The Fifties

by David Halberstam

of television, was primal. Reeves liked to tell the story of the mule trainer, called in to deal with a recalcitrant mule, who had begun the treatment by first hitting the mule in the head with a two-by-four, explaining to the astonished owner, “Well, first I’ve got to get his attention.” One of his campaigns for Anacin was a classic example of this. It portrayed the inside of the head of a headache sufferer. Inside were a pounding hammer, a coiled spring, and a jagged electric bolt, but they were relieved by little bubbles making their way up the body from the stomach. The Anacin ads, he later admitted, “were the most hated commercials in the history of advertising.” But they increased Anacin sales from $18 million to $54 million a year in an eighteen-month period. “Not bad,” Reeves once said, “for something written between cocktails at lunch.” While his brother-in-law, David Ogilvy, was doing campaigns for Schweppes tonic, Rolls-Royce, and Hathaway shirts (the last of which featured the man wearing an eyepatch), Reeves was working with mass-consumer items: soap, toothpaste, and deodorants. As far as Reeves was concerned, the difference between him and Ogilvy was the difference between doing snobbish ads for the elite that ran in The New Yorker and running mass campaigns for America’s most important consumer merchandise. When Ogilvy once mentioned that he had learned much about advertising from Reeves but that it was a shame he had never been able to