ADMAN TURNED AUTHOR OF SPY THRILLERS
Ted Bell, a former awardwinning advertising copywriter and creative director who abandoned Madison Avenue in his early 50s to recast himself as a bestselling novelist by writing and marketing his Alex Hawke spy thrillers, died Jan. 20 in Hartford, Conn. He was 76.
The cause was an intracerebral hemorrhage, a type of stroke, said Evelyn Lorentzen Bell, a former wife.
Bell evolved from a successful advertising executive seductively pitching products like Heinz ketchup, Miller Lite beer and Marlboro cigarettes to an author of fever-pitch thrillers for readers enraptured by the exploits of Hawke, a British billionaire secret agent.
After the Young & Rubicam advertising agency, the world’s largest at the time, lured Bell from Leo Burnett U.S.A. to become its vice chairman and worldwide creative director in New York in 1993, he was asked to describe his creative philosophy. His answer, in the context of product promotion, might have applied correspondingly to his later career as an author.
The theme should be “fresh and fun and exciting” and “tell a real strong story,” Bell told The New York Times.
“The only reason we’re in this business,” he said, “is to sell.”
Theodore Augustus Bell III was born on July 3, 1946, in Tampa, Fla.
Bell was an avid reader who, by the time he was a teenager, idolized Ian Fleming, devouring a dozen of the author’s James Bond books.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in English in 1969 from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia., Bell worked brief ly as a copywriter at Wilson, Haight, Welsh Advertising in Hartford and at Tinker, Dodge & Delano in New York.
“Banking was in his blood, but not in his heart, coming from three generations of bankers,” Sally Bell said in an email. “In his heart, he always wanted to be a writer.”
In 1971, at age 25, Bell sold a screenplay called “Screamathon” to the producers
Joel B. Michaels and Garth Drabinsky.
The following year, he was recruited by the Doyle Dane Bernbach ad agency, where he became vice president and creative director. He joined Leo Burnett U.S.A. in Chicago in 1982 as a creative director and was named president and chief creative officer in 1986, at age 40.
After joining Young & Rubicam, he and his collaborators won seven Clio advertising awards, three Cannes Gold Lions awards in creativity and the Cannes Lions Grand Prix award.
He retired in 2000 and published his first novel, “Hawke,” in 2003.
In 2011, Bell, who lived in Greenwich, Conn., was named a visiting scholar at Cambridge University’s department of political science and international studies and a writer in residence at Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge.
At least eight of Bell’s 14 novels were logged on the The New York Times bestseller lists, including his young adult fiction featuring the time-traveling hero Nick McIver.