Ashes to Ashes (29 page)

Most of all, Joe Cullman, Jr., minded his business. He bought to hold, was never a speculator, and nicely weathered the great Wall Street crash in 1929. But the ’Thirties were not kind to the cigar business, and Joe Junior grew moody now, seized by frequent bouts of depression brought on by fears that the Cullman enterprises would soon be pauperized. Except while at play with them, he treated his sons as a stern Victorian father, fearful that heaping them with luxuries or overt love might spoil them. He was best at preaching the work ethic to the boys. His third son, Edgar, once was to accompany his father on a business trip to Tampa but elected to stop off en route a day early to attend a friend’s wedding in Georgia. Plane service was less than reliable in those days, and foggy weather forced Edgar to phone his father to say he feared he might not arrive on time for their appointment. “He hung up on me,” Edgar remembered,
“and when I finally got there, my father had completed the business call and gone.” Nothing further was ever said about his truancy, “but the episode made an impression on me.”

Among other companies represented in the Cullmans’ investment portfolio was little Benson & Hedges, offspring of the early Bond Street tobacconists who had competed for the carriage trade with Philip Morris’s old London shop in the mid-nineteenth century. An import branch had been opened in New York at the close of the century and sold out to American interests in 1928. B&H’s principal place of business by then was a swank shop on Fifth Avenue near Thirty-ninth Street that offered such boutique items as monogrammed, gold-tipped, hand-rolled Turkish cigarettes and customized boxes embossed with family crests. The store staff wore morning coats, even the deliverymen were uniformed, and English tea was served to the clientele each afternoon. The operation expanded in 1931 from the customized cigarette business to a new premium ready-made brand, Parliament, a Turkish-American blend featuring a recessed European-style mouthpiece that kept tobacco shreds away from the mouth; later a combed-cotton filter was inserted in the mouthpiece to reduce the intake of irritants in the smoke. Making and attaching the filter were slow work—it took ten times as long to make one Parliament as it did to turn out one standard-brand smoke—and the cigarettes had to be hand-packed in their fancy tan-gray slide-and-shell box. Priced at thirty cents and little advertised, only 20,000 boxes of Parliament were sold that introductory year, mostly in New York.

But the brand slowly built up a following and was selling 95 million units by 1941 when the marginally profitable company was being offered for sale. Philip Morris briefly considered it, but fearful of antitrust implications after the company had been included among the defendants in the government’s sweeping suit filed that year, Chalkley and Lyon let it go. But the latter urged his close friend Joe Cullman, Jr., to look into the company as a complement to the family’s flagging cigar volume. The manageably small size of the operation, its snobbish affectations, and the jewel-like profit in such retail items as a fifty-unit glass jar of cigars selling for $25 appealed to Joe Junior, who put up $850,000 for control of Benson & Hedges and remarked that he would gladly take the crumbs off Big Tobacco’s table.

Even under wartime wraps, the little outfit grew, grossing more than $5 million by 1945. And then, with ads in magazines catering to the affluent, like
The New Yorker
and
Cue
, the product’s ritzy tone caught on and outpaced all competitors in the deluxe field. The little B&H factory on Water Street was soon humming as never before, packing a million Parliaments a day.

Joe Junior now had to divide his workday between overseeing Benson & Hedges operations in the morning and the family’s leaf and investment interests in the afternoon. He ran a tight ship at B&H, and by the late ’Forties, demand
for Parliaments, which netted their maker 3 cents per box compared with about 1.2 cents for every standard-brand pack, was happily outstripping the company’s capacity to supply them. Sales surged 25 percent in 1948, 47 percent in 1949, and 66 percent in 1950. Even so, B&H’s share of the cigarette trade was only three-tenths of a single percentage point. Joe Junior told
Fortune
magazine that year that he was “happily married to the carriage trade” and had no intention of deserting it at his age—nearing seventy—for the rough-and-tumble of the mass market. The photograph accompanying the story showed Joe Junior with his oldest son, Joseph F. Cullman III, at his side, a hand resting on his father’s shoulder in filial devotion. Joe Third, as his son was known to the trade, was by then running B&H and, at thirty-eight, was un-fazed by the perils of the big-time tobacco business. His ambition was soon to be tested—and the future course of the whole industry altered as a result.

