Painting Faces: The Art of Public Relations

By Frances F. Friedman

While many women working in offices were making coffee, Frances Friedman was making history. In the notoriously sexist age now being brought to life in the hit TV series, Mad Men, Fran became the first woman president of a top ten international PR firm, the GCI Group, a subsidiary of Grey Advertising. Painting Faces: The Art of Public Relations is a fascinating collection of case histories. Its also an insiders candid picture of the first woman to occupy the corner office in a major, dynamic agency ... a woman who had it all fifty years before anyone thought it possible.

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You finally got smart, you hired a woman, said Leona Helmsley to PR genius Howard Rubenstein, shown here as he oversaw a meeting of the key women in his life.

Photo: Howard Rubenstein (rear), Leona Helmsley, Fran Friedman

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514457870

Frances F. Friedman

Frances F. Friedman’s distinguished history in public relations began in the nineteen-sixties, and later included a key position with several firms, including Howard J. Rubenstein Associates, where one of her main clients was the legendary Leona Helmsley. After presiding over her own successful business, Frances F. Friedman founded the GCI Group, Inc (formerly GreyCom), a subsidiary of Grey Advertising. Named president and chief executive officer in 1984, her task was to re-establish Grey Advertising’s public relations subsidiary, formerly Grey & Davis, which had $600,000 in fee income. In little more than a year, the new agency had close to $2.5 million in fee income, thirty-three employees in New York, and a West Coast office. After two years in operation, GreyCom made Crain’s New York Business list as one of the top twenty-five firms in New York. At Fran Friedman’s retirement, seven years later, GCI had an international division with twenty-five offices in fifteen countries, a strong West Coast division, and a specialized corporate and financial group. The company’s fee income was close to $30 million. As president of GCI Group, the author worked with the Spanish Sherry Institute, Proctor & Gamble, Smith Kline-Beecham, Kenner Toys, Remington, and Panasonic, and handled the introduction of Nissan’s new Infiniti. Under her stewardship, GCI won two PRSA Gold Apple Awards for crisis counseling, and two Silver Anvil Awards, which included recognition of the company’s work on the restoration and opening of the Ellis Island Museum. Fran Friedman established her reputation in crisis counseling in the early seventies, during New York City’s fiscal crisis, as PR counselor and lobbyist for the major teaching hospitals in the city and the public and private medical schools in New York State. She has been counselor to some of the country’s leading corporate leaders, and has specialized in corporate counseling, healthcare, government relations, real estate, hotels and airlines, and packaged goods. As personal media advisor to CEOs, Fran Friedman has counseled on corporate takeovers, proxy contents, corporate positioning, and restructuring. The first woman to be elected to the City College Fund Board, she is a recipient of the 1989 Matrix Award, the highest award given to women in communications. In 1993 she was the first woman to be awarded a Bartel’s Fellowship by the University of New Haven, and in 1994-5 she was invited to the White House to help women appointees disseminate the news about the many programs the Clinton Administration had created for women. In 1997, Fran Friedman joined Hillary Clinton at a seminar in Vienna, Austria, for women living in Eastern Europe under Communist rule. Fran Friedman is a native New Yorker, as was her late husband, Clifford J. Friedman, an arbitrator with the American Arbitration Association and vice-president of Dean Witter Reynolds. Fran and Cliff Friedman’s two sons are Kenneth, an actuary, and Jeffrey, an executive with a television production company. She lives in the home she shared with her husband in Kent, Connecticut.

Book preview

PAINTING FACES

The Art of Public Relations

A MEMOIR

Frances F. Friedman

Copyright © 2016 by Frances F. Friedman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Friedman, Frances F. Painting faces: the art of public relations /

Frances F. Friedman, 1st ed., Kent, Conn.:, c2013..; cm.

