were over, most Americans thought Nike had been the official shoe of the Summer Games, much to the chagrin of Converse, which had paid $4 million for that designation. But the understated campaign, accompanied by the Nike “I Love L.A.” television commercial with Randy Newman in his convertible, was possibly a bigger breakthrough for Chiat / Day itself. Combined with the publicity it received earlier in the year for its controversial “1984” commercial for Apple Computer, Chiat / Day performed its own Olympic feat: It leaped the bounds of anonymity that had contained even the most profitable ad agencies on Madison Avenue and elbowed its way onto the evening news and into sports columns.

The agency’s rising profile, as it happened, fell flat with the executives at Nike, who grew uncomfortable with what they saw as the admen’s opportunism. It takes two to make an ad, they felt, and they had contributed much to their winning marketing image. “They got very upset about it, something we didn’t really understand,” Chiat says. “They were a great client. They came to us and pushed us to do something crazy.”

Today, the Portland agency of Wieden & Kennedy handles Nike’s advertising, while Chiat / Day is producing those surreal commercials for arch-competitor Reebok. Nike and Chiat / Day have gone their separate ways to success, and for Jay Chiat that has meant building his agency into the largest in the West, an achievement that required going East.

Though the ride to the top has been steady during this decade, it has sometimes felt like a roller coaster: a surge of new accounts, the sudden loss of others. In 1986, Chiat lost both Nike and Apple, which had been his biggest and most prominent account. Then, one year ago, he snagged the heftiest piece of business in the company’s 20-year history, the $150-million Nissan Motors account, one of the richest in the United States.

Making good on the gamble of expansion to New York seven years ago, Chiat has led his agency from near-obscurity at the time to its position as one of the hottest creative “shops” in the country, turning out distinctive ads for Reebok, Ricoh copiers, Drexel Burnham Lambert, Yamaha motorcycles, Arrow Shirts, Christian Dior and others. Combining a healthy unconventionality with a philosophy of “creative environment” developed in Los Angeles, Chiat stands on the verge of establishing the first outside agency to survive and flourish in Manhattan. In the process, he has become one of the most talked-about admen on either coast.

Many in the L.A. advertising community point to the chairman’s powers of self-promotion as a key to his success. Chiat makes certain, his competitors say, that the right people are regularly informed about the agency’s accomplishments. He has also found time to model his “bi-coastal style” in GQ magazine.

“Everybody who’s mundane and boring sits around and criticizes Chiat / Day,” counters Hal Riney, the leading San Francisco adman, who persuaded large numbers of Americans that Gallo’s Bartles & Jaymes Wine Coolers were manufactured by a couple of rubes named Frank and Ed. “They’re a little trendier, a little hipper than we are. I think our ads are a little more thoughtful. But they set the standard we try to compete with.”

“Ad agencies used to be nice, austere places where you saved the bylines for the clients,” says Larry Postaer, a founding partner of Rubin Postaer & Associates, the Los Angeles agency that handles advertising for Honda. “If you were in advertising, your mother didn’t even know what you did. Now, you expect to see it on ‘Entertainment Tonight.’ It’s Hollywood. I’m not sure I’ve figured it out yet or want to, but Jay’s one of those people who’s definitely figured it out. He’s a man for his times.”

“They’ve done an incredible job of merchandising themselves,” says John Littlewood, Los Angeles chairman of N W Ayer. “They’ve paid as much attention to selling Chiat / Day as the products they’re hired to market.”

“But it wouldn’t have worked if they didn’t do good work,” adds Postaer. “I’m sure everyone was thinking, ‘Ah, well, he did it in L.A., but he won’t be able to do it in New York.’ But he has. He’s knocking heads in New York.”

“The work attracts a lot of attention from the press,” Chiat says. “We don’t send out special promotions.” He adds, dryly: “We’re just so incredibly interesting.”

Cashing In on California

CHIAT, WHO MOVED TO New York in 1981 to open the office there, now commutes between New York and Los Angeles once or twice a month. In the past seven years, he has never spent more than three consecutive weekends in either place. He also drops in on the agency’s other two offices, in San Francisco and Toronto, and flies here and there to attend client sales meetings, design conferences and advertising competitions. He has a secretary on each coast, and while the two women have yet to meet face to face, they talk so often on the phone tracking their boss’s comings and goings that they have become good friends.

