Ashes to Ashes (38 page)

Not surprisingly, highly flavored brands with the least filtration fared best in the marketplace. Winston’s filter left it with a tar and nicotine yield as high as its RJR stablemate, unfiltered Camel, still the top seller among all U.S. brands. In 1955, its second year on the market, Winston sales tripled; another 50 percent gain the next year made it the runaway leader among filter tips. Marlboro made up for its late start with superior packaging and a sales pitch steeped in testosterone. Beyond its telegraphic pitch of “Filter … flavor … flip-top box,” Philip Morris peopled its Marlboro ads with the most virile-looking guys it could find, whether cowboys, longshoremen, or grizzled tennis players, all possessing a hand tattooed with a winged shield, the insignia of the sort of man who led a more adventurous life by, among other manly acts, smoking Marlboro because “the filter doesn’t get between you and the flavor.” Typical ads in the brand’s early years stated with practically orgasmic zeal that “the man-size taste of honest tobacco comes full through”—does taste have a size and what size is a man?—and pictured a rugged hunk captioned “a lot of man … a lot of cigarette” or displayed an adoring younger female in the background under the headline “Where there’s a man, there’s a Marlboro” (and, apparently, women who like men who like Marlboro). By 1956, its second full year on the market, Marlboro was outselling Kent by four to one; another 44 percent jump in 1957 brought it closer to No. 2 filter brand Viceroy and No. 3 L&M.

The most instructive performance in the ’Fifties tar derby was turned in by
Lorillard’s Kent brand, which after early misadventures scored a triumph confected chiefly—in about equal measure—of perseverance and cynicism. Following a flurry of interest in 1952 based on its alleged health advantages, Kent made little headway against the new, lower-priced, and more highly flavored filter brands. Its prime asserted virtue, a truly effective “Micronite” filter, had proven its undoing; smokers complained that puffing on a Kent was like smoking through a mattress. To make matters worse, Lorillard’s research director, Harris Parmele, had determined from tests by two independent laboratories that Kent smoke contained “[s]harp little fibers” of asbestos, tiny barbs that, as one of the research reports visualized it, implanted in smokers’ lungs precisely those irritants that the filter was designed to screen out. Four decades later, researchers would learn that of thirty-three workers at a Massachusetts factory where “Micronite” filter material was made for Lorillard for almost five years, nineteen had died of cancer—five from mesothelioma, the form associated with the inhalation of asbestos fibers.

Parmele, in an age still largely unaware of the perils of asbestos, nevertheless took the laboratory reports seriously and set to work seeking a substitute filter material. But the company did not advise the public of its quest and indeed kept advertising the Micronite filter as entirely harmless. Nor did it announce, having flaunted Kent as a brand low in tars and nicotine and, accordingly, less hazardous to its users’ health, that it was loosening the filter to allow more flavor—and irritants—through it. By 1955, the original yield of 2 milligrams of tar had been increased sixfold and the 0.5 milligram of nicotine had quadrupled. Still, there was no pickup in Kent sales.

When hard-boiled Lewis Gruber, who had been instrumental in Kent’s creation, was named chief executive of Lorillard in mid-1956, he immediately ordered the brand’s price slashed four cents, in line finally with rival filters, and its tar and nicotine yields heightened still further—to no avail. But by mid-1957, Parmele was ready with the “New Micronite,”
sans
asbestos and very like other filters in its composition but more tightly crimped and supplemented by porous cigarette paper. The result was about a 35 percent drop in its strength, enough to place it one-third below the yields of most leading brands. Fortunately for Lorillard,
Reader’s Digest
was then running an expose of misleading filter-cigarette advertising and raved about the new Kent’s lowered numbers. On the strength of the publicity via the
Digest’s
massive circulation—at 14 million copies sold a month, it was the nation’s largest periodical—Kent skyrocketed to a strong No. 2 position in the filter field, and Lorillard passed Philip Morris and Brown & Williamson to gain fourth place in the industry.

