Myril Axelrod Bennett, 93; female pioneer in ad world

Nearly three-quarters of a century removed from her beginnings on the New York University student newspaper, Myril Axelrod Bennett still worked diligently to capture the attention of readers while writing profiles as a guest columnist for boston.com’s Your Town websites. She knew the opening was all-important, and could write an arresting first paragraph.

“If you want to talk to Bonnie Norton, don’t call her on Tuesday. She’ll be in prison,” she wrote in June 2012, not long after turning 92.

Writing under the byline Myril Axelrod, the name she used professionally, her profiles of residents and workers at the Lasell Village senior housing community in Newton were the final achievements in a multi-faceted career that began in the 1940s. One of the early female vice presidents at the Young & Rubicam advertising agency, she expanded the role of qualitative research in ad campaigns, using skills honed as a newspaper writer and editor to better tap the desires of consumers.

“She brought reportorial instincts into the realm of research,” said her son, David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama. Her training in asking probing questions “became the foundation of her research, and yielded insights that polling couldn’t,” he added. “She was really a pioneer in that field.”

Mrs. Axelrod, whose 2010 essay for the Globe about her years in advertising shed light on the role of women in agencies during the era depicted in the television show “Mad Men,” died of heart failure Jan. 21 in her Newton home. She was 93 and in recent months continued to contemplate ways to refine her writing.

“I was lying awake this morning and I couldn’t think of an opening. I’ll be more relaxed when I can think of a good opening for this story I’m working on,” she said to her daughter, Joan Axelrod Lehrich, a learning-disabilities consultant from Arlington.

Her daughter said that “even in the last six months, she would say, ‘If I could just finish that article, then I would be done.’ ”

There was little chance of that, though, because work was never really finished for Mrs. Axelrod.

“From the time she was very young she aspired and achieved, and often did it by breaking down barriers,” her son said. “Everything she did, she did to perfection, and she demanded that of herself.”

A pioneering executive in a profession dominated by men, “she really resisted the idea of being labeled as a feminist,” said her daughter, who added that Mrs. Axelrod “had a capacity much of the time to sort of push her agenda with charm, rather than stridency.”

Nevertheless, she was a role model for women in advertising and was proficient at meshing professional and personal responsibilities.

“In terms of her influence on me, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t work and have a family. That just wasn’t an option,” her daughter said. “And not only did you work, but you needed to be a homemaker as well. To her, all things were possible.”

Mrs. Axelrod “never felt limited by boundaries,” her son said. “ ‘Why can’t we do this?’ That was the standard she applied to her life.”

The second of three children, Myril Jessica Davidson was born in Weehawken, N.J., and grew up in Jersey City.

Her father was a dentist whose patients included a young Frank Sinatra, but she took her career cue from her older brother. [William "Bill" John Davidson (born 1918)], who wrote biographies of celebrities and co-wrote a book with President John F. Kennedy, led the way to New York University’s journalism program, and Mrs. Axelrod followed. She graduated from NYU, where she edited the student newspaper.

In 1943, she married Joseph Axelrod, a psychologist, and initially stepped away from journalism as she wrote mental health survey reports for his work serving in the Army.

Settling in Stuyvesant Town in New York City, she worked at PM, a left-leaning daily that folded in the late 1940s, as did its short-lived successor, the New York Star.

At a time when newsrooms “were all-male preserves,” her son noted, “she just through sheer force of will was going to be a real reporter, and forced her way onto the city desk.”

After the Star folded, she switched fields, first working for Compton Advertising and then Young & Rubicam, where she became a vice president, unusual for women in the field at that time.

“As a specialist in qualitative research, I was committed to selling the importance of an emotional message to agency executives used to viewing everything in terms of numbers,” she wrote for the Globe in 2010. “My contributions in exploring and interpreting what our products meant in consumers’ lives helped me become an executive. My boss believed in what I had to sell. I was uniquely fortunate.”

Mrs. Axelrod’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1968, and her first husband died in 1974.

In 1970, she married Abner Bennett, a marketing executive. He died in 1986.

“What’s striking is that she was a trailblazer who never thought of herself in those terms,” said her son, who is director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. “Her notion was that she had something to contribute, and she was going to contribute it.”

A service has been held for Mrs. Axelrod, who in addition to her son and daughter leaves five grandchildren.

After retiring from Young & Rubicam in the early 1980s, Mrs. Axelrod conducted research for the senior housing industry. Her studies showed that many who are older prefer to live near family, rather than retiring to places with warm climates. That resonated with her, too, and prompted her decision to live at Lasell, closer to her daughter.

When Mrs. Axelrod conducted interviews at Lasell for her guest columnist profiles, “if they were matter-of-fact or flat about their history, she would push them and say, ‘This is something you should be excited about,’ ” her daughter recalled.

In that realm Mrs. Axelrod also set an example. Her enthusiasm for her life, work, and colleagues remained undimmed. She wrote in her examination of “Mad Men” that what bothered her most about the show was that she knew “too much about what it doesn’t say.”

“Perhaps one of the most disheartening things about the show is that there are no genuine friendships among the agency people” she said in 2010. “No one seems to like anyone else. That wasn’t my experience. Even now, 30 years later, I maintain close and meaningful relationships with the people I worked with.”