Summary: While many women working in offices were making coffee, Frances Friedman was making history. In the notoriously sexist age now being brought to life in the hit TV series Mad Men, Fran became the first woman president of a top ten international PR firm, the GCI Group, a subsidiary of Grey Advertising. This work is a fascinating collection of case histories. It is also an insider’s candid picture of the first woman to occupy the corner office in a major dynamic agency, a woman who had it all fifty years before anyone thought it possible.

1. Public relations—History. 2. Friedman, Frances F. 3. GCI Group—History. I. Title. II. Art of public relations.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 02/16/2016

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Contents

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1 Life with Father

Chapter 2 We’re Not Going to Live in Fear, My Beautiful Husband Said

Chapter 3 A Writer at Last

Chapter 4 The Dangerous Wife

Chapter 5 PR: My Passport to the World

Chapter 6 Playing in the Major Leagues

Chapter 7 And Then You Die—My Life with the Good Leona

Chapter 8 If Only Leona Had Listened

Chapter 9 Out on My Own

Chapter 10 Madame President: Growing Grey

Chapter 11 Painting a Powerful Financial Face

Chapter 12 Going Global

Chapter 13 To the White House

Chapter 14 Kevin Christopher

Chapter 15 An Award Is the Reward

Chapter 16 The Overeager Beaver

Chapter 17 Everything Must Come to an End

Acknowledgments

Dedication

To my two sons, Kenny and Jeffrey, who never made an issue of my job. I tried to be available to them when and if they needed me during the workweek, and my husband assumed some of their needs if I couldn’t get away. But they always knew they came first, and the job could wait.

Both boys have told me they were very proud of me and loved the exciting stories I used to tell. The important thing was that they both did very well in school. Kenny tied for first place in his class, and Jeffrey was at the top in his.

I continue to be very proud of them.

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Preface

O ne morning, as I was putting on makeup, I began to question what I was doing. Why do women paint their faces? Obviously, we do it to look better, to highlight our best features, and to downplay our less attractive ones.

Suddenly it occurred to me—that’s exactly what I have been doing for more than thirty-five years as a public relations consultant. I have been painting faces.

As PR practitioners, we take a product, corporation, service, government, or personality and present its best features while playing down the negatives.

Why is this important? Because every day the general public is exposed to news generated by the public relations practitioners in the White House, in Congress, in state houses, in corporate suites, and in not-for-profit organizations. As consumers of information, people will get more out of a newspaper or magazine article or newscast if they understand the role of the messenger.

Is public relations good or bad, or both? The best way to understand it, I believe, is by being given case-by-case examples, and that’s what this memoir provides.

Only with a memoir can I explain PR through examples from the many fields—business, government, healthcare, booze, cosmetics, travel, personalities—that will no doubt cover some of the areas that touch a reader’s life.

Since I will be explaining PR through my own personal examples, I thought I would touch on the special problems faced by women, not only in my industry but in industry in general, from the fifties through the nineties. Although women have gone on to make major strides in the first few years of the 2000 era, they are still far from equal.

And as a memoirist, I can show the difficulties I encountered in choosing to commute to New York City for a job when extra income was not needed, moving to New York City with my husband when our kids went off to college, and climbing to the top of my profession as a woman in New York.

In the process, I hope to show what determines success or failure. I believe the answer is simple: PR that enjoys long-term success is based on truth. PR based on lies may work well for a limited period of time, perhaps even for years, but it eventually defeats itself.

Once someone loses credibility, everything she or he says or does in the future is widely suspect. The individual, from a president down to your best friend, will never be trusted again.

You can’t erase the existing face in the mirror. You can only improve on what’s already there. No matter how hard I try, I can’t put Marilyn Monroe in my mirror. I have to start with Frances Friedman and improve that face as much as I can.

My primary goal is to provide enjoyment and to share some of the fun that I’ve had in the last thirty to forty years as a PR counselor to some of the finest corporations and institutions in America and abroad, as well as to leaders of industry, government, and education. Mine is a personal story that will also include case histories illustrating my painting faces theme.

