Ashes to Ashes (81 page)

Cullman’s growing grandeur made him a more prickly customer for subordinates to deal with. There was the time, for example, when Joe was due in Miami Beach for a big tobacco distributors’ convention, and Tom Littleton, then regional sales manager for Florida and part of the Philip Morris host party, was
to pick up the chairman at the airport. The company had a big hospitality suite at the Fountainbleau hotel, where Cullman was also to stay, but the evening of his arrival, Philip Morris was throwing a gala dinner at the Doral, where the chief executive was supposed to preside and charm the customers. That afternoon, though, Clifford Goldsmith, then in charge of domestic tobacco operations, phoned Littleton from New York to say that Cullman, who had become notoriously finicky and jumpy, was not in a good mood and ought not, on his arrival, to be allowed under any circumstances to retire to his own suite, because the odds were he would never be lured out for the festivities at the Doral.

Littleton, already in a sweat over having to usher the boss around, grew damper still as the company jet arrived late, and Cullman remained on board another twenty minutes after the landing. When he finally emerged, Littleton bustled him into the waiting limousine and found Cullman, as advertised, in a funk. As the limo raced toward the site of the dinner, Littleton recounted, “Joe was kvetchy all during the ride—‘It’s too hot in here, it’s too cold, it’s too stuffy, it’s too drafty.’” As the limo neared the beach, Cullman leaned forward to Littleton, who was in one of the jump seats, and gave the dreaded directive: he wished to stop by his hotel for a few minutes before going to the dinner. Littleton, by now a pool of perspiration, failed to pass the word to the chauffeur. As the limo raced past the Fountainbleau, Cullman asked his middle-rank sales executive with a flash of annoyance, “Didn’t you hear what I said?” Littleton, gulping, said no, he hadn’t heard, because he had a cold in his ear. Silence followed until they arrived at the dinner, where Cullman was at his most ingratiating. During dinner, however, he summoned Littleton to his side and said, “I know you heard me back in the car—what makes you think what you want is more important than what I want?” It was, without doubt, a rhetorical question. The chairman then told the weak-kneed Littleton, “Sit by me—you’re going to take care of my every need this entire weekend”—a task zealously carried out until Cullman reboarded his jet and said, not unkindly, “Now we’re even.”

Littleton’s punishment befit his crime but did not exceed it because Cullman thoroughly understood that the sales manager shared his boss’s sense of devotion to their joint corporate mission: each had a job to do that night, and they did it, however unhappily. “He knew what to do, what moves to make, and when to make them,” Littleton would remark years later, well after he had left Philip Morris, in tribute to Cullman. “He knew what good people were and how to let them do their work.” His was not a naturally extroverted nature but one of a dutifully applied attentiveness. “He had a totally strategic personality,” said Ronnie Thomson, whose own had never embraced Cullman’s knack for gracefully handling people who riled him even when they were trying their best.

Cullman brought a shining optimism to his embattled company which sometimes blinded him to its most pressing problem. He felt able to advise his stockholders at their 1971 annual meeting that, with regard to the smoking and health issue, “We have entered a period of relative calm.” And he himself was still giving no quarter in his public pronouncements on that subject, remarking on that same occasion: “A causal relationship of tobacco and various ills is increasingly open to question”—an assertion without scientific merit. If Cullman and his fellow industry executives were susceptible to charges of acting in a morally reprehensible manner, it was less for their continuing to purvey a product commonly understood by then to be a serious health hazard than for pretending it was otherwise in order to reassure those they lived off. Silence, even if taken for mute concession of the likely truth of the charges against cigarettes, would have been less heinous than blowing smoke in the public’s face. Possibly Cullman had so conditioned himself to being combative and justifying his and Philip Morris’s calling that he was no longer aware of just how objectionable his remarks on health and fitness sounded to those not financially dependent on tobacco. Looking fit and tan as he returned from his eighth African safari at the beginning of his last year as Philip Morris chairman, Cullman told the press, without seeming to recognize the irony, “I guess I’m sort of a physical cultist. … Someone who’s fit can do a better job. And in a complicated world, there’s nothing better than an exposure to the outdoors.” Thus did a man who made a sizable living by selling arguably the most lethal product legally available counsel mankind on how to lead a healthful existence.

However uneasy in his role as an apparently shameless polemicist, Cullman had long since honed social skills allowing him to move easily through a corporate world in which few other Jews of his generation had risen to the top. That it was Jewish executives, with the notable exceptions of Jack Landry and John Murphy, who led Philip Morris to the heights of the tobacco industry was, in Cullman’s view, “largely happenstance and certainly not intentional.” The net effect of his heritage, he believed, was to make him and his company more liberal and tolerant than most in its social attitudes and wide open to diverse, even eccentric sorts of people. Cullman’s broadmindedness was especially noticeable in PM’s overseas division, where foreign nationals were regularly given great freedom of action. Philip Morris was a meritocracy, among whose beneficiaries were the likes of Ronnie Thomson, who once noted, “Philip Morris International was built on the best guy getting the job regardless of background or nationality.”

As Cullman approached retirement age, speculation naturally intensified about the line of succession. The contest was plainly drawn in 1973, when George Weissman was advanced to the new position of vice chairman of the corporation, with special responsibility for all non-tobacco operations (particularly
Miller Brewing), and Ross Millhiser was given Weissman’s previous title as corporate president, with prime oversight of the tobacco business. The pair, both fifty-four at the time, had never been close, but each was smart enough not to let their differences in manner and temperament spill over into open incivility.

