Ashes to Ashes (32 page)

Liggett & Myers, he went on, was a trustworthy outfit, and “[f]or years and years they have been advertising, you never heard ’em make an unsubstantiated claim—ever!” And for the twenty-three years he had been on the air, Godfrey stated, “I have never misled you with advertising … .” The engaging redheaded schmoozer was later found to be suffering from lung cancer, though he survived it for some years and succumbed to another form of the disease.

Such egregiously self-serving disclaimers caused the FTC to go beyond its usual cease-and-desist efforts and ask the federal courts in late 1952 to issue an injunction against Liggett’s nervy new advertising on the ground that the company was now engaging in precisely the same sort of deceptive practices as its competitors which the regulatory commission had struggled ten years to halt. To allow Liggett to ignore the findings of the other four cases and exhaust its remedies over years of legal maneuvering was, by the FTC’s reasoning, to reward a malefactor. The company soon after compounded the transgression when it came to market in 1953 with its filter-tip brand, L&M. Liggett’s President Few, in an apparent spasm of candor, had commented to
Fortune
magazine that his chemists “say filter-tip cigarettes can’t be made with less irritating
factors than Chesterfields. But if the public wants it, so long as it isn’t harmful, we’ll give the public what it wants.”

The ads for the new L&M brand went even further. Typical was one featuring a picture of actor Fredric March declaring: “THIS IS IT. L&M Filters Are Just What the Doctor Ordered!” Subsequent ads left the statement in quotations but failed to attribute it to any speaker; other ads removed the quotes and left the bald assertion, with its unmistakable implication that the new L&M filter was of medically prescriptive value. The closest the company came to specifying which doctor did the ordering was a statement on the Liggett & Myers corporate letterhead and reproduced in the Fredric March ad in which the company’s research director, Dr. Frederick R. Darkis—with a doctorate in chemistry, not medicine—told of Liggett’s search for the “purest material” it could find for its new filter and how it allowed the L&M smoker to “draw into [his] mouth much less smoke with much less nicotine and nitrogenous constituents.” Tests failed to validate the claim that the new L&M filter was in any way significantly more effective than its rivals.

By the end of 1954, the truth-stretching L&M was selling 6.1 billion units, 50 percent ahead of Kent and more than twice the Parliament total but less than half of Viceroy’s nearly 15 billion units for the clear industry lead. But by then Reynolds Tobacco had brought out its filter entry that studiously avoided the health issue, and would shortly run away with the industry leadership.

V

LICKING
its wounds from the marketing fiasco of the king-size, unfiltered Cavalier, RJR Tobacco took solace in the early ’Fifties as its Camels continued to surge well ahead of Lucky Strike as the nation’s best-selling brand. By 1953, however, American Tobacco held a solid 25 percent lead in unit sales over Reynolds on the strength of its two king brands, Pall Mall and the cork-tipped Herbert Tareyton, the latter also cast as an elegant smoke in ads with a monocled, top-hatted, and presumably very British gent proclaiming the brand’s virtues. RJR was plainly in need of a successful new product to challenge American Tobacco’s stable, but the effort was not truly mounted until the death in 1953 of the company’s hypercautious head, James Gray, and his succession by a man universally regarded around Winston-Salem as a caring human being and the ablest Reynolds chieftain since the death of The Founder.

Nobody supposed that John C. Whitaker, a nephew of Will Reynolds and graduate of the university at Chapel Hill, would long remain in overalls when he began his RJR career on the factory floor in 1913, running a cigarette-making machine on the very same shift, company legend had it, that produced
the first Camel. But Whitaker remained on the factory side for twenty-five years, the genial and warmhearted “Mr. John,” who knew everybody in the place, pushing top management into more enlightened personnel policies, such as health and burial insurance, and hiring a minister to counsel drunks and burnouts among the nonunionized working force so that they would not have to be fired. Whitaker’s door was always open, and he answered his own phone, even as he finally rose in the executive ranks. His ascent may have been hampered by his unprepossessing looks; he bore a certain physical resemblance to the stage, screen, and broadcasting funnyman Ed (“The Perfect Fool”) Wynn. And Whitaker indeed loved collecting jokes, preferably off-color ones, and reciting them, just as he was fond of devoting his off-hours to playing the zither, performing locally as a ham actor, and deeply involving himself in political and civic affairs such as the construction of a substantial county hospital.

