Ashes to Ashes (22 page)

By 1938, even the company’s ads in medical journals were indulging in such rash statements as “Our research files contain exhaustive data from authoritative sources,” when in fact there was no new clinical support for the Mulinos and Flinn claims. That year,
Consumer Reports
, the monthly magazine of the two-year-old Consumers Union, a nonprofit organization devoted to objective assessment of product quality and claims, performed taste and chemical tests on thirty-six cigarette brands. The magazine noted in its July number that the makers of Philip Morris “lay great stress in their advertising upon their substitution of glycol for glycerine. The aura of science surrounding their ‘proofs’ that this makes a less irritating smoke, does not convince many toxicologists that they were valid. Of the many irritating combustion products in tobacco smoke, the modification of one has probably little more than a psychological effect in reducing irritation felt by the smoker.” All that Philip Morris had really proven was that in the creation of deceptive advertising, it could compete toe to toe with the big boys.

VI

THE
battle to put the new brand on the map was now joined in hand-to-hand combat, literally in some cases, in every store that sold cigarettes. Philip Morris had a unique asset in little Johnny, who was turning into a great door-opener for the sales force as parents brought their children to attend the pageboy’s personal appearances. These had become so successful and numerous that the company hired four understudy Johnnies to travel the country, but
only the original continued to give the call on radio that some in the business press said snidely was beginning to produce “an international earache.” Johnny’s celebrity compensated to some degree for the company’s relatively small marketing muscle, flexed mostly in the big cities on the East and West coasts, where two out of every three packs of Philip Morris were sold. The most hotly contested turf was, of course, New York City, where 20 percent of the brand’s sales were recorded.

Salesmen were dirt-cheap then, and the company put on some ninety men, most of them earning twenty to twenty-five dollars a week, to try to get the young brand into New York stores and displayed competitively. Unlike the big, rich companies that gave their field men a car to drive, the Philip Morris crew walked or used public transportation, lugging their samples and display materials with them. The full complement mustered early every morning at the company’s 119 Fifth Avenue offices, with their battered leather furniture and poky elevator, and, while standing, endured a harangue delivered by the sales manager, John Switzer, a terror who had worked for the Schulte cigar store chain and drilled his troops constantly on the price lists, how to cope with tough customers, and the need to save their empty packs of Philip Morris for conspicuous littering—the cheapest form of advertising. Switzer was said to have a weekly quota of men to fire in order to keep his salesmen inspired by dread at a time when it was hard to find any kind of a job. Woe be it, then, to any man called upon at the morning meetings, where the day’s routes were assigned, who did not give crisp answers and satisfactory reports on how many store visits he had logged, how many displays he had placed, and how many reorders he had written the previous day. The quickest way to be booted out the door was to refer to any rival brand by name—circumlocutions were mandatory; thus, Lucky Strike was “the brand with the green pack and bull’s-eye.”

“There was a terrific turnover rate,” recalled Max L. Berkowitz, who as a youngster from the Bronx came to work for Philip Morris in 1937, hid in the back of the room to avoid Switzer’s terrible lash, and survived forty years, eventually to direct the company’s sales operations. The Berkowitz sales technique, more suited to the New York tempo than Al Lyon’s more folksy and leisurely approach, became a company legend. “You had to talk fast and hard,” he would recount long afterward. “People had to be trained—you had to know how to open—you just couldn’t say hello.” His typical opening was to lay out a few packs of Philip Morris on the counter until he caught the eye of the store owner or manager and would remark, “Everyone else in the area tells me they’re selling an awful lot of Philip Morris—how are you doing with it?” If the answer was positive, Berkowitz pushed for a bigger order or an earlier reorder. If the answer was negative, he would ask why and offer to improve the situation by putting up a display carton on the counter or in the window.
Usually the offer was curtly rejected, and Berkowitz would begin to fast-talk. What was the problem—the push money from Liggett for a window display? How much were they paying? “None of your business,” the owner answered. Berkowitz persisted: “So what is it—three bucks? Seven bucks? Whatever it is, you’re tying up your window for—so how long is the deal? What,
three, weeks!
The cigarettes get stale sitting in the window that long—make it two weeks, and put us in there for a week—people don’t want to keep looking at the same thing for too long, anyway.” If the window was out, he would push for the countertop. “Here, let me put up a carton on display for a week—what, a week is too long? Two days, then—you can spare the space for two days, can’t you?” If the answer was still no, Berkowitz would practically have to beg for one day of free display, and if he succeeded, there was every chance that the next salesman through the door from a rival brand would take down the Philip Morris carton. Sometimes out of desperation, Berkowitz recounted, “we became prosecutors, saying things like ‘Why are you doing this, putting in so much two-for-a-quarter stock when you can do better with us at fifteen cents a pack?’” The key was to ready a comeback for every situation. “You see, the salesman actually has the upper hand—it’s like a pitcher in a ball game. He knows what pitch he’s going to throw, and the batter doesn’t.”

