Jean was a regular contributor to BBDO’s series of promotional pamphlets, the Wedge. Aimed at potential corporate clients, the columns were often written in the voice of a chummy businessman—a tone Jean excelled in mimicking. One of her columns, “The Story of Susy,” was an encomium to advertising told from the point of view of an adman. On his daily subway commute, our narrator always sees a “drab little girl,” “someone’s office girl, probably,” scuttling in and out of the train. “Susy,” as he nicknames this familiar stranger, is irredeemably mousy: baggy clothes, stringy hair, “skin that tired color city skins grow.” Her case appears hopeless.
But one day, something changes. Susy’s skin has become “cream-smooth” and glowing; her gray eyes are suddenly visible beneath artfully applied shadow. Her hair, too, is transformed: arranged in a “soft, friendly swirl,” and she had “learned, somewhere, how to make it gleam, sparkle, come alive.” The transformation is not merely a matter of appearances; improved looks go hand in hand with improved life prospects. The narrator guesses that Susie must have “gotten a better job” as a result of her makeover, as evidenced by a set of spanking-new clothes that give an added “lift” to her new face. Finally, one fine morning Susy appears with a beau at her side: “I saw them coming down the steps that morning—a pair of husky brogues pacing her small, pleased feet. She was laughing up at him—he was looking down at her. From that day they rode together—alone in a noisy world,” “the still gleam of a diamond on [her] hand.”
This fairy-tale ending, the narrator assures us, was made possible thanks to advertising: “friendly, helpful advertising” that taught Susy “about soap, about makeup, about how to care for her hair and nails.” “Miracles! Fairy Tales! Cinderella and Prince Charming,” the narrator concludes with satisfaction. “Yes, there are miracles awakening, miracles of transformation, miracles of lives coming into their own all around us every day . . .—through that magic that is advertising.” The piece ends with a postscript promising, with a wink, that BBDO can perform similar “makeovers” on any company’s lagging sales numbers, making “business dreams come true.”1
The origin of the “makeover” as a staple in beauty magazines is often traced to a 1936 Mademoiselle article, “The Made Over Girl,” featuring real-life nurse and magazine reader Barbara Phillips. Phillips wrote to the editors asking for tips on how to “make the most” of her plain looks; the magazine team took their subject directly in hand and published dramatic before, during and after photos of their “Cinderella” beauty regimen: a recipe for turning plain girls into princesses. The piece was so popular that Mademoiselle made it a regular feature.2
That Jean should cast the story of advertising as a tale of miraculous metamorphoses—whether of Susies or of corporate bank accounts—is no accident. By the time Jean was writing the majority of her copy for cosmetic companies in the 1930s, the advertising industry had long established itself as playing a crucial role in the larger chain of national product production and distribution.3 In his sweeping 1929 history of advertising from ancient Babylonia on, industry pioneer Frank Presbery waxed poetic about advertising as a progressive, rationalizing force. Properly deployed, advertising would not only evenly distribute earthly goods to the masses, but would make knowledge universally available as well. “If everybody had all the knowledge that exists and is available, and applied it, there would be very little unhappiness,” Presbery concludes sunnily.4
But American advertising—and cosmetic advertising, in particular—traces its origins to the decidedly less-than-rational hodgepodge of science, magic, and faith that formed the culture of medicine and “wellness” in the late nineteenth century. The first efforts at national advertising were launched by patent medicine manufacturers, whose elixirs, pills, drops, and ointments promised customers miraculous physical and mental transformations. For all of its purported down-to-earth rationality, the advertising industry had deep roots in magical thinking. This was a past it would never completely leave behind: that was, in fact, integral to its cultural success. The advertiser’s promise of salvation through consumption blended rationality and magic, scientific progress and dreams into a remarkably potent tonic.
“Patent” medicines—so-called because in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, one had to acquire a government license to peddle them—had a guaranteed place on every apothecary’s shelf in colonial America. Such English imports as Daffy’s Elixir, Dr. Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, and a specially patented “Oyl extracted from a Flinty Rock for the Cure of Rheumatick and Scorbutick and other Cases” were stocked side by side with the druggist’s more standard materia medica.5
Nineteenth-century medicine lagged notably behind other scientific fields, with the average doctor’s practical knowledge barely advanced beyond the medical wisdom of the second-century Greek physician Galen. Galen’s “humoral” theory hypothesized that the body was composed of four substances: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Sickness resulted from an imbalance in these elements. The average physician’s principal weapon for fighting illness—induced vomiting/diarrhea and copious bleeding of patients with lancets and leeches—remained of dubious aid. Those desperate to see themselves and their loved ones well were naturally tempted by alternative remedies.
