Shirley Polykoff

FAMILY LIFE
Continued

1937 - George and Shirley
at the top of Canada's Hill #69
(Photo from Does She... Or Doesn't She, 1975)

Shirley Polykoff was "wedded to the notion of the suburban, tastefully dressed, well-coddled matron who was an adornment to her husband, a loving mother, a long-suffering wife, a person who never overshadowed him" (Gladwell, 1999). She grew up believing the best thing that could happen to a girl was to grow up and become a mother (Polykoff, 1975). However wonderful this dream was to Shirley Polykoff, she really wasn't that kind of woman at all (Gladwell, 1999).

For all her ambition and career successes, Ms. Polykoff was "cut from a pre-feminist mold, never forgetting, as she often put it, that she was 'a girl first and an advertising woman second'." It is legend that Ms. Polykoff went as far as to request that her salary not exceed that of her lawyer husband's salary. Her salary was held at $25,000 until her husband's death in 1961. Then, Foote, Cone & Belding doubled her salary twice within a decade (Thomas, 1998). Prior to her retirement in 1973, she was FC&B's highest paid salaried employee making over $100,000 per year (Cummings, 1985).

Shirley Polykoff has been described as "flamboyant and brilliant and vain in an irresistible way." It was her conviction that the kind of person she spent her life turning herself into didn't go with brown hair. She thought she should be a blonde... and she thought the decision to be blonde was rightfully hers, and not God's (Gladwell, 1999). Ms. Polykoff's daughter, Alix, says her mother was proud to be Jewish; however, she "believed in the dream, and the dream was that you could acquire all the accouterments of the established affluent class, which included a certain breeding and a certain kind of look. Her idea was that you should be whatever you want to be, including being a blonde" (Gladwell, 1999).

The color of Ms. Polykoff's hair "was a kind of useful fiction, a way of bridging the contradiction between the kind of woman she was and the kind of woman she felt she ought to be. It was a way of having it all. She wanted to look and feel like Doris Day without having to be Doris Day. In twenty-seven years of marriage, during which she bore two children, she spent exactly two weeks as a housewife, every day of which was a domestic and culinary disaster." She and George decided she should return to work in order for them to be happy - and that she did on the following Monday (Gladwell, 1999).

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~ Early Career ~ FC&B ~ Clairol ~ Miss Clairol Ads ~ S.P. Advertising ~
~ Ad Collection ~ Honors ~ Conclusion ~ Bibliography ~