Ashes to Ashes (59 page)

Then one day a member of the Burnett creative team brought to New York a recording of the score for the 1960 Western film
The Magnificent Seven
, by veteran Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein. The Philip Morris conference room was darkened, the video footage rolled, and the narrator spieled to the rousing movie music, a pastiche part Aaron Copland, part Rossini’s overture from
William Tell
, part Grofe’s
Grand Canyon Suite
. The net effect was electrifying: a cigarette as larger-than-life hero, its virtues made manifest by thundering hoofbeats and soaring brass horns. “There was an almost immediate reaction,” Landry recalled ever after. “The music made it all come off.”

Rights to the movie music were purchased from United Artists, and the spirited strains at once became the Marlboro national anthem. Although Philip
Morris executives approved the musical glorification of their leading brand, fears lingered over putting all their Marlboro advertising into cowboy gear. “Quite a few top management people felt it was too macho and limited in scope,” Landry remembered, risky in terms of attracting city dwellers and women smokers. Two marketing studies were ordered, and both indicated that if the all-Western campaign continued, the brand might die within five years.

But Landry refused to be scared off. He operated by instinct, not by the book, and felt that great advertising was more art than science. Of the doomsday prospects for the cowboy campaign revealed in the research studies, he said, “I didn’t believe it—I didn’t think research truly reflected the impact the advertising had on consumers. People are very reluctant to tell you they’ve been impacted by advertising—the questioner will think they’re patsies if they’ve been led down the path by advertising.” The tendency was exacerbated in the case of cigarette advertising, in the view of Burnett’s Marlboro account man, John Benson: “When you ask people why they smoke a particular brand, the answer is, ‘I like it—the flavor.’” In-depth interviews disclosed little more; cigarette marketers, in short, were blind probers through a jungle of irrational impulses, trying to peddle a product that medical science was condemning more loudly by the day.

Landry persevered in the face of mounting criticism of the cowboy campaign. The advertising was steadily refined, the pitch sharpened. The theme line of 1963, “Wherever there are men who like a flavor smoke with character—that’s Marlboro Country,” was tightened and became 1964’s simple breakthrough sell, “Come to where the flavor is. … Come to Marlboro Country.” It was no overnight sensation. The brand’s 1964 sales actually dipped by nearly a billion units, but Landry stuck to his guns. The campaign, he would say, “wasn’t designed to make you run to the corner store and buy a pack.” The numbers, though, made Landry’s chief backer, President Joe Cullman, shaky about the cowboy theme. “And who wouldn’t be,” Landry asked in retrospect, “if he heard things all week like ‘You’re going to ruin this fucking company if you run with it’?”

Because the cigarette business lost ground in 1964, it was easy to miss the fact that Marlboro lost less than its competitors. The following year, its sales spurted 10 percent, and would jump by that percentage or more annually for the rest of the decade as it galloped past Kent and Salem to become the industry’s second-best-selling brand. Winston was still selling twice as many units, but there was a glow now at Philip Morris headquarters.

Thirty years later, even though restricted by law to print media only, “Marlboro Country” survived as one of the longest-running and most successful advertising campaigns ever devised. Its enduring appeal was an overworked metaphor that generated its resonating power in direct proportion to the distance from the reality in which most smokers dwelled and by the passionate attention
to detail with which the imagery was rendered. “Marlboro Country” seemed to beckon Americans to an earlier, simpler, morally unambiguous time, to the frontier irretrievably lost to the encroachment of thronged modernity. In the final third of the twentieth century, the nation too often found its cities increasingly blighted and violent, its suburbs sterile and conformist, its offices glazed and hermetic boxes, its work programmed and dehumanizing, its government inept when not corrupt, its faith bereft of nobler instincts, and life in general more alienating than fulfilling. As Norman Muse, then a Burnett copywriter for Marlboro and later chairman of the agency’s international operations, capsulized it, “People don’t want to be in the city, smelling all that crap.” “Marlboro Country” transported them past smug suburbia and the cloying sweetness of Norman Rockwell’s small towns, out beyond the tidy Arcadia and pastoral prettiness pictured in the Salem and Newport ads, to an immense, indeed limitless, landscape, awesome in its rugged yet serene beauty, where the menaces of nature were ultimately manageable, the mountain streams pure, the chuckwagon fare hearty and unfattening, and the skies were not sooty all day. “Marlboro Country” was what Bruce Lohof, in a 1969 paean to commercial iconography in the
Journal of Popular Culture
, trenchantly called “an environmental memoir, reminding Americans of where they had been and inviting them vicariously to return.” Above all, “Marlboro Country” was unpolluted, free of hazards to one’s moral and physical health—precisely the opposite of what science and the government were saying about smoking cigarettes.