In New York, where he spends most of his time, Chiat lives in an ultramodern townhouse remarkable for its supply of minimalist contemporary art (the first floor is a gallery), bamboo trees and palms under skylights and a chef’s kitchen that overlooks East 38th Street. His Los Angeles residence is a 1,000-square-foot condominium on the beach at Marina del Rey. He walks to work in both cities, and it takes him about the same amount of time--20 minutes.

Using the hyperbole of his own trade, it might be possible to describe Chiat as the symbol of a creative revolution rising out of the West, a man on a surfboard riding a wave up the East River. The truth is perhaps not quite so grand or picturesque, though the evidence points to the fact that, at age 56, he is making history.

“It’s more a case of being from California and being fresh,” says Chiat, who declines the title of Madison Avenue avatar of the West Coast aesthetic. “We weren’t the same old faces they were used to seeing here.”

This year, with the addition of the Nissan Motors account, plus the separate $80-million Nissan Dealers account, Chiat / Day expects to spend between 525 million and 550 million advertising dollars on behalf of its 46 clients. That billings figure, the industry’s first measure of size, will probably place it among the top 20 firms in the United States at a time when mergers and acquisitions have created a small cluster of multibillion-dollar international mega-agencies at the top. Chiat / Day’s income from its total billings, based on commissions of up to 15%, will amount to about $75 million, up 35% over last year and almost five times the agency’s 1983 income.

Chiat has made it acceptable for a national company to look to the West Coast for advertising ideas, and he’s not finished yet.

“He’s played a major role in making L.A. a place to visit your ad agency,” says Steve Hayden, the man who created the “1984” ad while at Chiat / Day and is now an executive vice president in charge of the Apple account at BBDO. “I can remember when he was still spelling his name over the phone to people in New York. I don’t think he has to do that much anymore.”

Why Be Normal?

CHIAT (RHYMES with “Hyatt”) got into the business as a copywriter for a small Orange County agency in the 1950s, after a tour as an Air Force communications officer had brought him to California. He formed his partnership in Los Angeles with Guy Day in 1968 and continued to write ads until he discovered that he preferred the role of editor and, later, entrepreneur. He found that he functioned best as the leader who set the tone and decided what was good and what wasn’t.

He was able to attract talented creative people who found his “attacking style,” in the words of one former colleague, to be based on a fierce drive to get the most out of others by challenging them to do their best. “He was mercurial,” recalls another, “sometimes abrupt to the point of being abusive, then flipping over to being kind and considerate--you know, a real crazy-maker.”

He had strong opinions and did not hide them, and the ads coming out of his agency reflected his passion to succeed by breaking the rules. Chiat / Day’s ads were clever, full of puns and humor, surprising. They won industry awards right and left.

Guy Day, who left the business twice, the last time in 1986, reflects on his former partner: “I find Jay fascinating, alarming, highly driven, and I admire him greatly. And it’s easy to do as long as I can do it from afar.”

Gary Johns, the art director who designed the Nike billboards and earlier worked for Jerry Della Femina, the brash New York adman to whom Chiat has been compared, says: “Jay is a more hands-on, beat-you-up kind of guy. Jay would actually come into my office and ask me, ‘Why did you do it this way?’ Whereas with Jerry, if he didn’t like something, it would come down to you through channels.”

“Jay is the original ‘It’s not good enough’ guy,” says Lee Clow, Chiat / Day’s president and executive creative director and No. 2 man since the departure of Guy Day. “He’s ongoing quality control.”

“Lee is really the creative force there,” says former copywriter Jeff Gorman. “Jay is the motivator, but Lee is the genius.”

Though associates say Chiat sometimes comes up with astounding ideas, he no longer actually creates the ads that are making him famous: For instance, the California Cooler commercials that mocked the virtues of the Golden State (“One more reason to hate California. . . .”), the Pizza Hut spots that featured Martin Mull and other celebrities telling you how to match your pizza to your mood, and most recently the eye-catching, brain-teasing ads for the new line of colorful Reebok sneakers that promise to “Let U.B.U.”

