Ashes to Ashes (21 page)

Now the only problem was to spur the nation’s 5,000 jobbers and 600,000 retailers to place the new Philip Morris into smokers’ mouths. Ellis and McKitterick drew on every ounce of the considerable reservoir of good will the pair had built up during their combined sixty years in the tobacco trade. In consideration of the higher margins that the fifteen-cent price would provide them and the company’s fervent pledge to cut out any dealers who refused to hold the line, many retailers across the country gave Philip Morris free window and counter display space during its debut month. Certain key dealers, it was whispered within the company, were presented with small parcels of Philip Morris stock to assure that the new brand, on which so much was being staked, received preferential display treatment. Such help was essential because the company lacked cash to grease dealers’ palms and could not afford a massive advertising campaign to compete in the top sellers’ league. And what they did spend on advertising had to pay off. A small New York agency run by Milton Biow was hired to conceive a campaign that had to sing out memorably above the din generated by the trade’s heavy hitters. Biow’s chief contribution to the process was to discover precisely the right singer.

Johnny Roventini was much like any other lad growing up in Brooklyn’s tough Bay Ridge section. He played ball and roller-skated, hawked newspapers along the waterfront, and spoke the harsh argot of the neighborhood. But Johnny was unmistakably different from other teenagers; he had grown to a height of only forty-three inches. His mother, puzzled because she, her
husband, and their three other children were of normal stature, took the nice-looking boy to every doctor she could find who might unlock the mystery. In despair, she counseled Johnny to eat well and get plenty of exercise, and eventually he would outgrow his affliction. But Johnny was to remain vertically disadvantaged. In his late teens he went to work as a pageboy in New York hotels, where his high, clear voice was an asset.

One morning in April of 1933, twenty-two-year-old Johnny was at his job in The New Yorker hotel, in his uniform of knickerbockers and an English tweed jacket, earning ten dollars a week in wages and another ten in tips, when adman Biow approached him. In his quest for an attention-getting but inexpensive gimmick to implant the Philip Morris name in the American psyche, Biow had rummaged through the company’s file of old English journals from the turn of the century and come upon ads that featured a bright pageboy in pillbox hat, brass-buttoned jacket, and smartly striped pants who was offering readers a silver tray with a box of the distinctive Philip Morris brand and a card that said, “Call for Philip Morris.” Pageboys seemed to suggest hotels and resorts that attracted wealthy guests—of the sort who could afford a fifteen-cent brand even in hard times—and now, Biow thought, with the arrival of electronic broadcasting, a page’s call could become manifest, hammering on the national eardrum until the new brand’s name was firmly registered within. Biow’s inquiries for a page with an unusual voice brought him to the lobby where little Johnny Roventini worked.

Biow gave the page fifty cents and asked him to announce a message for Philip Morris—“without the ‘Mister’”—and Johnny scurried all over the lobby, up to the mezzanine, into the barbershop, and through the dining room, emitting a vibrant, even piercing, but never shrill cry: “Call-l–l–l for-r-r-r Philip Maw-reeeees!” It was a pure, unforgettable sound, without a hint of the Brooklyn sidewalks from which its owner had sprung. Biow knew he had his pitchman.

Johnny was hustled over to the NBC studio, where Philip Morris’s weekly radio program, a musical variety show under the supervision of orchestra conductor Ferdinand Rudolf Grofe, was in rehearsal. On testing, Johnny’s call proved to be a perfect B-flat pitch and worked well harmonically with the “On the Trail” section in E-flat of the
Grand Canyon Suite
, which had established Ferde Grofé as a serious composer and served as the musical signature for the Philip Morris radio show. Johnny was put on the air at the first opportunity a few days later. McKitterick, who was on the West Coast, had thought the whole pageboy concept pretty silly; he changed his tune the moment he heard Johnny’s piping call across the network’s coast-to-coast hookup.

