The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way Read Online Free PDF Page B

goes nowhere? What spark lights so hot a fire in a man that he ends with $100 million, and where does the spark come from? Neither Benton nor his mother nor his biographer could answer those questions. We will be on the trail of this elusive spark from here to the other end of the gallery. Maybe we’ll pin it down and maybe we won’t. But the hunt promises to be most exhilarating.
    Benton went to Yale University with scholarship aid and was graduated in 1921. This fact in itself makes him unusual, for three-fourths of the men in our gallery aren’t college graduates, and half aren’t even high-school graduates. But Benton was no maverick. He bought the standard advice given out to younger men by older men: If you want to succeed, get an education.
    After college he sold cash registers in Utica, New York, for a while, then drifted to New York City. The advertising business attracted him in a vague way, and he landed a $25-a-week job with an agency called Lord and Thomas. He had been an aggressive kid in school, and he was an aggressive young man in business – not the kind who disrupts the established order and gets everybody mad at him, but the kind who works within the organizational structure and delicately, without damaging it, turns it to his own advantage. This technique had always carried him to the top of social structures in school and now it sent him zigzagging upward through the ranks of Lord and Thomas. By 1925 he was in charge of a group of copywriters, some of them older than he.
    He was now 25 years old, a man of medium height and slight build, with a square face and a thin, curved beak of a nose. Later in his life, when he became a U.S. senator, some who liked him called him Hawk and some who didn’t called him Hook. His nose gave him a faintly predatory look.
    Early in 1925 he hired a young assistant, a newly graduated Yale man named Chester Bowles. The two become close friends and within a couple of years were dreaming and talking about starting their own ad agency. The middle and late 1920s were bullish times and there was a lot of money around and a lot of optimism in the air. Benton and Bowles probed here and there to see what clients, if any, the dreamed-of new agency could hope to capture. One possibility was General Foods, whose advertising chief had been impressed with the copywriting work both young men were doing at Lord and Thomas. The ad chief indicated that, if the new agency ever got itself born, it could count on getting at least some of General Foods’ business.
    The firm of Benton and Bowles got itself born on July 15, 1929, a few months short of the worst stock-market crash in history. The capitalization was a slender $18,000, with each man putting up half. Benton had managed to save only some $5000 during his salaried years at Lord and Thomas; so he couldn’t immediately come up with his $9000 share of the capital. He borrowed the missing $4000 from Bowles, who was blessed with a moderately wealthy family.
    General Foods, true to its promise, gave the new agency the job of advertising Hellman’s mayonnaise and a jelly additive. Working out of a small, cramped New York office, the little outfit blundered bravely into the hurricane of the Great Depression. For a while it looked as though Benton and Bowles would sink from sight along with thousands of other small, leaky businesses that had been launched in the calm and friendly seas of the 1920s. But, by bailing furiously, the two men managed to keep their battered little craft afloat. They did it mainly by establishing a reputation as an agency that was ready to try novel ideas – among them the utterly goofy idea that radio was probably as good an advertising medium as magazines and newspapers.
    Benton roamed around the country to convince potential clients that the sensible reaction to hard times was to buy more advertising, not less – and that, since conventional selling approaches obviously weren’t prying customers loose from