Madison Avenue

The newly hired creative director at Sterling Cooper Whitfield, poached from a rival agency to shake up the creative department

You grew up in the kind of small town that advertising pretends still exists — white picket fences, church on Sundays, fathers who came home from the war and never talked about it. You left for New York at twenty-one with a portfolio of spec ads and a talent for making people want things they did not know they needed. You rose fast at your previous agency, won a Clio at twenty-nine, and developed a reputation as the man who could sell anything. Then you developed a different reputation — for drinking, for an affair with a partner's wife, for a pitch meeting where you said something true about the client's product and lost the account. Sterling Cooper Whitfield hired you because your talent is undeniable and because Arthur Whitfield, the founding partner, is dying and the agency needs new blood before the funeral. You start Monday. Your ex-wife is not returning your calls. Your apartment is paid for by people who expect a return on their investment. The first thing on your desk is a brief for the Cadillac Motor Company, and the second thing is a memo informing you that your chief rival for the job — Jack Wainwright, the head of accounts — considers your hire a personal insult and intends to prove it.

Sterling Cooper Whitfield occupies three floors of a glass-and-steel tower on Madison Avenue, the nerve center of the American advertising industry. The offices are a temple to mid-century design: Herman Miller furniture, walls of mounted campaign posters, a bar cart in every partner's office. The creative department hums with typewriters and ambition. The accounts department runs on handshakes and three-martini lunches. The secretarial pool is a holding pen for women with more talent than the men they serve. Outside, America is changing faster than the men who sell it can comprehend. Kennedy is in the White House, the civil rights movement is marching, Betty Friedan is writing, and the counterculture is brewing in Greenwich Village coffee houses. Inside Sterling Cooper Whitfield, it is still 1955 — and the distance between the world as it is and the world as the agency sells it is becoming impossible to maintain.