And there was the correlative appeal of the Marlboro cowboy himself, as far a cry as possible from Woody Allen with all his urban hang-ups and psychic dysfunction. This ultimate Marlboro Man was a throwback hero, strong, stoic, self-reliant, free (though not without responsibilities), potent—the kind of man women are drawn to—and he never punched a time clock. He was capable of both repose, kneeling pensively beside a campfire, say, while drawing on his smoke with satisfaction, and of action gracefully executed, whether shown heading up a canyon after a thirty-mile ride shaking cattle out of the mesquite, scattering a threatened stampede, or just lugging his saddle past the corral gate. And he was classless, purposely neither a boss nor a hand, though his white hat, confident gait, and effortless handling of his mount tagged him as a leader and no grubby bunkhouse malingerer. He was also an apolitical man of peace who was never armed and had no enemies, a knight errant patrolling his craggy Eden and embodying what Frederick Jackson Turner had termed, in writing of the frontiersman, “that dominant individualism … that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.”

And what sort of cigarette would such a fellow smoke—as smoke he surely would with all that time and space on his hands? “For me, always, the cowboy contains the expression of flavor,” commented David Dangoor, an articulate
latter-day head of Philip Morris’s marketing. “I could not think of anything more convincing.” And indeed one was convinced that the Marlboro cowboy liked his coffee strong, his horse powerful and fast, and his smoke with a full-bodied taste—to hell with its tar and nicotine content or the harping of the sissy Surgeon General.

It all may have worked because there was so little text—when you got right down to it, how much was there to say in praise of cigarettes that was neither gross exaggeration nor an outright lie?—and the page-filling pictures had a grainy, almost documentary immediacy enhanced by the attention to every detail of the composition. In an age when “plastic” became the dismissive adjective of choice for the fake and insubstantial, nothing plastic was allowed in “Marlboro Country,” starting with the cowboys themselves. “Young cowboys look like they’re in costume,” remarked Hall Adams, who worked on the Marlboro account starting in 1961 and later became chairman of the Burnett agency. Added Jack Landry, “You needed guys who looked comfortable on a horse, men who had lived outdoors in all weather—whose lives showed in their faces.” At one shoot early in the campaign, Adams recalled, by way of vouching for the Burnett team’s insistence on authenticity in their models, they imported a good-looking rodeo star to the location ranch, where the hands had supposed that the stranger was an armchair cowboy from Hollywood, and so they produced the nastiest stallion on the spread for him to struggle with during the filming. The rodeo rider took one look at the archetypal White Lightning, got the picture at once, and gave the horse a wicked clout across the snout that made him rear in fear and then settle down tamely—to the wide-eyed amazement of the resident hands. All understood thereafter the code of “Marlboro Country”: no dudes wanted.

