IT MIGHT SOUND BIZARRE TO compare a DM copywriter like Ed McLean with the novelist Nelson Algren. But McLean, who died in August at age 77, shared certain things with Algren, including a Chicago background and a footloose youth.
Like Algren, Navy vet McLean spent time in New Orleans, selling pots and pans door-to-door and writing ads. Then he came to New York during the blizzard of 1947 (at age 20) and lived on the wild side as an aspiring novelist and cartoonist.
Certainly, his early years did not point toward a career in direct marketing. His friends were Wallace Wood, Jerry Robinson, Burne Hogarth and other comic artists, and he did lettering for Will Eisner. And he worked the kind of odd jobs that struggling writers and artists have always held — in a Bickford's restaurant, and then selling baby photos door-to-door out of Court Street in Brooklyn. At this he proved a natural.
“I was young, and had a handsome face, pre-mustache,” McLean remembered over breakfast one morning in 1995. “And I'd get leads from people. If a woman had a baby, there would have to be a grandmother.”
But one day a dog bit his ankle on Eastern Parkway, and two weeks later another dog bit the same ankle. “That was it,” McLean laughed.
He moved up in the world, writing for the Radio Advertising Bureau and Sky Publishing (a publisher of true detective magazines). And in 1959, McLean wangled himself an interview at Newsweek.
Having told the employment agent that he had done reporting in New Orleans, he thought the man interviewing him was an editor. But that man, Red Dembner, was looking for a direct mail copywriter. “Finally Red said, ‘Let's back up. What are we talking about?’” McLean recalled.
McLean wrote four sample pieces over the weekend, got the job, and under Dembner's tutelage became a master of the literate four-page direct mail letter.
It was the golden era of circulation marketing. Time was mailing millions of red pencils and Newsweek was sending surveys to get recipients physically involved. “It was about involvement, and the tangible touching of stuff,” McLean observed.
And it was there that McLean, who also was writing columns for The Village Voice and Fire Island News, wrote one of his most famous letters.
Dear Reader,
If the list upon which I found your name is any indication, this is not the first — nor will it be the last — subscription letter you receive. Quite frankly, your education and income set you apart from the general population and make you a highly rated prospect for everything from magazines to mutual funds.
That note became Newsweek's control for 15 years. In those days, the control was called the basic, McLean observed. The letter that beat the old basic by 12% to 15% would become the new basic.
“Some people believed in making small changes, but I learned not to fiddle with old controls,” he said. “People liked to use the expression ‘stable of controls,’ but I believe that's anti-testing. Breakthroughs are better.”
But McLean wasn't exactly working in a glamorous field, as he found out when he jumped to the J. Walter Thompson agency.
“Direct mail was shit in the ad world,” McLean said. “It was not commissionable. When creating TV or radio spots, you could make money even for production costs. But in mail, the costs were very low, so you couldn't make any money on that.”
This disdain was reflected at JWT. The main direct mail copywriter was “an old hack living in Montclair,” McLean recalled. “She would put out old copy when she came with an assignment. They'd scratch out the old date and recycle it.”
Worse yet, the designers “didn't like to design for mail,” he continued. “A designer would hold it up like this” — McLean then held his nose — “and let it drop to the floor.”
Finally, he had to go to the “animal trainer in charge of the copywriters” to get a seating assignment every day. “I wandered around for six months,” he said. “I never had an office. I had a manual typewriter on a dolly.”
To some extent direct mail deserved its bad rap, since it was being used to sell work-at-home programs and other sleazy offerings. “The consumer was prey who had to pray,” McLean said.
But JWT's clients were starting to demand mail. “Ford told them, ‘Either staff up or we'll do it internally.’” And soon McLean was up to his neck in work. He wrote copy for Pan American, Phillips Petroleum and Reader's Digest. And that got him an offer from Ogilvy, Benson and Mather, as it was known in those days.
Although not a direct marketer, David Ogilvy was “an inventive person,” McLean said. He was good at inventing myths, and terrific at presentations. He could spin a web.”
He certainly must have inspired Ed McLean, for in 1965, the latter wrote one of his greatest series of letters, selling diesel cars for Mercedes-Benz of North America. The first one, signed by CEO Heinz C. Hoppe, read as follows:
Dear Sir,
‘Forget it, Heinz,’ the experts told me. ‘It just won't sell here.’
They were talking about the Mercedes-Benz 190 Diesel — a car that's owned and driven daily by more than 500,000 people overseas.
‘Americans won't buy it,’ said the experts. ‘Why pay $4,068 for a German car with a noisy engine when for $891.37 more they can get a Cadillac?’
I had reason to believe the experts were wrong.
This letter sold cars, and it won a Gold Mailbox award, the precursor of the Echoes.
Sure of his skills, McLean left Ogilvy in 1966 to found an agency with Walter Wientz. But the partnership only lasted a few months. At that point, McLean started his freelance career, and in the decades to come he wrote thousands of successful packages.
I got to know Ed when he wrote a column at DM News during my years there. He was a fine writer with great personal charm and depth, and I always enjoyed his visits.
He never seemed happier than when he was running to catch an Amtrak train for his farm upstate — to join his wife Ylavaune (they were married in 1957), and his sons James, David and William.
The writer's life is not an easy one. McLean had the occasional trouble collecting from a client. And illness eventually caught up with him. In these things, too, he resembled Nelson Algren.
So let the epitaph on Algren's tombstone also serve for Ed McLean: “The end is nothing, the road is all.”
