Who's the Boss?

[caption id="attachment_10300" align="alignleft" width="190" caption="Poster from the film, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit." The Hollywood Roy Larsen is pictured in the inset, middle left."][/caption]

When Sloan Wilson set out to write his second book, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, he likely took the advice often given to novelists: Write what you know. Not only did the 1955 novel include things Wilson knew well, like war and money woes and struggles with conforming to expectations, but it also featured a boss patterned after someone well known not only to him, but also to the Ed School: Roy Larsen, a longtime visiting committee member and building namesake.

As it turns out, just before Wilson wrote the novel, he handled public relations for Larsen, who was the powerful head of Time-Life Publishing in New York. Larsen didn't realize it at the time, but Wilson was studying him. Wilson told the Harvard Crimson in a 1992 interview, "Initially, I couldn't figure out what made this man rich and powerful." It's the same puzzle that Tom Rath, the main character of the novel (and Wilson's alter ego), tried to solve about his boss, Ralph Hopkins. Hopkins was president of a fictional Manhattan-based television company. And like Larsen, he was also civic-minded.

"We people in the business of communications have a fundamental responsibility to bring key issues to the attention of the public," Hopkins says to Rath in the novel. The way he did this was by starting a national commission on mental health, with Rath writing press releases and helping to stir up buzz. In real life, Larsen also wanted to bring a key issue to the public's attention: reforming education at the local level. In 1949, he took charge of the newly created National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools, which, by the end of the 1950s, helped spur the creation of more than 15,000 citizen groups focused on working with local district officials to improve local school problems. Larsen asked Wilson to join the commission to help write press releases and position papers, just as Rath did for Hopkins' commission in the novel. In 1955, the same year The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit came out (and became a bestseller and eventually a movie starring Gregory Peck), Larsen once again recruited Wilson, this time to be part of the planning committee for that year's White House Conference on Education.

It's unclear if Wilson (or Rath) ever completely figured out his boss, but there's no doubt that Larsen was content with how he was loosely portrayed. Once described in a Massachusetts Historical Society publication as a generous man "with a genuine flair for business and promotion, yet always with instinctive conviction about what was right and honest," Larsen never tried to meddle with Wilson's words. After Wilson showed Larsen an early draft of the novel and asked if wanted to change anything, Larsen simply wrote back, "Say anything about me except I changed a good book."