Before the scientific revolution, science and magic—including the science of healing—were separated by only the finest of lines. Medicine men were stock characters at carnivals, markets, and fairs, peddling their cures alongside palm readers, acrobats, magicians, and animal trainers. Indeed, the pairing of “showmanship and dental surgery” was a bizarrely popular genre, spawning a number of dentist-puppeteers and dentist-acrobats who, presumably, found that, in the absence of anesthesia, their surgery went more smoothly when performed on distracted patients.6 They and their heirs attracted an audience as much for their entertainment value as for their medical adventuring.
In this vein, nineteenth-century American patent medicine manufacturers mounted elaborate “Medicine Shows,” sent out to travel the highways and byways of the country. The Wizard Oil Company, founded by magician John Hamlin, is illustrative of the genre, whose popularity peaked in the 1870s and ’80s. The Chicago-based company combined a canny modern distribution model with the ancient lure of spectacle: Hamlin sent out fleets of horse-drawn wagons, emblazoned with colorful ads for Wizard Oil and equipped with a stage and parlor organ. The performers not only conducted open-air entertainments and point-of-service sales but stocked village pharmacies throughout the midwest with bottles of Wizard liver pills, cough remedy, and liniment oil.7
Despite the appeal of these theatrical extravaganzas, American patent medicine manufacturers got their greatest boost from the rapid spread of literacy and print media in the nineteenth century. In 1800, the United States counted 20 daily newspapers; by 1860, that number had shot to 400, thanks in part to steam-powered presses and cheaper paper.8 Patent medicine companies were among the earliest and most cash-flush investors in the new advertising medium. True to form, patent medicine print advertisements were flamboyant and theatrical. “There is no Sore it will Not Heal, No Pain it will not Subdue,” promised one newspaper advertisement for Hamlin’s Wizard Oil. “The Great Medical Wonder . . . Magical in its Effects,” the company assured health-conscious consumers. “The bones are sold with the beef,” sighed one small-town editor when readers objected to the quantity of advertising in the paper. He knew that without ad revenue, the paper would require a paid circulation of two thousand, rather than its current two hundred, to survive.9
Nor did the patent medicine companies confine themselves to newspaper ads. The introduction of photo-engraving and chromolithography meant that advertisements and other printed promotional materials could be made more eye-catching. Medicine firms ran off handbills, pamphlets, posters, trade cards and, perhaps most effective, almanacs. The traditional almanac was intended for use as a calendar, but it could also contain general reference material, horoscopes, recipes, and cartoons and jokes, making its annual publication something of a literary event. No other printed sources were issued in such large editions, with the possible exception of the Bible. While patent medicine companies began by taking out ad space in popular almanacs, they soon realized printing and distributing their own almanacs provided better exposure. By the 1890s, all of the major patent medicine companies were distributing their own almanacs—replete, of course, with generous plugs for their healing remedies—free of charge to drugstores across the country.
Trade cards were another means by which advertising slipped, often unnoticed, into the American home. Indeed trade cards were, according to one historian’s estimate, the most ubiquitous form of advertising in America in the 1880s.10 These palm-sized three-by-five cards, engraved with the name and address of a product and an accompanying picture, created brand loyalty and a feeling of “ownership” in the customer. The fact that the pictures were printed in color was both a delight and a novelty to the average nineteenth-century reader, and the cards quickly spawned a collecting craze. Young women and girls, in particular, organized them into scrapbooks, cutting, pasting, and collaging the images into playful patterns; ads for tea, soap, shoes, and sewing thread side by side with plugs for Dr. Grosvenor’s Liveraid and Lydia Pinkham’s Female Vegetable Compound.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, there was no village so remote, no backwater so forsaken that the patent medicine industry hadn’t penetrated it, spreading its garish, cheerful gospel of good health through mass mailings; trade cards in scrapbooks; almanacs piled high on drugstore counters; posters plastered on fences and billboards and barns. But the American unconscious had been primed, perhaps, for this riotous explosion of therapeutic messages by the religious fervor that had swept the country in the 1830s and ’40s. During the Second Great Awakening, revivalist preachers canvassed the nation, holding forth in local pulpits and in open-air “camp meetings,” calling for believers to step forward and accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. The promise of rebirth and spiritual rejuvenation through Christian faith overlapped with the rhetoric of medical “miracles” common among patent medicine hawkers.