Such dauntless prodigies of salesmanship began to pay off. Philip Morris sales were now doubling annually, and by 1938 the brand had swept by Old Gold to take fourth place among the cigarette industry’s top sellers. And the profit margins were strong, thanks to the flagship brand’s fifteen-cent retail price, a highly effective advertising campaign—the company spent only two-thirds as much per unit sold as Reynolds did on Camels and half as much as Liggett did on Chesterfields—and a generally tight, no-frills operation. Al Lyon’s selling prowess was celebrated in a
Time
magazine cover story in April of 1938, and Wall Street took notice as net income that year reached $5.6 million, as much as the company was grossing in sales just before the launch of the “English Blend” Philip Morris.
Financial World
called the company “a coming blue chip,” and its new issue of preferred stock was snapped up.

About the only setback the company suffered as the ’Thirties wound down was a slap on the wrist by the Federal Trade Commission, lately empowered to police deceptive advertising and business practices. The brazen, ersatz Englishness in the packaging and presentation of the Philip Morris brand was no longer acceptable. The prominent “London W.” on the package front was replaced by “Made in the U.S.A.,” the “Inc.” in the company name was made the same size as the “Ltd.,” and the unicorn facing the rampant lion on the imitation British royal crest lost its horn to become a plain horse.

More nervy by far than the company’s counterfeit Englishness in introducing its bread-and-butter brand was the original pricing decision. Based on nothing intrinsic to the product—no fancier tobaccos or flavors or packages or
greater length of smoke—the fifteen-cent price was imposed on a marketplace in upheaval. By 1940, due almost entirely to the performance of that stodgy little brown pack, the company had won 7 percent of the U.S. cigarette market. The other top shares by brand were held by Camel, with 24 percent (and about to lose the lead to Luckies); Lucky Strike, 22.6 percent; Chesterfield, 18 percent; the ten-cent brands combined, 12 percent; Raleigh, 5.1 percent; Old Gold, 3 percent; and Pall Mall, 2.2 percent. It had been a remarkably skillful piece of marketing for Philip Morris to have penetrated the Big Three oligopoly—and done so with the gusto of a practiced mountebank.

VII

TO
label the cigarette makers of the ’Thirties as knowing charlatans, as unconscionable purveyors of a wicked product, would amount to unfair revisionist history. It would be closer to the truth to note that Americans were in love with smoking at a time when their collective life was low on other consolations. If the habit was bad for their health, so was hunger, and the latter seemed the more pressing peril by far.

Even the most responsible journals in the periodical press were moderate in their criticism of smoking, which on balance was held to be a marginal social benefit.
Fortune
magazine, in a late 1935 appraisal of the medical effects of tobacco and alcohol, reported that much mystery on the subject remained and “[i]t is only certain that the cigarette evil has been exaggerated.” Although some medical men claimed that oral and bronchial cancer were more common among smokers, “the, prevailing opinion is that they are not,” and while some practitioners believed that chronic bronchitis linked to the habit (“smoker’s cough”) made the subject more susceptible to pulmonary disease, “this belief is now discounted … .” That same year,
Forum & Century
, a prominent journal of social commentary, gushed over how Nature, “to protect the delicate tissues of the breathing organs … places around the system a screen, as it were, which assures the normal function of breathing and yet permits indulgence in smoking to a considerable extent, with little, if any, damage to the mechanism.” In its June 1936 issue, the highly regarded
Scientific American
ran a piece by one of its editors who stated, “Most smokers—probably all smokers—are doubtless harmed to some extent, usually not great, by smoking.” But the article went on to contend that cigarettes represent “a packet of rest” that quiets the nerves, that “the average intelligent smoker knows when he is smoking too much because he does not feel well … and eases off, almost unconsciously,” and that even if smoking were truly risky, it is also dangerous “to climb mountains and stepladders, play football, cross the street, or merely to exist, but the risk is so small that we willingly accept it … .”