Johnny not only sounded good, but with his small, even features, which gave him a porcelain-doll prettiness, and his slender form, he looked good, too, especially when marched into the Brooks costume shop and outfitted in a tight
scarlet jacket with bright gold buttons, black trousers with a red stripe, white gloves, and black pillbox hat. Actually, with his full, ruddy cheeks, which seemed androgynously rouged, he was
adorable
. Before long 100,000 life-size cardboard-cutout likenesses of the uniformed Johnny and foot-high statuettes of him were on their way to cigarette vendors all over the country for display purposes. When the announcer introduced Johnny as “stepping out of the store windows and showcases all over America” to deliver his patented call at the beginning and end of each weekly radio broadcast, the sound of tinkling glass was all but palpable. The little man was about to become the world’s first living trademark, and the brand he pushed began to sell seriously.

V

WHEN
Rube Ellis died at fifty-four toward the end of 1933, Philip Morris cigarettes were off to a promising start, but in the face of such a key loss in the company’s leadership, new president Len McKitterick recalled Al Lyon from the West Coast, where he had been earning $5,000 a year while performing wonders for the company and especially the new brand. Lyon had opened up with just two salesmen in his charge, but within two years he had forty hard at work and had organized a network of college representatives, unique in the trade, to push Philip Morris with schoolmates.

Installed as vice president for sales, Lyon supplied the dynamism that would fuel the company for the better part of twenty years. An extroverted, debonair charmer, he was nearing the apex of a career that would be crowned by his inclusion in the book
America’s Twelve Master Salesmen
, published in 1950 by
Forbes
magazine. Lyon, a self-instructed and omnivorous reader with a prodigious memory for passages he loved to spout, was full of gab and a disarming inquisitiveness that became his most useful sales tool. His trick was to probe lightly in an effort to learn all he could about his prey—where and how did his customer live, what were the names of his wife and children, which were his favorite foods and drink—or anything else that was grist for a chat. “A business deal doesn’t have to be a dull, cut-and-dried operation,” he would write. Superintending the now enlarged Philip Morris field force and glad-handing his way around the country, Lyon insisted that the company’s representatives be courteous even when thwarted, make a good appearance because good grooming lent an air of authority to a man, and above all, never ask for an order until they had done a service that the customer had not expected, even if that meant helping the dealer open up his shop at seven-thirty, sweeping the floors, taking inventory, and/or buying his twin girls dresses for their third birthday.

With his sales apparatus well in hand, McKitterick addressed anew his flagship
brand’s purported health advantages as a result of the humidifying agent, diethylene glycol. If the substance was so beneficial, why weren’t other manufacturers using it, too?

To find the answer, Philip Morris engaged the services of Michael Mulinos, an associate professor of pharmacology at Columbia University’s medical school, the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Mulinos had performed earlier tests on the potency of various irritants by applying them in solution to the delicate tissues that formed the linings of rabbits’ eyelids and then measuring the edema, or amount of swelling. For Philip Morris he prepared three batches of cigarettes made from the same tobacco: one batch had a humectant consisting of a 3.65 percent concentration of glycerine, the substance used in most other brands; the second had a 2.74 percent concentration of glycol, the humectant used only by Philip Morris, while the third batch had no humectant added. The smoke from the three batches was dissolved by being bubbled through three different liquids: water, a saline solution, or a preparation called Ringer’s fluid, the latter two approximating the salt content of the blood and other chemical constituents of bodily fluids and tissues used in experiments. The outcome, as measured by the rabbits’ edema, was that the smoke with the glycol added was rated “much less irritating” than the smoke with the commonly used glycerine—and,
mirabile dictu
, less irritating even than the smoke with no humectant at all.

The limitations of Mulinos’s study, however, ought to have left the company’s technical people wary. To start with, the two humectants were of differing strengths, and the results might have been less favorable if each had been applied at the same concentration. Worse, no distinction was made among the three differing fluids in which the three kinds of smoke were dissolved, even though there was a distinct possibility that plain water, without the saline solutions, was more of an irritant than the prepared solutions. Here, then, were two important sets of what scientific researchers call “confounding factors,” which muddied the results. Furthermore, there was no objective standard for measuring the degree of swelling of the rabbits’ eyelids—only the momentary visual observation of the investigators. And whether the human tissue in smokers’ throats was comparable to that of rabbits’ eyelids in susceptibility to the effects of the humectants was anybody’s guess. Finally, a certain skepticism prevailed even in that: period regarding research subsidized by any party with a vested interest in the outcome.

