Ashes to Ashes (17 page)

Step one was to resuscitate the old “Toasted” flimflam, which Lasker’s people now cloaked with the trappings of scientific legitimacy. Research chemists reported that the “toasting” in the Lucky Strike manufacturing process, by heating the leaf to between 260 and 300 degrees, did indeed reduce the nicotine and ammonia content and other acidic irritants, thus producing a “milder” smoke. Milder than what, was left to the imagination—surely than whatever the Aztecs had smoked in pre-Columbian Mexico. That the tobaccos in other leading brands were comparably handled was irrelevant to the Lord & Thomas scheme, “
AN ANCIENT PREJUDICE HAS BEEN REMOVED
,” claimed the headline in a typical new Lucky Strike ad, which depicted a hand marked “American Intelligence” breaking free from the shackles of ignorance, elaborated thus in the copy:

YEARS AGO
, when cigarettes were made without the aid of modern science, there originated that ancient prejudice against the cigarette. That criticism is no longer justified,
LUCKY STRIKE
, the finest cigarette you ever smoked, made of the choicest tobaccos, properly aged and skillfully blended—“It’s Toasted.”

“TOASTING
,” the most modern step in cigarette manufacturing, removes from
LUCKY STRIKE
harmful irritants which are present in cigarettes manufactured in the old-fashioned way … .
LUCKY STRIKE’S
extra secret process … removes harmful, corrosive
ACRIDS
(pungent irritants) … which in the old-fashioned manufacture of cigarettes cause throat irritation and coughing … .

To glorify this nonsensical claim, the hoary practice of soliciting celebrity endorsements was given a new twist. Moving beyond opera stars whose vocal cords were presumed uniquely sensitive to smoke irritants, Lasker’s people signed up attractive stage and screen stars like Helen Hayes and Billie Burke, song-belter Al Jolson, heroic aviatrix Amelia Earhart, socialite home decorator Elsie De Wolfe, and then a slew of leading business executives, their egos fanned by public exposure in formal photographic portraits that bore their signatures as if to certify the goodness and unirritability of Lucky Strike. In a masterstroke Lasker then achieved the apotheosis of endorsements by soliciting doctors across America to try Luckies, and if they agreed that the manufacturer’s miraculous, secret heating process made them the least abrasive brand on the market, they would receive five free cartons. The response allowed Hill’s new ads to assert raucously what his competitors only implied in their velvet references to mildness: “20,679 Physicians Say Luckies Are Less Irritating … .”

The Lasker-Hill team truly hit its stride, though, with the sales proposition that smoking promoted slenderness, a pitch that deftly mated health concerns and female vanity. Who thought up the idea was beside the point, but the company’s version of the famous campaign naturally credited George Hill, who was being chauffeured up Fifth Avenue one day on the way to his marble-pillared home on the Hudson in suburban Westchester when his car paused for a traffic light and he noticed a heavy woman on the corner chewing gum. Alternate versions have this rounded pedestrian wolfing down some sort of fattening refreshment, but all agree that when Hill swung his gaze to a taxicab waiting next to his car headed downtown, he noted that its passenger was a svelte woman sipping at her cigarette holder. Eureka! Already convinced without a morsel of documented evidence that smoking cigarettes was an effective appetite suppressant, Hill got on the phone with Lasker at the earliest possible moment, and soon thereafter the new campaign was exhorting, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” After the candy industry protested loudly, took ads out to complain that tobacco was a far worse health peril than candy, and pressured
affiliates like the Schrafft’s restaurant chain with its big candy-counter business to ban the sale of Luckies on its premises, the slogan was modified to “When tempted to over-indulge, reach for a Lucky instead.” Lucky Strike sales raced ahead by 5.7 billion units in 1927, by an additional 8.3 billion in 1928 to surpass Chesterfield for the runner-up spot, and with a gain of nearly 10 billion in 1929 pulled within 200 million of Camel’s stagnant sales.

