Ashes to Ashes (16 page)

Anxious to improve Camel’s appeal to better-heeled customers, ads for the brand now spoke of the quality and mildness of its tobacco and depicted smokers of presumably good taste and breeding, in evening attire at dinner parties or on ocean liners or more informally garbed for a tennis or polo match, all of whom were urged to “
HAVE A CAMEL
,” the Ayer advertising agency’s notion of a catchy slogan. Reynolds’s approach to the market seemed to be that of a winner eager not to make a mistake by any display of flamboyance. The company’s prosperity and high standing were splendidly embodied by the opening in 1929 of its $2 million new headquarters in Winston-Salem, a twenty-two-story structure sheathed in Indiana limestone with Art Deco detailing designed by Shreve & Lamb and resembling the next major edifice that firm would fashion—the Empire State Building. The Reynolds tower was among the tallest structures in the South and surely its handsomest office building.

The very blandness of the Camel approach all but invited an intensified onslaught by competing brands. While Reynolds, with a cultural conservatism reflective of its regional base, declined openly to seek female smokers or display them in their ads—the women in them smilingly
watched
the men enjoy their Camels—even cautious Liggett & Myers began to explore the distaff market, albeit with a style and subtlety that eluded the RJR admakers. “Blow some my way,” implored a fetching young woman nestled by her devoted companion on some idyllic crag as he puffed away in a 1926 Chesterfield ad considered daring for its day. The Chesterfield ads in general were the smartest-looking in the
cigarette business, with their elegant drawings and type styling, tight copy blocks and abundance of white space, constant promise of mildness “without a hint of harshness or irritation,” and cryptic yet pleasingly suggestive slogan—“They Satisfy.” By decade’s end, Chesterfield was selling three-quarters as much as Camel.

The appeal of “mildness” became a watchword in cigarette advertising in this period, as if the industry recognized that despite the absence of condemnation by the legitimate scientific community, the chronic inhalation of tobacco smoke could hardly help being an irritant and that likelihood had to be implicitly counteracted, if not openly denied. A brasher approach to this sensitive subject was taken now by a new brand that was to become the most successful cigarette arrival of the decade, and in the nick of time for its manufacturer, P. Lorillard.

Handed the bulk of the tobacco trust’s Turkish brands, representing about one-quarter of the industry’s cigarette revenues in 1912, Lorillard did not flourish as an independent operation. As war and the xenophobic impulses it triggered cut heavily into its Turkish brands, Lorillard responded far too timidly to sustain or build market share. Its 1915 introduction of Tiger was so transparently imitative of Camel and so ineptly mounted that the brand quickly vanished. Even the company’s pathbreaking pursuit of women customers, to whom Lorillard pitched as early as 1919 with ads for its Murad and Helmar brands showing or strongly implying their use by women, was viewed in industry circles as foolhardy. It was the very moment when Prohibitionists, fresh from their triumph over alcohol, were hot on the trail of tobacco. By 1925, the company had lost all but 2 percent of the cigarette market and was staying in business on the strength of its other tobacco products.

Raising $30 million, Lorillard ended its slide in 1926 by leaping afresh, if ten years late, into the Burley blend competition with a new brand, Old Gold, which it promoted with vigor and imagination that surprised its rivals. But they could hardly admire the newcomer’s bravura slogan, “Not a cough in a carload,” a claim of innocence from an affliction tacitly imputed to Old Gold’s competitors—smoker’s cough. Its ads made prominent use of the “blindfold test,” a self-serving technique authoritatively discredited only a few years earlier by the big J. Walter Thompson agency, which had shown that panels of smokers, asked to judge cigarette brands with their imprinted identities masked, correctly identified their own no more frequently than the law of averages would have dictated. Still, the company flaunted its claims, hiring artist John Held to draw his famous flapper girls for Old Gold ads, featuring in others the equally famous Petty girls posed as lithesome pirates in short pants and similarly coy guises, and making imaginative use of the comic-strip form in ads based on Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” wowsers and the gifts of illustrator Winsor McKay, whose “Little Nemo” creations were the Sunday comics’
nearest approach to high art. Old Gold, promoted as well on the newest ad medium, radio, and by inventive contests, had expensively gained 7 percent of the cigarette market by 1930. Advertising, it seemed, could achieve almost anything if you did enough of it and with verve.

