She recalled judging a contest wherein the contestants needed to end this sentence a couple of material brightener: “I like LaFrance Bluing Flakes as a result of. …” The winner wrote, “I washed a pair of curtains two weeks aside, they usually got here out the identical shade of white.” That entry gained, Ms. Cutler concluded, “as a result of it was concrete and particular and contained an illustration,” ideas that caught along with her as she climbed the ladder.
She went on to work as a typist on the J. Walter Thompson company within the late Nineteen Forties earlier than being promoted to copywriter. She left to do publicity for Walter Winchell, the nation’s reigning gossip columnist, then joined McCann Erikson in 1964, deep into the “Mad Males” period.
“Sure, there have been loads of three-martini lunches,” she wrote in her memoir. However she labored her manner as much as inventive director on meals and pharmaceutical accounts, which have been thought of a step up from vogue and sweetness (the place the fictional Peggy Olson was caught).
When Ms. Cutler was in her 20s, her hair began turning prematurely grey. Clairol, one in every of her shoppers, nudged her to paint it. However that may have required her to spend three hours each three weeks on the hairdresser — an excessive amount of time, she determined. She stayed grey and finally misplaced the Clairol account.
Ms. Cutler did marry a lawyer, Stanley Bernstein, in 1952. Nonetheless, she was the first breadwinner within the household, they usually later divorced. She married Theodore J. Israel, an investor, in 2002; he died in 2015.
She is survived by her daughter, Amy Bernstein, who confirmed the dying; two sons, Jon and Seth Bernstein; six grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. Lloyd Cutler, her brother, died in 2005.
Ms. Cutler adored her brother, even when she felt overshadowed by him. In her memoir she recalled a reception in Washington the place she was launched to Katharine Graham, writer of The Washington Publish, as “Lloyd’s sister.” At that, Edward N. Ney, chairman of Younger & Rubicam, the worldwide advertising and marketing company, stepped in to inform Mrs. Graham, “In our world, he’s Laurel’s brother.”
“Lloyd informed that story for the remainder of his life,” Ms. Cutler wrote. “And he all the time stated I made more cash than he did, which was most likely true.”