Snakes in the garden

For all you adgrunts who still can't get enough of the Wal-Mart/Draft story, New York Magazine digs deeper into the trash.

"At Wal-Mart, Julie was teamed with Sean Womack, a similarly fresh-faced vice-president hired the same month from ad giant Saatchi & Saatchi’s Arkansas outpost. Their chief assignment was to search for a new ad agency. They spent seven months on the road together, becoming something like office spouses. Which was how the whispering started back in Bentonville. Were they more than colleagues? In October, Sean and Julie introduced the solid citizens of Bentonville to the cheerful id of Madison Avenue in the person of Howard Draft. Howard, 53, had climbed from the bottom of the ad business, out of a pile of junk mail, which is what he built his first empire on. By the time Julie discovered him, he had, by force of will, taken over one of advertising’s venerable old-line agencies and upgraded his lifestyle to fit his new station. He drove an Aston Martin, built himself an architectural showplace in Aspen, Colorado, and bought up a bit of modern art. Oh, and he dated models (traits that would later become issues with Wal-Mart). With all the success, Howard still had a dream. Howard sometimes saw himself as the future king of advertising. Bentonville, with its $580 million advertising budget, was where he was going to earn the crown."