Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [18]
One of Bob’s favorite Lasker stories is about an exchange he had with the adman in the first week of that show. It seems that Lasker was so impressed with Bob’s first broadcast that he suggested that the comedian’s original $4,ooo-a-week contract be raised to $6,000. One of Lasker’s assistants rushed up to Bob with the happy news. Robert, ever alert to a good thing, decided to see just how much the traffic would bear, so he replied:
“Tell him thanks, but I’d be very unhappy if the figure weren’t $8,000.”
When this message was relayed to Lasker, the adman snapped:
“Tell him to be unhappy at $4,000 a week!” and with that, he canceled the raise.
(Lasker later became a good friend of Hope’s, but Bob has never forgotten the afternoon he fast-talked himself out of $2,000 a week.)
But as John Gunther has so aptly noted in his biography of Lasker, Taken at the Flood, building up a huge advertising agency was only one of the many interests of this Midwestern marvel. Lasker was once part owner of the Chicago Cubs with William Wrigley, to whom he later sold out. He was instrumental in getting Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis named Commissioner of Baseball and Will Hays appointed Hollywood movie czar. He assembled one of the great private art collections in America. And through the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and the annual Albert Lasker Medical Journalism Awards he has posthumously contributed to advanced medical research.
Among the most prominent of the many famous Lasker trainees is William Benton, once U. S. Senator from Connecticut and now back in Chicago as chairman of the board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is edited and published here. In 1921, while Benton was still a Yale undergraduate, he resolved to become a millionaire by the age of thirty-five. Later, after he had worked as Lasker’s right-hand man for a time, he faced the boss with a startling question.
“Am I worth enough to you to merit a raise to $50,000 a year?” Benton asked.
“You are,” said Lasker. “The raise is yours.”
“Then if I’m worth that much to you, I should be worth twice that much to myself,” Benton replied. Whereupon he resigned, joined Chester Bowles, organized the Benton & Bowles advertising agency, and reached his million-dollar goal with ease.
Lasker’s successor at Lord & Thomas, Fairfax Cone, reorganized the agency as Foote, Cone & Belding. “Fax” is another titan in the field. As shown by his recent speeches on the advertiser’s responsibility in helping to upgrade TV programming, he is not afraid to level constructive criticism at his own, sensitive profession. He is also a practice-what-you-preach leader in civic affairs, who has served on Our Town’s Board of Education and headed the Community Fund’s Crusade of Mercy drive, which won him a “Chicagoan of the Year” award.
Such men as Lasker and Cone – and Freeman Keyes, Mel Brorby, Ed Weiss, Will Grant, George (“There’s a Ford in your future”) Reeves, and Leo (apples in the reception room) Burnett – have put Chicago agencies in the billion-dollar-a-year class in billings. Chicago’s Adman’s Row is second only to New York’s Madison Avenue.
(Burnett, incidentally, is the 1962-63 president of the Advertising Council, a national, nonprofit organization set up by the industry for public service. “Fax” Cone headed the Council in 1951-52.)
But are today’s tycoons mere shadows of those of the “good old days”?
Perhaps they are not as spectacular as some of the great many individualists who preceded them, but as you’ll see if you follow me through several present-day executive suites, they are scarcely a line-up of nobodies.
There is J. Patrick Lannan, whose Susquehanna Corporation has won control of such interests as Crowcll-Collier and The Macmillan Company, the Milwaukee Road, and Minneapolis-Moline. Lannan’s apartments in Chicago,