Books: Prince of Hucksters

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Until Lasker's day, agencies did not write their own ads, but peddled the creations of others. But when Lasker learned that Pepsodent toothpaste contained a detergent called sodium alkyl sulphate, he ordered his own writers to rename the ingredient in three vowels and two consonants. Later Lasker delighted in saying, "I invented irium. Tell me what it is." (He never found out.) When a Quaker Oats product, Wheat Berries, got nowhere, Lasker changed the name to Puffed Wheat, "The Grains That Are Shot from Guns," and business ballooned. When Hill decided to declare war on the candy industry with the slogan "Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Bonbon," Lasker changed the last word to "Sweet" (on the theory that they might as well cut into the cake and pie business too). That, too, was advertising history of a sort.

Humanizing Harding. Lasker was too energetic and too insatiably curious to confine himself to advertising. One of his sidelines was baseball. After the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1920, he wrote a four-page code of ethics which is still the gospel of organized baseball. (As co-owner, with William Wrigley, of the Chicago Cubs, Lasker made the first big-money major-league-player purchase: he paid a sensational $50,000 for Pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander and Catcher William Killifer Jr.) He was hired by the late Will Hays to "humanize" Warren G. Harding in his presidential campaign and became the first, for better or worse, to introduce advertising techniques to politics. In the last decade of his life, Lasker shut down Lord & Thomas, and with the gentle encouragement of his third wife Mary, became a connoisseur and collector of French art, a philanthropist, and a fund raiser for medical research.

Although Gunther, as an old friend, tends sometimes to sugar-coat his product, Lasker harbored the irium of human frailty. He was fascinated with his own opinions and monologues; in one bravura performance he talked to his staff, with minimal interruptions, for three days running. He demanded utter loyalty from his employees—not only to himself but to the products he purveyed—but he was not above firing 50 men at once without qualm or explanation. In a moment of complete self-approval, Lasker once said that "there is no advertising man in the world but me." If he had studied the phrase a little more carefully, Lasker would probably have changed "but" to "like"—and hit the mark, as usual.