Fizz (22 page)

The deal, signed in August 1960, shattered the Japanese anti-Coke coalition. By the year's end the last restrictions on Coca-Cola had fallen. Unshackled at last, Coca-Cola quickly confirmed the fears of Japan's domestic soft drink industry by stomping over local rivals like a carbonated Godzilla. By 1965 Coke sales in Japan passed the 480 million bottles a year mark and Mitsuya Cider was displaced as Japan's favorite soda after almost eighty years at the top. More than five hundred of the thirty-five hundred Japanese soft drink manufacturers that existed before the restrictions were lifted were gone by 1968, a figure the country's soft drink association blamed entirely on Coca-Cola. Ten years later, Coke was so big in Japan that the country accounted for 18 percent of the company's global profits, enough for Coca-Cola president Paul Austin to wonder how he could maintain growth when he was “fresh out of Japans.”

For Japanese nationalists, Coca-Cola's runaway success symbolized all that was wrong with post-war Japan. Yukio Mishima, the Nobel Prize-nominated author who advocated a return to the ways of imperial Japan and the samurai, was among those horrified by Coca-Cola's rise. In his
Sea of Fertility
tetralogy of novels, Mishima painted a vivid picture of a nation in decline, and in the concluding book,
The Decay of the Angel,
he cast Coca-Cola as a symbol of Japan's downfall. When the main character Shigekuni Honda visits Komagoé Beach, he finds sands covered in “empty Coca-Cola bottles, food cans, paint cans, nonperishable plastic bags, detergent boxes,
bricks, bones.” In the former imperial capital of Kyoto, Honda encounters “a clutter of all the dreary details of new construction, to be seen throughout Japan: raw building materials and blue-tiled roofs, television towers and power lines, Coca-Cola advertisements and drive-in snack bars.”

On completing
The Decay of the Angel,
Mishima decided to stage a coup to restore the emperor's powers. On the morning of November 25, 1970 he and four loyal followers headed from his suburban home in a Toyota Corona to the military headquarters in Ichigaya for a seemingly innocent meeting with the army general. On reaching the general's office they took him hostage and barricaded the doors, and Mishima headed for the balcony to deliver a speech to the troops assembled below, hoping to inspire a revolution. The soldiers merely laughed at the pompous novelist, so he retreated inside and, in keeping with his belief in the customs of the samurai, committed ritual suicide by slicing open his own abdomen with a dagger before being clumsily beheaded by one of his followers. If it was a choice between a Japan of Coca-Cola and a Japan of Mishima's beloved samurai, the Japanese clearly preferred the Real Thing.

It wasn't just right-wing nationalists who saw Coca-Cola as a threat. In the ideological clash of the Cold War between the free and Communist worlds, a brand as synonymous with America as Coca-Cola became a target for Communists everywhere. When Mao Tse-tung took over China in October 1949, he banned Coca-Cola from the country. The Soviets refused to let Coca-Cola through the Iron Curtain and ordered Cominform, the Kremlin-controlled agency that coordinated Europe's Communist parties, to stoke opposition to the American drink. As Communist sentiment against Coca-Cola hardened, the company found its operations under fire across Europe. In Italy the Communist paper
L'Unità
claimed that the drink would turn children's hair white. In Vienna Communist activists turned words into action by tracking down the local Coca-Cola boss, pulling him from his car, and beating him in the street.

The French Communist party went even further than its Austrian and Italian peers. It forged an unlikely but highly effective alliance with the country's winemakers and launched a campaign to drive Coke out of France. The winemakers were more concerned about protecting their
profits than about Marxism, but in Coca-Cola they and the Communists found a common enemy. By late 1949 their anti-Coke movement had won over the French media and political establishment. The weekly news magazine
Paris Match
reported that “the foreboding noises of the tom-tom of Coca-Cola are already being heard in France.” The daily newspaper
Le Monde
called the drink a threat to French civilization. And the Communist newspaper
L'Humanité
summed up the nation's fears with the rhetorical question: “Are we being Coca-Colonized?” Across Paris, Coca-Cola ads were vandalized with graffiti of skull and crossbones signs, while customs officials repeatedly refused to let Coca-Cola import the ingredients it needed to make its drink.