“I’m the spiritual creative director,” Chiat says during one of his visits to the L.A. headquarters, which are actually in Venice, just down the street from the Rose Cafe, in a former drapery factory that has been given the Frank Gehry treatment. When Chiat talks, as he often does, about “creating the right environment for creativity,” he means it literally. His concern with his surroundings borders on an obsession and may have something to do with how he became friends with Gehry.

The noted architect has designed a whole new building for the agency, a few blocks away, but until it’s completed, Chiat’s army of about 275 writers, designers, researchers and accountants make do in this picture of corporate loft living--a stylish honeycomb of sawed-off cubicles spread out on an unpainted concrete floor under 24-foot ceilings. A central conference room is built in one of Gehry’s favorite shapes--that of a fish. Nearby sits a 10-foot-high ball of cloth, a sculpture by Claes Oldenburg. There are ficus trees along the aisles but few doors. Everything is open, airy and free of clutter. The chairman does not like clutter, and employees are said to embark on urgent campaigns of neatness when he’s due back in town.

“We wanted a physical environment,” Chiat says, “that would make people feel good about coming to work in the morning.”

The agency’s last office was in the equally unlikely setting of the Biltmore Hotel, downtown. Chiat prides himself on running away from the pack, “shucking when everyone else is jiving,” he says. “I really believe in change. I think change is an incredible motivator for creative people. So a lot of what I do is make sure we don’t get complacent. What happens in most businesses is that you get successful and then you go to sleep.”

He half-jokes that advertising is a profession for people with short attention spans. When an associate once proposed discussing a five-year plan with him, he told him: “This is a two-week business. How can you talk about a five-year plan?”

As he talks about his theory and practice of advertising, Chiat is wedged into the corner of a couch in a small conference room, fidgeting and talking in a low drone that hardly fits his description of himself as “a hot emotional personality.” He is a tan, medium-sized man, in good shape, wearing dark pressed slacks, a blue oxford-cloth shirt and print tie. His white, curly hair is cropped close, and he has brown eyes. Despite his reputation as someone who goes around throwing others off guard, people also find him easy to like, informal and direct.

“It makes life interesting,” Chiat says in defense of advertising. “If you walk out of a supermarket with a generic cereal, you don’t feel as good about yourself. I’m in favor of an exuberant, entrepreneurial society. Just go from West Germany to East Germany, if you want to see the difference.

“I think everyone in advertising has questions about the superficiality of what we do. But we try to do great work. We don’t have any ‘closet accounts’ that we do just for the money and don’t put on the reel. I think you ought to be able to go to a dinner party and talk about the work you’ve done and not be embarrassed.”

Early on, he and Day decided that, for ethical reasons, they would not take on certain accounts. They ruled out, among others, cigarettes and political advertising. But morality had its limits. “One time we looked around the shop and realized that if we tested every product on moral grounds, we’d be out of business. I mean, we figured even Apple computers are used to guide missile systems.

“Are there a lot of products that we advertise that the world could do without? Yeah. Are we embarrassed about that? No, we’re not. And the reason we’re not embarrassed about it is that I know we try to do our best to do it as honestly as possible and as good as you can do it.

“I still really get a charge out of a well-designed, well-written ad,” Chiat says. “When you go through a magazine without the intention of seeing any ads and you discover something that, first, you’re interested in but that also jells or moves you, and it happens to be for one of our clients, it’s really terrific.

“Television is really easier to do. It’s easier to do because it’s a visual medium and most people, with the exception of jingles occasionally, don’t remember most advertising copy. That’s why clients are so insistent on slogans. Because the research shows that if you get a slogan, memorability goes up, when in reality all you want is to create a great impression. So a slogan might be memorable but not necessarily meaningful, though the research might be interpreted as being meaningful. That’s the problem with research--it can be manipulated so easily. I mean, do you really think ‘Ford Has a Better Idea’? If you’re just looking at memorability, it’s a brilliant slogan. But it doesn’t necessarily translate into a positive image of the company because there isn’t too much honesty there.”

