Ashes to Ashes (19 page)

And Esty was just warming up. Determined to outdo Luckies’ confected benefits from being “toasted,” the adman searched high and low for clinical evidence to help Camels, and finally found an article in
Science
magazine, an exceedingly serious journal, by a pair of Yale physiologists who reported that smoking raised the body’s blood sugar level, taken by some to be an index of human energy. Inquiring whether their studies had involved the use of Camels, Esty found the Yale scientists ill disposed to such exploitation; they suggested he enlist a commercial laboratory to do his bidding. While awaiting positive results from a New York food research lab, Esty’s continual search yielded another article, this one by a pair of Swedish scientists reporting on the effects of smoking on diabetes—essentially negative, since it stimulated the adrenal glands, which in turn triggered the release of blood sugars (not to mention—which Esty did not in his ensuing copy—speeding up the heartbeat). As it happened, the Swedish investigators had used Camels in their tests. Esty went back to the Yale researchers with the Swedish data in hand but was told nobody knew if constant stimulation of the adrenal glands from smoking was healthful or harmful for the human organism. A trivial caveat for Bill Esty, who from these few threads fashioned a campaign that exclaimed, “
YOU GET A LIFT WITH A CAMEL
,” adding, “
A FACT
: Science Advances New Data That May Completely Change Your Ideas of Cigarettes.” Accompanying were little graphs and pseudo-scientific language that never bothered to explain how slight and transient the blood sugar rise was from smoking, that it was contraindicated for diabetics, that its connection with relieving muscular fatigue was hazy at best, or that even if Camels had this marginal tonic effect, so did every other brand. It was as outrageous and phantom a claim as Luckies’ “toasted” boast, but it made for rousing ad layouts. One version spoke of
“A HARMLESS RESTORATION OF THE FLOW OF NATURAL BODY ENERGY”
from Camels which had been “confirmed by a famous New York research laboratory.”

Camel sales climbed 8 billion units that year, while Luckies slumped by 4.5 billion and fell a fraction behind RJR’s resurgent brand. Now Esty was hitting his stride. His 1935 marvel was “
THEY DON’T GET YOUR WIND
,” a shrill endorsement by leading sports stars, with a virtual warranty of harmlessness in
the supporting claim, “So mild … you can
SMOKE ALL YOU WANT
.” Typical was an ad built around the then forty-two-year-old nonpareil of the net, Bill Tilden, who was quoted as saying, “Playing competitive tennis day after day, I’ve got to keep in top physical condition. I smoke Camels, the mild cigarette. They don’t get my wind or upset my nerves. I’ve smoked Camels for years, and I never tire of their smooth, rich taste.” Combining “smooth” and “rich” was an improvement, at least, over “mild” and “rich,” but scientists by then were well aware that the faster heartbeat and reduced oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood which were a result of smoking, when combined with the higher oxygen demands of the body due to athletic exertion, were highly likely to induce breathlessness in the chronic smoker pursuing sports. Nevertheless, the latest Camel claim helped push its sales further ahead of Luckies.

Emboldened by his early success, Esty reached even further in 1936 by asserting, “For Digestion’s sake, smoke Camels!” The subheading of this most dubious of all departures from scientific legitimacy-read, “Camels make mealtime more pleasant—digestion is stimulated—alkalinity increased.” Authorities cited for these claims were the maitre d’ of the Louis XVI dining salon at Washington’s deluxe Shoreham Hotel, the most valuable baseball player in the National League during the previous season, and an “on-the-go” salesman of unspecified affiliation who confided to readers, “I smoke Camels as an aid to my digestion.” To the extent that science understood anything at all at this time about the relationship of smoking to digestion, the prevailing view was that the custom might cause an excess of acidity, which is harmful, not beneficial, to digestion. In his mastery of mendacity, Bill Esty threw in a few other tricks that he supposed nobody was likely to learn about or call him on, such as the claims that Camels were lower in nicotine—than which competitors, the ads did not indicate—and left no aftertaste when in fact Camels were higher in nicotine than some rival brands, such as Lucky Strike, and
all
cigarettes left an aftertaste. Esty also wangled endorsements from celebrities like photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who would later concede that they had never smoked the brand.