At this point, American Tobacco lawyers were summoned to the Federal Trade Commission offices, where competitors had charged Hill and Lasker with concocting an ad campaign that amounted to an unfair business practice. The company was kindly invited, in the FTC’s gentlemanly fashion of reprimand, to lay off the implicit claim that smoking cigarettes was a suitable way to diet. The Hill-Lasker response was ingenious. In a new series of ads, the drawn figure of a trim man or woman in the prime of life was shown in an athletic posture—a swimmer toeing the edge of a diving board or already in graceful descent, a horseback rider taking a jump, or a tennis or golf player completing a perfect swing—and hovering immediately adjacent in ghostly silhouette was a blob recognizable as the distended likeness of the original figure, striking a grotesquely similar pose. The ads bore headlines like “Is This You Five Years from Now?” or “Before It’s Too Late” or “Face the Facts,” followed in each case by: “When tempted to over-indulge, reach for a Lucky instead … (and) Avoid the Future Shadow.” To hush the FTC, a line in small type across the bottom of the ads read, “We do not say that Luckies reduces
[sic]
flesh. We do say when tempted to over-indulge, ‘Reach for a Lucky instead.’”

The Lucky Strike campaign of the late ’Twenties had none of the dull dignity of the Camel ads, the smart looks of the Chesterfield ads, or the occasional charm of the Old Gold ads; instead, it was strident, alarmist, numbingly repetitious in words but not graphics, and almost joyfully vulgar. No one would have mistaken these ads for art, but they worked.

To strengthen his hand further, Hill also hired the best publicists money could buy, in the persons of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays. The latter was particularly adept at reading Hill’s moods and broadening his outlook. When, for instance, the company wanted to do something dramatic in 1929 to counter the taboo against women smoking on the street, Bernays was allowed to engage the services of psychiatrist A. A. Brill, who counseled Hill that cigarettes were symbols of freedom for women as well as “a sublimation of oral eroticism; holding a cigarette in the mouth excites the oral zone,” as Bernays recounted this flash of profundity. Thus, Brill concluded, “Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom.” This last phrase sounded so uplifting that Bernays, with Hill’s blessing, organized a “freedom march” led by ten debutantes and some prominent feminists who strode up six blocks of Fifth Avenue while smoking extravagantly as part of the Easter Sunday parade of
finery. The stunt won enough publicity for Hill to seek analyst Brill’s renewed counsel a few years later for a billboard campaign to show women smoking. One favored version presented a woman offering a smoke to two men, but Brill reminded its creators that the cigarette was of course a self-evident phallic symbol, thus the men ought to be offering it to the woman. Such was the motivational research of the day.

Superintending all this hoopla turned Hill into an obsessive autocrat. When a Luckies ad did not get preferred placement in a magazine or dominate its newspaper page, the Lord & Thomas team on the American Tobacco account might receive a furious tongue-lashing at any hour. Or Hill, who was said to have a radio constantly turned on in every room of his palatial home in order to monitor the Luckies commercials, would protest promptly if he didn’t approve of the way an announcer delivered his paean to the brand. His expensive suits were tailored to conceal half a dozen packs of Luckies, which he used for impromptu sampling. The windows of his limousine were turned into miniature showcases for the brand. And in the garden of his Westchester home, tobacco grew.

During his first five years as head of American Tobacco, George W. Hill boosted the sales of Lucky Strike by 230 percent; by 1930, the brand was more than 8 billion units ahead of Camel. A mad hatter he may have been, but he could sell cigarettes with Buck Duke any day.

The Golden Age of Malarkey

AMONG
those envious of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco’s success it was sometimes snidely suggested that the initial letters of the company’s hometown stood not for Winston and Salem but for Work and Sleep, the principal, if not exclusive, activities in that torpid backwater. To this list they might charitably have added Prayer, all but obligatory in a town where the Methodist and Baptist congregations vied avidly for predominance, and Golf, the preferred recreation of the local upper crust. In truth, Winston, however suffocatingly parochial, had become a boomtown on the strength of RJR’s rising fortunes.

