Meet the man who makes Don Draper look like a hack
George Lois, legendary ad man and allegedly the inspiration for Don Draper, came to the Death+Taxes offices last year to discuss his new book, his life’s work, and of course, his opinions on new season of Mad Men.
Not surprisingly, his opinions were many, and they were strong. More surprisingly, unlike Don Draper, the man swears like a sailor.
You know George Lois. If you don’t know the man, you know his work. If you don’t know his work, you know its influence.
Lois has spent his career in advertising and as the creative director of Esquire from 1962-1972 (a dazzling run that produced the most provocative, influential magazine covers in the history of publishing). But to say that Lois simply made ads and magazines is like describing Orson Welles’s The War Of The Worlds simply as a radio show. Like Welles, Lois’s real work has been in the realm of ideas.
As a young man just back from the Korean War, Lois led a shift in the way advertising is conceived and consumed, away from simply showing products to what he calls The Big Idea–appealing to the intellectual and emotional framework of the viewer. Sound familiar? If you watch Madmen, then it probably does. Lois’s life was the inspiration for its semi-hero Don Draper, although Lois himself dismisses the show out of hand as “just a bunch of assholes getting drunk and playing golf.”
If you’re a fan, you’ll have to excuse him if Draper and Co. look like a bunch of chumps to Lois–but he wrote the book on this stuff, and he didn’t do it by acting like an arrested-development case, running around on his wife and being exiled out in the suburbs.
Indeed, Lois’s Big Idea revolution sprung from his indefatigable thirst for the history of human culture. Lois has lived and worked in New York City his entire life. He talks of “going to worship every Sunday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” And after more than fifty years of marriage he still seems downright giddy about his relationship. His wife Rosemary has been at his side ever since he convinced her that their Pratt art professors were mostly useless because they didn’t possess the capacity for original thought.
Fittingly, The Museum of Modern Art has an exhibit of Lois’s Esquire covers on display through March 30. Lois also recently published his newest book, called George Lois on his Creation of The Big Idea, a brilliant collection in which he offers a first-hand glimpse at the thought processes behind his most important work.
Lois made the short trip from his office to the Death+Taxes office in SoHo to discuss his new book and his life’s work. He greeted me with the vigor and bravado of a guy who keeps audience with presidents and calls Muhammad Ali one of his best friends–but also with the sincerity that allowed him to throw the same passion into campaigns for Ovaltine and Jiffy Lube that he had for the most lauded Esquire covers.
“I don’t design,” Lois tells me. “I put my idea down and that’s the design. My ideas are my design.” Of himself and his peers, who lead a paradigm shift towards ideas in the 1950s, he explains, “Other designers were artists–you know, Artists. We were communicators, with design. My thinking was grittier, it was tougher, it was funnier.”
The real triumph of his career has been to spark conversations–to grab our cultural framework and rattle the hell out of it. Muhammad Ali as a martyr during Vietnam? That was Lois. The injustice of falsely imprisoning Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter–the inspiration for the Bob Dylan song? That was Lois. I want my Maypo? I want my MTV? You guessed it.
Lois’s influence on modern advertising and media is so fundamental that you might not even recognize it. But look at it this way: every time you see an ad that makes you laugh, every time you see a magazine cover that makes you think, hell, every time you see a Shepard Fairey poster, it can be traced back to his innovation of The Big Idea.
“I don’t just add lines and things,” he continues. “I’ll watch at kids today at their computers–they’re putting things on it and I’ll say, ‘Well what’s the idea?’ and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know, I’m fooling around.’ And I’ll say ‘What the fuck are you working on the computer for? You don’t have an idea. You ought to go to the computer when you have an idea.’”
Lois talks like that. He comes from a different time. In the course of our conversation, he tells me stories about two ex-presidents and an almost-senator. One of them excused himself from a lunch meeting with Lois for an illicit rendezvous in a restaurant bathroom. “When he came back to the table,” Lois recalls incredulously, “I said to him, ‘Do you fuck ‘em, or do you just get a blow job?’ He says to me, ‘George, I’m a busy man–I got no time. I just get a blow job.’ Can you believe that?”
After attracting national attention for his ad campaigns, Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire, asked to have lunch with Lois. “He had this great magazine,” Lois tells me, “but he knew his covers sucked. Everybody’s covers sucked.” It was probably Lois’s frankness and disarming confidence that led him to tell Hayes exactly that.
“Can you do me a favor” Hayes said, “and do me one cover? Because I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
After being briefed on a few topics in the issue, Lois had his Big Idea. Exactly one week later he handed in his first cover. It depicted Floyd Patterson, heavyweight champion of the world, knocked out flat on his back in the middle of an empty ring, in an empty stadium. The championship title fight with Sonny Liston was set for a week after the Esquire cover hit stands, with Patterson favored eight to one as the winner.
