Ashes to Ashes (24 page)

As the New Deal’s public works projects had vitally helped save the nation’s economy from hemorrhaging fatally during the ’Thirties, so now the massive armaments required to win World War II had the deeply consoling effect of restoring the country to prosperity. There was work for everyone, and if profits shrank due to inflation, higher costs of labor and supplies, price controls, and new taxes against profiteering, consumption of nearly all goods soared. As particular beneficiaries of wartime demand, cigarette makers might theoretically have sold all they could produce, even as the price per pack advanced to fifteen cents and finally twenty before peace came. In fact, the ingredients that went into the manufacture of cigarettes were all in short supply, along with equipment and skilled workmen to run it. Since military purchases were given priority, exacerbating the shortage as demand outstripped supply, the hoarding of cigarettes by civilians became inevitable, along with a black market that included many consumer goods. Distributors were put under tight allocations by the manufacturers to prevent the situation from growing ugly, and while cigarettes were never officially rationed like gasoline and meat, smokers grabbed any brand they could if their favorite was out of stock.

World War II guaranteed a vastly expanded future customer base, as millions of previously nonsmoking youngsters in the service sampled the product, available either free as part of their combat ration or for a few pennies a pack at commissaries behind the lines, and became addicted to it. American soldiers, furthermore, passed out the smokes from their abundant supply to civilians in lands they liberated as a good will gesture or for services granted them in return. For several years after peace came to those war-shattered societies, American cigarettes became part of a quasi-official currency in barter economies, and ten smokes could buy a soldier a full meal or a night with a woman. A decade was to pass before the U.S. cigarette makers began actively to exploit the war-nurtured taste for the American blended product that would eventually become the world standard.

Wartime prosperity also reestablished and indeed deepened the dominance
of the leading cigarette manufacturers. The
raison d’être
of the bargain brands all but disappeared in the full-employment economy, and while the huge growth in demand might have lured new competitors into the field, the outlay for leaf, equipment, and advertising to establish a viable presence would have required capital in heavy demand by the rest of the booming economy. Within two years of the war’s end, the top three companies commanded more than 80 percent of the market, as most older buyers went back to their prewar, pre-Depression favorites, and new smokers gravitated toward the market leaders. Not only were the manufacturers beginning to prosper notably as wartime controls receded, but their distributors and tobacco growers were doing far better as well. Leaf farmers, who saw prices for their crops jump threefold between 1940 and 1949, were at a point where, so long as they abided by the strict acreage allotments set for them by the federal government, which bought up all unsold tobacco at no less than 90 percent of the annually adjusted support price, tobacco growers were raising the single most valuable crop per acre.
Fortune
magazine, no enemy of free enterprise, commented that the growers had now joined the tobacco manufacturers as an integral part of “the tightest little monopoly you ever saw.”

During the war years, the cultural habituation of Americans to their cigarettes was seductively advanced by Hollywood. In that pre-television age, the movies were at their apex as an entertainment medium, and actors had discovered the protean uses of smoking on celluloid to enhance their craft. To convey callow anxiety, you lit up fumblingly, whereas the powerful, controlling screen personality did so with a masterful flick—always toward the smoker himself if a male, as if manfully impervious to the flame, and away from herself with caution if a woman. The little burst of fire signaled a moment of supreme self-awareness, often full of portent, and how the performer handled the emotion-laden prop thereafter spoke volumes. Quick puffs and repeated tapping of the ash meant irritation or nervousness. The lovingly cupped butt, slow draw, and billowy exhalation might signal profound contemplation or the cagey bluff. The stubbing out, depending how emphatic, might register menace or relief but announced at any rate that a decision had been reached and action was imminent.