Such nonchalance was even echoed in
Consumer Reports
. The scrupulously objective journal said in mid-1938 that many readers had asked its staff to render a technical judgment of cigarettes, “one of the most widely used and most misrepresented products,” because, for all their common usage, their quality was unregulated by government. After running chemical and taste tests on thirty-six top brands,
CR
reported: (1) There was little perceptible difference between brands of cigarettes of the same type, and in blindfold tests smokers could “little distinguish” between brands; and (2) “ … [c]igarette smoking is probably slightly deleterious to the human machine,” and none of the popularly advertised brands appeared to be any more or less harmful than the rest. It gave the back of its editorial hand to “the obvious bias of cigarette manufacturers, as well as of the ‘scientists’ whom they directly or indirectly subsidize,” and, with regard to claims of mildness, listed the concentration of nicotine it had found among the market leaders. Chesterfield, the least clamorous in its advertising, was rated as strongest with 2.3 milligrams of nicotine per cigarette, tied by Philip Morris’s specialty premium brand, Marlboro—“mild as May” it wasn’t. Philip Morris itself was close behind with 2.2 mg. of nicotine, followed by Old Gold, 2.0 mg.; Camel, 1.9 mg.; and last—
i.e.
, lowest in nicotine among the leaders and thus making partially good on its many boasts of superiority—Lucky Strike at 1.4 mg.

The same year that
Consumer Reports
ran the first of what would later become a regular battery of comparative tests intended to keep the cigarette industry honest in its ad claims, a widely respected biostatistician at Johns Hopkins announced perhaps the most, troubling data yet on the relationship of smoking and health. Raymond K. Pearl had long been fascinated by why some members of the same species live longer than others and, after studying rats, roosters, vinegar flies, mice, and—now near the end of his career—men, he had concluded that “the duration of life in general varies inversely with the rate of living.” The heart that beat faster, the organism with the higher metabolism, did not survive as long. In exploring the subject, Dr. Pearl constructed life tables for 6,813 men whose medical histories he found in the Johns Hopkins files, complete with their smoking habits. These revealed that smoking “is associated with a definite impairment of longevity,” that only 45 percent of smokers lived until age sixty, compared with 65 percent of nonsmokers who did so, and that the disparity held at every age level up to seventy, even for those who smoked moderately—not the case with moderate drinkers. Pearl was not prepared to argue conclusively that smoking
caused
poor health; indeed, it might have been a manifestation of a faster “rate of living” that took its toll in many ways, with smoking an incalculable factor inseparable from the rest. Pearl was a bit vague, moreover, about the source of his data and the uniformity of its collection, and his sample was hardly random or representative of the whole population.

If the effects of smoking on the human system remained unclear, in one area of pathology, at least, cigarettes were beginning to be seen as a discrete and likely agent of harm—cancer of the lung. Only 371 cases had been reported throughout the United States in 1914; by 1930 the figure was 2,357, and by 1940 it would reach 7,121. Here was a growing incidence of a subspecies of a disease long regarded as so mysterious and shameful—in part because it was dreaded as the incurable prelude to a lingering and painful death—that it was rarely even mentioned in obituaries; its victims were said to have succumbed “after a long illness.”

For medical science, cancer represented a rebuke to man’s limited curative powers. The disease rarely manifested itself until those harboring it were too far gone to save, and even then, the surgeon’s art had not sufficiently progressed to cope with the immense energy of the virulent invader. Cancer was the single name for a disease of baffling complexity, producing more than one hundred kinds of tumors with rogue cells that never ceased the process of mitosis—subdividing—in contrast to normal ones with a finite number of divisions programmed into their genetic code. Cancer cells were known to steal oxygen and other nourishment from surrounding cells for their own malignant needs and to use their support systems to create a network of connecting tissue, blood vessels, and nerves, all of which starved the body and gave its victims a wasted look. In time, the cancer expropriated the body’s blood and lymph systems for growth and waste removal, voyaged around the body, and colonized, with fatal results.