These public spectacles of conversion entailed their own kind of theater—and magical thinking—with prospective converts frequently overcome by sobs, moans, fainting spells, and bouts of hopping and shouting as the Holy Spirit did its appointed work. Indeed, one minister who became alarmed at the carnivalesque aura attaching to religious revivals, John Fanning Watson, penned an 1819 pamphlet entitled Methodist Error; or, Friendly Christian Advice to Those Methodists, Who Indulge in Extravagant Emotions and Bodily Exercises. In it, he warned readers that these “noisy Christians” prone to “falling down, jumping up, clapping hands, and screaming” were, far from bearing witness to the miracle of transformative grace, committing a “gross perversion of true religion.” Despite their different genres, the acrobatic dentist, banjo-strumming medicine salesman, and leaping Christian bore an uncanny family resemblance. All promised rejuvenated bodies and souls to an audience in search of health.11
For proof that Christian conversion narratives and patent medicine could comfortably cohabitate within nineteenth-century wellness culture, consider the life of one itinerant evangelist preacher, Lorenzo Dow. Known for his shaggy, unkempt appearance, in imitation of the apostles, Dow larded his apocalyptic sermons with plugs for his patented Dow’s Family Medicine (reportedly a mixture of Epsom salts, water, and nitric acid, recommended for all nature of “bilious derangements”). One doctor, Benjamin Dolbeare, wrote a posthumous testimonial to Dow in 1836, claiming that he, “in science, had no rival; in piety, religion and morals, no equal,” and that “it appears that hardly anything short of inspiration could have led to the discovery of such a remedy, so wonderful [is it] in its effects.”12
The Reverend Watson’s suspicion that an element of superstition and even black magic lurked within the Christian conversion experience was not unfounded. On the eve of the American Revolution, only 15 percent of the American population belonged to a formal church. In his famous 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur remarked that the average American’s religious training was so poor and mixed that “religious indifference [is] . . . one of the strongest characteristics of the Americans.”13 What was widespread, in the absence of strict Christian dogma, was a hodgepodge of occult practices held over from Europe, including astrology, alchemy, and divination. While the eighteenth-century Enlightenment spirit had done much to dampen such superstitious habits in America, folk magic continued to be popular into the nineteenth century, especially in rural areas. In many cases, folk magic blended indifferently with orthodox Christian beliefs.14
The European folk practice of divination—or seeking buried treasure through occult means, such as dreams, divining rods, mineral balls, or “seer stones”—continued to flourish in the New World and was not uncommonly imbued with Christian meaning. Treasure seeking was located, as one scholar has noted, “at the murky intersection of material aspiration and religious desire,” and could serve as a reassuring physical token of divine election. Joseph Smith Jr. got his first inkling that he might be God’s prophet when, at the age of fourteen, he began helping neighbors seek out lost property or find buried treasure with the aid of his “seer stone.” It was with the help of this same divining tool that Smith later discovered the spiritual payload of the Golden Tablets—and by which he was able effectively to transmute the profane mud of pagan treasure into the institutional gold of the Church of Latter Day Saints.15
During her childhood, Jean Wade was steeped in this uniquely American blend of Christian-pagan prosperity folklore. In that worldview, God’s “power” is an influx or inspiration that, if we believe in it firmly enough, will deliver both spiritual and material fruits. The cleaned-up brand of Christianized, self-help wisdom that Robert Wade preached did not truck with the more obvious magical claptrap of Wizard Oil and seer stones and divining rods. But at its heart, there lodged a similar sturdy faith in “miracles of transformation.” Jean was a successful adwoman because she instinctively combined the roles of carnival barker, minister, therapist, and life coach that could guide Americans on their quests for better living and better health. She had come by it naturally.