Why is my personal story important? It’s because I entered the job market a few years before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in February 1963. The mystique she describes was based on painting faces of happy housewives who, regardless of their educational or financial backgrounds, were said to be totally self-fulfilled by their exclusive roles as housewives and mothers. Betty Friedan’s book courageously debunked the overwhelming women belong in the home posture that determined the way we lived at that time.

During that era, Why do you need to go to work? was the unspoken question I faced. I feel it is important for women today to know how the propaganda of the fifties and sixties made it extremely difficult for career-bent women to be taken seriously by others and to avoid their own sense of guilt for preferring career to home.

Another major goal of this book is to make people better readers. It’s important that they be aware of the message that is behind the messages they receive daily in newspapers, magazines, television, and radio. Wars have been fought—and ended—based on public response to news. Presidents are elected and reelected based not necessarily on fact but on public perception. And women’s growth or lack of it is in response to the popular news and entertainment messages of the day.

Influence is achieved by carefully chosen words, photos, headlines. Someone’s opinion is to be found, however, not only in editorials but in every straight-news report, movie, book, and form of entertainment, even in cartoons and comic strips. That’s the information I hope my readers will take away.

Through case histories, I hope to show how the PR messenger works at defining and refining the messages that the readers, listeners, or viewers ultimately receive.

Although public relations is frequently slighted by the media itself, the fact is there would be no PR if reporters, writers, and editors didn’t need the information they get from this source. No media outlet has the manpower to cover all that is happening in the world. It simply behooves the reader or listener to search for and stay with the truth. I hope this book will help us do that.

Finally, I hope readers will take away two major points.

One, that there is no finer career path that a woman can follow than the field of public relations. In PR you are always in the middle of things, always learning what’s new, always enjoying a present and future that keep you on your toes in a country where what you are doing can make a difference.

Two, PR is one career, once limited or closed to women, that in the last thirty to forty years has become available to us. Not only is it possible to have a voice in this business, but women—and I was one of them—have shattered the glass ceiling in my field. We are not quite all the way there; but we have gone beyond our previous restriction to the women’s pages, way beyond, right up to the front pages of the newspaper. And we’ve only just begun.

Painting Faces: The Art of Public Relations, my memoir, is the story of my almost forty years of painting faces, my wonderful career in the business of hoping you will see things my way.

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CHAPTER 1

Life with Father

I am the third child in my family—the one not planned. My parents had two daughters they could barely afford when my mother discovered she was pregnant. If abortion had been legal in 1928, I probably would not be here writing this today.

But a very smart doctor appeased my father by telling him my mother was carrying her first son. He was not just guessing, he told my father. He was sure. That quickly changed everything. The whole family looked forward to my arrival. And when, instead of a boy, this little girl came, everyone cried.

Despite my father’s disappointment, he spent a lot of time with my sisters and me, including holding classes on Sunday mornings, when he taught me arithmetic from a sixth-grade textbook when I was in first grade, the only textbook he had.

I don’t know why I decided to become a writer at age nine. There were no writers in my family. But in fourth grade, I won a statewide contest sponsored by the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) for a composition on what the American flag meant to me. I concluded that I must be a good writer and started writing short stories at home. In middle school—we called it junior high—I joined the school newspaper and became editor in chief. I was really very shy, and like my father, I rarely spoke up. But I could express myself in writing, where I didn’t have to face anyone.

The die was cast. I would become a reporter. Better still, I would be a reporter for the New York Times. That’s when I ran into discrimination. Being Jewish never stopped me. Being a woman did.

The principal discriminator was my father. "Women [he actually said girls] don’t become reporters. Study accounting. You need to make a living."

This is when I belatedly discovered that this shy little girl, when pushed to the wall, was able to fight. We had a portable typewriter belonging to my big sister that offered the keys to my new world. My mother, a former legal stenographer, typed my short stories. She would never publicly disagree with my father. But in this tacit way, she gave me her approval and offered me her encouragement.