Weissman, generally seen within the company as the cooler and more calculating of the two, was contemplating broader entrepreneurial horizons for the company beyond tobacco. Millhiser, while probably the more intellectually adventurous, was the one who kept closer to the core business and was skeptical of the company’s ability to thrive in any other sort of operation. If Weissman traveled in an entirely different social world from that of the Cullmans and the Millhisers, lacking their family connections and resources, he was nevertheless the most cultivated of the top Philip Morris people. It was he more than anyone else who pushed the company into becoming a highly visible patron of the arts, on the premise that such a role would help win it friends among opinion-shapers and counteract the unending bad news about smoking from the medical community. By the mid-’seventies, the Philip Morris name was linked as major underwriting sponsor to events like the U.S. tour of La Scala’s opera company and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ exhibit “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” and as a corporate contributor to such unexceptionably worthy institutions as the New York Public Library and the Henry Street Settlement House. Weissman was also the most politically active liberal in the place, having signed advertisements in opposition to the war in Vietnam and thereby earning a place he was proud of on Richard Nixon’s infamous “Enemies’ List”. A civil rights advocate and conservationist as well, Weissman pushed the company to widen its minority hiring practices, and it was no accident that Cullman served as president of the Whitney Young Foundation, advancing educational opportunities among blacks. Possessed of the broadest smile and heartiest handshake in the company, Weissman had also indisputably proven himself an able administrator and superior judge of managerial talent.

For all of that, it was Millhiser who remained the favorite of the tobacco insiders. He had a profound knowledge of the product in all its phases and was no empire builder, as Weissman was suspected of being. There was little slickness to his jus’-folks personal style, and he was one of the few people in the company who could tease the board chairman to his face. At the same time, he was perceived as more emotionally volatile than his rival for chief executive, perhaps a bit eccentric in some of his maunderings. His practical side, though, forged a close bond with Clifford Goldsmith, his dedicated line officer, with whom he often argued, but between them they were running the smoothest tobacco operation in the world and winning medals for Cullman.

As 1977, the expected year of decision, dawned and Philip Morris executives
chose up sides in the pending contest, Joe Cullman decided that things were going so well under his baton that he would stay on past his sixty-fifth birthday to conduct the company’s affairs. This thunderbolt may have done wonders for Cullman’s morale, but it was surely a crushing depressant for his would-be successors. On further reflection, the chairman decided that his in-dispensability should not extend beyond one more year.

Breeding a One-Fanged Rattler

SHORTLY
after being chosen in the autumn of 1971 as chairman of British-American Tobacco, Richard P. Dobson passed a remark stunning in its candor for a prominent official in his industry. “It’s hard to argue that filling your lungs with smoke can be actually good for you,” he said. He quickly added, as if fearful of being dethroned on the spot, “But surely it is a question of moderation, and I do sincerely believe that the tobacco industry, in total, does more good than harm. I know more people who have liquor problems than tobacco problems.”

Dobson’s appeal to “moderation” by smokers, never uttered in any of the industry’s advertising, seemingly had a commonsensical core, but upon closer examination, it rang hollow. What constituted “moderate” smoking—a cigarette or two a day, five to ten, a pack or fewer? Did that not depend rather on the size, weight, age, robustness, and degree of inhalation by the smoker? And if “moderation” was meant to imply a safe level of use, who had established it “surely,” to use Dobson’s telltale word, for
any
level of smoking? All that dozens of epidemiological studies had shown “surely” was that the more one smoked, the greater one’s risk of eventually falling deathly ill from the habit. Other studies showed that few smokers in fact used cigarettes moderately; only about 10 percent smoked five cigarettes or fewer daily. And if “liquor problems,” as Dobson styled them, were more apparent to him than “tobacco problems,” it was only because the debilitating effects of alcohol abuse were so much swifter. The more pertinent fact, which he omitted, was that the incidence of immoderation was of an inverse ratio for drinkers and smokers: between
5 and 10 percent of the former became dependent alcoholics, while three-quarters of smokers consumed fifteen or more cigarettes a day.

More studied, and thus perhaps less innocent, in his expressed view of the uses and abuses of cigarettes was Philip Morris’s research and development director, Helmut Wakeham. In addition to pushing his laboratories to produce what he called a “better”—he did not say “safer”—cigarette, Wakeham had asked for and been granted license from his superiors to probe why people smoked, the better to defend the product against its detractors by understanding its true appeal to consumers (and, in the process, market it more effectively). On the opening of his new research tower late in 1972, Dr. Wakeham, a nonsmoker, spoke to the Richmond press about the activities of his staff of 400. “According to the psychology of smoking, I’m not cut out to be a smoker,” he said. “There are people who need the tension-relieving experience of a cigarette, and some need it more than others … . We think cigarettes help people to be less tense, but we don’t know how.”

Interest in such questions grew industry-wide now, as cigarettes were consumed in record quantities in the early and middle ’Seventies despite the ever graver cautions being sounded by the public-health community. In their efforts to identify the causes and rewards of smoking, behaviorists in the 1950s had focused on why youngsters chose in the first place to engage in a habit generally taken up by the end of the teenage years or not at all. Studies showed that many sampled cigarettes in very early adolescence, and that some 75 percent of smokers were fixed in the habit by the end of their high school years. Pace-setting investigations by Daniel Horn and others stressed the primacy of parental influences, either as role models or by degree of permissiveness, and added that a further key element was the perceived consolation that young smokers derived to ease feelings of social or intellectual inadequacy. By the ’Sixties, the smoking field was attracting more psychological inquiries but yielding few remarkable insights.