The Kitchen Table

Before we started this place in 1983, Rich and I worked for Hal Riney. You may not know who he is. This is too bad.

Then again, there was a time when I didn’t know who he was either.

It was 1980 and I was working at J. Walter Thompson in San Francisco when I got a call from Hal’s assistant, Nikki, who said Hal wanted to speak with me. “It’s raining,” she said. “You could take a cab over around 6:00.” Hal’s office at Ogilvy & Mather was three blocks away.

I agreed to show up, even though I’d never heard of the guy. The way she said it, he sounded important.

I told a senior writer at JWT about the call. “Are you kidding?” his eyes grew wide. “You have an interview with GOD.”

After three years working for Hal, I found myself ready to quit and start an agency with Rich. Riney was a stern and impatient guy. We were a little in awe of him. It was not going to be fun to tell him this.

We decided on a particular day to go in and quit. Naturally, that morning Rich wanted to go in and tell the old man immediately. I, on the other hand, wanted to put it off as long as humanly possible. I kept finding things I had to do.

“Come on!” Rich whined. “Let’s go in and get it over with. There’s no one in there with him! We can go in and quit now!” This happened over and over.

Sometime in the late afternoon, Rich’s constant bouncing at my doorway finally worked. We trudged down the hall and sat down in Hal’s office.

There was a long silence. Finally, Hal looked up “Well now. What brings you boys down here?”

Rich looked at me. “Tell him,” he said.

Okay, that might be embellished a little. But it’s funnier this way.

In between these two events was a lifetime of learning about people, advertising, and craft. Riney was charming, cruel, mercurial, loyal, insecure, belligerent, and sensitive, all at once. His expectations for the quality of our work were nothing less than stratospheric.

I happened to be in his office one day, early in my tenure there, when he received a phone call from a well-known director. I could only hear his side of the conversation:

“Hi, how are you?”

Pause.

“Not much. Just trying to do some more of the best advertising in the whole fucking world.”

He looked right at me as he said this, and suddenly I realized something. At JWT, they talked about being good. Hal demanded it, expected it, did anything and everything to get it, there in that office of only 28 people. Weirdly, this tiny place was the biggest of the big leagues. He expected us to be the best, anywhere.

For me and Rich, Riney infused a fear of failure, a fear of not being good enough, a desire to go back again and fix it, over and over, until it was right. He taught us to make every piece of type, every cut, every thought count, to do things other people would never think of in a million years.

Oh yeah. And make it look easy.

Because Hal was so influential upon so much of what GSP has become, I have included three pieces here that will give you a feeling for the man. I would also suggest that you watch Art & Copy, if you haven’t already. You will see Rich and me lamely attempt to keep up with the thoughtful, funny, and appreciative interview Riney gave, in the last year of his life.

The first of these pieces is an obituary I wrote for Hal, at the request of his family. It ran in the New York Times with very few changes.

The second is a tongue-in-check appreciation of Rich and me that Riney wrote for Advertising Age.

Finally, there is a talk I gave at Riney’s memorial. It was a lot of fun, very liberating, and well received by the long-suffering and oppressed company that was present. Like prisoners of war, we have come to think of our former plight as funny. I don’t know how that happens.

THE OBITUARY

Hal Riney: A Western Voice of Popular Culture

Hal Riney–who wrote “It’s morning again in America,” saw himself nominated for an Academy Award, and led the passengers of an airliner on a daring escape from terrorists–has died at his home in San Francisco. He was 75.

He was surrounded by his family. His passing was announced by his wife, Elizabeth Sutherland Riney.

Mr. Riney created (and often narrated in his own resonant voice) advertising campaigns for Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, Gallo wines, Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve beer, Perrier waters, and Saturn automobiles, among others. His elegant, wry style stood in stark contrast to the jangling commercial world of the latter twentieth century. The company he founded, Hal Riney & Partners, rose to the top of the industry on the basis of his distinctive sense of humor and reserve.

No less than David Ogilvy himself proclaimed Mr. Riney “far better than I ever was at my best, and he may be better than any other person I have known in this business.”