No one smoked on screen to greater purpose than Humphrey DeForest Bogart, son of a New York society doctor and star of the 1942 film
Casablanca
, in which the hero is first encountered through a shot of his hand signing his name to a check and reaching for a half-smoked cigarette in a nearby ashtray. In that hand and in his mouth, the cigarette became endowed with a kind of ironic nobility as Bogart used it to make a moral statement about a world gone awry. He was that self-contradictory figure, the contemplative man of action, with a somehow tarred past, living dangerously in a present beset by corrupt authority and social injustice, toward which his every considered drag and expelled
puff of smoke seemed to represent a mocking laugh of bitter defiance. Cool under pressure, Bogey characteristically—and
Casablanca
set the mold—wielded his smoke as a swordsman or gunslinger would his weapon in a pirate film or a Western, but instead of slaying his tormentor, he was more likely to resolve matters ambiguously by deftly discarding his still burning butt in a low, flat trajectory that ended in life’s gutter.
Now Voyager
, first exhibited the same year as
Casablanca
, featured that prototypical female screen smoker Bette Davis, for whom the cigarette was laden with unspoken sexual language. She seemed to smoke with a seething intensity and, when she spoke, used the cigarette to punctuate her words; when she stubbed it out with ferocious finality, the vixen was ready to strike.

Yet it was Davis’s co-star, Paul Henreid, who stole the show at the end of
Now Voyager
with the most intimate light-up in the annals of filmmaking. As the lovers hug the rail, this suavest of all screen smokers, to mark the unfulfilled outcome of their shipboard affair, placed two fresh butts in his mouth, lit them effortlessly, remarked, “Shall we just have a cigarette on it?” and delivered one to Davis, as if to bond them in the knowledge that love is perilous, and often as ephemeral and uncontainable as smoke.

II

THE
war years and the one immediately after marked the swan song of George Washington Hill, whose rambunctious career at American Tobacco dated back to the beginning of the century and established him as the cigarette industry’s most skillful pitchman. Hill never performed better than during those last years when Luckies flew by Camel to become anew the nation’s favorite smoke.

Famed photographer Yousuf Karsh captured Hill’s essence in a portrait at the time that revealed not a handsome man but a highly purposeful one, his by then fleshy face framing full lips, a beaked nose, and eyes shrewd, narrow, and not a little distrustful, surmounted by thick, demonically unruly brows; he wore his customary dark suit, solid dark bowtie, and trademark dimpled fedora, cocked slightly as if to declare his insistently eccentric personality. His hand, a heavy gold signet ring on the pinkie, held a lit cigarette, its smoke in a sinuous curl. He looked, all in all, like someone vastly enjoying himself.

And well he should have been. As a showman, he was in rare form, glad to shell out $22,000 a week for the talent alone—airtime was a lot extra—on Lucky Strike’s top-rated Jack Benny comedy show and to impose, though more lightly than he had been wont, his regressive musical taste on “Your Hit Parade”. At Hill’s insistence, the latter dispensed with the services of a hot young singer named Frank Sinatra, whose style the cigarette baron judged too
slow and swoony, and hired renowned baritone Lawrence Tibbett from the Metropolitan Opera to belt out “Accentuate the Positive,” “Mairzy Doats,” and other such catchy ditties. It was as a sloganeer, though, that Hill continued to enjoy his greatest success. You did not have to be Sigmund Freud to detect the sexual overtones of the Luckies slogan “So round, so firm, so fully packed … so free and easy on the draw.” Hill had his share of duds, of course, like “Lucky for you, It’s a Light Smoke” and “Have You Tried a Lucky Lately?” and his misguided venture into anthropomorphism, “I’m Your Best Friend” (said the talking cigarette). But even one of his most banal slogans hit pay dirt: “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” Repeated endlessly on the air and in print, it took on the quality of a profound mantra, and by 1944 had become familiar enough to be abbreviated—“L.S./M.F.T.”—and thus gain telegraphic urgency. Hill was so taken with the letters-only slogan that he ordered it placed at the bottom of every Luckies pack. He had an indisputable knack for arresting the attention of the consuming public without actively offending it, though he did not hesitate to grate on its nerves by endless repetition of that season’s talismanic slogan.

His nerviest, probably most effective, and possibly most fraudulent slogan dealt with nothing more vital than the color of the Lucky Strike pack. For years, close advisors like Eddie Bernays and Pat Weaver had been counseling the boss that the brand’s dark green color against the brilliant red disk bearing the Luckies name was an impediment to sales to women. The color, however pleasing, was strong and would necessarily clash with or poorly complement a woman smoker’s outfit and accessories on any given day. A more neutral color, preferably white, would be smarter and more appealing, the way the Chesterfield pack drew women to the brand. But Hill, having been a major player in the creation of the brand and the original pack, was loath to depart from it beyond a slight streamlining of the lettering and other small changes at the time of the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair.