The Filter Tip and Other Placebos

WHILE
a precocious lad of seven, Clarence Cook Little began studying and breeding mice, an interest that in time led him to the field of biology at Harvard, where he won his doctorate in the subject. But there was no mistaking “Pete” Little, as he preferred to be called, for an antisocial researcher chained to his laboratory. A Boston Brahmin of Huguenot ancestry, descended from Paul Revere on his mother’s side, he was a large man of magnetic charm, with an impeccable Harvard accent that could, on certain lubricated occasions, transform itself into a hilariously salty Down East dialect for folksy joke-telling. As he pursued his dissertation on genetics and raised his personal colony of mice, he managed to serve Harvard in a variety of junior administrative posts, including secretary to the corporation. Upon his completion of a four-year fellowship studying experimental evolution, Little’s outgoing and high-toned personality, his training in academic management, and credentials as a serious scientist earned him appointment in 1922, at the age of thirty-four, as president of the University of Maine.

Three years later, Little became the youngest head of a major American center of higher learning by assuming the presidency of the University of Michigan, and his mice followed him west. But after only four years in Ann Arbor, Little was hounded from his post for his outspoken views in favor of birth control, his permissiveness toward unorthodox student conduct, and continuing reports of an adulterous relationship. Among those who had befriended him in Michigan was a wealthy automotive executive, Roscoe B. Jackson, who put up the funds for a research institute in his name and under Little’s supervision
in Bar Harbor, Maine. His well-established colony of purebred mice found their ultimate home and usefulness there, for the spartan brick compound, affectionately dubbed “Mousetown” by its staff, was essentially a facility for the breeding of mice. The fastidious conditions Little insisted upon helped create worldwide demand for his mice for experimental uses. But Jackson Memorial Laboratory was an austere operation: Little himself was paid only $3,000 and had to ask his staffers to go fishing once a week to help keep themselves fed.

Little’s reduced circumstances and geographic remoteness were somewhat alleviated by his 1929 appointment, simultaneous with the establishment of the Jackson laboratory (and mouse factory), as managing director of the still fledgling American Society for the Control of Cancer (ASCC). Very much under the sway of the medical profession, itself in continuing dread of the disease and its impotence to cure it, the ASCC paid Little $9,000 a year to commute from Maine to its New York office for a few days a week and help reduce the public’s phobic attitude toward cancer through education and the message that early detection was the chief, if not only, hope of beating the affliction. And big, personable Pete Little was the perfect messenger, especially among society matrons whose idle hours he enlisted to help spread lifesaving word about how to spot uterine cancer early. Among his writings was the book
Civilization Against Cancer
, typical of his efforts to explicate the disease, the enormous complexity of which fascinated him. Cancer was “not a unity,” he wrote, “and many factors must be considered in attempting to blot it out—heredity, sex, hormones, diet, sunlight, vitamins … .” While not on the forward edge of the new field of oncology, Little grasped early on that the carcinogenic process was probably not initiated by a germ or virus, as were most infectious diseases, but came, as he wrote in 1933, “from some as yet mysterious ‘derangement’ within a single body cell.” As to the growing incidence of lung cancer and its possible causal link to smoking, he wrote in a 1944 ASCC pamphlet, “Cancer: A Study for Laymen,” that although there was as yet “no definite evidence” of such a relationship, “it would seem unwise to fill the lungs repeatedly with a suspension of fine particles of tobacco product. … It is difficult to see how such particles can be prevented from becoming lodged in the walls of the lungs and when so located how they can avoid providing a certain amount of irritation … .”