Mr. Riney held fast to his Western roots throughout his life, never leaving the West Coast. It was a source of inspiration for a body of work that stood in stark contrast to the urban, savvy, ethnically rich advertising from New York City, then the center of the American commercial world.

“People who grew up around Manhattan tend to look at the world through the eyes of a New York City person,” Mr. Riney said in 1986. “People who grow up in Des Moines probably have a broader picture of our country.”

Throughout his work, Mr. Riney celebrated an optimistic, perhaps even romantic vision of America. It was a land populated with people of simpler values, small-town Fourth of July parades, and rocking chairs on shady porches. There was little tolerance of fakery and cant. It was this vision he mined in his 1984 campaign for President Ronald Reagan, and even in his advertising for beer and automobiles.

“The beauty and whimsy, the cleverness and the suggestion seem to be gone from everything,” Mr. Riney said in 1982. “And it’s been replaced by two people holding up a product they would never hold up; and talking about it in a way no one ever talked; and being astonished, pleased, delighted or surprised about characteristics of a product which in real life would actually rate no more than a grunt, at best.”

The magnetism of Mr. Riney’s persona catapulted his San Francisco agency to national and even international fame. His style was widely copied, and his disciples went on to found no fewer than 28 other advertising companies.

Hal Patrick Riney was born July 17, 1932, in Seattle, Washington, and grew up in Longview in the shadow of Mount St. Helens. His father, who split with his mother when Mr. Riney was five, was a swashbuckling, idyllic figure for Hal throughout his life. Mr. Riney described him as a writer, newspaper publisher, actor, salesman, cartoonist, and gambler who wound up in jail after writing “a check that wasn’t the best check he could have written.” A photo of his father was always in Mr. Riney’s office above his Underwood typewriter.

His mother, a teacher, became a volunteer fire lookout during the summers of World War II in the Cascade Range of Washington state. The young Hal and his mother and older sister were taken out to a fire station by mulepackers who brought them regular provisions in the forest. Mr. Riney remembered taking overnight hikes all alone, when he was as young as 12. It was here he developed his lifelong love of flyfishing and the outdoors.

After working as a Safeway grocery boy and in the lumber mills around Longview, Mr. Riney studied at the University of Washington, graduating in 1954 with a degree in art. He served as a writer and public relations officer for the US Army in Italy, then returned to take a job in the mail room at the San Francisco office of BBDO, which was then the city’s largest advertising agency. He was soon promoted to art director.

Riney described an art director’s duties there: “My job was to make logos bigger. Once the logo got big enough, they would have a meeting. Then I would move the logo up or down, or to the right or to the left. Finally, I would be told to make the headline bigger. Because compared to the logo, it was now too small.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Riney became the agency’s creative director nine years later. It was at BBDO that he hired composer Paul Williams in the mid-sixties to create a musical theme for San Francisco’s Crocker Bank. The resulting song, “We’ve Only Just Begun,” went on to become a number one hit, recorded by the Carpenters.

It was here that he also met Jerry Andelin, the art director with whom Hal would collaborate until the end of his agency career.

In 1969, Mr. Riney, along with his lifelong friend Dick Snider wrote and directed Somebody’s Waiting a documentary about the patients at a Sonoma County mental hospital. The film, shot in their spare time, was nominated for an Academy Award that year.

After a stint as creative director of the Botsford Ketchum agency, Mr. Riney opened the San Francisco office of Ogilvy & Mather in 1976, inside a brick garage. During his tenure there and in the years that followed, he would write three of the 100 campaigns selected by Advertising Age as the best of the twentieth century.

For the Blitz-Weinhard Brewery in Portland, Oregon, he created a historic-seeming beer from scratch, based on a formulation created by the brewery’s nineteenth-century founder, Henry Weinhard. The brand, Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve, was advertised with commercials featuring postmodern admixtures of authentic historic characters, Oregonian locals, and odd anachronistic dialogue. The beer was an underground hit, eventually outselling even Michelob in San Francisco.

