Cinema Reel: Mad Men and Women

Recently, we featured Frank Tashlin’s 1957 comedy, “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?,” in our DVD of the Week video series. The film stars Tony Randall as Rock Hunter, a copywriter who tries to save his job and his ad agency’s biggest account—Stay-Put Lipstick—by landing a celebrity endorsement from the voluptuous Rita Marlowe, played by Jayne Mansfield. Tashlin’s film is a zesty satire of the advertising and television industries which happens to propagate the myth of the all-male ad team: Rock Hunter tries to pitch his save-the-day lipstick campaign to a boardroom of suits (who look rather constipated, mentally and otherwise). The notion that ad campaigns which stereotyped women were exclusively made by male executives is an enduring one (see Don Draper et al. every season on “Mad Men”). Yet, historically, women had a large role in creating advertising campaigns targeted toward other women. Juliann Sivulka writes in the Advertising & Society Review,

What Betty Friedan and other feminist critics later deemed as sexualizing American women and stereotyping their role in society as mothers, wives, and servants of men was not an all-male development by men’s institutions and advertising—that is, solely the work of the businessman and the ad man. For one thing, these commercial images were largely created for women by women.

In fact, as Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker in 1999, the transformation of ads for hair dye were indicative of women’s changing self-perceptions in post-war America—starting with Shirley Polykoff’s mildly suggestive Clairol catchphrase of the fifties, “Does she…or doesn’t she?,” which evolved into Ilon Specht’s adamant proclamation for L’Oreal in the seventies, “Because I’m worth it.,” and so on. Polykoff was born a brunette, but lived life as a blonde. And, as Gladwell observes, she “always had a career and she never moved to the suburbs…. For Shirley Polykoff, the color of her hair was a kind of useful fiction, a way of bridging the contradiction between the kind of woman she was and the kind of woman she felt she ought to be.”

John McCarten, in his review of “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” for the magazine in 1957, referred to it as a “mash of stale jokes, bad acting, and dull drama,” ultimately labelling the entire production “mucilaginous nonsense.” It was just one year earlier that Polykoff’s advertising handiwork started to make a cultural impact on women in America. Gladwell recounts:

Clairol bought thirteen as pages in Life in the fall of 1956, and Miss Clairol took off like a bird. That was the beginning. For Nice ‘n Easy, Clairol’s breakthrough shampoo-in hair color, she wrote, “The closer he gets, the better you look.” For Lady Clairol, the cream-and-bleach combination that brought silver and platinum shades to Middle America, she wrote, “Is it true blondes have more fun?” and then, even more memorably, “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” (In the summer of 1962, just before “The Feminine Mystique” was published, Betty Friedan was, in the words of her biographer, “so bewitched” by that phrase that she bleached her hair.)