Home medicine in the early modern period fell within woman’s proper sphere. Women were expected to tend to “domestic” illness and injuries, from cuts to stomach aches, and often had recourse to recipe books of “home physic” in healing. “Cosmetical physic,” means of improving or beautifying the body, were a subcategory of these home remedies. One of the most popular ladies’ recipe books in seventeenth-century England was Sir Hugh Plat’s Delightes for Ladies, To Adorne their Persons, Tables, Clothes, and Distillatories with Beauties, Banquets, Perfumes and Waters. The cosmetic recipes were often equal parts chemistry, magic, and astrology, such as this one for the removal of freckles: “Wash your face in the wane of the moon with a sponge morning and evening with the distilled water of Elder leaves, letting the same dry into the skin.” An updated freckle-removal recipe from 1876 omitted reference to the lunar calendar, but retained elder flower as an active ingredient, now mixed with the slightly more scientific-sounding “sulphate of zinc.”16
It was not until after World War I that “face paint”—the use of face-altering color such as rouge, lipstick, and eye pencil—became acceptable for middle-class American women. Through much of the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth, any cosmetic that crossed the line from “improving” to “painting” a woman’s face was condemned. A popular ladies’ recipe book of 1876, Madame Bayard’s The Art of Beauty, or Ladies’ Companion to the Boudoir allowed that certain powders to lighten the skin (perfumed chalk, crushed mother of pearl) were permissible, but that in general, “no borrowed charms can equal those of ‘A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted.’”17
This ban on face paint stemmed from the presumed connection between a woman’s external appearance and her inner virtue. For a woman to mask her God-given face was a particularly vicious type of deception because it would hide not merely her physical qualities but mislead others as to the state of her inner soul as well. Alexander Walker, a Scottish physiologist, proclaimed that “goodness and beauty in woman will . . . be found to bear a strict relation to each other; and the latter will be seen always to be the external sign of the former.” That men are naturally attracted to beautiful women was essential, according to Dr. Walker, as “individual happiness” and nothing less than the “amelior[ation] of the species” depended on a man’s choice of a morally upright reproductive mate. A woman with a painted face would leave her suitors in agonizing doubt as to whether she was truly virtuous or just putting on a show.18
But if appearance-altering face and body paint was stigmatized, products that promised to “cleanse” and thus “transform” the skin from the inside out were another matter. Indeed, it was precisely because of the presumed link between a clean face and a clean soul that these products’ appeal was so powerful. By 1885, no one thought it particularly odd that the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher should publicly endorse Pears’ Soap, announcing that “if Cleanliness is next to Godliness, then Soap must be considered as a Means of Grace.”19
Women’s magazines from the 1880s up through World War I featured advertisements for a wide variety of soaps, creams, and powders that were judged to be “skin improving” rather than skin covering or masking. In part, the rhetoric of cleanliness worked because it resonated with a wide range of “clean living” health and reform regimens that were popular in the nineteenth century, from hydropathy (water cure) to temperance to vegetarianism. These movements imagined the human body as a porous organism whose health depended on strict regulation of inputs and outputs, guarding against attack by toxins and foreign bodies.
Hydrotherapy, which by the end of the century counted thousands of adherents and dozens of treatment centers nationwide, operated on the principle that cold water taken internally and applied externally conferred a host of health benefits. In his 1850 medical treatise Hydropathy for the People, Dr. William Horsell counseled daily vigorous cold-water sponge baths as of “the greatest value to persons suffering from gout . . . , nervous irritability, or weakness of the skin, etc.”20 In our artificial state of civilization, Dr. Horsell clarified, we fear exposing the skin to the natural healing elements of air and water, instead keeping it jealously wrapped up. The result is that our “skins become clogged, . . . until at length we get crusted over with a substance similar to Roman cement.” “Open pores” and a “vigorous skin” are essential to “complete restoration” of bodily health.21
The water cure mantra was echoed in cosmetic literature. The skin, Madame Bayard averred in The Art of Beauty, is among the most important of organs and the principal means for purifying our bodies. The pores exude daily “a multitude of useless, corrupted, and worn-out particles,” by which “the greater part of all the impurity of our bodies is removed.” Clogged pores result in “acidity and corruption of our juices,” she said, and are the “secret source” of disease.22 Partly in response to a contemporaneous push for sanitation reform, and tied to the spread of indoor plumbing, the market for soap exploded between 1890 and 1920.23 Soap ads, using water-cure rhetoric, routinely compared the skin to a living, breathing entity whose vigorous natural process of absorption and evacuation were impeded only at grave peril.
