Ashes to Ashes (62 page)

Perhaps the single most moving of the antismoking commercials during the two years they were aired in prime time featured actor William Talman, who had played the prosecutor who always lost to Raymond Burr in the “Perry Mason” television series. After seeing the first of the antismoking messages under the ACS aegis, Talman telephoned Rimer, revealed that he was dying from lung cancer, and asked if a camera crew and scriptwriter could be dispatched at once to his home in California. The commercial showed a drawn and obviously sick man who spoke of his wife and children and the good life he had had, then added: “I have lung cancer. Take some advice about smoking and losing from someone who’s been doing both for years. If you don’t smoke, don’t start. If you do smoke—quit. Don’t be a loser.” By the time the message aired, Talman was dead.

“We were scaring the bejesus out of the tobacco industry,” Rimer said, harking back to that period that was “the most exhilarating time” of his thirty years with the cancer society. Few in the cigarette business would concede the cumulative effectiveness of the estimated $75 million worth of free airtime that the public-health forces were granted under the FCC’s fairness doctrine. “I never heard anyone in the industry who said, These [antismoking] ads are ruining us,’” recalled Rimer’s counterpart then at the Tobacco Institute, William Kloepfer. What truly irked the industry, he said, was that the messages backed by the ACS and other health organizations were “propagandistic rather than factual”—as if cigarette commercials had ever been fair and square and the industry’s refutations of the health charges against it were justified.

If Banzhaf’s efforts were not overly appreciated at the FCC and the ACS, Henry Geller conceded that the young lawyer performed a singularly useful service in monitoring broadcasters’ compliance with the requirement for adequate airtime for the antismoking commercials—a task the FCC’s limited staff simply could not accomplish. When Banzhaf, by then out of his law firm and trying to put together his own organization, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), tabulated the airtime being allotted by New York’s WNBC-TV for the antismoking commercials, he found that it came to far less than one-fourth of the time consumed by paid cigarette commercials, the ratio set by the FCC’s guideline. He promptly petitioned the commission to strip the NBC network’s flagship outlet of its broadcast license—a move that caught all broadcasters’ attention and notably improved compliance.

A few years later, as a member of the law faculty at George Washington University specializing in tort law and consumer advocacy, Banzhaf continued his crusade against the tobacco industry, leading the way, for example, in the effort to obtain separate smoking and nonsmoking sections in airplanes. As a frequent public speaker and expert witness before Congress, he had a gift for dramatizing the antismoking case and made telling use of props of his own devising, like an ashtray he distributed to congressional offices that was topped by a plastic model of a pair of human lungs, one of which turned black when it had absorbed enough cigarette smoke. But ASH served in large part as a vehicle for Banzhaf, and his unwillingness to share the spotlight and build an organization would ultimately keep him from becoming what he liked to bill himself as in the early days of the antismoking movement—“the Ralph Nader of the cigarette industry.”

IV

AMERICAN
T
OBACCO
, then ranking second in sales in its industry, and last-place Philip Morris faced different challenges in the late ’Sixties.
American, under its new president, ex-salesman Barney Walker, vowed to reverse a seven-year slippage in market share by dramatically altering its product mix, which was 90 percent in unfiltered brands when Walker took over in 1963. Philip Morris, with 90 percent of its sales already in filter brands, was in danger of becoming a one-horse stable—only its Marlboro brand was displaying friskiness.

Walker was a whirlwind. He markedly increased the advertising budget, strengthened the sales force, putting his field men on a pay-for-performance basis, and installed a companywide profit-sharing plan to spur initiative. He also cut production costs in ways that old-timers felt were cheapening the company’s brands, like making use of less expensive foreign leaf and reconstituted tobacco sheets, and replaced twelve of the company’s seventeen directors, previously all American Tobacco officers, with outsiders. He introduced many new cigarette brands and, though last in the industry to do so, undertook a vigorous drive to diversify the company, all the while enjoying the fast corporate lifestyle, seeing his name in the papers, and office perks like a chef who prepared no fewer than four daily specialties for the officers’ dining room. But in the end, American Tobacco only lost ground in the cigarette business as Walker mistook motion for progress and favored the broadside volley over the sharpshooter’s aim.

The trouble began with Carlton, his first new brand, introduced just before the first report to the Surgeon General. Walker could not get himself to acknowledge that Carlton, by far the lowest-yielding brand on the market, had been designed to allay fears of health-conscious smokers. Caught between Meyner’s idiosyncratic application of the industry ad code, fickle FTC rules, and Walker’s own reluctance to risk carving a niche for the brand among health-conscious smokers by conceding anything to the medical evidence, Carlton went nowhere. Nor did any of the other filter brands Walker introduced, at the rate of seven a year during the first three years of his tenure, among them Half & Half, a hybrid derived from one of the company’s leading pipe tobacco blends; a batch of mentholated brands; Waterford, with a water capsule in the filter; old-timers Sweet Caporal, with a new simulated cork tip, and Bull Durham, fattened to 27 mm. in circumference from the standard 25 mm.; Colony, with a coupon premium to compete with Raleigh; Silva Thins, aimed at women smokers; and a filter-tip version of Lucky Strike to try to rescue that aging star from encroaching oblivion. None of these entries was presented with compelling verve or charm.