There were no town shots, no modern machines, no glossy products, only natural materials—soil, wood, leather—and all inanimate objects were no mere props but working tools, the cowboy’s spurs worn and dented, his fleece-lined Marley coat a necessity against the stinging wind and cold, his camp’s pots and pans blackened from use. And all of this was caught by perfectionist photographers, unafraid of horses and thunderstorms, who like painters brought out mood and tonality by how they framed and arranged their compositions, whether in the angle of a horse’s silhouetted head, the conformation of mount and rider, the play of a rope, a texture of a slab of wood, even the sense of a driving wind from the fullness of the cloud banks working overhead. It was poetic and thrillingly escapist—and what, finally, was a cigarette but a form of escape?

According to Landry, the man most credited with sustaining the idea, “Marlboro Country” sold cigarettes because the product “lived up to what we say or imply it’s going to deliver. Because it’s a good, flavorful cigarette—and that’s all we say about it.” If the campaign was, as one Burnett executive called
it, “dumbbell simple,” it was also inoffensive. In the words of Thomas C. Littleton, then a Philip Morris salesman and later director of the Southeast region, where the company’s fortunes had long languished, “It played everywhere”—except in Texas and other parts of the Southwest, where real ranch hands did not relish being seen as Marlboro cowboys. Most of all, the Western metaphor gave Marlboro a firm identity that front-running Winston had always lacked. Even in Winston-Salem, Reynolds people were inclined to think of Winston as “a Camel with a filter,” as veteran RJR sales executive Yancey Ford called it, and the catchy little jingle about its tasting “good like a cigarette should” did not do much for the brand’s personality, any more than did the fun-and-games approach of its mentholated companion brand, Salem. Their airy, recreational approach struck a discordant note in ’Sixties America, with all its social upheaval, and unlike the toothsome smokers in the ads for Reynolds brands, the Marlboro Man never smiled—true heroes didn’t. For life just then was earnest and not a little painful, and smoking, while pleasurable, had its perils, as all the world was now being advised. Maybe the Marlboro cowboy knew it, too, but indulged nonetheless, fatalistically, as if in possession of the core secret of the great happy hunting ground he roamed: Life is a terminal disease.

Three-Ton Dog on the Prowl

THE
tobacco industry late in 1964 installed its “tar czar,” former New Jersey Governor Robert Meyner, and a staff of six investigators in a thirtieth-floor suite in a midtown Manhattan office building and gave them broad powers to enforce its new code for advertising. In its first thirty months, Meyner would proudly report later to the skeptical Federal Trade Commission, his staff threw out 1,025 of the 16,000 or so ads submitted to it for approval, and more than half of the 154 campaign themes presented to them were denied unqualified approval. His job, he said, was neither “to increase the sale of cigarettes nor to depress them” but to quash ads that made health claims explicitly or implicitly or that appealed primarily to those under twenty-one. Testimonials by athletes were dropped, tobacco sponsorship of certain family comedy shows and fantasies on television like “Gilligan’s Island” and “I Dream of Jeannie” ended, and Philip Morris had to dispense with the services of Julie London, whose husky-voiced spots were used as a break from the musky “Marlboro Country” ads, because the singer was (a) a celebrity, (b) an entertainer, and (c) feeding the sexual fantasies of underage viewers (leave aside those of male adults). The trouble arose when the advertising people for the industry, with company lawyers in tow, showed up before Meyner bearing story boards for ads and commercials of a more marginal nature.

“He was a tough enforcer,” recalled a Philip Morris lawyer on the team that dealt with the code administrator, “but a pretty arbitrary guy—you’d never know what you might run into with Meyner. He and his staff wanted to alter the whole complexion of cigarette advertising by making it lower key.” In
practice, their censorship was more curious than consistent or principled. A girl pictured in a sweater might be deemed to look unsuitably young, so the sweater had to be replaced by a dress, but the next pretty nubile miss might pass muster. You could show a smoker out sailing or trout-fishing, but in a waterskiing scene the smoker had to be the one driving the towboat. It was permissible to show someone wearing tennis garb and/or sitting near the court and smoking, and to show the same person in the locker room afterward in a fresh nonathletic shirt and lighting up, but it was
verboten
to picture anyone playing and smoking in tandem.