George Lois, ad man and creator of iconic Esquire covers, dies at 91

George Lois, a Madison Avenue ad maven who in the 1960s injected counterculture ethos into Esquire magazine’s covers, wounding boxer and anti-war activist Muhammad Ali with arrows and drowning Andy Warhol in a can of Campbell’s soup to depict the collapse of avant-garde art, died Nov. 18 at his home in New York City. He was 91.

Lois’s son, Luke Lois, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.

Though Lois designed groundbreaking ad campaigns for brands such as Stouffer’s, Xerox, Tommy Hilfiger and MTV – his “I want my MTV” commercials and posters were a staple of 1980s culture – his Esquire covers, the subject of an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, were considered his magnum opus.

Working with photographer Carl Fischer, Lois depicted Ali, who had been convicted on draft evasion charges for refusing to fight in Vietnam, as the martyr Saint Sebastian in black and white boxing trunks – “a combo of race, religion, and war in one image,” Lois later said.

He put a halo over the head of Roy Cohn, chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his investigation into communist activity. In 1963, as racial tensions flared, he put a Santa Claus hat on boxer Sonny Liston for the December cover, angering “half the country,” Lois later said, and causing the magazine’s circulation director to ask Esquire editor Harold Hayes, “What the hell are you trying to do to us?”

Lois’s most shocking cover was of William L. Calley Jr., the Army lieutenant court-martialed and convicted in the brutal My Lai Massacre, smiling in uniform with Vietnamese children sitting on his lap. To get him into that pose, Lois told Calley about his own experiences fighting in the Korean War.

“I won him over,” Lois told New York magazine in 2010. “And the kids just looked at the camera, and I said, ‘Calley, give me a big s---eating grin!’ And he did it. It ran and, I’m telling you, people went crazy in America.”

Which was precisely his intent as an art director.

“My kind of art has nothing to do with putting images on canvas,” Lois said told an audience at a Miami Beach design and advertising event in 2014. “My concern is with creating images that catch people’s eyes, penetrate their minds, warm their hearts, and cause them to act.”

To do so, he said, “I’ve had to shove, push, cajole, persuade, wheedle, exaggerate, manipulate, flatter, be obnoxious, occasionally lie, and always sell.” Throughout his career, he told stories about those methods with considerable, if not questionable, zeal.

In one story, it is 1959 and Lois is a young ad man with the Goodman’s matzot account. He designed a poster in a pop-art style with a colossal piece of matzoh under huge Hebrew script that translated to “kosher for Passover.” Goodman’s executives hated it.

“The owner was about 92 – all he knew how to do was say no,” Lois told New York magazine in 2003. “So I said, ‘Let me go out and sell it to them.’ That never happened back then – they just didn’t think that way. Back then, they wouldn’t let the art director go sell the job.”

So off he went to the Goodman office building in Long Island City. “I’m getting nowhere,” Lois recalled. “So finally, I had to do something.” He opened the window and stepped out onto the ledge. “You make the matzos,” he told Goldman’s owner, “I’ll make the ads.”

“Come back in, I’ll run it already,” the owner yelled.

“That became a famous story on Madison Avenue,” said Lois, who told it in his 1977 book “The Art of Advertising.” In a review headlined “Flaunting It,” New York Times book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote, “George Lois may be nearly as great a genius of mass communication as he acclaims himself to be.”

George Harry Lois was born June 26, 1931, in New York City and raised in the Bronx with two sisters. His father owned a flower shop. His mother was a homemaker. Being of Greek heritage made him a target in the neighborhood. “I had a fistfight with every kid on my block,” Lois told New York magazine.