In the wake of a very successful celebratory campaign for Gallo Wines, Mr. Riney worked directly for Ernest Gallo in the creation of Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. He named the brand and, with Mr. Andelin, designed the packaging and shot innovative TV commercials with two fictitious entrepreneurs who had allegedly invented the product.

The campaign was an evocation of Mr. Riney’s lifelong distrust of MBAs and business-school culture. (“The best thing to do with an MBA,” he said at one point, “is to take it out and get it drunk.”) The two main characters said they’d learned how to start a business with the help of a mail-order course from Harvard, and spoofed market research in wry dialogue: “Ed has engaged in a scientific program to determine which foods go well with wine coolers,” says Mr. Bartles. “So far Ed has only found two foods which don’t. Kohlrabi–which is a vegetable sort of like a turnip–and candy corn.”

In l984, Mr. Riney joined Ronald Reagan’s so-called Tuesday Team, a gathering of campaign professionals put together to reelect the popular president. He created a television campaign that depicted a happy, contented, safe America and asked why we’d ever want to return to the days before Mr. Reagan’s tenure.

He also wrote a controversial commercial about Cold War armament that featured a hunter confronting the thinly veiled image of a Russian bear: “Some say the bear is tame,” the announcer, Mr. Riney himself, says. “Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear–if there is a bear?”

In 1985, Mr. Riney purchased the O&M office and renamed it Hal Riney & Partners. Shortly thereafter, the office became well known for its introduction of the new Saturn brand for General Motors (“It’s spring in Spring Hill, Tennessee”). It was the most successful new-model launch in GM history.

Mr. Riney’s agency went on to create campaigns for John Deere, Alamo, Blue Cross, and Dreyer’s Ice Cream. In 2003, the firm was sold to the Publicis Group and renamed Publicis & Hal Riney.

Throughout his life, Mr. Riney’s love of the outdoors led him to travel far and wide, fishing and hiking in farflung parts of Norway, Alaska, all over the Western states, and even to Honduras. “Why I prefer fly-fishing and being alone on a river to almost any other recreation,” Mr. Riney said, “is because it’s so much the opposite of what I have to do day in and day out.”

On a trip to Honduras in 1982, Mr. Riney’s SAHSA Airlines flight was hijacked on the runway in Tegucigalpa. Honduran rebels with semiautomatic pistols and bombs rigged with dynamite held the plane for a full day until, sensing a moment of inattention, Mr. Riney opened a plane door and leaped to safety with several other passengers.

Throughout his career, Mr. Riney maintained a prickly, curmudgeonly presence that to some seemed at odds with his celebrations of American openness and innocence. Closer examination of some of his office memos, however, reveals that at least some of this stance was tongue in cheek. One year, for instance, he suggested that employees lump their Christmas celebrations together into one, as they did monthly birthdays, “so you can better schedule your work.”

In his private life, he was a doting father who wrote and illustrated hundreds of unabashedly sentimental letters to his children. One of these, not surprisingly, included a poem explaining that the Easter Bunny was actually a lawyer for a special interest group who, once a year, assuaged his guilt by distributing candy.

Mr. Riney is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Sutherland Riney, and his children–Ben, 21, and Samantha, 19–from a previous marriage. In lieu of flowers, memorial gifts may be sent to Save the Children at www.savethechildren.org or to Earthjustice, for their work to protect Pacific fisheries, at www.earthjustice.org. A date for a memorial will be announced by the family.

RINEY’S PRAISE OF GOODBY AND SILVERSTEIN

To Whom It May Concern:

As one gets older, memory fades, and only the most significant people and events remain.

So it’s a tribute to Jeff and Rich that despite my advancing years, they and the event of their arrival in my advertising agency those many years ago still remain sharp and crystalline clear.

Oddly enough, I really can’t even remember which agency it was, but I’m all but certain it was an agency. It could have been mine, but then again, it’s possible it was someone else’s. In any event, when those two guys showed up, my life immediately got better. I don’t actually recall their first assignment, but I’m sure it was a beverage of some kind. Either Corn Nuts or the Oakland A’s, I think. Well, whichever it was, the work they did was terrific: I do know that.

