I knew next to nothing about David Ogilvy until last week when Ken McCarthy paid us a visit and was intrigued by our Aga – I don’t suppose they’re easy to come by in New York. Ken then started telling us that David Ogilvy began his career, get this, selling Agas door-to-door in 1931 in Scotland. If selling the world’s most expensive cooking stove at the peak of the world’s worst financial crisis to the world’s canniest nation is not a feat of genius, then what is? Not only that, but Ogilvy proved tremendously, unbelievably successful at it. So much so that Aga commissioned him to write the sales manual.

Ken wrote to Ogilvy at his chateau in France before he died requesting a copy of this sales manual which was kindly sent. I have managed to get my hands on a copy also and it makes the most wonderful reading. If only all training manuals could contain so much erudition, wit, colour, sense and kindness then we would be a nation to be reckoned with. I will write another blog post about the manual at some point.

And so began my quest to find out more about this incredible man. I have started with Roman’s new biography on Drayton Bird’s recommendation. Drayton worked a lot with Ogilvy towards the end of his life and sold his business to Ogilvy and Mather so he would know.

I won’t recount Ogilvy’s whole life here as you can read it in Roman’s tremendous work. Suffice it to say that each chapter of this man’s extraordinary life is more bizarre and incongruous than the last. After a term spent reading History at Christchurch, Oxford on a scholarship, Ogilvy decided he would change to Medicine. This didn’t quite work out, presumably because he had never studied science and so he was sent down. Bereft, confused and penniless, he relocated, in modern parlance, to Paris where he got a job peeling potatoes at the Hotel Majestic, which just happened to be the best hotel in Paris with the best restaurant in the world. Nevertheless, he just peeled the spuds. On his first day, slouching by the sink and desultorily hacking away at a King Edward, he was clipped round the earhole by the famous chef, Pitain who screamed “What are you doing, you toad. Take pride in what you do. Stand up straight! Everything in this kitchen matters!” I rather think this piece of advice stuck with Ogilvy, so diligently did he apply himself to his work throughout his life. After a few months, he was promoted to egg-white whisking and then a few months later, he reached the apogee of his career as a chef: gilding the cuisses de grenouilles with tiny fronds of chervil to serve to no less than M. Doumer, President de la Republique. As Ogilvy placed each tiny frond on the frogs’ legs, Pitain called everyone round. Ogilvy’s knees trembled as he knew he was in for the routine public humiliation the head chef was so fond of. “Voila, mes hommes! ‘Ere we ‘ave a true chef” and he wiped a tear from his cheek. Ogilvy later referred to this as the proudest moment of his career.

After the dizzying responsibility and the heady praise for his chervil decoration, Ogilvy clearly felt there was nothing left to aspire to in the kitchen. He must also have felt that there must be easier ways to earn a crust than sweating away for 14 hours a day 7 days a week in the gastronomic equivalent of Hades. So he got the boat back to Britain and through a connection of his elder brother, landed the unenviable position with Aga as mentioned above.

Once he had written the definitive guide to selling Agas, David clearly felt that once more it was time to move on, so he went to America and became a spy. He hung around with all his other fellow spies, like David Niven, Cary Grant, Roald Dahl (!!!) (I couldn’t believe all this when I read it) and ended up being instrumental in dragging a reluctant America into the war thereby saving our skins in Europe.

Post-war, Ogilvy found himself again skint and with not much to do until a chance meeting with a likeable chap called Dr Gallup. Between the two of them, Ogilvy and Gallup came up with this novel idea that if you ask people what they want and then give it to them, you could make a fortune. The Gallup pole was born. Ogilvy thought the best place to start was Hollywood and he went there and told the producers he could guarantee their shows would sell out. He polled cinema audiences, found out that 65% of cinema goers were under 25 and not particularly well-off and told Hollywood to start making films about young, poor people.

After huge success, Ogilvy and Gallup parted ways amicably, Gallup with a bloody good business which Ogilvy had set up, run and had grown, and Ogilvy with little more than his youth and a pocket full of dreams. Oh and a Bentley. By now married with a child, he went and became a farmer living amongst the Amish community where he was welcomed, accepted and loved. All this despite driving around in a Bentley in a community whose raison d’etre is to shun modern ways of life and to this day travel by horse and cart.

It was only at the age of 38 that he set up Hewitt, Benson, Ogilvy and Mather. Ogilvy had never done any advertising in his life but within one year he made this one of the most successful advertising agencies on Madison Avenue. Here he found his true talent and his niche. The rest is history (and can be read in Roman’s book).