I graduated from high school just two months after my sixteenth birthday. My father wanted me to go to work; the family needed my help. But I insisted that I was going to college and I would major in journalism.

Fortunately, I easily qualified for city college, which was free. He admired that. Nevertheless, after finally consenting to college, he said, Major in accounting or forget college. Amenable to compromise, I enrolled at city college as an accounting major.

Downtown City College was the business school (it’s now Baruch). Accounting 101 and 102 were required courses, no matter what your major, while only those majoring in accounting went on to 103. As a seventeen-year-old sophomore, I reluctantly took all my 110-pound, five-feet-and-a-half person into the Accounting 103 classroom, the only woman in a class of men. This was unusual, even for that time. World War II had just ended. While women were a minority in most classes, they were seldom alone.

The professor knew me since I had been in his 101 and 102 classes, and he asked me what I was doing in 103. I shyly replied that I was majoring in accounting. He would probably be fired for this today, but he put his arms around me and said, Fran, you’re a very bright little girl. But no businessman is going to trust you to audit his books.

I should have been mad. Instead, I was delighted. Here was my passport out. I changed my major to advertising, the best I could do and stay in the school of business, and minored in journalism, since at that time public relations was relegated to just one course in the advertising curriculum. I went to daytime classes, paying my own way by working part-time after school as a bookkeeper.

I don’t know how I got the courage to make the change without parental approval. And I don’t remember how long it took me to get the courage to tell my father. Neither did I predict how enraged this quiet little man would be. I only know that my father stopped talking to me, a silence that lasted for a full two years, until I was midway into my senior year, when he realized I was really going to graduate. (My older sisters had each dropped out of college after one year.)

I graduated two months after my twentieth birthday, during what was then known as the postwar (WWII) recession. There were no media jobs for men or women. They used to say there were two behinds for every seat at the New York Times, where reporters who had gone to war were promised their jobs back when the war ended and wartime replacements had been promised they would be retained.

Nevertheless, there was one writing job posted on my college placement board. It was with a New York retail furniture chain, and I got it, possibly because I was a woman and they figured I would not object to the low salary.

But now I had to face my father again. I was giving up a $50-a-week bookkeeping job (my former part-time job during my college years) for a $35-a-week copywriting job. It’s hard to appreciate the $15 difference, but in those days, it was significant. My father was speechless at first. But he didn’t stop speaking to me this time. He just shrugged his shoulders and decided I was crazy, a spoiled brat, and probably a Communist.

I now realize that my father’s behavior was based on fear, which was a product of the Great Depression. He was solely responsible for supporting his family at a time when no man would even consider allowing his wife to work. My mother had been a legal stenographer before she was married and probably could have contributed generously to the family income. But a woman working meant the husband was a failure.

My father worked seven days a week, never took vacations, and, except for his three daughters’ weddings, tried never to go into debt. He did so well that my sisters and I never knew we were poor. Everyone else in the neighborhood was in the same boat. Had my father lived longer (he died in 1964 at the age of sixty-four), I would have told him I forgave him.

The question remains, would he have forgiven me?

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CHAPTER 2

We’re Not Going to Live in Fear,

My Beautiful Husband Said

M y $35-a-week copywriting job for a chain of furniture stores, which I got from the listing at school, was not the answer. How long can you write about the merits of a sofa? Besides, advertising was not even close to journalism, my desired field. Public relations was. But there were no jobs in PR. So since I couldn’t work in—or even toward—my career goal, I decided I might as well opt for money. (Isn’t that what my father was trying to tell me?) I left the advertising job and took a job as a bookkeeper, which eventually paid me $70 a week. I didn’t check it out, but I’m sure my father was smiling.

And then I met Cliff, a Harvard Law School student, who proposed to me on our first date. And I said yes. (I always wanted to go to Harvard.) I actually