Some of My Best Friends Are Black (28 page)

Moving from full-time to freelance and back again, from one agency to
the next, I never had to sit for a single performance evaluation or go on a single job interview save the first one. I never had to produce a résumé, a portfolio, or fill out any sort of application. I just kept getting work because I knew the people doing the hiring because they’d known the people who’d hired them; just a few years in and some of us were already management. All that time I had one foot out the door because what I really wanted was to “be a writer.” Yet by the end of my run, I’d tripled my pay rate, was using a window office overlooking the Hudson River, and had been offered a managerial slot that came with a very decent low-six-figure salary. My cubicle-mate? The guy with the degree in furniture design? He was running the department. He’s the guy who offered me the job.

I’ve since been told—by those who defend Madison Avenue’s hiring practices—that my experience in the industry was some sort of anomaly, that you’re not supposed to be able to skate through the system and get as far as I did the way that I did. Maybe. But I’m pretty sure I’m not that clever, and I know I’m not that charming. The truth is that a bunch of kids out of college happened to be in the right place at the right time and the world started dumping money in our laps.

Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good summary of how the entire modern advertising industry was born. After World War II, a bunch of white guys in New York happened to be in the right place at the right time the last time the next big thing came along. And, no, it wasn’t television. Madison Avenue became what it is today—incredibly lucrative and permanently divided—thanks to the federally subsidized, racially restricted suburb.

In the early 1950s, BBDO hired Clarence Holte, the first black man ever to hold a professional position at a major ad agency. But Holte was hired solely to cover the Negro market, handling accounts that bought media in black newspapers and on black radio. It was a niche position, as few advertisers were genuinely interested in marketing to black consumers to begin with; they were too poor to merit attention, companies felt. At the time, most every black person who worked in sales and media was relegated to a position like Holte’s. It was assumed that the Negro market would forever stay the Negro market, and that niche was the only place blacks were qualified to work. No black person could get hired to write or manage general-market (i.e., white) advertising, because what black person would possibly know how to talk to all those white suburban housewives?

Television changed the way we communicate, but it was suburbia that drove the demand for the advertising that paid for what was on television. To make money for J. C. Nichols, the Federal Housing Authority had sent the Greatest Generation out to live in a bunch of empty houses in the middle of nowhere, and now all those empty houses had to be filled up with stuff. New dishwashers. New carpet cleaners. New lawn furniture. New everything. In the 1950s, the total dollars spent on advertising
grew by 75 percent, rising faster than average household income and faster than the gross national product.

We all know that advertising is a big con to get us to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need. It works on us anyway. Ads work because they’re aspirational. They tap into some unsatisfied desire and then sell you the solution for it. Buy this product, take it home, and you’ll be safer, happier, and more attractive. And therein lay the root of the industry’s problem with race, both in the office and on the airwaves. If advertising is aspirational, who in the 1950s aspired to be black? No one, as far as major corporations were concerned. The big money was in selling suburbia, and the appeal of suburbia was rooted in its racial and social exclusivity. Maytag wasn’t going to sell washing machines to Susie Homemaker by showing a prosperous black family moving in with one next door. Blacks played only one role in white America: they were the help. And that was the only role they played in advertising as well. Aunt Jemima stopped by at breakfast to serve pancakes, but otherwise black America was kept well out of sight.

For much of the twentieth century, it was even a novel idea that black people should aspire to be black. Black newspapers and radio stations were filled with ads for skin bleachers and hair straighteners. Relative to their income, blacks overspent on fine clothes and Cadillacs, buying the markers of white status to compensate for the daily insults to their own. But with the civil rights movement gaining steam, blacks were becoming an increasingly self-assertive and self-respecting demographic; the postwar economic boom had given them more disposable income than ever before. Companies began to realize there was profit in getting a share of black dollars, which meant that advertisers had to be able to talk to black consumers without talking down to them. That opened up jobs for people like Clarence Holte to serve the Negro market. But the color line on Madison Avenue was impermeable. So impermeable that it was broken only by a man who wandered across it by accident.