But what lessons can be garnered from this wonderful man’s life?

For one thing, it doesn’t matter how peripatetic your life is, your purpose in life and your true talents will make themselves known to you at some point whether you are 18, 38 or 88. Just try and be open to new experiences and don’t stick at the same old thing because you are scared to move on

Secondly, take pride in what you do however lowly, whatever type of potato you peel. If you do it to the best of your ability, it’s going to hold you in good stead somehow.

Thirdly, fourthly, fifthly…you will have to read the book to get to know this fabulously funny, eccentric and likeable genius. His whole life is an example of how humour, curiosity, consideration, open-mindedness, ballsiness and an ability to truly connect with people can enrich your life in myriad ways.

Archer is not an author I would reach for ordinarily. The gold lettering on his covers and the prime spot on the Tesco bestseller shelf put me off. And frankly I am far too snobbish to read anything approaching a “blockbuster”.

But in anticipation of seeing him talk at an event in London next week, I thought I might try him out and see if his style had changed any since an adolescent reading of Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less over twenty years ago.

In truth, I cannot really remember the content of that book or even if I enjoyed it. Along with other novels of its ikind, I have found a direct corollary between pageturnerishness and forgettability. I wondered if this would be the case with his latest offering.

I actually enjoyed it. In parts. And I cringe as I write this but I actually wept at the end. The genre is one that pleases me – what I call the factual-fictional biography which in case you are confused is when the outline of a celebrated life is woven with the whimsy and imagination of the novelist into a jolly good read. It is a form that introduces you to and educates you in the life of a hopefully intriguing person whilst showcasing the writers wit and skill in inhabiting the mind of the protagonist.

The Paths of Glory is the story of the half-forgotten mountaineer, George Mallory, whose ascent of Everest in 1922, over thirty years before Hillary and Tinseng, ended in tragedy – his body was not discovered until 1999. No one is sure whether he actually made the summit. What is sure is that he got within 600 feet of it.

So Archer charts the progress of Mallory’s life from boyhood, through his years at Oxford where he hobnobbed with the likes of Lytton Strachy, GBS, Dora Carrington and other Bloomsbury intellectuals. And true to form he weaves a good story. Page follows page as you devour the tale of Mallory and his quintessentially English life at quintessential Oxford, displaying quintessential English character traits such as bravery, wit, phlegmaticism and sheer genius. Oh and sheer dogged determination to get to the top. But (and this is where the book starts to flounder), Archer, almost as if he has realised half way through that this guy’s personality is getting a bit too stylised, seems to go back and embue his Mallory’s weltanschaung with a precocious and anachronistic streak of femininism. At the tender age of nine, when most lads were sucking lead soldiers and blowing up frogs, Archer has Mallory musing on the fate of women and the injustice at the inequality in the education system, “‘Isn’t it possible’, suggested George, ‘that a husband might benefit from being married to a well-educated woman?’ ‘That’s the last thing a man wants’” snaps his mother. One of the novel’s more convincing statements.

So to avoid stereotyping Mallory, Archer attempts, almost as an after thought, to flesh him out a bit by turning him into a Suffragette. Which is odd because it turns out that the theme of women overwhelms the whole book in ways which I am not convinced Archer intended.

There are many impardonnable mannerisms of style in this novel. Not least is the characterisation of the personalities surrounding Mallory and indeed Mallory himself. While the men seems to all resemble Kitchener to greater or lesser extents, the female characters have hardly any substance at all and float in and out of the narrative like ephemera with nothing more to them but rigid morals and a saintly virtue. However there is one ‘female’ character which dominates and this is Chomolungma herself. On an unforgiveable number of occasions, the climbers in the book refer to the mountain as ’she’ – the ‘unforgiving lady’, the ‘temptress’, the ‘icy queen’… Unforgiveable but enlightening. One cannot help but feel that Everest, to Archer, represents the whole of the fairer sex and that all that great mountain’s attributes are those of the other 51% of the population: majestic, frozen, mysterious, unconquerable, awe-inspiring, dangerous, frozen, distant, and above all, there. That is one point of view of course. Another maybe that mountains are mountains and women are, well, women – that is men with a slight chromosomal difference and a more intuition.

That’s why I love factual-fictional biographies. They tell you more about the author then the author would wish you to know.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Happy Birthday to Me!