A more enduring phenomenon than Kent’s comeback—and equally without evidence that they were less hazardous than any other form of smoke—was the rise in the later ’Fifties of the mentholated brands. These represented only 3
percent of all cigarette sales in 1956, when Reynolds, in the full flush of its success with Winston, launched its companion brand, Salem, the first filter-tip menthol. It had the same size, format, and packaging look as Winston, but instead of the torrid red banding, Salem was done up in a chilly blue-green to suggest its taste. It reached the marketplace, by dint of an accelerated push from the production people, shortly before the filter version of Brown & Williamson’s Kool and a repackaged version of Philip Morris’s laggard menthol, Spud. But Salem enjoyed two advantages over its established rivals. First, it had a much lighter menthol taste than Kool and so appealed more to women, especially the heavy smokers among them who were uneasy about the health risks of their habit. (Ironically, the erroneous belief that the cooling sensation of menthol brands made them less hazardous, if not actually medicinal, invited deeper and longer inhalation, thus likely promoting rather than retarding disease formation.) Second, RJR mobilized a massive marketing effort for the new brand, combining a powerful push by its giant sales force with the pull of big advertising dollars in a campaign featuring softly colored scenes of inviting nature and a slogan that proclaimed Salem to be “Refreshing as Springtime Itself;” there were none of the medicinal overtones that Kool had always emitted. By its second year on the market, Salem was selling twice as many packs as Kool. Salem soon introduced high-porosity paper that its copywriters said “breathes new mildness into the smoke … new freshness into the flavor,” and the artwork grew as lush as Impressionist landscapes, with hand-entwined lovers traipsing over upland meadows, their tumescent hearts doubtless set on a pristine kiss and a Salem to soothe whatever followed. By 1960, the brand had tripled Kool’s rising sales and was largely responsible for the menthols’ 11 percent share of the market; by the ’Eighties, the category would command more than one-quarter of all cigarette sales and become the preference of perhaps as many as three-quarters of African-American smokers. Nobody could adequately explain this latter peculiarity; some market researchers saw it simply as a cultural preference, even as blacks disproportionately favored fruit-flavored sodas to colas in the soft-drink field, while others theorized that the Kool brand name stemmed from jazz argot, of black origin, in which “cool” was the essential term of approval.

An intentional laggard in the tar derby was American Tobacco. On the strength of its unfiltered brands—Lucky Strike, Herbert Tareyton, and still climbing Pall Mall—American clung to first place in industry sales ahead of onrushing Reynolds, but plainly it needed a new freestanding filter entry, not just its indifferently promoted filter version of Tareyton, to remain on top.

The result, late in 1956, was Hit Parade, a brand utterly devoid of a unique selling proposition, to use the term adman Rosser Reeves popularized in that era. Hit Parade had the same full flavor, easy draw, flip-top box, and red-and-white packaging as Winston, L&M, and Marlboro, leaders in the filter field,
but it was a tardy copycat. The company’s rescue effort, by recasting it as a quasi-health brand with a sharply lowered tar and nicotine yield and “400,000 filter traps,” twenty times the Viceroy claim, could not save it.

As if in compensation, American’s filterless Pall Mall in the beautiful red pack, by making a virtue of its strong flavor (“No flat, filtered-out taste”) and the remarkable fact that “you can light either end,” overtook Camel in 1960 as the best-selling individual brand and held the top spot for half a dozen years—a temporary anomaly in the age of the filter and a diversion from the reality that, despite later desperate efforts to recoup, American Tobacco’s long hegemony in the cigarette trade was over.

II

BY
disallowing the most blatant health claims of cigarette makers’ advertising while permitting them to offer descriptions of filter tips with their implied efficacy—they had to be filtering out
something
—the FTC unwittingly validated the grand deception being foisted on the public. To compensate for the taste robbed from them by filters, the new brands used stronger tobaccos that yielded about as much tar and nicotine as the old unfiltered brands—a fact never noted in the industry’s advertising. The filters, by and large, were merely cosmetic mouthpieces.