While he enjoyed occupying the platform as the cancer society’s chief spokesman and popular educator, Little did not succeed in nurturing the organization beyond its larval stage. Its prewar staff had just a few publicists, its fund-raising netted scarcely $100,000 a year, and its managing director seemed to lack any vision of an enlarged role for the cancer society. And so its leadership was wrested from him in 1944 by a group of prominent New Yorkers, who renamed it the American Cancer Society (ACS).

Principal agent of Pete Little’s unseating was Mary Woodard Lasker, second wife of legendary advertising man Albert Lasker, who had helped turn Lucky Strike cigarettes into the nation’s leading smoke. Mrs. Lasker’s housemaid had contracted cancer in 1943, and the more her employer, a Radcliffe honors graduate, looked into the disease and the primitive stage of its treatment and research, the more appalled she grew. An attractive woman of wealth, social grace, and considerable self-assurance, with a wide circle of influential friends, Mrs. Lasker approached Pete Little with a plan to turn the cancer society into a big-time volunteer health organization. They would enlist nationwide movers and shakers in industry, finance, law, education, labor, and government to reinforce the doctors and scientists who were the frail society’s present leaders and the socialite women who formed its rank and file. Instrumental in this process that Little embraced were Emerson Foote, head of Foote, Cone & Belding, the sudcessor firm to Albert Lasker’s agency, and investment banker James Adams, a partner at Lazard Frères, who turned to a number of executives he knew in the pharmaceutical industry and urged them to get into the fight against cancer both on humanitarian grounds and as smart business in view of the unfolding research on chemotherapy as a weapon for halting the spread of the disease. Adams’s chief recruit was Elmer H. Bobst, the ex-druggist who had made a fortune in the vitamin business as head of the Hoffmann-La Roche company. Word spread from the Laskers’ swank salon on New York’s Beekman Place, the de facto fund-raising nexus of the ACS, and within a few years the society’s annual appeal was netting $10 million, as industrialists and other large givers found the cause irresistible and the publicity for its benefactors not a little self-serving. Soon the society had a sizable new headquarters with a permanent staff of several hundred, including a dozen highly adept publicists, and was reaching out to schools and colleges, offices and factories, churches and fraternal orders in virtually every community.

With such growth inevitably came tensions and jealousies, especially between the medical and scientific people and the laymen at the top of the organization. Bobst, a vain but energetic and highly committed catalyst, became chairman of the ACS in 1949 and helped devise a new structure for the organization’s directors to avoid divisive policy battles. By design the board of fifty-six would be split evenly between professionals and lay people, with one of the former serving as president and one of the latter as chairman. The working heart of the effort would be its enlarged professional staff, whose new young medical-scientific director, the complex and eloquent Charles S. Cameron, a breast cancer specialist, brought a passion to his task of a sort that Pete Little had never managed. His departure from the ACS was understood to have been prompted in large measure by Mary Lasker’s deep disapproval of both his professional conduct within the organization and an attitude toward women said
to be alternately patronizing and predatory. If Little was embittered by his removal, he gave no overt sign, but events a decade later would suggest that the scar never healed.

II

AMONG
the professional newcomers to the American Cancer Society staff under Charles Cameron’s command was a young epidemiologist of impeccable academic credentials, an elegant bearing that revealed his patrician roots among Maryland’s Chesapeake gentry, and a singular dedication to the intellectual task he had been assigned—namely, the strengthening and broadening of the ACS’s statistical research section. Although the society did not itself undertake biological research into the nature of the disease but rather made grants to individuals and institutions for that purpose, it turned in 1946 to thirty-four-year-old E. Cuyler Hammond, a tall, slender Yale graduate with a doctorate from the Johns Hopkins public-health school, to coordinate the nationwide effort of ACS branches, cancer registries, and other agencies gathering data on the disease in all its insidious forms: you had to know your foe in order to conquer it.