It was no wonder, then, that
Fortune
magazine, the most astute chronicler of American business, labeled William Cole Esty the “Whizz and Whoozle Man.” His technique, full of energy and visual pyrotechnics, left Luckies’ pitch sounding muted and Chesterfields’ genteel in the extreme. By the close of 1937, Camels were outselling Luckies and Chesterfield by some 40 percent. The Winston-Salem millionaires had put it to the city slickers at American Tobacco.

III

IN
Slicktown itself, an aging, thickening, and somewhat mellowed George Hill, still wearing his hat, sat in his plush, thirty-foot-square office on the second floor of 111 Fifth Avenue and, with less histrionics than a decade earlier, plotted how to halt the Camel resurgence. He was not given to small talk or foolery, but the new man from the Lord & Thomas agency on the American Tobacco account—Emerson Foote, who would one day become a principal in Foote, Cone & Belding, the successor firm to Lord & Thomas—found Hill’s reputation as a man-eater somewhat overstated. “But Mr. Hill did have a unique faculty for creating tension in a meeting,” Foote would later recall, and people at the agency on the American account “did have a way of disappearing without a trace.”

If a touch more benign now, Hill still ran the company in an unorthodox fashion and very much as his own fiefdom. He installed his personal barber, Vincent Riggio, as the sales chief, after a spell of training, on the theory that he was very much in touch with the common man. As his chief aide and liaison in the all-important advertising department Hill designated his son, George, Jr. In 1931, he added, amid a cadre of yes-men vice presidents, a slight, soft-spoken attorney out of Columbia Law School who had been with the firm handling American Tobacco’s legal problems, and before long Paul Hahn became Hill’s shadowy amanuensis, a hired brain he trusted and tutored in the tobacco business. In time, he became the chief planner and rival to Riggio and George, Jr., as Hill’s would-be successor.

Possibly Hill’s most useful aide was a young former copywriter with the Young & Rubicam agency, brought in to energize American’s creative marketing efforts. Sylvester Weaver, called Pat, was anything but a yes-man to the redoubtable huckster, who found in the irreverent newcomer a bold jester able to say things that made him laugh and think as few others in the place managed. Weaver, who would later have a notable career in broadcasting as the creator of the “Today” and “Tonight” shows for NBC television (and father of the actress Sigourney Weaver), found American Tobacco in the later ’Thirties a dream place for a bright young man to work at. Even though Lucky Strike was struggling to regain supremacy in the marketplace, morale was excellent. Weaver remembered, “you didn’t have to work very hard—at least I didn’t—and the pay was very, very good.” As a junior executive, Weaver earned $35,000 a year in those still Depression-weary days, with an additional $10,000 for expenses. All the vice presidents were pulling down a quarter of a million or more at a time when that was a small fortune, and Hill held out the lure to Weaver. “He dangled the prospect in front of me, and I listened.”

Lucky Strike advertising had become tiresomely repetitive, and to free it from Hill’s heavy, strangling hand, Weaver had to be adroit enough, in developing fresh strategies, to present-them in such a way that the boss either thought of them as his own or came out where Weaver and the agency people wanted him to. Part of the problem was weaning Hill away from media that were no longer cost-effective, like newspapers and billboards, which by definition were local and expensive. Weaver, Foote, and other young people on the Luckies account pushed for more play in national media, like magazines and radio. And in place of Hill’s insistence on back-cover, black-and-white use only of the leading weekly publications, Luckies ads began to run in four-color reproduction inside the magazines on a biweekly basis, which, for a comparable outlay, created a far more striking appearance. The ads themselves moved away from the old sensationalism to a higher plane in a kind of lyric salute to the romance of tobacco, of which Lucky Strike was the ultimate embodiment. Leading artists, among them Thomas Hart Benton, were hired to paint handsome, heroic farmers lovingly examining the great golden leaves they had coaxed fecund Nature to bring forth. If the poetic copy partook of the fatuous and was less grabbing than the artwork, the net effect was nonetheless pleasing, and Luckies began to narrow Camels’ lead.