VII

YET
another brand made its appearance during this period, and while it would prove modestly profitable, there was little about its style or performance to foreshadow the magnitude, in a reincarnated form, of the success it would one day score. The company that produced it was a pygmy in the field.

Marlboro was the brainchild of a personable native Alabaman named Reuben Morris (no relation) Ellis, who in 1924 had been named president of the Philip Morris Company, Ltd. Ellis had made his mark in sales as a youngster first with the tobacco trust in Philadelphia and then in New York with the leading independent firm of Miltiades Melachrino, an Egyptian whose Turkish brand, named for himself, had a considerable following in America’s great portal city. With a colleague, Leonard Burnham McKitterick, a Nebraskan ten years his senior, Ellis put Melachrino on the map in the heyday of the Turkish brands. While they worked the whole country, their main effort was focused on New York itself, where they ceaselessly sampled hotel and theater lobbies, society balls, Bowery boxing clubs, and the racetracks. “We never knew what it was like to have a night to ourselves,” McKitterick would later recall. One of his basic sales preachments, delivered to a young drummer he enlisted by the name of Alfred Emanuel Lyon, who would one day forge a fateful union with him and Ellis, was “People don’t buy your product—they buy you and then sell your product.”

When the trust was broken up, one of its quasi-independent parts, the United Cigar Stores, survived intact under its president, George Whelan, who at once used his chain as the basis for a holding company he called Tobacco Products Corporation. With financial help from Wall Street, he tried to snatch up any good little independent company he could find, now that the trust no longer threatened to strangle every operator outside its web. Among Whelan’s first purchases in 1912 was Melachrino, whose stars, Ellis and McKitterick, he made Tobacco Products directors and handed major operating responsibilities. Though the Turkish market rapidly eroded, Whelan kept wheeling and dealing, and since every brand he could get his hands on had the advantage of favored treatment in his stores, the holding company’s survival was not imperiled. In 1919, Whelan picked up Philip Morris as his final acquisition for Tobacco Products, and a nice little plum it was.

Since its American incorporation in the first years of the century with stockholders
on both sides of the Atlantic, Philip Morris had puttered along unspectacularly, trading on its English name and resonance, which enhanced its standing during the war years even as the Turkish brands lost favor. Its makes still bore the royal coat of arms, though the king who had appointed its parent firm as tobacconist to the crown had been dead for almost a decade by the time Whelan used a group of Tobacco Products stockholders including Ellis and McKitterick to buy the little outfit and tether it closely to his holding company. Whelan put Reuben Ellis in charge of Philip Morris, whose brands held a collective half of one percent of the cigarette market in 1925, and told him to build it.

Aware of the growing female sector of the market, somewhere in the 10 to 15 percent range, Ellis reached into the Philip Morris trademark list for the Marlboro name and positioned it as a premium-priced smoke for women by putting it in a white pack with heavy foil, the royal crest in black and the Philip Morris signature scrawled across it in script, and a little arrangement of scrolls surrounding the motto “The Mildness of America’s Best.” In case anyone missed the point, the advertisements from the first bore the prominent slogan “Mild as May,” the drawing of an obviously female hand holding a cigarette, and a smart text saying that no less outdated than the mustache cup, the overstuffed parlor, and the lapdog was the notion that “decent, respectable women do not smoke. … Has smoking any more to do with a woman’s morals than has the color of her hair?” No other company had put the matter so boldly yet so artfully. By 1927, Ellis’s company grew more aggressive, melding the snobbish and feminist appeals: “Women—when they smoke at all—quickly develop discerning taste. That is why Marlboros ride in so many limousines, attend so many bridge parties, repose in so many hand bags.” To lend elegance, an “ivory tip,” a little laminated wrap around the unlit end, was added to keep the cigarette paper from clinging to lipsticked mouths.

For all its
soigné
lure, Marlboro sold only a few hundred million units a year, barely one-fifteenth of what Old Gold managed. Even so, it helped Philip Morris turn a tidy profit—a lot more than could be said for the rest of the Whelans’ Tobacco Products empire, which in 1929 crashed a few months before the stock market. When the separate units were sold off to satisfy creditors, on hand to pick up control of Philip Morris was Rube Ellis, who had gradually added to his holdings in the operation and now summoned his erstwhile colleague Leonard McKitterick from a long sabbatical in Europe. Between them, and despite an economy gone suddenly haywire, they would turn their little British-American hybrid of a duckling into a lustrous, if tobacco-stained, swan.

