The Real Mad Men by Andrew Cracknell

Author:Andrew Cracknell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762442430
Publisher: Running Press

From left to right: Fred Papert, Julian Koenig, and George Lois. A Wasp, a Jew and a Greek – the prototype sixties Creative Revolution agency.

An account handler, Carl Ally, is alleged to have punched George Lois in the stomach. Today, Lois is indignant at the suggestion: ‘Ally punched me? Are you crazy? I’d have laid him out. It was Papert he went after!’

Illustrating the macho atmosphere at PKL, Lois recalls, ‘We had the best basketball and softball teams in advertising. Our basketball team played in the Bank league, which had all-American college guys on their teams. The agency was loaded with strong guys. We were all depression babies, a lot of ethnics, a lot of street kids. It wasn’t like walking into an Ogilvy or Benton & Bowles, it was a place where men were men. We’d play in Bedford Stuyvesant where no white people went.’

It’s sort of appropriate that when it came to doing an ad for their women’s fashion store client, Evan-Picone, the models were dressed as mobsters and their molls. It’s equally appropriate that the mobsters were Charles Evans, the client; George Lois; an unidentified man from the PKL art studio; and Tony Palladino, an art director at PKL. Later, Palladino was to take the role rather too seriously in an incident in London which today seems comical but at the time was near tragic.

In 1964, PKL had opened an office in London for no particular reason other than that, according to Lois, Papert was an Anglophile and wanted someone to book his West End theatre tickets. Two New York PKL staff members were sent over to help set up and run the office: Ron Holland and Tony Palladino. The man appointed to head the Knightsbridge agency was a red-haired, dark-suited English aristocrat, Nigel Seeley (later to become Sir Nigel), a former client of PKL in New York. An ex-Army officer, Seeley had been trained in unarmed combat.

Says Peter Mayle, who would become PKL London’s creative director, ‘We all thought he was a toff because he took snuff and his uncle was an earl or a duke. When the uncle died, Nigel inherited the title (and his uncle’s crested socks, of which he was sinfully proud). I liked him a lot, I never found him disdainful but he certainly had a patrician manner. This might very easily have upset people.’

George Lois, who knew Palladino from childhood, says, ‘Tony was a tough kid, ready with his dukes. He grew up in East Harlem, black neighbourhood. Number of times I’d leave school and find Tony having a fist fight with a couple of black guys. I’d have to drop my books and start swinging.’

You can see what’s coming. It arrived about an hour before the agency Christmas party. Mayle recalls, ‘Nigel was in his office having a drink with one of the boys. I don’t know what he’d done to infuriate Tony but when he went into Nigel’s office it wasn’t to wish him Merry Christmas. Strong words must have been exchanged, causing Tony to attack Nigel with a view, or so I heard, to strangling him.

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