Advertisements For Himself

By -- Stuart Schoffman

BLOOD, BRAINS AND BEER: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DAVID OGILVY

Atheneum; 181 pages; $7.95

A glass of raw blood every day, a plate of calves' brains washed down with a beer thrice weekly, and you will grow strong and smart. So predicts David Ogilvy's Scotsman father in 1917, when the future advertising genius is a wee tyke of six. Dad speaks sooth. Young David finesses his way into Oxford, drinks, and flunks out cheerfully after two years. A charmer, this youth, right out of Fielding. By now the reader is hooked, and Ogilvy never lets him go.

David journeys to Paris, becomes a chef, then enjoys a brief career as door-to-door salesman before pushing on to America. In the New World he goes to Hollywood to survey the box-office appeal of leading stars. He boosts the career of Lana Turner; others are branded "Box Office Poison" and quickly fade from the screen. War breaks out, and David serves England as aide to Spymaster William Stephenson.

Then the adventurer becomes, of all things, a tobacco farmer in Pennsylvania's Amish country. No outsider knows more about the sect than Ogilvy, who scatters insights and anecdotes in his wake. He is a bust at farming, and at 38 he conquers Madison Avenue. His exploits there have been boomed in Ogilvy's bestselling Confessions of an Adman. Here he moves on to publicize his most complex and delightful client--himself.

The chap who put an eye patch on the Hathaway shirt man and made Commander Whitehead a household beard consistently heeds the advice he has dispensed for decades. In the Confessions he warned never to be boring, and to repeat that previous campaign--the earlier book was intended to drum up business, and did--would thus be a sin. Blood, Brains and Beer also adheres to other cardinal principles of admaking: the straight story, smoothly told, sells stuff best; it is wrong to lie, but feel free to omit; humor should not be overdone (it is a bit too scarce in the last three-fourths of the book); testimonials work wonders (Ogilvy quotes verbatim an honorary degree citation awarded him by Adelphi University). The adman is now retired to a 37-bedroom medieval French chateau. There he continues to produce work that sounds less like a grand seigneur than a great copywriter: "How would you like to watch a Wall Creeper running up and down the apricot walls?" he writes. "You lunch in the garden in the shade of a seventeenth-century holly tree."

Sold.

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