Love That Account

. . . This was Evan Llewelyn Evans, advertising and radio genius, scourge of account executives. . . The man who had built and broken more stars than anyone else in radio . . . who had fired a world famous Metropolitan Opera soprano because she wouldn't sing Some of These Days. . . . Mr. Evans raised his straw-covered head once more, hawked and spit on the mahogany board table. . . . It was always there, the feeling of fear. It hung in the air in the office of Evan Llewelyn Evans. . . . The Fear.

In these crisp, copywriter words, in his best-selling book The Hucksters* (Rinehart; $2.50), Frederic Wakeman described a big advertiser and the fear of losing his account that supposedly haunts all ad agencies. As a onetime account executive for Manhattan's Foote, Cone & Belding he had handled the big American Tobacco Co. account ($3,000,000 a year) a job in which he had had to satisfy American Tobacco's exacting president, George Washington Hill.

Who, Me? How much of his own experiences went into The Hucksters, currently soaring past 750,000 copies, was anybody's guess. Although Wakeman insisted that his fantastic, domineering Evan Evans was a fictional "composite," the resemblances to George Hill seemed more than coincidental. Like Evans, Mr. Hill is fond of wearing a hat in his office. His alltime Hit Parade favorite is a slam-bang version of Over There (a tune which delighted Mr. Evans). Like Mr. Evans, whose slogan was "Love that Soap," Hill believes in irritating and ear-shattering repetition. Some American Tobacco plugs: "Herbert Tareyton is back--yes, Herbert Tareyton is back!" "Lucky Strike Green has gone to war" and "L.S./M.F.T."

Like Evan Evans, Hill believes in object lessons. Once, the story goes, he commanded a new agency man to follow him from his office, drove wordlessly up Fifth Avenue to Tiffany's, demanded that a clerk show him a $150,000 necklace. Hill picked it up, shook it in the face of the astounded adman and boomed: "That's what I mean. Give me finished copy--not rough layouts!" Then he handed the necklace back to the clerk, walked out. Presumably on account of such didoes, Young & Rubicam resigned the Pall Mall account ($400,000 billings) in 1941 because Hill demanded too much service.

If George Hill thought he saw himself every time he looked into The Hucksters (gossip was that his staff referred to the book in hushed tones as "That Thing"), he was not the only one. Emerson Foote, head of Foote, Cone & Belding, had been Fred Wakeman's boss and "Kim" Kimberly, agency boss in the novel, is a jittery man, given to benzedrine tablets, double Scotches, and other extravagant habits. But in this picture of an ad executive at work, friends of Foote found little they could recognize.

At the Old Stand. Jaws dropped all along ad agency row last week as "the Fear" was felt in the offices of Ruthrauff & Ryan. Mr. Hill's $3,000,000 radio account (Frank Morgan and Jack Benny) was quietly taken from R.&R. and handed to Foote, Cone & Belding, thus giving the agency all of American Tobacco's advertising accounts (worth about $900,000 a year in commissions to F.C.&B.). It was the second body blow for R.&R. in the past two weeks (TIME, Sept. 2) but the agency seemed to be bearing up nobly. Although many an adman would not rate American Tobacco's account as No. 1 on his popularity Hit Parade, one R.&R. executive said: "We have not had more trouble than you would expect from an exacting client." An underling at F.C.&B. was blunter. Asked if it was true that the $3,000,000 plum had indeed dropped into F.C.&B.'s lap, the employe sighed: '"Yes, too true."

*In a poll of leading advertising men, the trade magazine Tide found that only 5% considered the book a fair picture of their profession; 21% declared it "untrue and exaggerated."

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