The Unsinkable Andi Emerson

She was a New England Emerson, she’d have you know.

But Andi Emerson had a bohemian streak. It came out when she was sipping wine and recalling parties of the past, when she extolled the creative life and when she made her final request: "F**k the charities. Send flowers."

That’s why DM creatives are mourning today. Andi Emerson, who died at 82 Wednesday morning after a long bout with emphysema, was a great contributor-with an outsize personality. That’s saying something in this field.

Ann Adams Emerson was born on Nov. 1, 1925 in New York. Her father, Willard Ingham Emerson, was a polo-playing investment banker and she grew up around the horsey set.

She was a precocious young lady. "I went to Barnard at 15. I got married at 17. I never finished college," she said in an interview in 1995.

A flinty, strong-jawed beauty with red hair and freckles, she could have passed for Katherine Hepburn. Indeed, she worked as a runway model, one of several odd jobs she held during her early years in New York. She also drove a cab.

But all these gigs were warmups for her true vocation. She was hired by an ad agency, and her boss gave her some sound advice when the place collapsed: "You can’t go to a regular agency-they won’t take women. Go into direct mail."

She did, first working for a lettershop, Circulation Associates, and then for a mail order house. Her problem was that she couldn’t write copy, and she was fired when this was discovered.

A friend from Circulation Associates, Bob Gale, intervened. He paid Len Reiss, who had worked for the Famous Artists School, to teach her copywriting during a hellish weekend in a New York hotel. "He screamed and gave me assignments," Andi recalled. "He’d say, ‘I never read such drivel. It’s the worst kind of stuff."

After two days and nights, Reiss told her: "You can write copy. You’re not a good copywriter, but you can write mail order copy."

And so she did. She ran her own agency, Emerson Associates, for a time, then went to work for the mail order king Gene Schwartz at Eugene Stevens Inc.

That outfit offered vitamins, tranquilizers, and industrial products. It was here that Andi learned the true art of merchandising, and she eventually became a partner.

Typical Gene Schwartz copy: "After 27 years of research! After thousands of Reducing Miracles performed in doctors' offices! Now you can lose UP TO 33 POUNDS -- SO QUICKLY THAT YOUR FRIENDS WILL GASP IN ASTONISHMENT -- without starvation diets, without a single hungry moment, without even giving up the foods you love!"

No wonder Emerson called that period "the most fun time of my life."

"Gene was not a crook," she said. "His enthusiasm sometimes got ahead of him. That's why I edited his copy."

(For more on Gene Schwartz, click here. http://directmag.com/disciplines/creative/gene_schwartz_0214)

The Nervous Breakdown Saint

Andi married her second husband, the insurance broker Ken Weeks, around this time. "It was cheaper for him to marry me than pay for agency services," she laughed. And she started her next agency.

It was tough running a business while raising four children. She took the kids to nursery school at eight, went to the office, and got home at six. "After the kids were fed, a woman came in. I'd put them to bed, then go back to office and work until 10:30 or 11," she said. "I nearly lost my mind."

But it paid off. One day, she was visited by Father Bernard Dazzi, a Franciscan in need of a direct mail writer.

"Father, I’m not Catholic," Andi protested. "I’m Protestant if anything, but I’m really an agnostic. My assistant is Mormon, and my art director is Jewish."

"Great," the Franciscan reportedly said. "I’m sick and tired of being ripped off by Catholics."

That was the start of a great partnership.

They determined quickly that there had to be saint if they were going to stand out in the fundraising world. So they found one known inhouse as "the Nervous Breakdown Saint." Some copy survives:

"People suffering from jagged nerves and emotional disturbances may not be aware that a loveable girl saint has been granted unique power to help them in their affliction. She is Irish-born St. Dympha, the ‘Lile of Eire’ whose feast occurs on May 11. This is her story.’

Later, Emerson wrote a letter explaining to the faithful how their names had ended up on the good father’s list.

"Dear Patron,

In order to do the work of our Lord, we must reach the ear of the very few people who command the respect and the love of their communities…Every so often, someone will send in the name of an outstanding Catholic whom they know and respect. These names are added to our Leaders List, and your name was included several months ago."

But there were bigger accounts in the offing. Emerson worked for catalogs, sometimes producing a 10 cent cost per order, and as a subcontractor of Wunderman, Ricotta & Kline. "I had office there," she said. "The accounts didn't know it."

Her opinion of Lester Wunderman? That he was "pure, 100% great. I went with him when he was doing a pitch. I have never been so impressed. He verbally put arm around prospect. You had to hire him."

Andi and Johnny

Direct marketers were a tight-knit group back then. Andi would throw a "Bring Your Own bottle" party during every DMA convention. She’d have "competitors sitting side by side, swapping jokes. I supplied mixers and space."

Then she made the connection of a lifetime: John Caples, author of classic mail order ads like: "They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play…" Brought together by list leader Mal Dunn, they hit it off, and Andi started the John Caples Awards in 1978 to honor Caples and foster creativity.

"I’m proud that when his mind went from the drugs they were pumping in for his back pain, the only two people he recognized were me and David Ogilvy," she said. Caples died in 1980.

Emerson ran the contest for over 30 years. She kept it going even after an assault on a subway platform laid her up in the late 1980s, and was still calling into meetings during her final illness.

What did she achieve in all that time?

"Andi Emerson has done more to raise the level of creativity in direct response advertising - on a global level - than anyone else in the direct marketing field," wrote Sid Liebenson, of Draft, in a DMA Hall of Fame nomination he submitted a few years ago. "Thousands of working creatives in all parts of the globe take inspiration from the Caples Winners (meticulously profiled in annual Caples Program Book). What’s more, she’s traveled the world, presenting speeches and seminars on direct response creativity as illustrated by Caples Award winning entries.

But she wasn’t always easy to work with. She knew what she wanted, and she made sure that she got it.

The NoHo Star

For all that, my fondest memories of Andi are sitting with her in her small Greenwich Village office or in the NoHo Star restaurant downstairs and talking about the old days.

Did you ever wonder what selling was like before online checkout platforms?

"The stuff was $2 or $3," Andi recalled. "People would send in cash with the order. They would slit the envelopes, take the money out and throw it out into cardboard carton. At night, the partners would pick up the money and count it and put it in the bank."

The list was on color-coded Speedomat plates. "You could pick out RFM and categories of customers who bought what," she continued.

And the copy? Don’t even mention it.

"David Marguiles looked at a stupid garlic crusher and formed it into a major mail order product," Andi said. "There must have been 4 billion people who looked at garlic crushers before that and didn’t see what he saw. He just ‘saw’ a whole way to present that and dress it up and write copy. These were mental images-not wordsmithing, but vision."

But those days are gone. "The guys who could ‘see’ things went bye-bye," Andi said. And now she has joined them.

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