In the quest to differentiate themselves from competitors—as well as to drum up new markets—soap advertisements in the Ladies’ Home Journal during the 1910s and ’20s were keen to teach consumers that household soaps, for use with laundry and dishes, were not to be confused with toilet soaps. Jap Rose soap, for instance, advertised with the tag line “Give Nature a Chance!,” warning that the woman who used “opaque, sediment depositing” household soaps on her skin was asking for complexion trouble. Only “transparent” Jap Rose soap would “loosen impurities” and “let the air in.”24 Ivory soap alone resisted product differentiation, marketing a single soap product for toilet, kitchen, and laundry, but offering detailed instructions on how to use it in each context.25
Almost without exception, soap manufacturers crafted their advertisements around the principle that proper cleansing helped the skin and scalp perform its “natural” biological functions. With assiduous attention, the user’s inner beauty (and thus moral virtue) could be coaxed to shine through. Packer’s Tar Soap, for instance, promised that regular use would not only cleanse but “quicken the blood supply, increase the scalp’s nutrition, and thus aid nature in keeping your hair alive and beautiful.”26 Packer’s also claimed for itself the honor of being “first assistant of good Dr. Nature,” bringing “quickened life to your glands.”27 Woodbury’s and Pears’ soaps echoed this pseudoscientific, vitality-obsessed language. Beautiful hair starts with a “vigorous” scalp, they assert, since it is here that the nutrition-rich “network of blood vessels,” “fat glands,” and “color supply pigment cells” lie nestled. Stimulating massage plus lather plus water flushes out “dead cells” and “dust,” leaving “the pores clear and free to do their work.”28 In a stroke of off-label marketing genius, Sunkist citrus fruits even got in on the cleansing game. Sure, soap helped flush out sediment, but who was to say that soap wouldn’t itself become a kind of second-order sediment? Only the fresh-squeezed juice of a lemon, Sunkist offers helpfully, “cuts the alkali in the soap and leaves the hair really clean.”29
Advertisements assured women that beautiful skin was democratic: it was not a luxury reserved for the few, those with a “naturally” good complexion. On the contrary, all women harbored potential inner beauty that simply had to be coaxed into expressing itself outwardly. “Nature intended your skin to be flawless,” announces a 1919 ad for Woodbury’s soap, noting that “skin specialists are tracing fewer and fewer troubles to the blood.” Instead, skin blemishes are the result of one “insidious and persistent enemy”: bacteria and parasites smuggled into the pores via atmospheric dirt, soot, and grime.30 It is up to the woman to keep a sharp watch over the proper evacuation of her pores.
But the true appeal of early twentieth-century soap advertisements lay not in their promise of glowing skin and gleaming hair, but in their suggestion that this “quickening” and “renewal” of the epidermis was but the precursor to a deeper, more existential transformation. Woodbury’s caught the spirit of this symbolism best in its ads throughout the 1910s and ’20s, which emphasized the skin as in a continual state of metamorphosis. “Your skin, like the rest of your body, is changing every day!” a 1915 ad announced. “As the old skin dies, new forms in its place.”31 “This,” the ad goes on to suggest, “gives you your opportunity”—and only the foolish (sinful?) girl would fail to nab it. “How many girls despair of ever rousing a sallow, sluggish skin!” sighs another Woodbury ad in 1918. But the solution lies within every woman’s grasp, with a proper cleansing regimen: “Have you ever thought that your skin can be changed?” The change you seek is within you—in fact, it is in the bar of soap you hold in your hand.32 By drawing on centuries-old Protestant spiritual habits and narratives of conversion, soap manufacturers successfully marketed their product as a means of secular grace.
A 1919 advertisement for Resinol soap portrays two young women seated in a theater balcony, one gazing rapturously at the stage, the other taking a furtive sidelong glance at her companion, clearly trying to puzzle out the secret to her appeal. “You must have seen it—the clear unconscious smile of the girl with the fabulous complexion,” the ad confides.33 A clear complexion induces an “unconscious” inner confidence that ensures its lucky possessor “radiates magnetism,” making her “a center of attraction among her friends.” A clear skin is not an end in itself; it is merely the first step to a girl’s eventual social and romantic apotheosis.