To try to calm the situation, Coca-Cola sent in Alexander Makinsky. Born into a Russian aristocrat family in 1900 and raised by a British nanny in the city of Baku on the shore of the Caspian Sea, Makinsky grew up surrounded by wealth and power. When the Communists took over Russia, he fled to America and became an international political representative for the Rockefeller Foundation. A lover of intrigue and the machinations of power, Makinsky networked his way around the world sipping champagne with presidents and using his aristocratic charm and high-powered connections to steer decision makers around to his employers' way of thinking. In 1946, as Coca-Cola began its rapid global expansion, the company realized it needed to be better plugged into world politics if it was going to deal with the challenges of operating internationally, and it recruited the tall, elegant Russian to be its eyes, ears, and voice in the smoky corridors of power.

But even Coke's corporate diplomat found the French situation hard going. The French government, he reported back to Atlanta, has a “personal grudge against us,” and his fears only deepened in late 1949 when the French authorities charged Coca-Cola with breaking the country's health laws by adding phosphoric acid to the drink. The charge, Makinsky noted, was one that may well be upheld in court.

Europe's concerns about phosphoric acid as an additive had been needling Coke since the end of the war. The health laws of many European countries appeared to outlaw its use, and Coca-Cola spent much of the postwar years smoothing over the issue in Belgium, Switzerland, and
Britain. But the intransigent attitudes encountered by Makinsky in Paris suggested that France would not bend so easily.

In December 1949, as Coca-Cola mulled over how to deal with this latest attack, the Communists and winemakers turned up the heat by introducing two separate bills in the National Assembly that were designed to banish Coca-Cola from France for good. The Communist party's proposal was the cruder of the two—a simple demand for a ban to protect French businesses. The winemakers' man in the assembly—Paul Boulet, the mayor of Montpellier—offered a more politically astute proposal that would empower the French health minister to ban soft drinks made from vegetable extracts to protect public health. Boulet's proposal never mentioned Coke by name, but there was no mistaking the target.

The following February the assembly rejected the Communist proposal but passed Boulet's alternative. The prospect of a complete ban from France and its territories, which still included Algeria at this time, seemed uncomfortably close to actually happening. With time running out and the French unwilling to listen, Coke called in the big guns from Washington. Makinsky pressed the State Department to act and it sent David Bruce, the US ambassador to France, to meet with French premier Georges Bidault. Bruce warned the French leader that America would respond to unwarranted discrimination against its products. Coca-Cola also alerted the American public to the situation, with James Farley, the former postmaster general turned Coca-Cola Export Corporation chairman, using a press conference to make the matter a question of national pride. “Coca-Cola was not injurious to the health of American soldiers who liberated France from the Nazis so that the Communist deputies could be in session today,” he told the assembled reporters who dutiful recounted the line to their readers the next day. Farley's dig rallied America to the cause of Coca-Cola and unleashed an anti-French backlash.

Politicians and media commentators called France's proposed ban an affront to America and talked of banning French perfume in retaliation. Others demanded an end to Marshall Plan aid for France and labeled the French as snobs. Eugene Cox, the Democratic representative for Georgia, announced he would no longer eat French dressing—clearly unaware that
no one in France would recognize the American condiment as having anything to do with their cuisine. Soon French wine sales were falling, and the French ambassador was complaining about anti-French attitudes. With a tit-for-tat trade war looming, the fire behind the campaign to rid France of Coca-Cola went out. The French Senate unanimously rejected Boulet's bill, and when the National Assembly forced it into law regardless, the country's Ministry of Agriculture refused to use its new powers against the drink. When the phosphoric acid case finally reached the courts in 1953 the judge ruled in Coke's favor, and the last ember of French political resistance was extinguished.

Not that the French converted to drinking Coca-Cola as enthusiastically as the Japanese. The French still preferred wine, and Coca-Cola also faced an unexpected challenge from an upstart soda called Orangina, which was making rapid inroads with the nation's youth. Created in 1933, Orangina was the brainchild of Dr. Agustin Trigo Mirallès, a Spanish pharmacist who lived in Valencia and had briefly served as mayor of the coastal city a couple of years earlier. It was an unusual soda, a lightly carbonated combination of orange, grapefruit, lemon, and mandarin flavors that came complete with the pulp from the squeezed oranges used to create it. The soda's bulging bottle also departed from the norm thanks to its stopper, which was a vial of essential oils that drinkers were supposed to pour into the liquid to complete the taste. Mirallès named his beverage Orangina Soda Naranjina, and in the fall of 1935 he made the fateful decision to attend a trade fair in the French city of Marseille to tout his unusual sparkling drink.

Léon Béton, a French Algerian essential oils merchant from the town of Boufarik, was among those who sampled the Spaniard's drink at the fair. Béton was so impressed by the drink that two years later he bought the rights to the beverage, by which time the Spanish Civil War had ended Mirallès's own hopes of building its sales in Spain. Béton shortened the name to Orangina, ditched the vial stopper, and set to work trying to establish it in Algeria, only for his plans to be upended by the outbreak of World War II. Orangina vanished from stores during the war, but Béton's dreams of soda success endured and in 1947 his son Jean-Claude relaunched the business. After establishing the drink in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia,
Jean-Claude turned his attentions to taking Orangina out of the French colonies and into France itself.

To stand out in the French market, Jean-Claude created a unique pear-shaped bottle with a pebbly surface designed to mimic the bumps of orange peel. He then began hiring students to conspicuously drink Orangina at the outdoor tables of French cafés so that others would notice the eye-catching bottle and think about trying it themselves. In 1953, two years after its arrival in France, the final piece of Orangina's marketing jigsaw fell into place when he met Bernard Villemot, a painter who would do for Orangina what Archie Lee had done for Coca-Cola. Villemot created poster artwork that used a stylized swirl of orange peel, the pear-shaped bottle design, and bright summery colors to carve out a distinctive and attention-grabbing image for the soda. The vivid posters, unique bottle, and fake customers turned Orangina into a hit. By 1957 the company was moving fifty million bottles a year and the drink had become the number-two soda brand in France after Coca-Cola. By the mid-1970s Orangina was an international success that was chalking up sales of five hundred million bottles every year, even though it never replicated its European success on the other side of the Atlantic.

But if Orangina and the governments of France and Japan couldn't stop the global march of Coca-Cola, maybe Pepsi could. Pepsi had entered the postwar years on the back foot; the US military had built Coca-Cola the basis for a global empire, but all Pepsi got from the Pentagon was a lone bottling plant on the remote Pacific island of Guam. If Pepsi hoped to rival Coca-Cola on the world stage, it needed to catch up fast. To make up for lost time, Pepsi began striking deals with large local companies that could launch Pepsi in their home nations with a bang. In Britain it teamed up with Schweppes, agreeing to sell the British company's quinine water in the United States in exchange for access to its extensive distribution network in the United Kingdom. In France Pepsi found an ally in the bottled water firm Perrier. In the Netherlands Pepsi joined forces with the beer giant Heineken, and in Venezuela it forged a relationship with the powerful D. Cisneros & Cia conglomerate, which had interests in everything from car manufacturing to television stations. Between 1945 and 1950 Pepsi
established operations in thirty-seven new countries, and soon the two American cola superpowers were engaged in a sprawling corporate war for market share across the world.

The battle was fierce. In the Philippines, one of the world's biggest consumers of carbonated drinks, Pepsi and Coke fought a war of attrition across the archipelago's seven thousand islands. They plastered the country in advertising and jostled for the business of even the smallest stores in the hope of gaining the edge over their rival. Dirty tactics followed too, with both companies hoarding each other's returnable bottles, filling fields with their enemy's glassware in the hope of forcing them to invest in new containers rather than more advertising. Coca-Cola even donated $35,000 to a nutrition center founded by Imelda Marcos, the wife of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, to improve its links with the authorities. But the donation was in vain. By the start of the 1980s Coca-Cola was on the retreat in the Philippines. Its local bottler was more interested in the profits he was making from San Miguel beer than in distributing Coca-Cola, and by 1981 Pepsi was outselling Coke two to one.