Anne Tolstoi Wallach, who rose to the executive ranks in the male-dominated New York advertising world, then wrote a saucy, much-discussed best seller about a fictional woman who does the same, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said her daughter, Alison Foster.
Ms. Wallach shook up the publishing industry in 1981 with “Women’s Work,” her debut novel, which had brought an $850,000 advance from the New American Library publishing house, a staggering figure (the equivalent of about $2.4 million today) for a first-time novelist.
“I wrote this to amuse myself,” Ms. Wallace, surprised by her success, told The Boston Globe when the book was released. “That’s so much money for so little effort.”
The novel brought Ms. Wallach a flurry of publicity. Did the book, which was set in the early 1970s and was full of both chauvinism and sexy scenes, reflect reality? Was its main character, Domina Drexler, in fact Ms. Wallach herself?
“Her experiences are my experiences,” she told The Globe.
She used her newfound prominence to draw attention to issues of concern to women in the workplace, like maternity leave. That was something she had not had the benefit of when she had her children, she told People magazine; at the advertising agency where she worked in the 1950s, women had to use their vacation time for childbirth.
“Two weeks off for the first son,” she said. “Three weeks for the second, because I had worked longer by then.”
In a 1987 essay for The New York Times Magazine, Ms. Wallach acknowledged that things had improved somewhat since then and expressed hope that that would continue.
“After what working women have accomplished in one generation, I know they’ll make things even better in the next,” she wrote. “They’ll insist on equal pay for equal work, break the last barriers to high achievement, demand legislation that protects them.”
Anne Tolstoi was born on Feb. 19, 1929, in Manhattan. Her father, Edward, was a physician, and her mother, Cecile (Voice) Tolstoi, was a homemaker.
Ms. Wallach graduated from the Dalton School in New York in 1945. In 1949 she earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Radcliffe College, where she was editor of the literary magazine.
“I was going to be Edna St. Vincent Millay, at the least,” she told People. “I spent my whole college life sending poems to The New Yorker. I had a closet papered with rejection slips.”
After graduating she took a job at the New York agency J. Walter Thompson.
“I got my job at Thompson because I had secretarial experience,” she wrote in the 1987 essay. “It was the only way into advertising for a woman.”
She became a copy writer, working in a women’s group that the company had created in the belief that it took women to sell to women.
“About 60 of us, writers, art directors, juniors and supervisors, handled fashions, cosmetics and foods under a female vice president whose recommendations were often changed by men we never saw,” she said.
Ms. Wallach eventually became a Thompson vice president and its creative director. After 14 years there, she moved to another New York agency, Grey Advertising, where she also became a vice president and creative supervisor.
During her advertising career she worked on campaigns for the National Organization for Women (“Womanpower: It’s much too good to waste”), as well as for various products and companies. When her agent was auctioning her manuscript for “Women’s Work,” the price climbing into the stratosphere, she was preoccupied with the campaigns for Playtex and Aquafresh in her day job.
“My agent would call and say, ‘The price is going up!’ and I’d say absent-mindedly, ‘Yes, yes!’ and start worrying about the price of toothpaste and bras,” she told The Globe.
The $850,000 advance was said to be a record at the time for an unpublished novelist. Some critics were hard on the book.
“An intelligent and disciplined heroine who does her job well is probably too much (and too simplistic) to ask in a novel so obviously aimed at the trash market,” Charlotte Curtis wrote in her review in The Times. “Domina Drexler, the heroine, is as dim and unbelievable a person as one is likely to encounter between hard covers. Or any other covers, for that matter.”
“Women’s Work” didn’t do as well initially as its publisher had no doubt hoped. “The book made the hardcover best-seller list for all of two weeks — a relative disaster,” Newsweek wrote.
But the paperback version did considerably better. And the proceeds from the novel enabled Ms. Wallach to complete a labor-of-love nonfiction book: “Paper Dolls — How to Find, Recognize, Buy, Collect and Sell the Cutouts of Two Centuries,” published in 1982.
She had begun collecting the dolls in the 1970s, and by the time the book came out she had about 3,000.
“I’m afraid the collection has sort of taken over a room in the apartment,” she said in an interview with The Times. “But paper-doll collecting is ideal for apartment dwellers — everything folds flat and fits.”
Ms. Wallach left advertising soon after “Women’s Work” came out and pursued writing. She wrote two other novels, “Private Scores” (1988) and “Trials” (1996).
Ms. Wallach’s first marriage, to Ronald M. Foster Jr., ended in divorce in 1972. Her marriage to Richard W. Wallach, a New York state appeals court justice, ended with his death in 2003. Her third husband, Gerald Maslon, whom she married in 2009, died in 2013.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Wallach is survived by two sons, Thomas Foster and Alexander Foster; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
When she married Mr. Maslon, she was 80 and he was 84. But they had first met in 1947, when he was at Harvard and she was at Radcliffe. He was dating the woman who became his first wife, and she was dating her future first husband; the four became friends.
Ms. Wallach and Mr. Maslon remained friends over the years, and then late in life found themselves both widowed. In an article about the 2009 marriage that appeared in the Weddings section of The Times, Ms. Wallach explained that when she looked at Mr. Maslon, she always saw the law student she had first known.
“Jack and I were young together,” she said. “He’s always that boy in a tweed jacket swooping toward me on his bike.”
