Charles Saatchi, Beyond Belief: Racist, Sexist, Rude, Crude and Dishonest: The golden age of Madison Avenue - book review

We have seen Mad Men. We know about the ad-men of Madison Avenue. The naked chauvinism of their office politics. The bottom-slapping of their secretaries, and the lonely rise of Peggy Olson from PA to creative in the midst of it all. Some have glimpsed more of her world from Jane Maas’s memoir, Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond.

What we have not seen – or not for more than half a century – is the advertisements these ad-men dreamt up. Here they are, the campaigns of a generation of 1960s pioneers that defined the golden era of New York advertising, although they begin decades earlier and take us beyond the Sixties. As the title of this book observes, they are racist, sexist, crude, dishonest. Some are plain ludicrous. But to begin with, they are breathtaking for the shock of their misogyny.

Posters sell ketchup and detergent and suits with images of women kneeling at men’s feet or at the feet of their Hoovers; being spanked or stamped upon; half-naked and head bowed as they are encircled by grabby men. Women with pointed breasts entangled in body-shaping girdles and dragged across the floor by their hair, all with smiles on their faces.

In a later chapter on race, slave imagery of cotton-pickers and mammies sell soap and milk. Then there are babies urging their mothers to light up a Marlboro, and straplines suggesting that curmudgeonly old men calm themselves down with anti-psychotics ortranquillisers.

At times, they appear closer to images from an alternate Stepford reality, or descriptions from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels, than a visual record of one aspect of American cultural history. Collated by Charles Saatchi, himself an ad-man in a former life, the pictures come with his commentary – setting images of misogyny against the beginning of second-wave feminism; setting the weight-gain posters against the malnutrition of the Great Depression, and so on – which is well-meaning but bland.

The words add little more than historical context. Frustratingly, the text offers no self-reflection from a former advertiser who, with his brother, ran Saatchi & Saatchi, the biggest agency in the world in the 1980s, until being forced out (they famously dreamed up the 1979 poster slogan “Labour Isn’t Working”, which some might also say was “crude” or “dishonest”, in time for Margaret Thatcher to win that year’s general election).

What also hangs awkwardly in the air over the adverts and Saatchi’s endeavour in bringing them to us is the paparazzi shots of Nigella Lawson with Saatchi’s hands around her throat, or over her mouth, at a restaurant in 2013. Those images might not look out of place in the opening chapter of this book, and the publication as a whole has the whiff of a redemption project, even if that is not its intention.

Saatchi reminds us that women were shown in adverts as “passive sexual objects manipulated by male powers of attraction”; that depictions of female weakness and inferiority were used to sell products and that “the feminine psyche was under assault on all fronts; she must take into consideration beauty, weight, eternal youth, both attractive enough to keep her man, and the ideal housewife and mother”.

What is striking in the adverts he refers to is not just how much our attitudes towards women have transformed, but also a schizophrenic sense that, in fact, the underlying messages for and demands on women have not changed much at all – they are just not delivered as crudely. Any number of glossy-magazine or TV adverts reflect the impossibly perfect, multitasking woman who must, still, “take into consideration beauty, weight, eternal youth…” – just like her 1950s counterpart.

The title of the book suggests that this period marks a time of dishonesty when adverts were offensive and lacked truth. Has advertising started to sell the truth since then? Our own late-capitalist world of advertising overload is filled with offence and untruth too, from the dearth of black models on the cover of Vogue to the sexism of the “Beach Body Ready” poster and the current spate of “fat” models stories; similar images figure here, but in blunter, cruder, form.

What these early adverts do show well is the Madison Avenue ad-men’s successful endeavour to join up capitalist consumption with self-perception: “…the development of psychology led advertisers to a nearer understanding of the deep desires of men and women, the flows of the unconscious mind, and how choices between products are made and could be affected.” Lifestyle images of women draped across their washing machines show how they tied our idea of ourselves to the products we could own.

The housewife, Saatchi tells us, “was a figure targeted steadily by marketeers eagerly selling the newest frontier in consumerables – domestic appliances.”

While they were masterful, capitalist manipulators, it would be naive to think that aberrantly racist misogynists imagined these adverts. They were men of their time, reflecting the values of that time, and this is the most appalling aspect of Saatchi’s book.

We know that successful advertising implicates the public it sells to, because it must understand their psychology in order to exploit it. So the misogynistic or racist image managed to sell a shirt or a pair of shoes because it held psychological purchase for the consumer and was legitimised by his or her consumption.

The third chapter, on race, is the most shocking, but it also appears the most anachronistic. An open racism was at work here; even at a time when the Civil Rights movement was under way. A poster shows a black tribesman wearing bones in a line-up of white men in Van Heusen shirts. African Americans speak their messages in “plantation dialect” (“yas, honey child, dis heah’s real mayonnaise!”).

Pears soap employs a line from a Rudyard Kipling poem to suggest the colour of cleanliness, claiming that “the white man’s burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness”. Colour is used to sell soap more generally with promises that it can leave the user whiter: “We are going to use Chlorinol and be like de white nigger”, says a black boy on a boat.

The impact of the images subsides after this chapter – nothing can be as offensive – and the rest of the book presents outrageously misguided adverts for tranquillisers, cigarettes, fizzy drinks, and so on. It is almost comical to see doctors in white coats holding cigarettes, mouthing quasi-medical words about smoking being good for coughs, for keeping mum calm (“Gee, Mommy you sure enjoy your Marlboro…”) and for keeping men brawny (the image of the smoking cowboy becomes a repeated refrain).

Sugar is sold as “an effective dietary aid that curbs appetites”, 7-Up is offered as a cure for crying babies, and asbestos is a “magic mineral”. Sanitised tapeworm, meanwhile, is an elixir for losing weight – “No diet, No baths, No exercise!” It is as silly and as extraordinary as seeing an advert for the world being flat, and it is hard to believe that these were being pasted on billboards just a few decades ago.

Beyond Belief, for all its limitations, is a fascinating coffee-table book. It reveals the lies told in advertising history and implicates the advertising industry of today, even if Saatchi does not admit the latter. There is something of the art collector’s eye here too.

These are a collection of terrible popular-culture artefacts, the collection that Bluebeard would have kept in a locked room if he had been interested in lewd advertising imagery. We view them with a mix of horror and nervous laughter because they hint at the ways in which the world of advertising is still rude, crude and dishonest. We just can’t see it as clearly, yet.

Beyond Belief: Racist, Sexist, Rude, Crude and Dishonest: The golden age of Madison Avenue, by Charles Saatchi (Booth-Clibborn, £25) Order at the discounted price of £22 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop