Ashes to Ashes (13 page)

It would be sold not in a little box like many of the fancier Turkish brands but in a cheaper tinfoil-and-paper cup like Fatima, and the pack was to be as clean and simple as the name yet distinctive from the field. The result was a front panel consisting mostly of one riderless camel of the single-hump variety in a limitless desert landscape broken by two pyramids and three palm trees, all in pleasing yellow and reddish brown tints under a white sky across which the brand name, in silvered blue capital letters of vaguely Arabic styling, formed a gentle arc. The back panel offered a sketchy oasis with the obligatory mosques and minarets, and both front and back were framed along the edges by twin pillars with flared crowns and bases that gave each scene a rounded, picture-book look. On the back panel, the sky was imprinted with Reynolds’s inspired message to customers: “Don’t look for premiums or coupons, as the cost of the tobaccos blended in
CAMEL
cigarettes prohibits the use of them.”

The only trouble with the finished design, as presented to Reynolds by his illustrator in the fall of 1913, was the camel. It looked sad, with a shaggy pelt, awkward stance, and drooping neck, suggestive of a somewhat zestless product within. A perkier version was required. As chance (and company lore) had it, the Barnum and Bailey circus came to Winston-Salem just then, with a camel among its menagerie. When asked if the dromedary could be prevailed upon to pose for a local photographer, the circus superintendent balked, citing the notoriously cranky nature of the species. Reminded that Reynolds had traditionally given its workforce the afternoon off to attend the visiting big top—a highly reversible policy—the circus man changed his tune, and the animal was trotted forth. But Old Joe, as the camel was called, proved less than entirely obliging, stretching his neck sideways in a quizzical and most unphotogenic gaze at the camera. Joe’s keeper thereupon attracted his.attention with a
smart whack on the nose that succeeded in producing a look somewhere between astonishment and displeasure. His neck straightened, his tail lifted, and the photographer captured a forthright, albeit still ungainly, likeness of Joe, which was dispatched at once to the illustrator, who faithfully reproduced the pose.

Reynolds’s advertising agency, N. W. Ayer, kicked off the big introduction with a three-part teaser campaign in selected newspapers across the country. The first showed a picture of Old Joe and read, simply, “Camels.” The second was headlined “The Camels Are Coming” and its text said, “Tomorrow there’ll be more
CAMELS
in this town than in all Asia and Africa combined.” The clincher exulted, “Camel Cigarettes Are Here!,” and went into detail about the special new blending for keen flavor and the allegedly high-grade tobaccos used. The new brand was snapped up, and by mid-1914 Reynolds Tobacco was operating overtime to keep up with the demand. People liked the pronounced flavor, and the package itself became the object of fond scrutiny and parlor tricks. In the swirls of Joe’s textured hide, you might detect—depending on your imagination—the form of a lion or a naked woman or a man with an erection. When you held the pack’s side panel, bearing only the all-capitalized words “
CHOICE QUALITY
,” upside down in front of a mirror, the first word mysteriously still appeared right side up while the second was seen upside down (because, it happens, all the capitalized letters in the former word look identical upside down while in the latter, only the “I” appears unchanged). And when a favorite uncle came to visit, he might produce a pack of the new brand and a dime and tell his nephew the coin would be his if he could cover all the animal’s four legs with it. Try as he might, the youngster would be baffled—the space was just too great for the small coin to fill; the uncle would then merely place the dime over Joe’s forelegs, explain the feeble wordplay with a laugh, and, if he was any kind of an uncle, surrender the dime, anyway. Within a year, the new brand had captured 13 percent of the market.

Reynolds pushed hard now, advertising Camels in newspapers everywhere, including specialized journals that ranged from
The Wall Street Journal
to New York’s Yiddish-language
Daily Forward;
on billboards; and in magazines like
The Saturday Evening Post
, where a double-page spread for the brand in December of 1914 was the first cigarette ad to appear inside that popular weekly. Promising “no cigarette after taste (you know what that means) in the mouth,” Camel kept growing. At American Tobacco’s offices on lower Fifth Avenue, where news of the new brand had at first been greeted with snickers, nobody was laughing now. The company’s sales director (and eventually president), George Washington Hill, would later recall, “I worked the road in those days, and it was very discouraging. Territory after territory swung over in the Camel column. … [E]veryone was talking about this new taste in cigarettes.”

The price-slashing tactics of the old trust were unavailable now to Reynolds’s competitors, none of whom could afford to sacrifice one of their better lines as a “fighting brand,” and no secondary brand could blunt Camel’s sensational advance. War in Europe, moreover, seriously interrupted Oriental leaf shipments to the United States and turned public sympathy against Turkey and things Turkish as the inheritors of the Ottoman Empire leagued themselves with the Central Powers. And when America readied for and then entered the war, cigarettes were categorized as military supplies, and the government allocated its purchase orders along existing market-share lines—a bonanza for Reynolds, since Camel by then accounted for well over one-third of the nation’s cigarette sales. By 1916, Reynolds had surpassed Liggett & Myers to become the second most profitable tobacco manufacturer; by 1917, its net earnings of $10.3 million were only $3 million shy of industry leader American Tobacco’s.

When Richard Joshua Reynolds died in 1918 at the age of sixty-eight, he was not mourned with unalloyed reverence. Something of a penny pincher and slave driver, he was nonetheless admired as a stalwart defender of his workers, few of whom were ever fired except for the most flagrant of causes, and a battler against monsters to the north. By keeping costs low, centralizing output in one location, and concentrating his sales and promotion efforts on a few brands in the pioneering age of mass production, he prospered hugely in the end. At his death, the company held some 40 percent of the country’s soaring cigarette trade and 20 percent of both the chewing and smoking tobacco business.

II

IN
the aftermath of the trust breakup, the new, leaner American Tobacco Company had on hand the ideal successor to Buck Duke in the person of his longtime first vice president and order-taker, Percival Hill. A low-key manager moderate in all ways but his loyalty to Duke, Hill never buckled during his testimony at the antitrust trial by blaming the company’s brutal tactics on orders from above. Rewarded with the presidency of the diminished American Tobacco in 1912, he proved an able if undynamic chief, a details man with an agile mind for figures. His most useful contribution to the company’s fortunes was the steady advancement of his son, George.

Young Hill, possessed by a driving impatience that radiated from his fierce eyes and truculent manner, had dropped out of Williams College after two years and joined the old tobacco trust in 1904 at the age of twenty. He learned the business the hard way, training in the leaf department and on the factory floor for several years and displaying a serious-mindedness in all things, ineluding
the habit of inscribing in a small notebook his every gain and loss at the penny-ante card games that provided his prime recreation in the boarding-houses of Durham. His precocity won him the managership of a dawdling all-Turkish brand called Pall Mall, which he swiftly built into the leader in the deluxe market through Anglophilic snob appeal.

Hill had a real flair for advertising that boosted him up the corporate ladder. His method was to find or invent an attribute in each product that could be conveyed in an arresting fashion; just to showcase the brand with bland, dignified copy was a waste of money. The headline that asked a question was a device he favored for winning consumers’ attention. At his best, he pushed the forty-year-old brand of Sweet Caporal, still a strong seller, in an ad asking, “Who smoked ‘Sweet Caps’ when Garfield and Hancock ran for President?” and answering, “Ask Dad,
he
knows.” Even when his fertile brain misfired, his ads had a grabbing if goofy liveliness, as in one headlined “Where was Moses when the light went out? Groping around for a pack of Mecca;” boxed in small print below was the message “The price of Mecca cigarettes is not even a hint of their quality. Don’t let that nickel mislead you.”

George Hill was more than a phrasemaker; he was a salesman of such single-mindedness that he was affronted by store managers who failed to share his enthusiasm for American Tobacco products. Placed in charge of the company’s sales force, he expected his drummers to display no less dedication than he did. To maximize their efforts, he got the company to invest early in that new wonder of the age, the automobile, allowing his field men to reach even remote sales outlets on a regular route and keep a close eye on dealer stocks. A skilled packager as well, he developed such innovations as vacuum-packed tins for pipe tobacco, cigarette cartons wrapped in glassine paper, and dating on all shipping cases and boxes so that freshness of product could be maintained systematically.

For all his efforts, it became plain to Hill and his father that since Camels gave no sign of slowing their surge, American would have to compete with its own blended brand. But badly shaken by upstart Reynolds’s sudden success in a field where it had had no prior record, the Hills would not rush out just any old brand; it had to be as special as Camel yet readily distinguishable from it.

From the first, the new brand was conceived of as proudly American; there was to be nothing Turkish or foreign in the name, package, or blend. The Hills put the company’s best blender of plug to work in their Brooklyn factory on a formula that had even more Burley in it than Camel, while George scoured the long list of trademarks that the old trust had accumulated over the years for a striking name. He found it in a long-abandoned pipe tobacco brand once made in Richmond and registered in 1871 when memories of the California Gold Rush were still fresh—Lucky Strike. The old package had had a nice, unfussy look to it: a deep hunter green background and a bright red central disk bearing
the brand name. George had an artist clean up the lettering so that the name appeared all in bold, black capital letters without serifs and the disk was set off with a double band, gold on the inside and black on the outer edge. On one of the side panels a small Indian chiefs head was introduced—in time it would become the company symbol—and on the back, to counter Camel’s self-serving assertion that it had substituted a better grade of tobacco for customer premiums, Lucky Strike carried a money-back guarantee to buyers.

Still, George Hill did not rush to introduce Luckies, as the brand was informally called. It was in dire need of a talking point, something the advertising could seize upon. His field people, though, were haranguing him now almost daily to give them a brand to sell against Camel, and while dwelling more urgently on the problem, George one day headed for the manufacturing plant where the new blend was being processed in anticipation of the imminent launching. Within a few blocks of his destination Hill was bathed in the intoxicatingly rich aroma of the tobacco, not unlike mouth-watering baked goods or some similar confection by a master chef. On his return to the company’s Fifth Avenue offices, George reported his olfactory arousal to his father and thought it might hold the key to their missing sales gimmick. There was something about the way they were processing the leaf that George could not quite find the words for—it was as if they were cooking the tobacco. His father mused, “What is it that you use … where heat is applied in an appetizing way that will react quickly on a person’s mind?”

While the pair of them pondered, a mutual acquaintance from the cigar business wandered into the executive suite and was invited to share the Hills’ problem of how to express applied heat in an appetizing fashion. “I always have toast in the morning,” the visitor quickly answered. Percy Hill’s face grew incandescent. “That’s it—it’s toasted!”

That all other companies similarly “toasted” their tobacco during the drying and sterilization process before the leaf was shredded was no impediment to a true huckster like George Hill. He knew a winning phrase when he heard it.
“IT’S TOASTED
” went on the package right under the brand name—quotation marks included, as if the incantation of some celebrated sage—and became the sales mantra as Lucky Strike finally reached the market in 1916. “You’ll enjoy this
real
Burley cigarette. It’s full of flavor—just as good as a pipe,” George Hill’s early ads declared, adding that the Burley was toasted and this “makes the taste delicious. You know how toasting improves the flavor of bread. And it’s the same with tobacco exactly.” To one side of the copy within a heavily outlined circle, as if to explain this technological miracle, was an illustration of a hand holding a toasting fork with a piece of bread speared to it. Later versions would note how steak “broiled and buttered” or the lowly potato was similarly and wonderfully transformed by heat—so common a piece of intelligence
that Hill’s competitors supposed that the buying public would see through the bogus claim of a nonexistent distinction.

But it worked, probably more because of the catchy name and the smart package so easily visible on dealers’ shelves than the virtues of toastiness. George poured in the advertising dollars, and within a year of its debut Lucky Strike had gained 11 percent of the market. But America’s entry into the great war in Europe put a sudden brake on Luckies’ advance. The government’s allocation formula for military purchases locked in the prewar market shares—a heavy disadvantage for Lucky Strike and the price the Hills paid for their dilatory launching of it.