VIII

UPON
succeeding his father as president of American Tobacco at the beginning of 1926, George Washington Hill seemed possessed by a need to show the world that he had not gained his position through nepotism, as if his more than two decades of service to the company had not adequately testified to his abundant skills. At that moment, Chesterfield was outselling Lucky Strike by 50 percent and Camel was 150 percent ahead of it. The new president, at the age of forty-one, vowed to end American’s third-place humiliation. He did so with a single-mindedness indistinguishable from monomania.

George Hill, to put it charitably, was not a lovable man. He had few close friends outside of American Tobacco, and fewer still within it. A poor delegator of responsibility, he ruled like a paranoid dictator, energizing the company through tension and fear of his explosive temperament. He was forever issuing orders, now in a strong staccato, now in a high-pitched whine, and woe be it to whoever failed to execute his demands as prescribed. In some ways a throwback to the rugged individualism Buck Duke had embodied in the company’s early days, Hill brought a truculence and eccentricity to his leadership that made it unnervingly volatile.

There was the matter, for instance, of The Hat. Inside the company’s bastion on the east side of Fifth Avenue at the corner of Eighteenth Street, Hill always wore a hat. Sometimes it was a Stetson sombrero, sometimes a felt fedora, sometimes even a trout fisherman’s rumpled number. The in-house joke, never uttered above a whisper, was that the hat was the boss’s crown, always worn so none would forget who ruled. There were a few other trappings of kingly omnipotence, like the bodyguard patrolling the corridor outside his throne room and the Rolls-Royce perpetually parked close by the palace entrance, on standby to whisk him wherever the royal whim might dictate—usually lunch at the Vanderbilt Hotel near Grand Central Terminal. He was also reported to spit on his desk from time to time, though this may have been no more than a discharge of saliva accompanying an overzealously given command. To the outside world he was a mystery man. He rarely gave speeches or press interviews, avoided stockholders’ meetings, and directed that the company’s annual reports disclose as little as possible about its operations.

All that said, there was no denying Hill’s obsessive devotion to the task before him. He put in endless hours with his sales executives, for example, trying to perfect his field force’s presentation to retailers on the superiority of American Tobacco products. The marketplace had changed, of course, from the one in the days when Duke barged in on a still embryonic cigarette trade. Now the
battle required sales acumen as well as muscle—no easy matter when dealing with competing brands that were practically all the same, save for their packaging and advertising. But Hill insisted on a rote script that would surely have put off all but the most pliant customer if delivered precisely as handed down from the mount.

He was satisfied that in Lucky Strike’s cool green wrapper, he had the most distinctive and attractive package on the market. But Hill’s advertising was not working well enough. Higher expenditures for it helped raise Luckies’ sales about 7.5 percent during Hill’s first year at the helm, but the brand still lost ground to Camels and Chesterfields. Frustrated because he considered himself an advertising virtuoso who often wrote his own copy, Hill had to reexamine his thinking on the subject. It amounted to a simplistic set of assumptions: (1) Your product must have a real or claimable difference from others of its kind, and (2) if it does and you drum it home loud and often enough, it will sell. Missing from such a reductive formula was the belief that consumer persuasion might be more a form of art than an exercise in arm-twisting. Since Hill ate admen for breakfast, it was no easy matter for him to concede he needed talent beyond his own to help Lucky Strike, but having so concluded, he hired the man widely regarded as the best in the business.

Starting in the mail room of Chicago’s Lord & Thomas agency in 1902, Albert D. Lasker rose to its presidency in just eight years, and over the next thirty built such brands as Kleenex, Frigidaire, Sunkist, Pepsodent, and Quaker Oats into household, indeed almost generic, names. Lasker was a shrewd and somewhat cynical foil to George Hill’s evangelical style of hucksterism, but they shared a basic belief in “reason why” advertising that relied more on a product’s selling point of difference than brawny breast-beating. Between them they surveyed how rival cigarette makers were exploiting the themes of mildness and feminism, coded appeals to the fear of smoking irritation, and proceeded to outdo them gaudily.