Charlie Moss, whose ads spread love for a battered New York, dies at 85

By Sam Roberts

NEW YORK: Charlie Moss, the visionary advertising executive credited with producing the stunningly successful “I ♥ NY” tourism campaign in the mid-1970s — a time when garbage, graffiti, crime, racial strife and a serial killer made America’s cultural capital anything but lovable — died on Aug. 5 at his home in Wainscott, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 85. Susan Calhoun Moss, his wife, said the cause was a heart attack.

Moss also conceived Alka-Seltzer’s popular “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” jingle and the “Flick your Bic” slogan for Bic lighters; helped Braniff International Airways bring about “the end of the plain plane”; and declared Tic Tac “the original mouth whack.” The “I ♥ NY” campaign had many parents. John S. Dyson, the New York State commerce commissioner; his deputy, William S. Doyle; and Moss and his collaborators at Wells Rich Greene, the advertising agency run by Mary Wells Lawrence and hired for the project, all helped set in motion what Dyson described as a collective “eureka moment.”

“Charlie was indispensable to the whole project,” Dyson said in an interview. The campaign — complete with a heart icon doodled on the back of an envelope with a crayon by Milton Glaser, the graphic designer, and a jingle written by Steve Karmen — began in 1977, when New York City was staving off a devastating fiscal crisis. The city, derided by many as “the rotten apple,” was being shunned by visitors. By 1983, Doyle wrote in The New York Times, $3 billion in spending by tourists was directly attributed to the “I ♥ NY” campaign.

“The campaign was so successful,” he wrote, “that we seem to have forgotten what it was like to be unloved.” Moss won a special Tony Award for the campaign, which featured exuberant television commercials starring the cast of “A Chorus Line” and other Broadway shows. Among the directors of the commercials was Stan Dragoti, who also directed “Dirty Little Billy” (1972), a film he wrote with Moss about the outlaw Billy the Kid.

“Charlie Moss was born to be creative,” Howie Cohen, the Wells Rich Greene copywriter who created the “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing” commercials for Alka-Seltzer, wrote in his memoir, “I Can’t Believe I Lived the Whole Thing.” (Cohen died in March.) Charles Moskowitz was born on Sept. 7, 1938, in Brooklyn to Samuel Moskowitz, a salesman, and Celia (Liebes) Moskowitz. He attended the Lodge Professional Children’s School in Manhattan and graduated from Ithaca College.

As a child, he had a role in the acclaimed independent film “Little Fugitive” (1953). He maintained a lifelong interest in acting, and after he retired from advertising he was seen on “Law & Order” and other television shows. Moskowitz sought a career in advertising after he saw William Bernbach, the founder of the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, being interviewed on TV.

He started there as a copywriter and then joined Jack Tinker & Partners, where he met Ms. Wells Lawrence. He was the first writer she hired when she established her agency in 1966, and he became president of Wells Rich Greene at 33. “We’ve created a natural language for television; we’ve given the man in the street ammunition to be a comedian,” Moss told The Times in 1972 for an article about the agency’s Alka-Seltzer commercials. “That’s the psychological reason for the success. The characters in the commercials are personable, vulnerable people — the average man can identify with them, he can use their lines and be sure of getting a laugh. We’ve made the average man a kind of minor hero.”

A beanpole with a mop of curly hair, Moss was a big name in the advertising industry but relatively unknown to the public until he wrote “Dirty Little Billy” with Dragoti. He described the movie’s publicity as “a two‐sided coin: If your name is on it and people don’t like it, they know who to hit.”

He and Dragoti, who formed their own agency in 1995, were perfect collaborators. When Dragoti was brainstorming how to end “Mom,” his 1983 film about a businessman (played by Michael Keaton) who becomes a stay-at-home father while his wife works in advertising, Moss suggested the last scene: husband and wife, sitting together, watching a commercial that she helped create.

In addition to his wife, Moss is survived by a daughter, Mary Calhoun Moss; a son, Sam; a brother, Leonard; and a sister, Deanne. His son Robbie, from a prior marriage, which ended in divorce, died in 2003. Ms. Moss said the “I ♥ NY” tag line had come naturally to her husband, even though his affection for the city manifested itself in idiosyncratic ways.

“He loved New York, but he was not a normal person,” she said. “He liked the papaya hot dogs up on 86th Street, the Amateur Comedy Club he joined on East 36th Street. We loved Elaine’s on Second Avenue and the scene there.” “But mostly,” she added, “he went to work.”