Life After Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz
The woman who persuaded America to flick its Bic and love New York is marveling at how much Los Angeles has changed over the last decade. “I expected Century City,” Mary Wells Lawrence says as her pearl-gray Manolos click briskly down the path to her suite at the Hotel Bel-Air. “That was pretty much ordained. But Wilshire Boulevard, I can’t get over Wilshire Boulevard. It’s a canyon of glass.”
Voila. A quick snapshot of a prettified Los Angeles courtesy of one of America’s premier image makers, the woman who envisioned and touted the pink beaches of Peru--even if she had to send her creative director there twice to find them because they were that evanescent, glimmering pink only in the briefest shard of light.
It’s been more than a decade since Lawrence has had reason to come here as the peripatetic chief executive of the advertising powerhouse that bore her name, Wells Rich Greene. Before the firm was sold in 1990 to a French agency that eventually sank it, the agency was a virtual factory of pop icons, or plop icons, as the case may be.
Her agency urged America to seek relief in Alka-Seltzer’s plop, plop, fizz, fizz, and to Midasize its cars. It helped save American Motors from bankruptcy with its campaign launching the Javelin and lifted up the sagging Ford Motor Co. with bootstraps that asserted “Quality Is Job One.” Earlier in her career, when commercial air travel of the mid-’60s hadn’t progressed much beyond its military roots in offering creature comforts, Lawrence and her team declared “the end of the plain plane” at Braniff Airways, directing their client to paint its aircraft bright colors and dress its stewardesses in Pucci. (She later married Braniff’s dashing CEO, Harding Lawrence, who died in January.)
Along the way, Mary Wells Lawrence, now 73, helped transform the advertising industry by updating the unadorned sales pitch with production values borrowed from Hollywood. Dubbed “the gray flannel gal” by the media, she made business history twice--as the first woman to head an advertising agency and the first woman CEO of a company on the New York Stock Exchange. Her relentless drive earned her a place in the Advertising Hall of Fame as well as vacation homes in the Caribbean island of Mustique and St. Jean Cap Ferrat in the south of France where she partied with Princess Grace. Her drive also engendered a less savory badge of distinction on Madison Avenue--the nickname Queen of the Black Widow Spiders.
“Some of Madison Avenue’s old guard decided women were dangerous to the advertising community,” she writes in her new memoir, “A Big Life (in Advertising)” (Knopf). The Wall Street Journal has called the book “charming,” and the New York Times said, “That era of 60-second spots and lunches at La Cote Basque is evocatively and compellingly brought back to life” in Lawrence’s reminiscences.
In “A Big Life,” the queen glowingly recounts her more-than-three-decade reign, which she abdicated when the agency was sold. The book is filled with the sort of superlatives you might expect from someone whose job it was to turn stumbling blocks into steppingstones--or at least the public’s perceptions of them. In a typical burst of enthusiasm for her own work, Lawrence likens her leadership style to a veritable galaxy of A-list movie directors:
“I was the director, sometimes the star,” she writes. “The people I hired were the cast of characters and I was Elia Kazan, Mike Nichols, Francis Ford Coppola or Robert Altman--whatever it took to make them as good as they could possibly be.”
In person, Lawrence is far more circumspect and introspective than she appears in print. That’s partly the result of her second battle against cancer 15 years ago. The experience of beating breast cancer forced her to shift her sights beyond her career, which had long laid claim to her talent for focusing intensely. “Surviving cancer intensifies your awareness of other people’s problems and makes you want to help everyone in the world who needs help,” she writes.
At this point in her life, she questions some decisions she made when she treated doubt as a luxury. Lawrence says that now she wouldn’t do cigarette advertising, which her agency did for longtime client Philip Morris. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life,” she says. “I’d be more critical today about almost anything. That’s age. But at the time, people were concerned about drugs, not cigarettes.”