Although the agency has grown up in the city where the movies are made, Chiat claims not to care much about Hollywood or to have been influenced by it. “I would say it’s had less than no impact. We just function outside that milieu.” He does not think much of movies in general or movie people (“too many egos involved”) and has had only a couple of brief flings with the movie business, including having been hired to help publicize the inauguration of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox television network, a job that included transforming the Hollywood sign for one night to read “Fox” in violet letters.

Divorced twice, he lives in New York with a young potter named Jane Sachs. Chiat says he has “a rather eclectic group of friends--a museum director here and there, a designer, an ex-wife.” Gehry is a friend, as is Museum of Contemporary Art director Marsha Tucker. His closest friend is Los Angeles graphic designer Keith Bright; he acquired Bright’s company last year.

Chiat / Day & Night

CHIAT WAS BORN IN the Bronx and grew up in a modest house in Ft. Lee, N.J., where, he notes, “there was certainly no decorator involved.” He has spent much of his life putting himself through changes while acquiring something he says he grew up without--taste. He ranks taste near the top of the list of what one needs to be good at advertising, and he now is able to display his own hard-won taste through his choice of designer offices and homes, his extensive collection of modern art, his wardrobe and his nose for talented people and their work.

He says that because of the collaborative nature of making ads, it is not always easy to judge what someone has done in the past based on their “book,” or portfolio. The book doesn’t always reveal their true level of taste. “If you were to say, ‘Hey, I like this person’s work, now I’d like to visit you and see how you live,’ you’d probably get a better idea about whether this person did the work you admired. We don’t do that because it would be an invasion of privacy, but I think if I’d done that I would have made fewer mistakes in hiring people.”

The agency is known for attracting people who have been willing to work for modest salaries in exchange for the chance to do exciting and unbridled advertising. “Most of us here grew up with pretty much distaste for conventional advertising,” says New York copywriter Robin Raj.

Long hours are often included, giving employees a reason to refer to their company affectionately as “Chiat / Day & Night.” During the summer, however, employees are allowed to take every other Friday off, if at all possible; in both L.A. and New York there is a lunch or party in the office on the last Friday of each month for everyone from receptionist to chairman.

Chiat has tried to create a corporate culture, underscored by the openness of the offices, that is visibly egalitarian, with a minimum of hierarchy “and no executive washrooms.” Employees own 48% of the stock in the agency; the chairman owns the rest.

Frequent expansion and reorganization keep everyone at Chiat / Day loose and on the move, at the risk of a certain amount of confusion. “I’m a terrible manager,” Chiat says. He appoints others to do the managing.

“Jay’s theory is to be ever on the rise and on the cusp,” says Jane Newman, the British-born president of the New York office. “And as soon as you get too well-organized, you can’t be on the cusp anymore. It’s based on the idea that if you can’t do things differently, you can’t do them better.”

Chiat, who went to Rutgers University, later spent a year studying management in UCLA’s Executive Program. But he says, “The only thing I learned there was that lots of people in management school aren’t very bright.”

Chiat considers as one of his accomplishments to have found a way to incorporate market research, often dreaded by creative departments, into the earliest stages of an ad’s construction through a process known as “account planning.” It’s a technique, developed in Britain, in which a researcher representing the target audience sits in on sessions with the writer, art director and account manager.

A number of ad people outside the agency say that account planning is just another label for research, the main difference being that it starts earlier in the creative process. But others are envious and insist that many of Chiat / Day’s award-winning campaigns would never have survived the tedious screening process of traditional research at other agencies.

Advertising being an inexact science, not all Chiat / Day ads are hits, and the effectiveness of some of them has been questioned. The California Cooler campaign lost its market to Seagram’s and Gallo, industry observers say, because the ads, however entertaining, positioned the beverage strictly as a beach drink. Nissan’s slumping car sales did not rebound this year on the strength of the new “Built for the Human Race” ads, though Nissan national advertising manager Joe Opre has nothing but praise for the agency.