BBDO was representing Silver Dust Soap when the account came across Jean’s desk in 1936. The company was doing a brisk business selling soap flakes to housewives for use with laundry and dishes with the tag line “Deeper Suds.” “Richer, creamier, full bodied suds!” the advertising text promised, pledging that for “plenty of suds” and “depth of suds,” housewives unanimously recommended Silver Dust. But Jean saw an untapped market: why not sell suds to clean the body as well as the dishes? “The wealth of B.O. and body daintiness advertising has laid the background for a need for super cleanliness in bathing,” she suggested in a memo. “I think you might be able to interest Silver Dust in producing a flake soap for the bath—Fairy Foam, Bath Foam, Bath Suds, Foamy Flakes, Fairy Flakes, etc.” Never one to shy away from her own products, Jean reported that she took an experimental bubble bath in Silver Dust flakes and found it “downright luscious.” “It soaks out weariness,” she informed her colleagues, “leaves your skin incredibly soft and smooth.”34 “Dishes sparkle, glassware glistens,” the Silver Dust soap ads had pledged, and Jean understood intuitively that housewives’ preference for “deep” and “creamy” suds in the dishpan could easily be transferred to the body. By combining the luxurious textural connotations of “cream” and “foam” with the breezy magic of mythical “fairies,” Jean imbued Silver Dust bubble bath with a quasi-baptismal quality: a release from pedestrian worries, a penetrating “soak” that would wash “the weariness” clean out of a woman’s tired body (and, perhaps, her soul as well).
Other soap brands were getting in on the act. In the same year Jean took on the Silver Dust account, Lux toilet soap ran an advertisement featuring starlet Carole Lombard on the glories of the bubble bath. “Often I come home from a long day in front of the camera thoroughly tired out,” a slightly deflated and blurry Lombard confides in the “Before” photo. But the “After” photo features the starlet’s face now delicately lit, its gentle white glow contrasting luxuriously with the black fringe of her lashes and black penciled arc of her eyebrows. A Lux Toilet Soap bath has done the trick, “pepping her up” with its “ACTIVE” deep-cleansing lather.35
The “wealth of B.O. and body daintiness” ads Jean noted referred to the surge of cleanliness-themed advertising following Listerine’s astonishingly successful campaign to make “halitosis” a household word as well as a household worry, beginning in 1920. Developed in 1879 by Dr. Joseph Lawrence as a surgical antiseptic, and named after the father of sterilization science, Dr. Joseph Lister, it was originally marketed to dentists as a means of killing germs during oral surgery. It served a variety of off-label uses as well, including foot-cleaning, floor-swabbing, and gonorrhea treatment.36 But by 1920, company president Gerard B. Lambert realized that Listerine’s association with clinical cleanliness could be harnessed purely for its social cachet, rebranded as an agent of “personal oral hygiene.” In collaboration with copy writer Milton Feasly, Lambert dusted off an ancient pseudomedical term, “halitosis,” and leveraged it to prey on the social anxiety of Jazz Age youth. “What secret is your mirror holding back?” queried a 1923 ad featuring a lovely young girl staring wistfully into her boudoir mirror. “She was a beautiful girl and talented, too,” the caption runs. “Yet in the one pursuit that stands foremost in the mind of every girl and woman—marriage—she was a failure.” Unpleasant breath was, of course, the answer to the puzzle of why this young woman found herself “always a bridesmaid, never a bride.”37
At about the same time Jean was working on the Silver Dust account, she was also brainstorming copy for Squibb toothpaste and working the “mouth freshness” angle so as to piggyback on Listerine’s well-established name recognition. In a memo, Jean dashed off a dozen or so tag lines. “Is your mouth sweet enough to kiss?” queried one. “She has been kissed often . . . but always good-bye!” ran another, darker example of what was known as “scare copy.” Jean suggested the ads should underscore that Squibb toothpaste contained “a mouthwash ingredient”: promising girls they would be kiss-worthy round the clock gave added value to the ho-hum business of keeping teeth clean. “Any toothpaste that could advertise a mouthwash ingredient would immediately capitalize on all of the powers of Listerine, Lavoris, and other ‘bad breath’ advertising,” she counseled.38
In her work for Wildroot Liquid Cream Shampoo, Jean helped the company zero in on its likeliest buyers: young women aged eighteen to twenty-five who washed their hair at home at least once a week, as opposed to their mothers who still had their hair “done” at the beauty parlor. “She wants her hair clean,” Jean informed Wildroot executives of their target customer, “because, let’s say it simply, she wants to get married more than anything else in the whole wide world.”39 “A girl wants two things from a shampoo—clean hair, and hair with a soft and alluring gleam,” Jean schooled her clients. With this in mind, Jean and her copy team played with tag lines until they came up with a seller: “Gleams as it Cleans, Cleans as it Gleams.” The phrase “So Clean, It Squeaks!” also tested well in Jean’s research, so they developed a cartoon personality, Squeekie, who dispensed cosmetic advice to girls. The chipper red-haired spokesgirl was splashed, in colored comic strip form, across magazines and onto subway billboards. Each comic strip portrays Squeekie giving sympathetic counsel to “fuzzy-wuzzies,” unkempt girls who had yet to discover the miraculous smoothing power of Wildroot.
