Mad Man

It's a gray Wednesday morning and I'm chasing Peter Arnell through the streets of midtown Manhattan. We're supposed to be going for a walk. But Arnell doesn't walk. He dashes—from Brioni, which does his tailoring, to Hatsuhana, his favorite sushi restaurant, to the Seagram building, where he offers me an impromptu lecture about the building's architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Arnell wears a gray Tom Ford suit and his trademark Corbusier-style eyeglasses. He puffs on a Zino Platinum cigar—a brand he helped create—and talks to just about everyone. Rounding a corner, he spots a bagel vendor who's selling Tropicana orange juice. He rushes over, picks up a carton and asks the vendor what he thinks of the new packaging. "I designed this," Arnell says. "How's it selling? Is it doing well?" The vendor raves about the new design. "You see that?" Arnell says as we're walking away. "That guy loves it. Why can't he have a freaking blog, right?"

Actually, the word Arnell uses is not "freaking," and he's using it a lot. Last year his "brand architecture" company, the Arnell Group, won a contract from PepsiCo to redesign the Pepsi logo and create new packaging for Tropicana, a PepsiCo brand. The new Pepsi logo drew mixed reactions. But the Tropicana boxes, which debuted in January, drove people nuts. Customers said the box was so different that they couldn't find Tropicana on the shelf anymore. They missed the familiar orange-with-a-straw picture. The blogosphere lit up with criticism. One blogger called Arnell "the Bernie Madoff of brands." People started comparing the situation to the 1985 New Coke disaster. In February, Tropicana announced it would revert to the old packaging.

That fiasco will cost Tropicana some money, but it could do even more damage to Arnell, who's been called one of the great brand impresarios of our age. "Peter is an artist—he's a genius," says Steve Stoute, a former partner at Arnell's firm who now runs a rival branding firm. "The characters on 'Mad Men' have nothing on Peter Arnell—they're not even close." Over the past two decades his agency has done high-profile work for clients like Samsung, Banana Republic, McDonald's, Home Depot and Pfizer. That iconic ad for Donna Karan's DKNY line, with the giant letters and the black-and-white photographs of New York? That's Arnell.

Yet despite his achievements, some rivals dismiss Arnell as a pompous, pretentious, phony intellectual—a fraud, basically. That criticism seemed on target when, in the midst of the Tropicana controversy, someone leaked a 27-page memo Arnell wrote for PepsiCo crammed with so much pseudo-intellectual claptrap—references to the Mona Lisa, the Parthenon, the golden ratio, the relativity of space and time, magnetic fields, "perimeter oscillations" of the Pepsi logo, the "gravitational pull" of a can of Pepsi on a supermarket shelf, the rate of expansion of the universe—that some thought it might be a hoax. It wasn't. In the small and catty world of advertising and design, Arnell's stumble has been cause for celebration. The schadenfreude on Madison Avenue hangs so thick you can practically taste it.

Still, even people who don't like Arnell (and there are many) will admit, grudgingly, that he is a terrific salesman—the name P. T. Barnum gets mentioned—and that he has done some wonderful work. Arnell shoots his own photographs and directs his own TV commercials. He designs logos. He designs stores. He helped revamp the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami and is helping design the $3 billion Fontainebleau resort in Las Vegas.

But in fact Arnell's greatest invention may be himself. Over the years Arnell, 50, has turned himself into a powerhouse brand, wrapping himself in myth and packaging his personal narrative with the same flair he brings to a Super Bowl ad. The remarkable story of Peter Arnell is one of a bright kid from Brooklyn who starts out with little more than a high-school diploma and a huge dose of chutzpah, talks his way into the advertising business and ends up becoming a huge success, with a stunning Manhattan office and a mansion on an estate in suburban Katonah, N.Y. Wherever he goes, he is trailed by smartly dressed junior executives who carry his canvas bags and write down everything he says in meetings.

Right now, however, this nearly perfect life is being marred by that freaking juice box. Arnell claims it doesn't bother him. But when you spend some time around him, you quickly realize that (a) he's extremely insecure, (b) he knows this mess has damaged him and (c) he wants to move past this as quickly as possible. That's probably why he agreed to let me spend two days following him around. He'll address Tropicana, then bury it with a blizzard of information about everything else he's working on. Smart marketing, no?

We meet for breakfast at Sant Ambroeus, a restaurant on the Upper East Side. Arnell talks. And talks. And talks. About his grandfather, his childhood, his work with the Special Olympics and his work with the 9/11 tribute center. He talks about Caravaggio, and Haydn, and Mozart. He talks about losing 250 pounds, going from 407 to 152 pounds in 30 months by eating the exact same food every day—carrots, cucumber slices and steamed cauliflower, dipped in mustard and sesame seeds.

There's a quick stop at a video-editing studio, where Arnell tinkers with the color of Kyra Sedgwick's hair in an upcoming Tropicana commercial. Then we hit the streets on foot. Outside Federal Hall, Arnell stops to chat with a busker. As he does this, another man approaches the busker. Arnell asks the man if he's a tourist. The man says no, he lives in the West Village and works in advertising. Arnell introduces himself. "Oh, my gosh!" the guy says, then gushes about how much he loves the new Tropicana packaging. Arnell swears this is not a setup. But who knows what's real and what's stagecraft? The entire day is a form of theater, with Arnell in the lead role and his underlings serving as supporting cast.

Arnell's wife, Sara, works at the agency as its "chief strategy officer." Arnell says she has told him to tone down his swearing when he's with me. Nevertheless, he swears constantly. "I'm a street rat from Brooklyn," he says, by way of explanation. The Arnells have three children. He collects toy soldiers and model spaceships and antique eyewear. He owns 1,600 pairs of eyeglasses, all fitted with his prescription. "Have you seen his house? It's a museum," says Martha Stewart, a friend and neighbor. Having done advertising work for the New York Fire Department, he's managed to get a fire-department badge and radio, and has outfitted his Jeep Commander with flashing lights. Two former business associates, who requested anonymity to avoid damaging their relationship with Arnell, say Arnell carried a handgun in an ankle holster. (Arnell acknowledges only having a gun permit and says stories of him carrying it at work are "inaccurate.") He also carries a Sony digital camera, and he snaps pictures constantly—75,000 in the past 12 months. An assistant uploads and catalogs them. Arnell devours oranges, about 20 a day, which turn his hands yellow. When he's done with one bowl, an assistant whisks away the peels and brings in another.