“What we wanted to gauge with Chiat / Day was not sales but to change the image of Nissan,” Opre says. “In that regard, we’re very satisfied.”

“You can’t sell a car in an ad,” Chiat says. “But you can get someone to go in and look at the car.”

Why the Apple Went Bad

HAL RINEY HAS SAID that the most important ingredient for success in advertising is having a good personal relationship with the chairman of the client company--in his most prominent case, the reclusive Ernest Gallo.

Chiat’s Apple Computer account, which brought the agency so much recognition (“The computer for the rest of us”) and at its highest point approached $108 million in billings, apparently depended heavily on Chiat’s close relationship with Apple’s impulsive chairman Steve Jobs, a Wunderkind once said to have exhibited in those years “a whim of iron.” “He and Jay had a lot in common,” says one insider. “If they had been closer in age, they probably would have clashed, but Jay had a chance to be avuncular with him. You have to understand that together they created the ‘Apple culture.’ Jobs pushed the agency to do revolutionary work, and Jay pushed back. They’re both the kind of person who is never satisfied.”

Challenged to introduce Apple’s Macintosh home computer, Chiat / Day came up with the now-famous “1984” commercial, a risky 60-second Orwellian spinoff directed by film maker Ridley Scott that attempted to allay the public’s fear of technology but never actually showed the Macintosh. The Apple board of directors opposed using it, and even Jobs was nervous. But in the end the commercial went on, during half-time of the 1984 Super Bowl.

“It sold the product,” Chiat says, in the offhanded style he sometimes uses to convince others of the virtues of Chiat / Day. “We know that because of the amount of people who showed up the next day at computer stores and the number of orders signed. I showed that ad to the heads of six agencies, and not one of them said they could recommend it to their client. But it worked.”

When Apple fell into an internal crisis the next year, the company slashed its ad budget, and its relationship with the agency soured. Some at Apple felt that Chiat did not pay enough attention to the company’s problems during the crisis. After Jobs gave way to John Sculley as chairman, Sculley asked the agency to compete with others for the account. It did so reluctantly and lost to BBDO.

When Chiat / Day lost both Apple and Nike in 1986, competitors began talking about the agency’s high client turnover. Chiat attributes the turnover to the skittishness of advertisers unwilling to swing for the fences, as well as to the revolving doors in many corporate executive suites and marketing departments.

“The problem with the agency business is that the minute you get a piece of business, you start losing it. It’s like uranium: It has a half-life. I think the average is about the same as when I entered the business, about seven years per account.”

Through the years, Chiat has followed a simple formula for growth: that you have to get clients faster than you lose them, and generally speaking, he has done just that. The growth has come largely from two new industries in California--Japanese imports and high tech.

Honda signed Chiat / Day to do its first national advertising in 1968 in what was then considered a coup for a California agency. When the auto maker’s growth forced it to depart for a larger agency in 1975, the loss was devastating, representing as it did at the time half of Chiat / Day’s billings and three-quarters of its income.

“It was the toughest blow the agency survived,” says Guy Day, who left the business for the first time not long after that. He returned in 1982 and left again four years later. He lives in Westlake Village, where he is writing a novel.

New York Aggression and California Freedom

AS THE AGENCY slowly rebuilt and made it into the 1980s, it began to take advantage both of the new industries in California and of the decline of New York as the dominant creative force in advertising. Though New York was and remains the center of the ad world, regional agencies such as Fallon McElligott in Minneapolis; Hill, Holliday in Boston; the San Francisco office of Foote, Cone & Belding; Wieden & Kennedy in Portland; Hal Riney in San Francisco, as well as Chiat / Day, began attracting attention for their fresh, original work.

In the case of Chiat / Day, it was work from California produced by a New Yorker. “What Jay combined,” says Clow, “was the aggressiveness of a New Yorker with the freedom of California. There was a less restrictive advertising establishment out here, and the work reflected that.”

Since California business still represents only about 10% to 15% of the nation’s advertising, to take his agency into the big time, Chiat had to go back to New York. The move, he says, was prompted by the prospect of a single client, a Japanese liquor manufacturer that never grew into its projected billings. But it was also prompted, he says, by his restlessness and compulsive need for change.