But by early 1942, war needs had cut the availability of the copper powder used to make the gold ink in which the inner circle of the bull’s-eye disk and the side panels of the package were printed, so a grayed tan had to be substituted. Soon after, according to the official company version, its vice president for purchasing advised Hill that the chromium used to make the brand’s basic green ink was down to a three-month supply, because it was in great demand for camouflage paint on military equipment. When Hill was shown a washed-out green-yellow pastel as a possible substitute, he asked the vice president if that was the best the production people could manage. His subordinate shrugged and replied, “Just like the soldiers, green ink has gone to war.” Hill’s palm came slapping down on his desktop, the Luckies pack was at once ordered changed to mostly white, and the ad agency hurried out the newly
minted (or deminted) slogan, “Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War … so here’s the smart new uniform for fine tobacco.” Competitors and skeptics questioned the authenticity of the claim. Emerson Foote, who as a young adman worked on the Luckies account, probably came closest to the truth when he recalled, “If it was not an outright lie, the claim was surely overblown. It was pure Hill, done simply to attract attention, with possibly a shred or two of fact connected to it. But the agency liked it.” The public liked it even more; Lucky Strike sales surged.

A longer-lasting demonstration of Hill’s genius for investing the banal with sales appeal was the revival of American Tobacco’s Pall Mall brand. The company became the first of the major cigarette manufacturers to field two strong entries, and in doing so, took pains lest the newer one cannibalize the mainstay. Pall Mall was differentiated from Lucky Strike by its British name, packaging, class appeal, and advertising, but for all its patina of elegance, the pitch was still vintage George Washington Hill in its shameless hyperbole and dubious allegiance to fact.

The chief distinction of Pall Mall was that it had been lengthened into a “king” size, a fact explicitly illustrated in all the 1939–40 ads by a little boxed diagram comparing it with standard-brand lengths and implying that you enjoyed more puffs for the same money. Then there was that gorgeous red pack with the gracefully elongated white letters of the name, the royal crest larger and bolder than on the Philip Morris pack, and beneath it, in case you hadn’t got the message of its snob appeal, was the slogan “Wherever Particular People Congregate.” For good measure, the crest bore
two
Latin mottoes, vying hard for the honor of being the more preposterously inappropriate:
“In hoc signo vinces”
(“Under this sign you triumph”), the divine message reported by the Roman emperor Constantine after dreaming he saw a Christian cross in the sky and later adopted as the banner and motto of the Crusaders; and
“Ad astra per aspera”
(“To the stars through adversity”), the state motto of Kansas. Hill and his dapper aide, Paul Hahn, assigned to take the refurbished brand big-time, were just warming up. The key sales argument was nothing so direct as Pall Mall’s greater length but an insistence that its shape represented “Modern Design,” the product of the very technology, claimed the ads, that was now bringing the world such wonder weapons of war as streamlined tanks, speedy aircraft, and the semiautomatic Garand rifle. “On the land, in the air, on the sea,” intoned the radio commercials in a baffling allusion to the ubiquitous charms of Pall Malls, the words followed by a triple beep of a warship’s horn. It may have made no sense, but it drew your attention. And then the crowning appeal: Pall Mall’s greater length, it was said, “gentles the smoke” and made it milder, cooler, and less irritable to the throat. “It is a scientific fact that tobacco is its own true filter,” the spiel claimed with Hill’s usual wave at the truth, but
the ads and commercials omitted that unless the smoker stubbed out the Pall Mall when he normally quenched his standard-length brand, he would absorb more, not fewer, irritants.

Hahn successfully sampled the new brand at 500 superior hotels, put on seventy-five salesmen to push it nationwide, and in 1940, the first full year it was broadly marketed, sales hit nearly 4 million packs a week. By war’s end, the figure was nearly a million packs a day; five years later, the total would be three times higher, nicely compensating for the slump in Luckies.