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You could, of course, shoot the commercial without Miss Cheng’s approval but you can’t put it on the air. Oh, I guess you could put it on any station in the United States which doesn’t subscribe to the Code of the National Association of Broadcasters. There may be two stations which don’t subscribe to the Code – maybe one of them is in a big market like Monahans, Texas (KMOM-TV).

So you go ahead and rewrite the commercial to make Miss Cheng happy and you go out to the Coast to shoot it and you spend I don’t know how many thousands of dollars putting it together and then you take it back to Miss Cheng so she can screen it. She looks at it in her little screening room, nodding her head sagely, and then the next day she calls you up and starts to hack away. One of the lines that Dorothy Provine says is, ‘There are a lot of other great products, but the one I use is Feminique.’ Miss Cheng doesn’t want the ‘but.’ The ‘but’ indicates that we’re trying to put down the competition. Miss Cheng wants Provine to say, ‘There are a lot of great products – the one I use is Feminique.’ Miss Cheng says we have a line in the commercial saying that Feminique has a fresh, clean fragrance you couldn’t get from a shower or a bath. Miss Cheng says that the line indicates – and this is the way she puts it – ‘you still stink’ after a shower or a bath. So help me, ‘you still stink.’

We’re killed again. She held us up, more problems, more hang-ups. It will go on and it’s a never-ending battle. The more power the censors get, the more I will have to fight them. And it’s a fight that the agencies don’t win. Eventually we got the commercial on the air. We dubbed, we cut, we made a mess out of a nice commercial to keep Miss Cheng happy.

I ran into censorship again when trying to run a print ad for Feminique in McCall’s magazine. Art Stein was the publisher of McCall’s at the time and he despised the thought of feminine hygiene. We went to him with the Provine commercial, which by now had been completed and cleared, and we showed him that the same ad had been accepted by the Ladies Home Journal and the Washington Post and a lot of other papers and magazines. Stein read the copy, part of which said, ‘Now that the pill has freed you from worry, the spray will make all that freedom worthwhile.’ ‘What makes you think the women who read my magazine take the pill?’ he said. ‘Well,’ we said, ‘we have a story that you ran in your magazine six months ago about the pill and pregnancy and the whole thing.’ We showed him the story. He said, ‘That’s the editorial side. My side is advertising. You can’t tell women that the pill has freed them from worry. I won’t accept it.’ ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘we’ll take that line out.’

‘You have another line here,’ he said, pointing to a line which said something to the effect that when you bathe, take care of the most important part of you. ‘This line,’ he said, ‘about take care of the most important part of you – you can’t say that.’ I said, ‘Well, look, I wrote the ad and I happen to think that that is the most important part of a woman.’

Stein got very red in the face and he looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Della Femina, did you ever hear of the heart?’ I told him that when I went to bed with a woman I didn’t particularly look for the heart. He said, ‘You are not going into my magazine with this ad; you’ll never get into my magazine with this ad. The story is closed.’ Boom. And he got rid of it. Since then, Stein has been fired and the man who took his place came up to our agency last summer asking if he could have the very same ad in his magazine. Censorship is just somebody’s hang-ups. I was censored because Mr. Stein could not bring himself to believe that the women who read his magazine had vaginas.

Don’t think for a moment that we’re the only ones having trouble with the censor because of the nature of the product. Once, at Bates, they turned out a commercial for a toy company that showed a kid with a little machine gun on top