Weaver and other younger aides scored their principal marketing victory not in the print media but in radio, the sensation of the age. A chief ingredient in this expanded effort was the sponsorship of more appealing and varied programs beyond Hill’s own narrow and insistent preference for sweet, up-tempo dance bands. Musically superior groups like those led by Wayne King, Eddie Duchin, and Kay Kyser were put on the air, and the Lucky Strike “Hit Parade” now became vastly more successful as the weekly dispenser of the nation’s top new popular tunes. In the comedy field, just opening up, Luckies backed the popular Jack Benny, whose arch voice and willingness to make himself the verbal butt of the show’s humor worked well in a medium without visual cues. For the more cultivated listener, the company put on the air broadcasts from the New York Metropolitan Opera, the social and political commentary of newspaperwoman Dorothy Thompson, and “Information Please,” a panel of cerebral types lightly parading their considerable learning. The company’s commercials, too, showed a better understanding of how to use the broadcast medium. The most arresting of its devices were snatches of the tobacco auctioneer’s twangy singsong, a.nonstop recitation of the offered prices that served to spare the speaker’s voice and baffle everyone but the buyers. The only decipherable part of the melodic babble as aired were the concluding words called out in triumph, “Sold A-mer-ican!” (as in American Tobacco). The delivery was inimitable and seemed to bond the company and all of tobaccoland inextricably.

The centerpiece of Luckies advertising in the late ’Thirties and early ’Forties
was a refinement of the endorsement technique that American Tobacco had pioneered in the late Twenties when it lured thousands of doctors into supporting its claim that Lucky Strike was less irritating than rival brands. This time, unworried by medical concerns, the company came up with another group whose collective endorsement of the brand was likely to be seen by smokers as still more expert and persuasive—the leaf men, those in the business who were closest to the raw commodity. The new ads sang out in a ceaseless anthem, “Sworn Records Reveal That:
WITH MEN WHO KNOW TOBACCO BEST, IT’S LUCKIES
2
TO
1.” And here was a photograph, so you knew he was real, of Mr. Billie Branch, veteran of 2,000 tobacco auctions, stating, “Like most other independent tobacco experts, I smoke Luckies.” He and his
confreres
, denizens of the auction warehouses across the South, testified that American bought the cream of the tobacco crop, and as a result, Luckies were less acidic and irritating.

This inspired campaign of persuasion unfortunately proved, upon close examination by government regulators a few years later, to be claptrap, a tissue woven from lies and gross exaggeration. The company claimed to have interviewed some 2,210 “experts,” of whom it said 1,184 were exclusive Luckies smokers. Of these, federal investigators tracked down 440 and discovered that more than 100 denied smoking Luckies exclusively, 50 did not smoke at all, and some smoked other brands exclusively, some did not recall having ever been interviewed on the subject by American Tobacco, and some had no connection with the tobacco industry. Such details aside, the campaign and the company’s new media-buying strategy were hugely successful, and by 1941 Lucky Strike would narrowly reclaim the market share lead from Camel and widen it dramatically in ensuing years.

“He was a dictator, of course,” Pat Weaver recalled of the newly triumphant George Hill of this period, but now he invited the input of others. “His strength,” said Weaver, “was his tremendous conviction about the importance of the business he was in. His weakness was tunnel vision—he was really obsessed with Lucky Strike, I’m afraid.” But not to such a degree that he failed to recognize the danger of his company’s dependence on a single brand amid the vicissitudes of a fickle marketplace. “One day, I came into his office,” Weaver remembered, “and I said, ‘Mr. Hill, I have a good idea.’ He said, ‘Great, what is it?’—he loved ideas.” Weaver’s was a not entirely harebrained scheme to get around the federal excise tax of six cents per pack of twenty cigarettes by putting out a brand in which each smoke was twice the normal length and the package would include a razor blade for slicing each one in two, thereby saving the customer the equivalent of three cents a pack.

Hill listened and nodded, then told young Weaver the government was not stupid and assumed that some smart aleck like him would dream up such a scheme and so had put a weight limit of three pounds of tobacco per thousand
cigarettes manufactured to qualify for the federal excise of six cents per pack. As it happened, this limit provided leeway for about 17 percent more tobacco than was actually being used in the standard-sized cigarette. Weaver retired in chagrin but succeeded better than he knew. Several months later he was summoned to Hill’s office, where he discovered to his astonishment its occupant sitting hatless at his desk. The hat sat on a table nearby, and Weaver was instructed to lift it. “That is how long a cigarette can be under the rules,” Hill told him as Weaver’s eyes feasted upon a carmine red package with an ersatz royal British crest in white and the name in slender, aristocratically elongated letters to emphasize the length of the cigarettes inside—
PALL MALL
.