It only got better. In fact, there were days—well, I suppose it could even have been months–when I’d wake up and wonder why there was any need to have any other creative people in the agency besides Jeff and Rich. In fact, I remember having thought of firing everybody else and just letting Jeff and Rich do it all. I think I actually may have fired everybody, because there are so many advertising agencies in the city which have names of people whom I vaguely recall as having worked for me, but I can’t be absolutely certain about that.

If I didn’t fire everybody, it was probably a good thing, because one day Jeff and Rich came in and quit, and that could have left me with a problem.

I’m fairly sure both of them quit, but now that I think about it there could have been three of them. I have a recollection of there being an additional person in the room at the time, but the name escapes me. I do have a sense that he liked to talk a lot. Or I may be thinking of someone else.

In any event, I want to congratulate Jeff and Rich on their success and the remarkable achievements of their agency over the past twenty years. It seems longer. They did some great work. I believe someone told me that they may still be doing it. Anyway, other than maybe a couple of people I understand might still be working for me now, Jeff Silverstein and Rich Goodby were the two best creative people I ever knew. And I expect I will remember them, and remember them well, for as long as I live.

Hal Riney

THE TALK AT THE MEMORIAL

At Hal Riney’s 50th birthday party in 1982, I worried for his longevity. The number seemed ancient, a definite downsloping of the road. I am 56 now, six years older than he was on that day.

And I now can see why he was actually at the very threshold of his accomplishments.

Hal was one of those guys you called the old man, sometimes affectionately, sometimes not, throughout his life.

I saw how true this was when, writing a piece about him recently, I happened across an Ad Age article with a picture of him. I thought, “Wow! Look how young he was. Cowboy hat. Big smile. Nice brown beard.” It turned out he was 49.

Suddenly, I realized: this was actually a full year before I attended the decrepit, pitiful old man’s 50th birthday party. And we were calling him “the old man.” In fact, I was mentioned in the article as “the recently hired Jeff Goodby.”

Forty-nine. And now I’m 56.

We were alive back then in some kind of miniature. A snow dome long ago, in which our perspectives were so different.

Riney’s fondness for older people–which was respectful and never critical or ridiculing, when you think about it–seemed like a quaint and affected posture. A creative person being different from his peers.

Actually, looking back on it, I think it was a unique grasp of longevity and death and the humor that could come from it–an acknowledgment of dying. Or at least a way to deal with the fear of it. Make fun of dying. Ridicule it away.

Well, we can see today that that shit didn’t work.

Being the old man was also, frankly, a little piece of intimidation. A kind of imposing seniority. In fact, a lot of things about Riney were little pieces of intimidation.

In 1980, after having him be incredibly charming throughout the process of hiring me, and after I had given notice at J. Walter Thompson where I was working, I called Riney’s office to see when I should come to work. I could hear his assistant, Nikki, talking to him in the distance.

“It’s Jeff Goodby,” she said.

“Who?” said Riney.

“He says you hired him.”

“Really. Don’t remember it at all. Okay, tell him to come in on Saturday.”

I’m not kidding, Saturday. More intimidation.

So I came in on Saturday and found myself at the coffee machine with this guy who’d been really nice to me, hiring me, my new buddy. “Hey, Hal,” I said. “How’s it going?” I was probably holding my hand out for him to shake.

“How’s WHAT going?” Riney growled without even looking at me.

“Well, you know,” I laughed nervously. “It’s just something people say.”

“What people?” he said. And walked off with his coffee.

I was the 26th employee of Ogilvy & Mather, the place that became Hal Riney & Partners. The company was still really small, over on Green Street. At that size, this stance of intimidation really permeated the place. Riney was the center of attention and I don’t think I will ever again sit around theorizing so much about what another human being thought or might do as we sat around theorizing about Hal.

We always knew where he was. We were like his collective GPS. It was self-defense, in case he surprised you by sending for you to “see if you had anything yet.” That was a bad scene. And of course I can still vividly see the effect he had when he walked slowly down the hall past all our offices to get a bourbon at a reasonable cocktail time like 1:00 p.m.

