Exhibit celebrates people behind those classic ads

NEW YORK - "Does she or doesn't she?" "I can't believe I ate the whole thing." "Where's the beef?"

Before these slogans became lodged in our brains, they were dreamed up by advertising copywriters and executives with a knack for tapping into the spirit of the times.

A new exhibit at the New York Public Library (www.nypl.org/) celebrates the creators of some of the most successful ad campaigns of the last 80 years - from a fresh-faced girl selling Palmolive soap in the 1920s to today's silhouetted figures with iPods.

The exhibit "The Real Men and Women of Madison Avenue" was conceived partly as a response to "Mad Men," the critically acclaimed TV show about the relationships and intrigue at an advertising agency in the 1960s.

"We just sort of wanted to say, 'Well, these are the actual people, and this is who they are,' " said co-curator Ann Cooper.

The show at the NYPL's Science, Industry and Business Library - on Madison Avenue, appropriately - features print ads and TV commercials plus recorded interviews with the people behind them.

"Rather than just making a big deal out of the work, it sort of puts it in a time frame," said Ed McCabe, whose work with Scali McCabe Sloves in the '60s and 1970s is in the exhibit.

"Mad Men," which starts its second season July 27 on AMC, relegates women to typing and filing.

But "The Real Men and Women of Madison Avenue" highlights influential women in advertising such as Phyllis Robinson, who joined Doyle Dane Bernbach when it opened in 1949 and came up with "It lets me be me" to sell hair coloring.

"It seemed very simple and straightforward and not pretentious," said Robinson, 86. Robinson said no one held her back because she was a woman.

"Not in the least," she said. "I slid right in and did my stuff." *