LESLEY: Alright. Back to high school.

JONI: So were you, Mary, the same person in high school as you are now?

MARY: Oh no, because I never existed in high school. We were very poor and they had — my mother wanted to get me out of Ohio because she wanted me to have a different life than she had. And she couldn’t afford to give me tap-dancing lessons, you know. She couldn’t afford all that stuff. So she found the Youngstown Playhouse. I mean it’s sort of a miracle because I didn’t know it existed. And then she really forced me to spend my life there when I was in high school.

LESLEY: But when you were 18, did you have stars in your eyes?

MARY: I was in New York then. I went to New York when I was 16 and a half to be an actor. I was in the Neighborhood Playhouse. Then I finally got a job out of desperation, because I knew I had to do something because I was going crazy. I really didn’t want to be in the theater. And the first job I got was in an advertising agency and I loved it and I was crazy about it. But everybody then that I worked for was a woman. They were all women and running —

LIZ: Isn’t that fantastic.

CYNTHIA: Did they treat you well?

MARY: Oh, very well.

CYNTHIA: Because, you know, people always say women are terrible to other women.

MARY: Oh, no, they were terrific. They were all my mentors. They all thought I was great. I thought they were great. They were all mothers to me, every one.

LESLEY: What planet did you grow up on?

MARY: I don’t know but they were fabulous. And Phyllis Robinson, who was the copy chief of Doyle Dane Bernbach — it was at Doyle Dane Bernbach just after it really hit. It was right after "The Graduate," it was right after the Beatles. It was when New York had gone creative in a huge way. And she was the one who was really running Doyle Dane Bernbach at the time. I mean Bill was the genius but she was running the show. And she was fabulous to me. And I learned so much watching how she handled a bunch of creative geniuses, and how she handled Bill, because handling him was a major to do.

CYNTHIA: You know, my memories of starting out were about being the only woman in the room most of the time, and about getting a lot out of that. I mean, partly it was about the empowerment that I felt as being the only woman in the room. And I understood full well people who later said they liked it that way and they wanted to keep it that way.

LIZ: Well, yeah, like me. I mean, those famous men I worked for – five or six of them in a row – I wanted to be just like them. And I had the chance to be ambitious, with them thinking I was harmless.

CYNTHIA: You know, do you see how recent this is? I gave a commencement address at Columbia Law School this year. So, I went back. And I graduated from law school in 1984 and it wasn’t until I went back to give that speech that I realized I never had one single female professor the entire time I was in law school. And, in fact, there were no women on the faculty.

LESLEY: What is it like now?

CYNTHIA: What astounded me is the faculty was on the dais with me and I thought, “There are an awful lot of women here.” And I said so. “Hey, are these people professors?” Yes. I mean, it is so different than it was.

JONI: Who were you in high school?