There was total silence as everyone made believe they weren’t watching him when he passed by. It was like something you could imagine when you take the Alcatraz tour.

While we’re on the topic of intimidation, and because Hal’s not here, I thought it would be interesting to think about some things we wouldn’t have dared to bring up in his presence. It’s a kind of revenge.

First, I’d like to ask whether anyone knew where Hal went to the bathroom. In all my time there, I never saw him in the men’s room, ever. Maybe he went to a gas station down the street or held it until he got home.

I always thought he wore his pants a little too high. The belt was way up here, like a golfer in the forties. Sam Snead.

What was the deal with not talking on the elevator when he got on? I said something one day and everyone looked at me like I’d lit up a joint. And think about this: How did that whole silent thing start? Did he actually tell someone one day that he’d kinda prefer that people not talk on the elevator?

I remember there were no-parking signs all over the alley at 120 Green Street, but Hal still parked his Bentley there all day, every day, and never got a ticket. How did that happen? Who was the mayor then?

And finally, no matter how good your new business campaign might be, weren’t you just waiting–knowing–that he’d come in at the last minute with something he wrote that would turn yours into setup material? It was like the sun coming up.

Okay, usually his stuff was better than yours. But since we’re saying things we wouldn’t have said with him around, well, it wasn’t always.

I remember a time when we had just gotten the Gallo business and we were all working on the first TV campaign we’d run for them. There were lots of good ideas around but, at the last minute, Riney came up with this truly lame–he’s not here, right?–truly lame campaign about the medals Gallo had won with their wines.

We all groaned about this total sellout. But the night before the presentation, when we had all resigned ourselves to being tomorrow’s cannon fodder, Andy Berlin called me up. “Goodby,” he said. “I was watching TV and Inglenook’s running that exact same medals campaign. Riney’s screwed. He can’t present it.”

I called Hal at home and told him the bad news, trying to contain my glee. I fully expected him to pull the campaign and present ours. “Mine is the best thing we’ve got,” Hal said. That was a big surprise. “I’ll have to present it and tell them there’s something else out there kind of like it.”

He did just that, confident that he’d make his thing so much more beautiful that the other campaign would shrink into history. And gallingly, Ernest Gallo went right along with it.

“Inglenook?” I remember Ernest saying. “We spend ten times as much as they do. It won’t be their campaign! It’ll be ours!” And so it was. We were foiled again.

I know it’s popular to say that all that intimidation got great work out of us, but I think that’s an oversimplification. Lots of bosses are scary and overbearing without getting anything good out of their people.

Instead, I think it was the release of that intimidation through humor and moments of genuine warmth with Riney that made us so attentive and willing. Those gratifying moments when he’d like something. Or make fun of you in just exactly the right way when he didn’t, with just enough humor to get you to start over. And actually enjoy it.

It was something that came out of his personality. He got us inside his insecurities and, while that was a bad place to be in some ways, it was a place that got better focus and work out of us than we’d ever done before. Anyplace else ever.

He expected it from himself. And somehow he got you to know that, and made you expect it from yourself. Better than anyone I’ve ever met.

It pissed you off sometimes, sure. But looking back on it, I think it was sometimes more us being disappointed with ourselves than us being angry at him. Although I wouldn’t minimize the latter, by any means.

That said, there was something even more important that Riney did that doesn’t seem to get mentioned much. Something that I think was maybe even a bigger contributor to that atmosphere of intelligence and ambition and humor.

And that was to hire many of you. To hire me and give me the honor of being with you. To have us all in one place together for many years. And here we are again today.

Hell, he even married some of you–well, most of you, actually, by last count–and fathered some of you to get you here today.

Maybe the biggest thing Hal did was to have all of us know each other. And to do so in an atmosphere of intelligence and irony and celebration of good things when they happened between us. These are great memories, for the most part, and you’ve got to admit, he had a lot to do with them.

I thank him today for that. For my knowing so many of you.

And I realize that there are many parts of this speech he would probably think could be funnier or better. I used to be aggravated at him for being so good at pointing out those parts. But I’m not today. Today, for once, I’d welcome that. I truly wish he were here to fix it.