Lawrence is petite and stylish, with huge blue eyes the color of Delft china, high cheekbones and a patrician nose. As she speaks, her eyes sweep the room like searchlights, occasionally resting on her interviewer. As a high-profile woman in the ‘70s when feminism was still finding its way, she was once castigated by Gloria Steinem as an Uncle Tom for buying into the male power structure. But Lawrence has no apologies for taking on men at their own game.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, feminism “never entered my head,” she says. “I was so focused on coming up with miracle solutions for clients in those years that I didn’t care. I never went to any of the old men’s clubs. I was never part of the industry that sat around and had lunches. I wasn’t interested.
“Later on it seemed to me, looking at the feminist movement as a whole, that the people who did it were certainly as important and effective for the movement as the people who talked about it. So I have great pride in the fact that I was one of the women who did it.”
And now that she’s scaled that mountain and devoted most of her adult life to breathing the rarefied air of CEOs, she questions the values of corporate America--and not only because of their impact on women.
“I know what my job was like the last seven years,” she says. “It wasn’t so terrific. It was terrific when I was building the company and I was finding creative solutions for myself. When the company got big and I was the one who was putting out the fires and handling the finances and the people, when I got into the purely business end of the business, I was working just as hard and having so much less fun.
“The big, big companies that are headed up by men, we had always presumed that that was the ideal, that what women were trying to do was to have the opportunity to get those jobs. But it struck me that perhaps women in very senior jobs were looking at those men and weighing that kind of life against a life with children and other interests.”
Lawrence the legend came from unlikely beginnings. She was born in Ohio to a traveling salesman and his homemaker wife. Her mother was disappointed in her humble, silent marriage and decided to equip her only child for a better life by offering Mary to the Youngstown Playhouse as a child actor. She went on to study Method acting as an adult, and although she wasn’t interested in a career in the theater, Lawrence later applied what she learned to advertising.
“It occurred to me when I saw television--and when I saw the advertising on television--that what was missing was a very obvious kind of thing, which is that you are more moved by things that you feel than by just presentations,” she says. “If I tell you something is good, it’s not as effective as if you actually experience it.”
Lawrence later smashed her head against a glass ceiling at one firm, whose founder rewarded her good work with an offer of $1 million over 10 years--an astronomical salary for 1966. He then refused to promote her to run the agency because, he said, the world wasn’t ready for female presidents. “He was shocked at the blazing fury that came over me, the war he saw in my eyes,” she writes.
So she elected herself the first female president in advertising by opening her own agency. And as intensely focused as she was on life at Wells Rich Greene--”I looked upon anyone who left the agency before 8 or 9 p.m. as a traitor,” she writes--her life ambitions didn’t end there. “Well, I was very hungry, very hungry,” she says. “I was hungry for more than power. I wanted everything.”
And she had it. After a short-lived first marriage, she joined forces with Harding Lawrence to form a very high-profile couple--not least because of their unusual long-distance marriage. Mary spent weekdays in her New York office and traveling around the country visiting clients. On weekends, she flew to Dallas, where Harding and their two daughters, Pamela and Katy, lived with Mary’s mother. She says long-distance mothering did not damage her relationship with her daughters.
“We had lovely help, and I was there on the weekend,” she says. “They were going to have a huge outdoor lawn, treehouses, dogs and cats and ponies. They were going to have a dream child’s world with Harding in Dallas, and there was never any possibility that I was going to stop working. And we took them everywhere. When they were not in school, they were with us every second.”
Negotiating New York on Harding’s arm was helpful at a time when powerful women were viewed with suspicion. Lawrence had to operate by different rules than her male counterparts. She never met with clients over cocktails as men did. Instead, she and Harding entertained them and their wives at their home in St. Jean Cap Ferrat. “I was a very attractive blond,” she says. “It was comforting for them, their wives, the community, that everyone knew that I was absolutely, totally married and totally sexless. I dressed as a nun. I wanted my clients to treat me like a man.”
These days, a couple of ad agencies have asked Lawrence to buy them out, and a couple more have asked her to sign on as a consultant. But she’s reluctant to be “on a leash” again, as she puts it. Meanwhile, she’s trying to stay open to her new life as a woman alone.
Harding “felt very strongly that we had known what we were going to do, but that alone I was a very different person than we were together and that I should open up to my own possibilities. Now this is a new life, and I should be the same about that as I have about everything else in my life. I should grab it, focus and have a ball.”
