Free The Real Mad Men by Andrew Cracknell Page A

not want to be, and the one thing they resented above all others about the current advertising. Commercials with actors playing reassuring doctors; perfectly coiffed housewives trilling about the perfection of their cake mix; and men in white lab coats holding up test tubes and booming in authoritative voices some drivel about ‘ingredient X’.
    IT WASN’T JUST THEIR ORIGINS , it was also their youth. America had just invented the teenager, had begun to give these youths presence and influence, and they were the first to benefit. Rebellion was in the air, with the icons of James Dean and Marlon Brando to emulate. There was even, for the more anguished, Holden Caulfield, JD Salinger’s young, disaffected hero from Catcher in the Rye .
    â€˜We came home full of kick-ass energy and the GI Bill to educate us. Tradition, school ties and old boys clubs became relics’, said Jim Durfee, a war veteran. At the time, he was a copywriter at JWT in Detroit, but later he was to co-found Carl Ally Inc, one of the very best agencies of the decade. That energy found a period of literally fantastic artistic expansion and experimentation to feed and fuel it. As George Lois wrote in a 2010 Playboy article, ‘It was an inspiring time to be an art director like me with a rage to communicate, to blaze trails, to create icon rather than con. The times they were a-changin’.
    From the white-tie audiences at Carnegie Hall to the marijuana-clouded coffee shops of the beat poets on Bleeker Street, the black be-bop jazz clubs of Harlem to the cooperative galleries of Tenth Street, nothing stood still.
    With Manhattan’s frenetic building and rebuilding programme, the world’s leading architects added their prestigious signatures to the cityscape. In 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright’s futuristic Guggenheim Museum was finished one year after Mies van de Rohe’s beautiful SeagramBuilding, fifty-two sheer stories sheathed in bronze and bronzed glass, the classic functionalist skyscraper. In furniture, European influences from the Bauhaus onwards removed the stuffing and streamlined the design – by the 1960s no agency with any self-respect could have anything other than Charles Eames chairs in their reception area.
    The spread of the 35mm camera, with its changeable lenses and greater portability brought magazines an indispensability and urgency as exciting news vehicles. Until television usurped it in the late 1950s, Life magazine had its purple period, sponsoring not just dramatic photography but superb illustration; its lofty literary content included the first publication of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea .
    IN MUSIC, ART AND LITERATURE a dazzling explosion of imagination and energy fired a million incandescent ideas across the decade, some false and quickly sputtering, others arcing with a brilliance into the next century. But it was ignited against a social background that was far from settled.
    Jazz writer Jeff Fitzgerald describes jazz in the 1950s as taking on ‘a restlessness, reflecting an undercurrent of trepidation lying just beneath the surface. Jazz became more cerebral, more introspective… the music of a generation in transition, searching for its identity in a world populated by increasingly invisible, intangible perils. In a world living under the shadow of the atomic bomb and the creeping menace of Communism and an increasingly automated society feeling the control of its own daily existence slipping away with the push of every button, it is perfectly logical that the music should reflect that nameless angst’.
    He could have added the tension caused by the rapidly growing awareness of racial injustice, and it was the black population that was the driving force behind jazz. Musicians like Art Blakey, Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk took the music into infinitely more complex forms. Free jazz ‘experiments’ were taking place at the Five Spot on Cooper Square,