Lois explains Hayes’s incredulity: “He said, ‘But you’re calling the fight.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘But what if you’re wrong?’ I said, ‘I’m not wrong.’ He said, ‘You’re crazy.’ I said, ‘You’re crazy, because you’re going to run it!’ You see, even if it was wrong, it was action.”
But the haunting image of the abandoned fighter left for dead did much more than call a fight. Decades before the celebrity-obsessed, build-you-up and tear-you-down mindset our culture has grown into, it’s a gripping comment on the nature of celebrity, success and failure. “It was an image of defeat, of a loser,” explains Lois. “If you lose, they forget about you. If you lose, you’re a dead man. It really is an image of a so-called loser in any category, in any field of work.”
There was a third layer of meaning in play: In 1962, racial tension in the country was approaching a boiling point. Liston, a juvenile criminal, had done time for robbing a gas station. He was a Scary Black Man to a xenophobic and still segregated society. Patterson was the good guy. He was safe. He was supposed to win. Liston was never supposed to win–he was terrifying. The image of Patterson, not only defeated but left for dead, stirred and challenged those fears in an entirely visceral way. And it became that much more chilling when Liston actually won. It was a picture worth way, way more than a thousand words.
In his pursuit to push the Big Idea ever further, it was one of Lois’s great gifts to convince highly visible people to do outlandish things in his ads and magazine covers. He got Mickey Mantle to cry like a kid. (“I want my Maypo!”) He somehow convinced Muhammad Ali, a devout Muslim, to pose as martyred Christian saint. (It would turn out to be perhaps the most famous magazine cover in history, and sparked the conversation about Ali’s protest against Vietnam.) He convinced the universally despised Roy Cohn, instrument of McCarthyism, to pose with a halo over his head, and the infamous Lt. John Calley of the Mai Lai massacre to pose smiling with Vietnamese children.
How did he do it? Sometimes he appealed to their needs–the need for personal vindication, the need for publicity, whatever. Cohn desperately wanted to do the cover to help sell his book. When Lois sat him down with the halo, he said to Lois, “You liberal commies are gonna pick the ugliest one, aren’t you?” “You bet,” Lois replied, “I hate your fucking guts.” But what could Cohn do? He needed the publicity.
When his Big Idea wasn’t feasible, Lois would doctor the covers in a pre-Photoshop slight of hand. There was the one of LBJ as a ventriloquist, holding a talking Hubert Humphrey doll; the paparazzi-style Howard Hughes cover; the 35th Anniversary edition at the end of the 60s, which pictured JFK, RFK, and MLK standing together in Arlington National Cemetery.
All this lead some people to ask the question, just as they do of advertising in general, Isn’t it manipulative? Isn’t it cynical? But the Big Ideas in Lois’s work have always been bigger than the subject on the cover or the subject in the ad.
For the Christmas 1963 cover of Esquire, Hayes asked Lois to do a Christmas-themed cover. “I said, ‘All right,’” explains Lois, “‘I want to take a photograph of Sonny Liston, the meanest motherfucking prick in the world’¬–and he was a prick, a really bad guy–‘in a Santa Claus hat.’” To get him to do it, he asked his good friend and boxing hero Joe Louis to ask Liston. They got Liston to the shoot without mentioning the hat. During the shoot Lois put the hat on him and the photographer snapped two shots. “‘Get this fucking thing outta here,’” Liston growled at Lois. “‘A couple more, champ,’ I said. He looks at me and says ‘Fuck you.’” But it became another landmark cover.
“It was a time of incredible racism,” continues Lois. “It was still the Jim Crow South. There were still segregated drinking fountains. And I was thinking, Jesus if I were a black guy I’d be a terrorist. There should have been a black terrorist organization. I’ll never understand why it didn’t happen.”
With one wardrobe addition of the Santa Claus hat, Lois subverted one of the major identity icons of white America and challenged its rancourous racism. Did he manipulate Liston into the cover? Possibly. But was it cynical? Anything but. In fact all of Lois’s Big Ideas rely on an overwhelming optimism of people to get the ideas and to do something with them–to think. They give their audience the credit of intelligence, and the vote of confidence to move progressively toward the right side of history. Picasso once said (and if Picasso said it, you can bet Lois read it) that “art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”
Which is what Lois seems to want for all of us. His new book, George Lois on his Creation of the Big Idea, reads like a love letter to learning, to history, to art, and seems to urge its readers to soak in more of it, to experience everything you can, to think more. “That’s what I’m trying to say in the book–” Lois tells me, “the more you understand about life, the more you understand about movies, the more you understand about seven thousand years of art, the more you understand about comic books, the more dirty jokes you know, the more you live your life and the more you know about ballet–I don’t know a lot about ballet, but you should know something about ballet–that’s where the DNA comes from. That’s your reserve when you’re thinking about ideas.” That, he claims, is where the Big Ideas come from. Take it from Lois–he should know.
