Discussing how office culture has changed since he started in business in 1962, legendary ad man Jerry Della Feminia tell the story of a colleague who used to visit his office at the start of every workday. He wasn’t there for pleasantries, or to discuss the day’s appiontments.
“I had a little wet bar in my office, and this guy would come in every morning at 8:30 and go over and pour himself a tumbler of scotch – I mean a giant glass, full of scotch – and drink it straight down. Then he’d say, ‘God, now I can face the day.’ ”
It would have been pointless for the breakfast-time boozehound to ask Della Femina to keep his habit a secret from the boss –
Della Femina was the boss. But remember, after all, who had the wet bar in his office to begin with.
“I wouldn’t discourage anyone from doing anything I was doing myself,” he recalls.
It was, needless to say, a different era. And it’s one that today’s Poland Spring-sipping office dwellers have recently had cause to consider, with the launch of the AMC show “Mad Men.” Set at a Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960, the show depicts an era when being a businessman (not “business person”) not only meant wearing a sharp suit and a hat, it also meant smoking like a steam engine, boozing like a frat pledge during rush week and feeling free to put the moves on the entire steno pool, or anyone else in a sweater.
Seen from the vantage point of the modern workplace, where smokers huddle on the sidewalk, on-site yoga classes far outnumber wet bars, and the vaguest whiff of sexual impropriety could lead to a human-resources intervention, if not civil-court proceedings, it’s an era that looks as antiquated as a hoop skirt. Is that really what the workplace of the day was like?
In a word, say Della Femina and others old enough to have been there, yes.
“Picture a bunch of drunks talking to each other through a cloud of smoke – that’s really what the ’60s was,” he says.
“They get a little over the top, but in my mind they pretty accurately depict the ad world of 40, 45 years ago,” says Michael Guarini, an ad-business veteran who’s now president of Ogilvy Health World, a division of Ogilvy &
Mather. Since then, he notes, “There’s been a pretty quantum shift.”
The Gin Game
For starters, there’s the smoking. In those days, when being health-conscious meant smoking a brand with a filter, one was free to light up anywhere – and pretty much everybody did, making the average office more full of fumes than an opium den.
“People smoked like chimneys,” recalls Mel Sokotch, a former Madison Avenue executive and three-pack-a-day man, now a consultant and the author of “Shortcuts to the Obvious: An Insider’s Guide on How To Get More Effective Advertising More Efficiently.”
Of course it was easy to lose track of how many cigarettes one was smoking, considering the number of drinks that were getting drained. Bottles in the office were not an uncommon sight – but much of the boozing went on over extended lunches, where white wine, much less mineral water, was nowhere to be seen.
“People didn’t drink a glass of chardonnay – they drank heavy-duty brown goods,” says Guarini, recalling the older colleagues who would take him out when he started in the mid-1970s. “I couldn’t keep up with them.”
Not only was the iconic three-martini lunch a reality, it could be just the beginning, recalls Della Femina.
“People would have three martinis at lunch, then they would have some wine, then they would have some scotch as a chaser, and then they’d go back to work,” he says. “The only thing that made it possible was that the people you were dealing with were as drunk as you were.”
The level playing field aside, that kind of booze intake still led to occasional complications.
“There were certain rules – there were clients who you never presented to after lunch, because they would either fall asleep or pass out on you,” Della Femina says. “Going to a meeting after lunch was always a contest to see who would pass out first.”
Or workers just might not make it back from lunch at all, recalls Ellen Hart Sturm, the owner of Ellen’s Stardust Diner in the Theater District, who held several office jobs back in the day.
“It happened all the time,” she says. “They’d go out to a big lunch on the expense account, drink and smoke a lot, and not come back.”
In case it needs to be said, the “they” in question were always men. “They really didn’t pay much attention to the females,” says Sturm. “Women were not considered. You weren’t included, and you felt it.”
It was “certainly a bit of a boys’ club,” agrees Sokotch, who recalls one particular account team he was part of.
“There was a definite macho swagger to the group. We were going through a period where all the guys were having babies, and there was an unwritten rule that if your wife had a baby in middle of the night, and you didn’t show up for work the next morning, you were a real wuss,” he says, chuckling at the memory.
Of course, just because the women weren’t getting much attention on a professional level, it doesn’t mean they were ignored entirely. A male boss trying to date a female underling didn’t raise an eyebrow, much less lead to a disciplinary hearing.
“Nobody even considered it inappropriate. In my agency there were at least 20 people who met at the agency and got married,” says Della Femina, who thinks the adoption of prohibitions on office romance counts as a turn for the worse.
“Today that wouldn’t happen, because the guy would be afraid he was going to get into trouble,” he says. “It’s really made it tougher for people to meet, because there’s this barrier that says we have to be politically correct.”
Fun to Funds
For the record, not everybody remembers the workplace being as libertinist, or as male-dominated, as “Mad Men” depicts.
To ad-business giant Allen Rosenshine, the former CEO and chairman (now chairman emeritus) of BBDO, the show is “a total fabrication.”
“I won’t deny that there was drinking, but it was never like that,” he says. “And if anybody talked to women the way these goons do, they’d have been out on their ass.”
Even Rosenshine, though, agrees with something echoed by everyone @Work spoke to – that business “in many respects was more fun then.” To some who were there, the show depicts more than an era when it was safe to down a few Gibsons at lunch with your lobster Newburg – it depicts a time when noses weren’t pressed as hard to the grindstone.
“I think business was a lot more fun then,” says Guarini. “Now, you might say, ‘Mike, you’re talking about sex and drinking and big lunches, of course it was more fun,’ and that doesn’t hurt, certainly, but I think it was more fun because the business was just inherently different then.”
In the advertising world, one big difference is that in the old days business was less competitive and few agencies were publicly traded, says Sokotch. When agencies went public and an increasing number of firms started competing for shrinking slices of the pie, things became more cutthroat – and less enjoyable.
“People work harder, and accountants and Wall Street play a greater role,” he says. “It’s still a good business, but back then, man, it was a great business.”
He’s echoed by Della Femina. “Investment bankers started invading the world, and it went from being a business of fun to being a business of money,” he says. “And that changes everything.”
Not that everything was great about the old-school workplace. Women and non-whites are certainly unlikely to pine for the old-boys’ club. And Della Femina is the first to acknowledge that a lot of those old-timers ended up in AA. Still, he says, it was fun while it lasted.
“All I can say about the old days,” he says, “is that I think about them every single minute.”