The whistle-blowing began in earnest in March of 1957, when small but influential
Consumer Reports
, in its biannual survey of cigarette brands (based on its own laboratory tests), disclosed that the tar and nicotine yields of the filter brands had been rising steadily for several years and now approximated the level of the older and presumably more hazardous unfiltered brands. Four months later,
Reader’s Digest
confirmed, in a report based in part on the findings of an independent laboratory, that smokers were being deceived in their hope to allay health concerns by switching to filter brands. RJR’s filterless Camel, for example, yielded 31 mg. of tar and 2.8 mg. of nicotine per cigarette compared with 32.6 mg. and 2.6 mg. per Winston. American Tobacco’s new Hit Parade had yields about one-third higher than its regular Lucky Strike, while Liggett’s filter brand, L&M, was comparably higher than its old Chesterfield. The
Digest’s
praise for the new Kent filter stemmed solely from evidence that, by having reduced its yields by about one-third (after having raised them considerably in the immediately preceding years), it was acting counter to the industry’s shameless practice.

While the
Digest’s
two-part expose was running, Congress for the first time probed the same terrain, albeit in a tangential and short-lived gesture. John Blatnik, a boyish-looking, five-term liberal representative from Minnesota—and a devoted smoker—led his subcommittee on government operations
through a four-day set of hearings on the FTC’s oversight of cigarette advertising. Blatnik bristled as the testimony, the first ever presented to federal lawmakers on the relationship of smoking to health, revealed the dimensions of the industry’s deception in increasing the strength of its filter brands.

Among the examples Blatnik cited in his report and later article on the hearings was how Liggett, after having boosted its nicotine yield by 70 percent over the previous three years and its tars by one-third, claimed in 1958 to have a “much more effective filter”—than what, it did not say—but tests revealed that eleven of seventeen rival brands had lower yields than the Liggett filter. Such licentious advertising was going unpunished—and at one point during 1958, six brands were simultaneously claiming the lowest tar and nicotine content on the market. If the FTC was guilty of laxness in protecting the consumer, as Blatnik charged, more glaring still was the smugness of the tobacco industry, which declined to send any company officials to testify, as Blatnik had requested. Its avoidance was understandable, for the placebo nature of the filters was both transparent and indefensible, but the industry was not made to answer for it. The closest it came to an official statement was the testimony of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee’s scientific director, Dr. Clarence Little, who said the industry had never told him anything about its use of filters or shown him any research on filters in their laboratories and, furthermore—despite the fact that smokers were switching over to filters massively and the manufacturers were singing their praises—“I have no opinion about … the filter at all. I don’t know why it was done, and I frankly—if you don’t think I am in contempt—care very little.”

In the aftermath of the hearings, Blatnik introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that would have limited the tar and nicotine yields of cigarettes and granted the FTC injunctive powers against deceptive tobacco advertising instead of requiring the regulators to jump through legal hoops for years before obtaining relief. So powerful was the tobacco industry, however, and so well placed were its home-state legislators that not only was the Blatnik bill denied a hearing in the House, but its sponsor was stripped of his subcommittee chairmanship and the subcommittee itself dissolved.

Blatnik’s effort was not entirely in vain, though. Stung by his and others’ criticism, the FTC convened a two-day conference in February of 1958 aimed at developing a single reliable test standard for measuring tar and nicotine yields in order to bring an end to the wild and conflicting brand claims that were making a mockery of the commission’s 1955 ad guidelines. But the last thing the cigarette makers wanted was to replace the test results obtained by their own unmonitored scientists or pet outside laboratories with a single, authoritative, and well-publicized rating system sanctioned by government by which the buying public could measure the presumptive degree of hazard in any given brand. This was especially true of the front-running companies with
the highest-yielding brands. In a bravura display of disdain for the collective scientific evidence, Reynolds’s new president, Bowman Gray, Jr., told the FTC gathering, “We attach no significance to the measurable quantities of solids and nicotine reported to have been found in the smoke of cigarettes.”

Unsurprisingly, no agreement was reached with the industry on a standard test for the strength of its cigarettes. But the message had registered. Even haughty RJR now joined with its competitors, all of them newly anxious over the public disclosure of their numbers game, in dramatically lowering the tar and nicotine content of their filter brands. Between 1955 and 1960, the yields were slashed by an average of 40 percent. But to call attention to their turnabout would have been to concede their past transgressions and admit they feared that the growing health charges against them might be true. Lowered yields, on the other hand, due to milder tobaccos, filters that actually filtered, and other precautionary manufacturing techniques provided uneasy smokers with what to them was an acceptable alternative to quitting, and implied to youngsters considering the habit that the peril was reduced.