A Big Life in Advertising, by Mary Wells Lawrence. Alfred A. Knopf. 307 pages. $26.
"I was working at McCann Erickson for the money, for little black dance dresses that showed off my Norwegian legs, for my baby daughters' smocked dresses from Saks and for an apartment larger than I could afford ..."
It should come as no surprise that Mary Wells Lawrence's memoir, A Big Life in Advertising, has a marvelous first line. After all, as founder and CEO of Wells Rich Greene, the influential Madison Avenue firm responsible for such canonical campaigns as Alka-Seltzer's "plop, plop, fizz, fizz," among many others, Lawrence knows a thing or two about hooking one's interest right out of the gate.
Unfortunately, that same breezy incisiveness, so effective at 30 seconds, doesn't always work at book length. Aside from the most glancing reference to "the fifties in New York," Lawrence neglects to tell us what year anything is happening until page 38, and by then it's already 1966. We are lost in the soup.
A Big Life in Advertising glitters on its surface, and seems chock-full of detail until one realizes that it is neither terribly juicy nor deeply informative. That advertisers are a different breed who think alchemically is the kind of smoke-and-mirrors non-speak best reserved for clients.
When speaking of the groundbreaking campaign for Braniff airlines, with its painted aircraft and Pucci-attired cabin crew, Lawrence writes how wonderful it was to see "Braniff's hostesses feel so beautiful and begin to walk like models, one foot in front of the other, tra la la, on the planes."
Catchy? You bet, but worth contextualizing even a little bit. What year, for example? Or briefly mentioning the later legal battles flight attendants waged not to have to be quite so tra la la to keep their jobs. Gloria Steinem is reported to have said that "Mary Wells Uncle Tommed it to the top." It's a stupid, reductive statement, to be sure. But Lawrence, having brought it up, never directly addresses the accusation, either.
The book is full of many similar easily avoidable missteps. When speaking of the security consumers feel with big name brands, for example, she writes "You would trust a McDonald's hamburger in Calcutta, wouldn't you?" Well, no frankly, specifically not beef, specifically not in Calcutta.
Mary Wells Lawrence spent decades doggedly working to avoid clients' losing face or looking stupid. She deserved at least that much in return and didn't always get it here. For that, the blame must land squarely on the shoulders of her editor.
How strange, then, not having really enjoyed the book much at all, that in its last quarter or so -- with the author's depiction of her two bouts with cancer and departure from the biz, rendered with acuity and no trace of self-pity -- one falls a little bit in love with Mary Wells Lawrence. Too late, alas, to combat the overwhelming shallowness of what came before.
Perhaps one might need to work in the ad business to get the full measure of the book's power. For the nonprofessional, however, the proceedings seem a little small. The Life may be Big, but its Message never expands beyond a Medium.
David Rakoff is the author of Fraud, a collection of essays, currently in paperback from Broadway Books. He is a frequent contributor to Public Radio International's This American Life and The New York Times Magazine.