Beneath the joviality and kindness was a steely will that functioned with the persistence of water wearing away stone. Whitaker hewed to the small-town virtues of hard work and a frugality that had allowed cost-conscious RJR to achieve the highest profit margins in the business—a good 20 to 25 percent ahead of its two chief rivals. In contrast to American Tobacco’s big-city spending ways, Reynolds prided itself on continuing to pay less for its supplies, credit, and labor. Its wages were 10 to 15 percent below its rivals’ and a little more than half as high as those paid to a union autoworker. Free from organized labor’s tighter manning rules, RJR could assign two “making” machines to each operator’s oversight, while American, rationalizing that it thereby gained more “quality control,” used one man per machine.

One of Whitaker’s pet projects, the use of reconstituted tobacco leaf, proved a major economy for the company. About 30 percent of the tobacco leaf, in the form of the woody stem (chopped out during the shredding process), scraps, and tobacco dust, used to be wasted routinely, prompting RJR to begin exploring in the late ’Thirties how to salvage this costly loss. It took a dozen years of seat-of-the-pants secret research to realize the savings by pulverizing the stems in an old-fashioned coffee grinder, draining the resulting pulp over a wire screen, adding the scraps and tobacco dust, and pressing the mess flat with a felt mat in a process that resembled papermaking. The trick was to get the resulting sheets to gain enough tensile strength so they did not shatter when cut for the blending process. Known also as RTS (reconstituted tobacco sheet), the homogenized leaf, when blended into the “natural leaf,” had no loose pieces and so was said to burn more evenly and provide a more uniform draw. It also readily absorbed flavorings, which allowed further savings because a cheaper grade of tobacco could thus be bought for the new filtered brand the company had begun to contemplate. Not incidentally, the heavy stems comprising the bulk of the RTS were lower in tar and nicotine content than the rest of the leaf.

Comfortable with who and what he was, John Whitaker was no domineering chief executive on taking the Reynolds chairmanship. In the critical sales and marketing area, where he was least experienced, Whitaker deferred to his second in command, Edward A. Darr, in many ways his opposite. A big, opinionated, stubborn man whose autocratic manner inspired dread among underlings, Darr had come into RJR after working the wholesale tobacco trade out of Baltimore, and from the late ’Thirties began urging the company to broaden its cigarette line. But he long found himself swimming upstream against the cautious, tightfisted Reynolds veterans, and when Cavalier laid an egg, Darr concentrated his efforts on energizing the sales force and pushing Camel back to the top. With supermarkets accounting by then for nearly half of all cigarette sales, Darr directed his field men to cultivate store managers, even if it meant circumventing the line of command with the chains’ home offices. As a result, Reynolds won wide placement of its racks, with their assured preferential display of Camel cartons, and many takers for its dealer-service plan, so the store managers were relieved of having to place cigarette orders and Reynolds was assured that Camels would never be out of stock at any subscribing market. “Nothing happens till somebody sells the product” was Darr’s anthem, and he got the sales executives out from behind their desks and into the field, constantly monitoring, demonstrating, and problem-solving. His field corps, whose managers averaged fifteen to twenty years with RJR, was the envy of the industry.

On a trip abroad in 1951, Darr was impressed by the fact that in the health-conscious Swiss market, filter-tip cigarettes were winning half the business. Convinced that filters were the wave of the future, he got nowhere back in Winston-Salem, where the old-timers mocked the innovation as an effeminate smoke and dubbed them “Tampax” for their absorbent qualities. But when named RJR president at the age of sixty-two, two years older than new chairman Whitaker, Darr at last had the power to move the filter. He was determined to avoid another Cavalier-like flop.