Competing shampoo brands tried a variety of twists on the basic “clean” theme by offering shampoo “oils,” “creams,” and “liquids,” each with its own mysterious advantage over the others. Wildroot hedged its bets by declaring its product a “liquid cream.” “It’s not just a liquid, not just a cream,” the ads enthused, “but the best of both!” How this alchemical merger surpassed the merits of each formula is left to the reader’s imagination.
Another sales genius discovered he could stir the pot of consumers’ irrational fear of soap “scum”—among the oldest of soap fantasy/nightmares—then dash to the rescue with “soapless,” scum-free shampoos. Here, too, Wildroot hedged its bets. While the eventual Squeekie ads proudly declared Wildroot to be soapless, a preliminary series of sketches for the campaign suggested, alternately, that its unique formula was (a) soapless, (b) “mildly soapy,” or (c) some magical transcendence of the soap/soapless dichotomy altogether. “Better than Soap . . . Better than Soapless . . . It’s Wildroot Shampoo!” read one.40 Another version vaunted Wildroot’s revolutionary “three-step” formula consisting of a mild “soapy base,” plus a “water softener” to “cut soap and uncover hidden highlights,” topped off with “processed lanolin” to prevent scalp dryness and dandruff. “Soapless Sudsy . . . Lanolin Lovely!” ran the almost nonsensical, yet sibilant and oddly hypnotic, jingle in the final ads.
The social suicide of dandruff was also a mainstay of shampoo “scare” advertising. Even before Listerine invented halitosis, the antiperspirant Odo-Ro-No had successfully introduced the shorthand “B.O.” for “body odor” into the public lexicon. In Jean’s work for Wildroot, the writers felt around for a catchy dandruff equivalent. “Can your scalp pass the ‘fingernail’ test?” asked one sketch.41 In the male version of the Squeekie ads, men unlucky in love were asked whether their scalps could pass the “F.N.” test and if not, to consider that this might be the source of their romantic problems. “If YOUR scalp can’t pass the F.N. (finger nail) Test, you need Wildroot Cream Oil,” announced the final caption.42
With scalp dandruff a recognizable “body daintiness” category, Jean sought to mobilize its dark, taboo power in her work for Lady Esther All-Purpose Face Cream by coining the concept of “face dandruff,” or flaky, dry skin. “Face dandruff is a recognizable condition,” Jean opined, insisting that Lady Esther could enlist “chemists, cosmetologists, and laboratory technicians” to vouch for the fact that “dry skin flakes off [your face] as dandruff just as it does in your hair,” and that the condition could be “illustrated by microphotographs.”43 Lady Esther could capitalize on this fear by, predictably, suggesting social isolation if left untreated. “No man likes to kiss face dandruff,” ran one line of reasoning. “If your skin is peeling, flaking off—LOOK OUT! You have face dandruff.” Here again, Jean threw out a pseudoscientific quiz/test combined with a snappy acronym to market Lady Esther products: “S.A.—Skin Appeal.” “Take this quick step to skin appeal,” and “She has S.A—and plenty of it (it’s really skin appeal).”44
The F.N. test and S.A. have been consigned to the ashbin of history. But the fact that B.O. is still alive and well in the American cultural unconscious as shorthand for social death proves that Jean had the right instinct; it was certainly worth a try. Jean’s work on soap products and its cosmetic offshoots—shampoos, toothpaste, face creams—reveals nothing so much as advertising in thrall to a kind of frenetic dream-logic of contagion. Since any campaign that led to multiplied profits and products was an unquestioned good, the formula that worked for one body part or one product was immediately transferred to other body parts and products ad infinitum: replication gone mad.