“Looking back once, I realized there was a pattern. Every two years I would do something different. I built a house once, I moved to New York, I opened the San Francisco office, I took up skiing at 49.”

“The New York expansion move,” Day says, “is very indicative of Jay’s peculiar ability to go ram his head into a wall. Moving to New York made no sense whatsoever in a purely analytical way. But it was essential if the agency was going to become national. He packed his bags and went and had four people and no accounts. And it was very expensive.

“For me, I thought we had got to a point where we were extracting too high a threshold from everyone involved. I applaud what he’s trying to do, but I just didn’t want to take the trip to where he wanted to go,” Day says.

“I don’t think the agency was ever noticed or respected the way it is now,” Chiat says, “and a lot of that has to do with being in New York. I mean, we’re not doing better work now than we were doing then. It’s just that it’s seen by more people.”

A Deal Maker’s Mind

CHIAT’S FATHER,of Russian-Jewish ancestry, left school after the sixth grade and eventually owned a number of small businesses, including a laundry and a drive-in restaurant, where young Jay learned to be a short-order cook. The businesses were never very successful, but his father passed on to him, he says “the understanding that you had to work hard. Whatever he lacked in other skills he made up in energy.”

He remembers, during a family gathering some years ago, seeing his father, then 70, sitting at the table reading the “Business Opportunities” listings in the New York Times classifieds. “He always thought he was just one deal away.”

Chiat believes that one of the reasons for his success in working with entrepreneurs is that he understands how they think. “I had an unfulfilled period one month,” he says, “so I started three other businesses.”

In recent years, he has signed up former Olympic marathoner Frank Shorter to develop a series of running videos and hired designer Gina Ferrigno to put out a line of handmade shirts. In June, in partnership with Frank Gehry, he opened in San Diego the first of a chain of fast-food restaurants called Sandwiches, which will combine a health-conscious menu with a high-tech environment.

As far as his aspirations for Chiat / Day, Chiat is known for saying: “We want to see how big we can get before we get bad.”

Some think he got his answer not long after winning the Nissan account last fall. The first wave of Chiat / Day Nissan television commercials--in which young engineers sit around a table earnestly brainstorming a new car to be “built for the human race”--won the trade magazine Adweek’s “Grand Baddie” award as the worst ad of the year. The judgment seemed harsh and could be seen as part of a continuing industry backlash against the agency’s run for glory. But some in the industry found the sequel, a more simple-minded series of spots that showed rebate money spewing out of the doorjambs of new Nissans and being stuffed into the pockets of prospective buyers, even worse.

“I can’t believe they did that,” says Gary Johns, the former Chiat / Day art director who now has his own commercial production company. “It’s so terrible. I see it on TV, and I think, ‘That’s not Chiat / Day.’ ”

“The question now is how far Nissan is going to drag them down,” says one Los Angeles ad executive.

“I can’t comment on the work,” Chiat says when asked about the first wave of Nissan ads. “Subjectively, I didn’t like all of it.”

He did, however, subsequently ban Adweek subscriptions from the office. “I had problems with their accuracy,” he explains.

But at the same time, Chiat is taking bows in New York for three highly visible and inventive campaigns for Reebok, Arrow Shirts and Nynex (The New York-New England Yellow Pages). The Chiat / Day creative team brought the Yellow Pages to life with a series of hilarious scenes. The Nynex heading for “Noise Control,” for instance, was illustrated by a sledgehammer smashing a loud portable radio to bits. The heading “Fishing Tackle” was dramatized by a football player in full pads lunging across the floor to “tackle” a fish.

U.B.U., and Chiat Will Be Chiat

“PEOPLE BUY ALMOST everything based on who they believe they are, not the product,” Chiat tells me one morning in New York. We are in a sumptuous conference lounge inside his lower Fifth Avenue offices, which, like the ones in Venice, are laid out in a pattern of airy cubicles. Here they occupy six floors of a former sweatshop tenement. The soft-white walls are decorated with paintings by such California artists as Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses and Chuck Arnoldi, as well as by a young German artist, Liz Bachuber, whom he hired to create an office-wide series of raised human figures made of chicken wire applied directly to the walls and covered with plaster and brown paint.

