Advertisement for career women

JANE Maas, one of the female pioneers of the advertising industry on New York’s Madison Avenue, is happy to be compared to Peggy Olson, the character from Mad Men, the 1960s-based American TV series about advertising, sex, booze and chain-smoking.

Maas, 81, the author of advertising memoir, Mad Women, was in Cork recently as the keynote speaker at Network Ireland’s celebration of International Women’s Day.

Maas — petite, charming and unpretentious — is, says Olson, “a hard-working woman who did what most women in advertising had to do in the 1960s. She started as a secretary and worked her way up.” This involved begging to copywrite, at night and at weekends, for no extra pay. She was finally promoted to copywriter.

Maas, famous for the ‘I love New York’ campaign, says her priorities were career, husband and children, in that order. “If I had to do it all over again, I would do it exactly the same way, because I’m driven enough to have wanted that career.”

A mother to two daughters, Maas says her late husband, architect, Michael Maas, “was extremely supportive. He was masculine enough to not be threatened by a successful wife, in an era when most mothers were not working.”

Maas says she has guilt about combining a career with a family. “I didn’t give my children much time. Our live-in housekeeper, Mabel, really raised my children. My youngest, Jennifer, thinks I was a terrific role model. She now works in marketing. But my eldest daughter, Kate, says I was never there for her at important points in her life.”

Maas, who started at Ogilvy & Mather, says Mad Men is right about the booze, but is too overt about the sex. “The affairs at work were more discreet than the goings-on in Mad Men,” she says. “Sex was in the air. The pill had become legal and it wasn’t so terrible to have an adulterous affair.”

Maas was sexually harassed by a boss who was something of a Don Draper. Although Maas rejected the advances, the unwanted attention continued for 18 months, so she went to see a psychiatrist, who was unhelpful.

“There was no HR department at work. The office manager was a drunken man who wouldn’t have cared. In the end, I went to David Ogilvy (the founder of Ogilvy & Mather) and told him that I wanted to be transferred to a different creative group to learn new skills. Then, I started crying. David pretended he didn’t see that. But I think he knew exactly what was going on. He moved me within two days,” Maas says.

Maas is frequently asked if there was as much drinking at work as is depicted in Mad Men. “What’s unrealistic are the scenes in Mad Men where somebody walks into the office in the morning and pours themselves a shot,” she says.

Maas’s male colleagues would wait until lunch to drink, usually downing at least three martinis. “Most of the senior men would have a bottle of whisky, or scotch, or bourbon stashed away in a closet.

“If we were working late on a big project, everybody would have a drink around 8pm and get a second wind.”

Looking back, Maas, who, like her female colleagues, didn’t drink on the job, says there was a naivete about alcohol. “A creative director that I worked with cried over the telephone when I was interviewing him for my book. He said that if he had known a bit more about alcoholism, he might have saved a copywriter’s life. The copywriter committed suicide,” Maas says.

Working in advertising seemed glamorous, but Maas says that its essence was fun. “Mad Men doesn’t get the fun we had, and how passionate we were at creating great advertising. What I don’t like about Mad Men is that the characters are always sniping at each other. Everybody wants someone else’s job. They’re always tearing each other down. Of course, that happened in real life, but not all the time.”

Maas, who was the president of a medium-sized agency for five years, retired, but after a week she was back at work, with her own consultancy.

She still works and says that she has “a beau.” Harry Garvin is aged 90 and was one of her tutors while she was a student of English at Bucknell University, in Pennsylvania. A few years after her husband died, in 2002, she looked up Garvin, inviting him to be her escort at a college reunion party.

“We took one look at each other and fell head-over-heels in love. Harry still teaches one course at Bucknell, so he won’t move to New York. But we spend one week out of every month together. It works and we have a lovely, sexy, romantic and wonderful time,” she says.

Jane Maas is clearly an ad for living the dream.

* The latest series of Mad Men starts on Sky Atlantic on Apr 10.