In sharp contrast with the big-city ways of that consummate flimflam artist George Washington Hill, who had pushed Lucky Strike ahead of Camel, Dick Reynolds’s successors were a diligent but lackluster lot, devoted to his memory and precepts—perhaps slavishly so—and disinclined to risk much. Will Reynolds continued to stalk the warehouse floors during the leaf auction season, heading a corps of one hundred Reynolds buyers and overseeing the production end of the business. The driving force, though, since the founder’s death in 1918 was the tireless Bowman Gray, who rose to the presidency from the sales side and was respected for his mastery of detail. A certain brusque-ness of manner was attributed to Gray’s shyness, a trait rare but not unknown among former salesmen; his penny-pinching was admired as tight management, and his idea of culture—having whole rooms removed from Touraine chateaux and shipped for inclusion in the manse he was having erected outside of town just across from Reynolda, the showy homestead R. J. had put up in his later years—inspired local awe. Nor was Gray hesitant to elevate his
nephew, James, who had worked for the Wachovia Bank, the local Moravians’ financial house, into a ranking post as RJR’s chief money-watcher.

What this team lacked in innovative spirit they made up for in doggedness, and the Reynolds coffers overflowed in the late ’Twenties. The company had no bonded indebtedness, had retired its preferred stock in 1926, and raked in enough cash to pay out 84 percent of its net in dividends, so attractive a ratio that its stock price advanced steadily. Indeed, reports abounded that of the company employees and outside locals who had bought in under the favorable arrangements R. J. had set in motion to remove his enterprise from New York’s control, some fifty now had Reynolds holdings worth a million or more dollars at prevailing market prices.

Still, American Tobacco under Hill had lately stolen Camel’s thunder, and the nation’s growing economic distress added to the sense that fresh blood might be a tonic for RJR as Will Reynolds retired as chairman in 1931 and Bowman Gray succeeded him. Installed as president and whip hand now was lawyer S. Clay Williams, who after fourteen years with the company, ten of them as its general counsel, was still viewed as something of an outsider. Much of this had to do with Williams’s differences in background and temperament from the rest of Reynolds’s lockstep managerial crew. For one thing, he was Presbyterian and thus suspiciously High Church by the local standard. He was also better educated than his colleagues; once a hulking guard on the University of Virginia football team, he had finished up college with a Phi Beta Kappa key from small but selective Davidson, while those few at the company who attended university went to the state institution at Chapel Hill. Then there was his profession: Williams was a funny, quick-witted, and somewhat long-winded attorney who loved the intrigues of state and national politics, often traveled for business and pleasure to Washington and New York—Sodom and Gomorrah to pious Winstonians—and was chauffeured to work at a company whose top executives had made it a point of honor to drive themselves in cars below the luxury line.

All that was petty stuff when stacked beside American Tobacco’s advance, which Williams promptly moved to counter. Reynolds began to put a cellophane sheath around the Camel package to assure greater freshness, and dubbed it a “humidor wrap” in ads proclaiming the innovation. But the advantage was short-lived as Luckies and then the rest of the industry matched the move. And Luckies’ advertising now grew even more cheeky as George Hill turned a lately acquired fascination with ultraviolet heat lamps for facial tanning into a new sales tool. “Don’t Rasp Your Throat with Harsh Irritants. … Consider Your Adam’s Apple,” his brash ads hectored, reminding smokers that Luckies were “ ‘toasted’ including the use of Ultra Violet Rays. … Sunshine Mellows, Heat Purifies … .” As if to distinguish them still further from its competitors, American’s ads now also ascribed to the company a candor
unique among cigarette makers: “ ‘Keep that under your hat,’ said the cigarette trade when first we raised the question—‘;Do you inhale?’ [E]veryone else inhales—whether they realize it or not,” but “Luckies’ famous purifying process removes certain impurities concealed in every tobacco leaf. Luckies created the process. Only Luckies have it!” Infuriated by now, Reynolds struck back with a series of combative ads cryptically mocking the Luckies claim by declaring that Camels were “
NEVER PARCHED OR TOASTED
” and urging smokers to switch to them for maximum freshness. But Lucky Strikes continued to gain ground, and Williams, in his annoyance, ordered the Camel ad budget pared back. And then he did something far worse.