My father was a gambler; and while an atheist and a socialist he harboured certain gambling superstitions. The cat had to be home before he could go out to play Manila. It was the 1970s and gambling was an illegal sport for a few, not today’s mass pokies addiction.

I too have developed a superstition. I must flick through George Lois’ pocket book, Damn Good Advice (for people with talent) on a daily basis.

The ’60s and ’70s creative adman’s 2012 release, Damn Good Advice, is now in its fourth reprint, and in seven languages. This May, Lois will be doing Ted Talks, and launching the Greek edition in Greece.

He’s happy to be going back.

“They’re [Greeks] making a big deal out of it.”

“I did a campaign in the ’70s, ‘Go home to Greece’, where I got all these actors like Zsa Zsa Gabor saying ‘I was born in Hungary. Now, darling, I am finally going home … to Greece’,” Lois says.

George Lois, the Bronx born son of Greek immigrants, is 82 and loaded with New York brashness, intelligence and sharply defined political values. Wall Street Journal described him as the original “… enfant terrible,” while GQ Magazine praised his taste for avant-garde design that “elevated ads to fine arts”.
Damn Good Advice has become my Little Red Book. I often come out of my office, frenzied, waving Lois’ pocket book at my wife and son and spouting quotes.
To my pre-teen son I read out ‘…oak trees don’t produce acorns until they’re 50-years-old’, whenever he pretends to know more than me. When my wife says “You just can’t pick fights with everyone that doesn’t agree with you,” I read out Lois’ – ‘If you’re going to criticise something, do it, don’t hold back’.
Lois’ advice is witty, simple and based on his life’s work of creating the most memorable advertising campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s.

‘Never, ever, work for bad people’ reflects his decision to dump a client who celebrated the assassination of John F Kennedy. ‘Tell the Devil’s advocate in the room to go to Hell’ is about those who decide to turn just as the decision is about to be made.

Lois’ covers for Esquire are some of his iconic work. In 1965 the Italian actress Virna Lisi was on Esquire shaving her face, in 1968, the most memorable cover, the Passion of Muhammad Ali. Later that year, the haunting cover where John F and Robert Kennedy are with Martin Luther King Jr standing in a cemetery.

Ali as Christian martyr Saint Sebastian, arrows jutting out of his boxer’s body, brought to light Ali’s refusal to be indicted into the US Army as a stand against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Lisi, her face lathered up and shaving, was a cheeky comment on the nascent modern feminism or “women’s liberation movement” as it was called.

“Esquire was the only magazine that was openly against the Vietnam War, I am proud of my work for Esquire,” says Lois.

I point to his advice to “keep up the fight against racism, no matter what the cost”, and ask how it has underscored his work ethic.

“I’m the son of a migrant, I always fought racism in everything I do ’cause I know racism, I have felt it,” he says emphatically.

“I grew up in an Irish neighbourhood where being a Greek kid was no different to being a black kid, I got into over two hundred fights and I won every one one of them,” he adds.

The HBO series Mad Men drives Lois nuts. ‘Fuck Mad Men – phoney, grey flannel suit, male chauvinist, no talent, WASP, racist, anti-Semitic, Republican SOBs!’ he writes.

“In the early days, there were no ethnics, no Greeks, no Italians, and only a few Jews, and hardly any women, it was an all WASP male industry,” he tells me.

Herschel Levit, his design teacher at Pratt Institute, “jump started” his career by sending him to Reba Sochis, the director of the Reba Sochis Design Studio. “Women in the advertising and design field were very rare in those days,” he points out.

One of Lois’ big campaigns was his attempt to free Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, for which he enlisted Muhammad Ali and did a ‘Svengali’ on Bob Dylan with his co-organiser Paul Sapounakis, convincing Dylan of Carter’s innocence.

A benefit concert ensued as well as that famous protest song, Hurricane. Lois writes how the then president of Cutty Sark whisky, Ed Horrigan, called him into his office and barked, “Lois, stop working for the nigger or I’ll fire you!”.

Lois said “no” and “lost the five million dollar account. To this day he’s “proud of that moment”.

His “proudest work” was running the advertising for Robert Kennedy’s campaign to become senator in New York State in 1964.

“That was a difficult election,” says Lois, “Kennedy was from Boston and to get elected into the Senate he need to be liked in New York.”

“‘Let’s put Bobby Kennedy to work for New York!’ was my slogan; when I showed it to Bobby and his brother-in-law Steve Smith, they said, ‘You’re saying Bobby is a carpetbagger, but who gives a damn – we need him in the Senate and with his influence in Washington – he’ll get things done for New York.'”
“We ran it for three months before campaigning started and when it did, the carpetbagger issue was a dead issue,” says Lois.

Lois had “battles, screaming bouts that would run over three offices” with Robert Kennedy on the issue of Vietnam.

“Bobby’s Chief of Staff would say, ‘you can’t say that stuff to Bobby’, and I’d say ‘fuck that!’,” he laughs.

“Bobby, was influenced by the Dean Acheson stuff, you know, the Domino Theory, if one country falls to communism the rest … but I said ‘are you guys fucking nuts?’.” Lois clearly is not prone to meekness.

Robert Kennedy finally “realised the mess that the Vietnam War was and he turned anti Vietnam in 1968”, says Lois.

“Bobby rang me and said, ‘George shut up – I’m going downstairs to announce I’m against the Vietnam War – so go fuck yourself’ and slammed the phone down. That was his way of saying I was right and his way of apologising.”

Lois’ anti-war stance is borne out of his experiences in the Korean War where, as he says, ” I went to fight for a racist army in a racist war”.

“We landed at Yokohama Port in Japan and all these women working there, and five thousand guys looking down from the ship, made squinty eyes and shouted racist remarks, I was in shock,” says Lois.

“I came back with a chip on my shoulder … a migrant kid in a racist army killing civilians … but I had to keep my mouth shut, or I’d get shot, but it made me anti-war,” he says unapologetically.

He went to war weighing 185 pounds (83kgs) and came back 130 pounds (58kgs). “I was starving,” he says.

In the end, George Lois’ core belief is that “the creative act can solve all”.

I ask about the social media revolution and he guffaws, “Ha, everyone talks about social media but it’s just a mechanism, in the end it’s the creative idea that is important. As I tell students, social media isn’t the idea, it’s a means.”

I spend the rest of the conversation trying to convince him to hire me – given I’m creative and stuff. He does agree to have a coffee with me when I’m in New York as long as I give him enough warning.

When we end the conversation I pick up Damn Good Advice (for people with talent) and wait for my son to return from school.

Damn Good Advice (for people with talent) by George Lois is published through Phaidon.

* Fotis Kapetopoulos, former English editor of Neos Kosmos, runs Kape Communications Pty Ltd. He manages the Bite the Big Apple! Arts Management Tour of New York City and a range of other arts programs such as Arts West. The interview with George Lois will also appear in Crikey Daily Review.