In yet another defense of the advertising industry that she wrote for BBDO’s Wedge, Jean again adopted the voice of an adman, this time one whose fourteen-year-old daughter Anne comes home from school to announce that—what else!—her teacher has warned students to be skeptical of advertising claims. In “You’ve Got to Watch Out for Advertising!,” the narrator launches into a satirical riff on the dangers of shampoo and soap advertisements. “Yes, you’ve got to watch out for advertising, if you’re a young and pretty girl like Anne,” he warns. “Advertising might tell you about . . . a new shampoo to put a special gleam in those soft and shining curls,” he teases. Or take soap: advertisements popularizing cleansers and detergents have resulted in the “dangerous” proliferation of cleaner, brighter students: girls clad in “sunny cottons,” boys in crisp “white shirts.”45
Jean’s public endorsements of soap appear to have coincided with her own private appreciation for advertising’s role in producing better-smelling, better-looking, more marriage-eligible women. Jean was, as we have seen, painfully frank about her own failures to meet the beauty standards of her day. She grabbed the first marriage proposal that came her way because, as a girl who was “short and fat,” she feared she might never receive a second offer. Among the sparse private records retained in her archive are notebooks recording her daily weight and calorie counts, testimony to her lifelong struggle with body image. An early article she pitched to New York Woman magazine, “So You Want to Be Thin!,” summed up the centrality of weight to a woman’s self-image. “There are, after all, only two kinds of women,” she opens authoritatively. “The fats, who want to get thin, and the thins, who want to stay thin!” Whether one classes oneself among the former or the latter, Jean sighs, one “sad fact” remains: “A woman carves her curves with her teeth!” Stick to the diet she proposes, Jean promises, and “you can become that sylph-like self that flits through your dreams.”46
Despite her best efforts, for Jean dieting was mostly a losing battle. She occasionally turned the visible fact of her weight to humor in speeches and client pitches, especially on accounts dealing with food. Sometimes she referred to herself quite bluntly as “plump” or “fat”; other times, she drew joking, self-deprecating attention to her figure as sad proof of how tempting food could be.47 The indulgent chuckles she elicited from the crowd no doubt put her, and her audience, at ease.
Jean made occasional reference to her daughter, Anne, in interviews, speeches, and even ad copy. (She referred, less frequently, to her son, John, as well.) The “Anne” named in Jean’s Wedge article was, in fact, her own fourteen-year-old daughter (whether the anecdote of the skeptical teacher actually happened, we will never know). When Jean does refer to Anne in a professional or promotional context, it is usually—as here—to marvel at how “young and pretty” she is, to bask in the romantic attention and social success that advertising’s beauty products have secured for her (and that, perhaps, Jean felt she had missed out on). Anne and her friends like feeling fresh and beautiful, Jean retorts to the naysaying teacher, and perhaps more to the point, “their boy friends seem to like their clean and shining hair” as well.
By all accounts, the young Anne imbibed her mother’s lessons. In 1954, she compiled a scrapbook, entitled “Through the Looking Glass,” outlining a complete health and beauty program for young women.48 Divided into the twelve essential elements of beauty (“Your Hair,” “Your Skin,” “Your Figure,” “Personal Daintiness”), the book offers helpful hints on how to achieve “that beautiful ‘American Look,’ today’s ideal of glamor.” The beautiful girl will pay attention not only to health and personal cleanliness, but above all to “ATTITUDE.” “You may be clean and healthy and have good features, but still be ugly, if you let hate, envy, spite, tantrums, blues, worry, unkindness curdle your disposition,” Anne warns. “Beauty begins within!”
By the end of “You’ve Got to Watch Out for Advertising!”, it is not only dull skin and oily hair that is redeemed from dinginess by the hallowed industry. Advertising is, in fact, the secret to keeping the American economy and “distribution system” itself squeaky clean by winnowing out the “unsocial” capitalists, to quote Simon Patten, and ensuring that only the highest quality, lowest cost items flow through the system. “The little man around the corner” who peddles his product out of “a little hole in the wall,” hidden away on a “dingy side street,” will be utterly flushed out by advertising, Jean assures her readers. Instead, consumers will be educated to accept only the transparent, “strict and unvarying quality control” provided by nationally distributed standardized products. In Jean’s parable, shampoo is much more than a product that will keep girls’ hair lustrous and procure them marriage prospects. Soap becomes a metaphor for advertising itself, the force that will slough off any inefficiency clogging the industrial mechanism, bringing purified, smoothly flowing, richly alive capitalism to bear its glorious material and spiritual fruits.49