We are watching a videocassette of the new Reebok commercials, developed by the agency’s New York creative director, William Hamilton, copywriter Marty Cook and art director Marty Weiss. To the unfamiliar sound of Russian folk music, a series of weird scenes flash by: a man with three legs and a floppy overcoat skipping past San Francisco rooftops, a girl in a tutu vacuuming her lawn, a woman playing a tuba on a tugboat. Each of these characters wears Reebok sneakers. The mysterious snapshots are intercut with extreme close-ups of the letters U.B.U. from different angles while a voice-over intones a declaration of individuality: “To be great is to be misunderstood . . . to recognize what is true in your private heart is true for all men--that is genius.” (The words are by that famous fashion plate, Ralph Waldo Emerson.) And finally, “Reeboks. Let U.B.U.”

Chiat has seen these ads many times, but he seems to appreciate them anew. “It’s actually anti-fashion, and yet its eccentricity puts it on the edge of fashion,” he says. “The problem with these aerobics shoes is that if kids see grandmoms at the supermarket wearing them, they won’t buy them anymore. The object in this campaign is to show that grandmom is hip, to return the cachet that Reebok had when they first introduced the aerobics shoe.”

That evening, over dinner at a steakhouse in lower Manhattan, he says there have been two times in his life when he felt successful. “The first time was a year after losing the Honda account. I realized that we were still in business, and that we were going to be in business next Thursday. There was another time at the shrink, and I was talking about something I’d done with the agency, and I realized that I actually felt pretty good about it.

“I don’t set myself up as a workaholic. I spend a lot of time playing. I believe in weekends and having time off and vacations and a change of environment. And I also enjoy what I do.”

In the 1960s, when Chiat came of age in the image-making business, the man who was breaking all the rules and setting new standards of creativity in New York was William Bernbach. His firm, Doyle Dane Bernbach, came up with, among other ideas, the one for Volkswagen that made it all right to “think small.” Doyle Dane Bernbach is now buried inside the multinational umbrella agency Omnicom, and Bernbach’s name is gone from the business. Chiat’s mission seems to be to go beyond Bernbach, to create a system of limber, independent thinking that can outlast the feast of prosperity now spread out before him and his agency.

“I don’t think any other agency has tried to do good work for 20 years and has accomplished it,” Chiat says. “Even Doyle Dane had a 10-year run, then management changed and the work kind of drifted away. Y&R; (Young & Rubicam) was a terrific agency 20 years ago. Wells, Rich, Greene was the hottest, most creative agency in the world in 1968, and that lasted about three years, and then they got hired by Procter & Gamble and other companies that weren’t interested in good work, and they stopped doing good work.

“The true goal of this agency, and I think we’ve partially demonstrated it already, is to do better work with the second-generation management than the founders did. No agency has ever successfully done that.”

As we stand outside the restaurant in the steamy New York summer night, I think back to something Chiat said earlier, which offered a less grandiose view of the marketplace in which he lives. “I have a kind of a shirt fetish,” he said. “They’re getting up around 200 bucks now for a shirt. I grew up with $3.95; that was a big deal for me. That’s what happens when you start making money. You have the same number of orifices in your body--you just figure out more expensive ways to stuff them.”

“Will he go down when it’s all over with the likes of David Ogilvy and Leo Burnett? Will he be a giant?” N W Ayer’s John Littlewood had asked earlier when discussing Chiat, trying to put all the noise about him in some perspective. “I don’t think we know that yet.”

Chiat bids me goodby and heads uptown toward his perfected environment, the New Yorker who reinvented himself in California and is now back home on his own terms, taking on 80-year-old Madison Avenue agencies for sport. It occurred to me that this might not be an image he would like--not, at least, to the extent that it implies satisfaction. For in his nightmares, Jay Chiat must see himself as that fearsome thing: a sleepy corporate don reclining in a corner office, his fresh pair of Reeboks propped comfortably on the desk, his mind wrapped around the challenge of a long weekend ahead in the Hamptons.