When Mary Wells Lawrence sold her advertising agency for $160 million in 1990 and walked away from the industry she had dominated for more than two decades, she did not look back. The woman who had been the first female CEO of a New York Stock Exchange-listed company, and the highest-paid executive in advertising during the 1970s, retreated into a private world of extraordinary wealth, entertaining Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor at a Palladian villa on the French Riviera and living in a 13-bedroom estate on Mustique that overlooked Mick Jagger’s property. Her own explanation for leaving was characteristically blunt. “Advertising changed.
It got big and boring,” she said. “Otherwise, I would probably still be in advertising. ”
Wells Lawrence died in London on May 11, 2024, two weeks short of her 96th birthday. Her death prompted obituaries that acknowledged what the trade had spent years forgetting: that during the peak of American advertising’s cultural influence, she had been the most consequential person in the business.
Born Mary Georgine Berg in Poland, Ohio, she was a shy only child who spent much of her childhood in the local library. Her father, a furniture salesman, took her to New York at age 12 to study method acting, an experience that shaped her entire approach to advertising. She studied drama at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon, rather than business or marketing, and she carried that theatrical training into every commercial she ever made. She began her career in 1951 as a copywriter for a department store in Youngstown, Ohio, then moved to New York, where she worked at Macy’s before climbing the agency ladder at McCann Erickson and Lennen & Newell.
Her personal life was turbulent during these years, marked by a marriage to Burt Wells that she ended, resumed, and ended again. The seven years she spent at Doyle Dane Bernbach, from 1957 to 1964, were, in her own words, “heaven on earth. ” Its co-founder, Bill Bernbach, was a transformative figure, and his belief that the truth was in the product became the foundation of her creative philosophy. By 1963 she was a vice president, and years later, when DDB ran into difficulty, Bernbach himself suggested she buy the agency and run the merged entity.
The assignment that changed everything arrived in 1964 at Jack Tinker and Partners, where she had moved as part of a creative think tank. Braniff International Airways, a Dallas-based carrier, needed a big idea, and Wells Lawrence told its new president, Harding Lawrence, that his airline’s terminals looked like a prison camp, its planes were drab, and its flight attendants dressed like nurses. The rebrand that followed was one of the most comprehensive in aviation history. She brought in designer Alexander Girard, who reworked more than 17,000 elements of the airline from aircraft livery to matchbooks, and Italian fashion legend Emilio Pucci, who created flight attendant uniforms designed to come off in stages during the flight.
The fleet was painted in bold colors, and the campaign, launched under the tagline “The End of the Plain Plane,” was credited with driving record growth. Working closely with Harding Lawrence, she fell in love with him. They married in Paris in November 1967, a union that raised ethical questions in an industry already prone to gossip, since she was the agency executive and he was the client. Braniff left her agency the following year under pressure from the conglomerate that had absorbed it.
The success of Braniff made Wells Lawrence the most sought-after creative executive in America. When the head of Interpublic, her employer, refused to give her the title of president at Tinker, telling her a woman could not win acceptance in that role, she walked out. In April 1966, she founded Wells Rich Greene with two partners, taking Braniff as its sole founding client. The agency grew at a speed that became legendary, exceeding $100 million in annual billings within five years.
In 1968 it went public, making Wells Lawrence the first female CEO of a New York Stock Exchange-listed company. At its height, the agency managed $885 million in worldwide billings. She ran the agency like a movie studio, introducing cinematic techniques and real emotion into television commercials. “The best advertising should make you nervous about what you are not buying,” she said.
Her campaigns became part of American culture. The Alka-Seltzer work, which began with a simple commercial showing two tablets dissolving in a glass of water, doubled sales by getting consumers into the habit of taking two instead of one. Later taglines included “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” and “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is. ”
For Benson & Hedges, she found comedy in the awkward reality of the unusually long cigarettes, showing them setting beards on fire and getting crushed in elevator doors.
Sales grew from one billion cigarettes in 1966 to 14 billion in 1970. She later expressed regret over the tobacco work, saying, “I would not do it now,” though she added, “I do not feel I owe anyone an apology. ”
When Ford was struggling under the Pinto exploding gas tank scandal, Henry Ford II turned to her. Her counterintuitive answer was to advertise the people rather than the cars, producing the enduring “Quality is Job One” campaign.
For Bic she created “Flick your Bic,” and for the Ad Council she created “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” a phrase that entered the American vernacular. By 1977, New York City was in crisis, facing financial insolvency with collapsed tourism and empty Broadway theaters. The state commerce department hired WRG with a budget of only $400,000. The agency developed the “I Love New York” slogan, and graphic designer Milton Glaser sketched the iconic heart logo on a scrap of paper in the back of a taxi.
Three months after launch, Broadway attendance jumped from 20 percent to 90 percent. The campaign became one of the most recognized and imitated place-branding efforts in marketing history. In the 1980s, the trade press began calling her Garbo because of her long absences from the agency. She was fighting cancer, first uterine and then breast, and she concealed it deliberately because she did not want rival agencies to use the fact to destroy her clients’ confidence.
She continued to run the agency while undergoing treatment. By 1990, she was 61 and head of the nation’s 15th largest agency, but she was alienated by the direction of the industry. The megamergers of the 1980s had produced bureaucratic holding companies that prioritized scale over creativity. She sold WRG to the French group BDDP for $160 million and retired.
The agency’s decline after her departure was swift. Acquired by BDDP, then GGT Group, then Omnicom, it lost clients, including Procter & Gamble, which departed in January 1998. Three months later, the agency closed. Wells Lawrence later said, “I should have put some of the creative talent I had into cloning myself.
The ending might have been different if I had worked harder at that. ”
She and Harding Lawrence had built one of the great private lives of the jet-set era, buying Villa La Fiorentina on the Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat peninsula and the Terraces on Mustique, a 13-bedroom estate on 17 acres at the highest point of the island, later reported to be worth $200 million. Maurice Saatchi once said that if she had gone into politics instead of advertising, she would have been America’s first female president. Harding Lawrence died of pancreatic cancer in 2002.
That same year, she published her memoir, “A Big Life in Advertising. ” Asked about her approach to life, she said, “If you are not satisfied with your life, it is time to invent a new one. ”
She never formally returned to the industry, living for years on her yacht, often docked in Cannes. In 2008, she co-founded Wowowow, a website created and written by women for women.
In 2020, she became the first woman to receive the Lion of St. Mark, the Cannes Lions Lifetime Achievement Award. Her career was marked by numerous honors, including induction into the Copywriters Hall of Fame in 1969, recognition as Advertising Woman of the Year in 1971, and appointments by President Gerald Ford and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to represent business at the Economic Summit and serve on the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans. Claims that she was the inspiration for Mad Men’s Peggy Olson are imprecise.
Creator Matthew Weiner also cited Helen Gurley Brown as a partial inspiration, and Wells Lawrence was never a secretary, always a copywriter. More accurately, she was the real version of what the show dramatized, more consequential than any fictional character. Her own diagnosis of her career was characteristically blunt. “Of course I am a legend,” she said, “but it is not because of any great gift I have.
It is because I am a risk-taker. ”
The assessment was incomplete, because the quality that made her legendary was the combination of theatrical intelligence, creative audacity, and the absolute refusal to accept the limitation imposed on her in 1966, when she was told she could have the authority but not the title. She responded by walking out the door and building an agency that outperformed the one that had refused to promote her.