Female trailblazer in the sexist world of New York’s boozy, womanising Mad Men
No finance, no cars, no liquor. Those were among the advertising accounts off-limits to female copywriters when Jane Maas was navigating the boozy, smoke-filled offices of New York’s Madison Avenue in the 1960s.
Male bosses ‘‘figured we didn’t know how to balance our chequebooks’’, she recalled years later. ‘‘They figured we didn’t know how to drive a car.’’ And alcohol, she added, was ‘‘what they used to seduce us, so that was clearly out’’. More suitable products, according to the prevailing view of the day, included dish soap and toilet cleaner.
Maas, who has died aged 86, was perhaps best known for midwifing the ‘‘I
Love New York’’ campaign in the
1970s. She became one of the first women to reach the top ranks of the advertising industry in the era dramatised in the TV series Mad Men.
Advertising Age, the industry trade publication, included her among the 100 most influential women in advertising and described her as a ‘‘real-life Peggy Olson’’, the Mad Men character portrayed by Elisabeth Moss, who starts the show as a secretary and becomes one of her firm’s creative minds.
Maas, who recalled witnessing even more drinking, more sex and more sexism at work than Mad Men depicted, had a similarly dramatic trajectory. Ever clad in high heels, a hat and a bra that she said made her breasts into ‘‘javelins’’, she trekked across the most venerable names in New York advertising.
She started out at Ogilvy and Mather in the 1960s, rising from junior copywriter to creative director. In 1976, she became senior vice-president at Wells Rich Greene, where she worked on the New York tourism campaign that featured graphic designer Milton Glaser’s iconic heart. It was credited with helping to revive the city after its close call with bankruptcy and worsening crime.
‘‘Lots of men say they are the father of ‘I Love New York’,’’ she once wrote. ‘‘But I am its only mother.’’
In 1982, her appointment as president of Muller Jordan Weiss made her one of the first women to lead a major New York advertising firm. In 1989, she became president of the New York office of Earle Palmer Brown, where she retired as chairwoman.
Maas chronicled her career in two books. The first, Adventures of an Advertising Woman (1986), was an apparent riposte to Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963) by David Ogilvy, the founder of the firm where she got her start. The second, Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond (2012), was much spicier.
If the boss ‘‘wanted to go to bed with you, you had to ask what mattered more: your selfrespect or your career’’, she wrote, recalling the injustices to which women were subjected, and the indignities to which some submitted. The worst offenders among the men were senior executives, because they had offices fitted out with doors and couches.
As for the drinking, she recalled that her colleagues did not indulge in shots in the office during the morning – one of the few departures from reality that she found in Mad
Men. She did, however, encounter an executive who once steered her towards Scotch instead of Perrier because the Scotch, he said, was cheaper.
But things were not always as they seemed. One of her colleagues was known for his ability to down four or five martinis in succession. ‘‘Don’t give me away,’’ he pleaded of her, when she once sipped from his glass, only to find that it contained water.
Women, she recalled, were expected to quit their jobs when they became pregnant. And the sight of a woman in a position of authority rarely failed to surprise. At a meeting with American Express, the client assumed she was a secretary.
Maas acknowledged a certain irony to her career: as she pursued the professional success made possible by the growing feminist movement, she contributed to advertisements that perpetuated certain sexist stereotypes.
Among those ads was one for Maxim coffee, in which actress Patricia Neal declared: ‘‘I use Maxim because I think it’s excellent. But – more important – my husband thinks so, too.’’
‘‘I look at that commercial,’’ Maas told
Advertising Age years later, ‘‘and think, ‘Did I really write that drivel?’ ’’
Jane Anne Brown was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. She began her career after working as an assistant on the TV show Name
That Tune, where she first became acquainted with the power of advertising.
Maas later struck out on her own as the personal advertising representative for Leona Helmsley, the New York hotel magnate known as the ‘‘Queen of Mean’’. ‘‘Don’t believe everything you’ve read’’ about her, Maas warned. ‘‘She was worse than that.’’
She was married for more than 40 years to Michael Maas, who died in 2002. Survivors include two daughters and and a granddaughter. –
advertising executive b March 14, 1932 d November 16, 2018
‘‘I look at that [sexist coffee] commercial and think, ‘Did I really write that drivel?’ ’’