Creative friends and partners, one in advertising, the other in marketing. Fund at The Trust supports arts education.
John Paul Itta (1930-1997)
Anthony F. Murray (1935-2006)
John Paul Itta was a groundbreaker in the advertising industry—the first to show a nude woman in an American ad, for Pucci perfume, a tribute in The New York Times noted. His other ad campaigns included Kent and Newport cigarettes, Soft & Dri deodorant, Alfa Romeo, Aer Lingus, and Riunite wines.
If you came of age in the 1970s or early ‘80s, you might remember the slogan “Riunite on ice … that’s nice!” Those and similar ads by John Paul Itta, Inc., helped push the fruity Italian wines imported by Villa Banfi USA in Old Brookville, Long Island, to the No. 1 imported wine label in America. In 1983, backed by $17 million in advertising, the company sold 11 million cases of wine, more than the next 6 importers combined, according to the company’s website.
John Paul was the second child of Vasiliki Doulis and Paul Itta, a Manhattan restaurateur. Raised in Washington Heights, John Paul attended public schools before moving on to Columbia College, where he graduated in 1951. He also briefly attended graduate school in architecture. He was extremely intelligent, athletic, artistic, musical, and entertaining—a true Renaissance man. Every year, for example, John Paul’s agency would send Christmas cards that contained an “impossible invitation” to an exotic locale–a yacht in the Mediterranean, the Pope’s summer villa, a remote island. All in good creative fun.
John Paul started his ad career in the mailroom of Benton & Bowles and worked for several agencies, including McCann Erickson and Cunningham & Walsh before forming his own in 1969. He published short fiction and was working on a movie script when he died on August 16, 1997, of acute myelogenous leukemia, according to his obituary in The New York Times. His partner, Anthony F. Murray, was referred to as “a longtime friend.” At John Paul’s funeral, the program included a quote he had written: “Sing no sad songs for me … Enjoy!”
Anthony F. Murray was born on the south side of Glasgow on August 25, 1935, the youngest son and fifth child of Daniel Murray and the former Catherine MacDonald. After Tony was born, his father brought home a new baby carriage, but he wanted Tony to see the person who was doing the pushing, so he had it modified. Tony’s brother James felt that this was how Tony developed his extroverted personality: He looked at people with “the eyes of child,” James said at Tony’s memorial, “the eyes of friendship.”
When Tony was three weeks old, his father died of pleurisy and double pneumonia. Then Tony became painfully sick. His mother carried him to the hospital on the River Clyde ferryboat crossing and then uphill to Yorkhill Children’s Hospital. He was diagnosed with a bowel ailment and saved by emergency surgery.
Throughout World War II, Catherine protected the children as bombs rained on the shipyards of the Southside. She focused on their education at St Anthony’s Primary School, then St. Gerard’s Senior Secondary School.
The family lived next door to a cinema called the Elder Picture House, which gave Tony his first glimpses of America, reinforced by the sound of riveting guns from the nearby yards, where ships were built and launched, bound for the Atlantic and New York.
Tony came to New York in the early 1960s, initially to work in fashion marketing for Rodex. He later moved into radio and TV marketing with Metromedia and NBC. Tony, who had a house in Setauket and an apartment in New York City, died July 22, 2006.
The Itta-Murray fund he established at The Trust supports “arts and music education, creative writing, and fine arts and cinema education.”