Roy Eaton grew up in the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem, the son of Jamaican immigrants, a domestic worker and a mechanic. Despite losing
part of one of his right fingers in a childhood accident, Roy wanted to learn to play piano. He first sat down at the keys when he was six years old. Nine months later he played Carnegie Hall—a prodigy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from City College of New York while earning a dual degree from the Manhattan School of Music, he was awarded a scholarship to study classical piano at the University of Zurich. After study in Europe, he later returned to the states to make concert debuts at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and at New York’s Town Hall.

Eaton’s musical career stalled, however, when the army drafted him to serve in Korea. After his tour overseas, he returned to Manhattan and struggled to find work. While searching for a teaching job in academia, he also looked into broadcasting; many of the radio and television programs of the era used live musical accompaniment. One of Eaton’s favorites was
Goodyear Playhouse
, but all he knew about the show was that a company called Young & Rubicam was involved in its production. He didn’t know what Young & Rubicam was. “Ignorance,” Eaton says, led him to Madison Avenue.

“I was visiting an employment agency on Forty-second Street. I walked into the telephone booth, looked at the phone book, and realized that Y&R was only two blocks away from where I was. It was a hot day in July. I just walked into the agency, walked up to personnel, and told them that I’d like to see the director. They took my résumé—it was a slow day, nothing was happening—and when the personnel manager saw all my academic and music credentials, he was very curious as to why I was there. He came out and said, ‘How can I help you?’ Which, by the way, is code for ‘What’s that black doing in here?’

“I said, ‘I know you do
Goodyear Playhouse
, and I was wondering if there might be an opening for someone to work in that area.’

“He said, ‘We don’t actually produce
Goodyear Playhouse
. Goodyear is the sponsor. We do advertising, but you wouldn’t be interested in that.’

“‘Well, I wouldn’t know if I was interested in anything unless I tried it,’ I said.

“‘Okay. Go home and write some ads, and I’ll submit them.’

“He figured that would probably get rid of me. But I went home and
looked at ads in
Life
magazine and over that weekend I wrote ten commercials; I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to do that many. One of the commercials I wrote used a concept that was already in production at Y&R. I wrote it for Hunt’s tomato paste. You’re in Italy, close up on the food, pull back, and you’re in America. The idea being to get Italian flavor in America. The creative director, Charlie Feldman, called me in for an interview. He was Jewish, had broken that barrier himself several years before. So he was interested in me. When I first interviewed, he said, ‘If you were white, you’d be at the desk right now. But you’re not, and I want a Jackie Robinson.’”

As it happened, Charlie Feldman was a classically trained musician himself. He asked Eaton to compose a few sample songs, commercial jingles. Eaton went home and cranked out seven of them. The next day he became the first black man ever hired to write advertising for white people in America. He quickly mastered the lowbrow art form. His tunes for Texaco (“
Trust your car… to the man who wears the star…
”) and Chef Boyardee (“
We’re having Beefaroni… it’s beef and macaroni…
“) would soon become woven into the country’s cultural fabric. For Kent cigarettes, he composed a jingle that incorporated the Bebop Jazz sounds recently pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Without anyone knowing, Eaton had slipped the avant-garde of black music right into white America’s living room. The Kent tune became a hit single, garnering a ton of radio play on its own. The very happy client upped its billings with Y&R by over a million dollars a year. Eaton’s annual salary was $8,000. “They got a bargain,” he laughs.

Yet Eaton’s salary was on par with, even slightly higher than, his white colleagues because of his musical expertise. “People with no experience usually started at six,” he says. “It was very fair. Once I was in, it was strictly about the work. With the exception of a few people who just hated blacks—and I knew who they were—I had no difficulties at all. People respected my talent, needed my talent, and that was it. Among my peers I made friendships that are lasting even to this day.” Charlie Feldman and Eaton would often play chamber music together. In 1957, a car accident in Utah left Eaton in a coma and killed his young wife. Being a black man, alone, in a coma,
in Utah
, Eaton was certainly not in line to
get the best medical services the hospital had to offer. But Charlie Feldman flew out, made sure his friend received every treatment possible, and stayed for his entire recovery. When the hospital bill came, Eaton’s colleagues all stepped in, pooled money, and picked up the tab.

Eaton was treated well on Madison Avenue. In 1960, the young black composer was even lured away from Y&R by Benton & Bowles, which promoted him to vice president and music director. But Roy Eaton was the Jackie Robinson who wasn’t. He’d only slipped around the color line. It was still firmly in place, and black America was still locked out of the major leagues.