Laurel Cutler

Laurel Cutler was a rare female advertising executive in the testosterone-driven “Mad Men” era of 1960s New York. During her five-decade career on Madison Avenue, Ms. Cutler was indeed a force. A high-powered career woman and for a time a single mother of three, Ms. Cutler cracked Madison Avenue’s glass ceiling during advertising’s Golden Age, when women were rarely seen as more than secretaries. Ms. Cutler died on Nov. 28 2021 at her home in Manhattan. She was 94. Her daughter, Amy Bernstein, confirmed the death. In the 1960s, she was a creative director at McCann Erickson. Lee Iacocca, Chrysler’s hard-charging chairman, was so impressed with her insights that he appointed her a corporate officer in 1988 — even allowing her to retain her senior management position at FCB/Leber Katz Partners. Laurel Eve Cutler was born on Dec. 8, 1926, in Manhattan. Her father, Aaron Smith Cutler, was a trial lawyer in New York and a partner of Fiorello H. La Guardia, the future New York mayor. Her mother, Dorothy (Glaser) Cutler, was a schoolteacher and homemaker. She skipped two grades in elementary school and entered Wellesley College at 15. When she graduated in 1946 with a double major in English composition and philosophy, she wanted to be a lawyer. Not only was her father a top litigator, but her older brother, Lloyd, fresh out of Yale Law School, would go on to become a highly successful lawyer in Washington and counselor to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Out of college, she landed at Reuben Donnelly, a marketing firm. She went on to work as a typist at the J. Walter Thompson agency in the late 1940s before being promoted to copywriter. She left to do publicity for Walter Winchell, the nation’s reigning gossip columnist, then joined McCann Erikson in 1964. Ms. Cutler did marry a lawyer, Stanley Bernstein, in 1952. Still, she was the primary breadwinner in the family, and they later divorced. She married Theodore J. Israel, an investor, in 2002; he died in 2015. In addition to Ms. Bernstein, she is survived by two sons, Jon and Seth Bernstein; six grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. Lloyd Cutler, her brother, died in 2005.