All of that notwithstanding, the Mulinos study was published in the October 1934
Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology
. His test was repeated the following year by a pharmacology professor from the New York University Medical School, and while he cured one of the flaws of the Mulinos study by dissolving the smoke from all three tobacco batches in the same saline fluid, the same laboratory assistant who had made the visual appraisals
of the edema in the earlier experiment was employed in the new one, compromising clinical objectivity. More to the point, other laboratories that investigated the subject failed to confirm the claims made for glycol.

Understandably uneasy at relying on the rabbit test, McKitterick commissioned a new kind of test. Frederick Flinn, head of the public health and hygiene department at Columbia’s Physicians and Surgeons, was a throat specialist who asked ten colleagues in his field to enlist the cooperation of ten patients each, who among them had smoked for an average of twelve years and were then consuming twenty-eight cigarettes a day. Three-quarters of them were suffering from a congested larynx or pharynx, two-thirds had coughs, and seven had irritated tongues. All agreed to quit their former brands and smoke only cigarettes with the glycol humectant. After just three to four weeks, according to Dr. Flinn, the symptoms of irritation presumably caused by the subjects’ smoking had disappeared in nearly two-thirds of the cases, while all the rest enjoyed a “considerable improvement;” three-quarters lost their cough altogether, and every case of irritated tongue vanished. Then the process was reversed: the subjects were fed cigarettes with the usual glycerine humectant, and before long some 80 percent of the subjects displayed renewed irritation, and many declined to continue smoking the obviously harmful cigarettes.

These truly astonishing results, while understandably inspiring exultation at the Philip Morris office, were clouded in the view of outsiders because there were no stated standards for what constituted “irritated” tissue, there were no data given on the differences in the subjects’ smoking habits—
e.g.
, how many cigarettes per day they smoked, or how far down the butt, how many inhaled, and to what extent—and there was no way of telling if all the sore throats and coughs were due to smoking. The perfection of the results from the manufacturer’s point of view was, on the face of it, cause for concern, and while the Flinn results, when published in the February 1935 issue of
Laryngoscope
, a professional journal, indicated that the research “was made possible through a grant by Philip Morris & Company, Ltd., Inc.,” the company’s vested interest in the outcome was not explained.

Such cavils were swept aside now by McKitterick, who ordered a rise in the decibels of the claims made in behalf of the Philip Morris brand. The clinical details were omitted from the consumer advertising, but the company hired nine publicists to roam the country distributing reprints of the Mulinos and Flinn studies to every medical practitioner they could find. They haunted doctors’ conventions, sent out mass mailings, and placed ads in some forty national and state medical journals, arguing the case for Philip Morris’s less irritating effects and offering copies of the experimental results to any doubters. The brand’s sales moved ahead steadily.

The drumbeat grew louder after the relatively cautious McKitterick died in August of 1936. His successor, Otway Hebron Chalkley, a lanky, reticent native
of Richmond, had served as secretary-treasurer of Philip Morris for a dozen years, knew the leaf and manufacturing end of the business inside out, and was judged a somewhat safer choice for president than the flamboyant Alfred Lyon, elevated to executive vice president and more than ever the catalyst of the company’s growing sales strength. Chalkley deferred to Lyon in the marketing area, and the latter lost no time in charging up the advertising with breast-beating hyperbole. Diethylene glycol, at best a dubious benefit to smokers, was touted as “the greatest achievement in cigarette manufacture since the introduction of cigarettes themselves,” while Flinn’s hazy study was said to have
“proved conclusively
that on changing to Philip Morris, every case of irritation due to smoking cleared completely or definitely improved” (italics in the original text). An asterisk indicated that the conclusive studies had appeared in “leading medical journals,” and it was further stated, “These facts have been accepted by eminent medical authorities.” Actually, the medical journals were obscure ones, no “eminent medical authorities” had embraced the findings, and there had never been any evidence that the throat irritation so swiftly cured by the glycol additive was “due to smoking.”