Essential to the company’s thinking was avoidance of the health claims that the smaller manufacturers were making for their filter-tip entries in a misguided attempt to steal market shares from the industry leaders. Banging the health drum loudly and incessantly would inevitably hurt them all; smokers might be risk-takers, but they were not certifiably suicidal. Thus, the Reynolds filter brand would have to be a far more flavorful smoke than the rest—a Camel with a filter attached, more or less—which would require a looser and thus less intrusive filter and invite the use of the cheaper, reconstituted leaf. Darr knew, too, that the new product had to be both king-size and priced at the level of Viceroy, just a penny or two above the standard brands, if it was to have mass appeal; the long length and filter would make it attractive to women and urban smokers, the sectors of the market in which Camels fared
most poorly, while men, thanks to a filter that was not too tight, could enjoy the Camel-like taste. Consistent with these basic considerations, Darr and his makers reached for nothing fancy or tricky in presenting the new entry. The first half of the company’s hyphenated hometown provided a perfectly serviceable name for the brand, one with a British tone to it like Kent, Viceroy, and Pall Mall, all enjoying strong acceptance in the U.S. market. The package itself was classically simple and inoffensive: the top and bottom third were pure fire-engine red with the midsection in white and the name “Winston” in black, easily legible, and uninteresting lettering. The pack also bore the no-nonsense message “Finer Filter, Finer Flavor” by way of implying that the taste of the product mattered as much to the manufacturer as any enhancement in safety.

There was no shortage of problems as the company geared up for the brand introduction. Lorillard and Brown & Williamson, for one thing, had tied up the supply of filter-making machines manufactured by the Molins company of England, the nonpareil of the business, so Reynolds had to wait its turn. And when the machines finally came in, the cigarettes they produced had far too many “broken necks,” where the filter join was imperfect. The blend itself proved complicated; the flavor had to be strong enough to penetrate the filter without overwhelming it, otherwise the unspoken reason for the device as a health safeguard would be defeated. Concern grew within the company that unless the Winston could be hurried along, it would reach the market too late to make a serious impact, especially with the L&M now out there and doing well. Charles B. Wade, Jr., a Reynolds vice president and director and, as a Duke man, the company intellectual, stopped Ed Darr on the street one day to urge him politely to bring out Winston soon, preferably within the month. Darr grabbed the smaller Wade by his tie, lifted him a bit, and snarled, “Not one damned day before it’s ready—and from what I’ve tasted so far, it’s not.”

When the day came in the spring of 1954, the Winston launch was most notable for the way its otherwise banal advertising giddily perverted the English language. A typical early ad showed a smiling mature couple, hands lovingly intertwined, with each also clutching a cigarette, and the headline “New filter cigarette:
WINSTON
brings flavor back to filter smoking!” Below the drawing of the smokers was a smaller heading that would turn into the unlikeliest successful slogan since “L.S./M.F.T.”—“Winston tastes good—like a cigarette should.” Countless literate folk were offended by this brutish usage of “like” as a conjunction, a linguistic gaucherie that made the new product the butt of sneering jokes. But the RJR marketers in Winston-Salem, never exactly a citadel of high culture and flawless grammar, were delighted with the attention, made the offending slogan the lyric of a bouncy little jingle on television and radio, and wryly defended their syntax as a colloquialism rather than bad
grammar. In this they were supported by the nation’s best-known philologist, Northwestern’s Professor Bergen Evans, later editor of
A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage
, who pointed out that Shakespeare, Keats, and the King James Version of the Bible had committed the very same sin.

The unanticipated flap served to spotlight both the brand and its chief distinguishing feature—that Winston had more taste than other filter tips—and with the muscle of the Reynolds sales force behind it, the newcomer had little trouble racing past Parliament, Kent, and L&M into second place behind Viceroy by the end of 1954.

At American Tobacco’s New York headquarters, meanwhile, they watched the filter phenomenon unfold, and waited. The ten-year headstart the company had enjoyed in the king-size market had made it fat, happy, and a bit complacent as the only cigarette maker with sales in excess of a billion dollars. Its quiet, dapper boss, Paul Hahn, was one of the new breed of organization men who used his high-priced vice presidents to administer the company in collégial fashion. The lack of flair showed in the steady decline of the flagship brand, Lucky Strike, but the slack was more than picked up by American’s soaring king brands, Pall Mall and Herbert Tareyton. It was a conservative time for the nation, with a patriarchal Republican administration running the federal government for the first time in twenty years, and the female star of Lucky Strike’s popular Saturday night television show, “Your Hit Parade,” was a pretty blonde named Dorothy Collins, who wore blouses with virginally high collars and seemed to embody the prevailing mood of propriety and orderliness. Why worry about reports from a few obscure scientists that smoking was a serious threat to the public’s health?