Riskiest of all was the line extension of American’s jewel, No. 1 seller Pall Mall, which Walker decided to market in the spring of 1966 in a “luxury length” of 100 mm., about half an inch longer than the standard “king” length of 85 mm. The company gave it what its president called “the Tiffany touch,” a glossy gold pack with white lettering, which was floated into the market at
swank hotels and fancy restaurants—rather more cautiously than Walker’s other efforts, most of them rolled out quickly and almost promiscuously without resort to test-marketing because the company still had surplus cash to burn in its drive for market share. But the beautiful-looking product called Pall Mall Gold 100s, the first major entry of that length to come to market, was not blessed with either aura or image. Instead, the company took a nuts-and-bolts sales approach, stressing that the brand offered more puffs per cigarette than any other and “filters farther for a milder smoke”—which happened not to be true in terms of the brand’s tar and nicotine content, among the highest on the market. Indeed, American suffered from uninspired advertising; only Tareyton’s “Unswitchables” campaign, featuring a proud smoker with an egregiously blackened eye and the caption beneath, “I’d rather fight than switch,” displayed a modicum of sprightliness and briefly lifted the brand onto the list of top ten sellers. Before 1966 was over, RJR’s Winston had overtaken Pall Mall as the top-selling brand.

By the end of the ’Sixties, Walker had pushed American Tobacco’s non-cigarette business up to 23 percent of the company’s volume, moving into the food field by buying up famous names like Sunshine Biscuit, runner-up to Nabisco in the cookie-and-cracker business, and Mott’s leading line of apple products. Its higher take from non-tobacco revenues, though, reflected American’s continued erosion in the cigarette market, where, after six years of Walker’s frenetic efforts, unit sales were off by 20 percent and headed south.

Joe Cullman at Philip Morris, meanwhile, was playing tortoise to Walker’s hare. Though Marlboro was finally making sustained strides by 1965, the company’s second best brand, Parliament, was on a plateau, and the rest of the PM stable was lame. There was a need for new brands that would broaden the company’s representation on store shelves as well as in vending machines, which accounted for nearly one out of five cigarette packs sold. But Cullman was not exactly awash in surplus cash to chance the savagely competitive cigarette market on a whim. Profits in his still fragile international operations were almost invisible, and whatever materialized was plowed back in and not repatriated to the parent company. The domestic diversification program was proving no great shakes, either. The ASR unit, after grabbing a full quarter of the new market in stainless steel razor blades, was getting rocked now by industry leader Gillette; the Burma Shave line had failed to generate new products to broaden its sales base; and Clark Gum, while tripling its volume in just a few years under PM ownership, still held only 5 percent of the market.

Never particularly innovative, preferring to learn from others’ mistakes before taking the plunge itself, Philip Morris closely tracked Barney Walker’s frenetic moves. Only the debut of Pall Mall Gold 100s caused their eyes to widen, and the idea of a new “luxury length” brand elegantly presented to the
public was brought to Cullman’s attention. He liked it and proposed introducing a competitor using the name of his family’s old company, Benson & Hedges, then adorning a low-selling boutique brand. The name had a nice pedigree, paralleling Philip Morris’s own. Now the game was to present the reborn brand in a way arresting enough to move it beyond the specialty category.

Although many had a hand in packaging decisions, no one at Philip Morris came to exercise more suasion in this area than its manufacturing overseer, Clifford Goldsmith, who achieved a quantum leap in power with the sudden death of affable operations chief Robert Roper, the victim of a heart attack at age fifty during the company’s 1965 Christmas party. Goldsmith was a driving administrator with a perfectionist bent who kept after problem areas indefatigably. Nothing captivated him more than the look of the products he was superintending. “I always felt that a cigarette pack on your table in a restaurant was something you ought to be proud of and therefore should look good,” Goldsmith recounted. But the notion of good looks, Goldsmith understood, varied with a brand’s mission. What was wanted for the B&H package was a look of refinement suited to an upscale market yet not pretentious. The result was a darkly burnished gold package with simulated wood-grained flecks running vertically to enhance the elongated height. The Benson & Hedges name appeared in small navy blue capital letters under an equally diminutive, embossed coat-of-arms that had become the company hallmark; at the base of the pack was the line “Park Avenue New York,” site of the manufacturer’s headquarters and, more pointedly, America’s foremost metropolitan boulevard of ritz. It was a mere cigarette pack, but it had a muted elegance more tasteful than Pall Mall’s glossy Gold 100s. “Philip Morris was appreciative that customers don’t need to be hit over the head with a brand name, but can be attracted by the uniqueness of the imagery and design that come with it,” remarked Walter Landor, San Francisco-based industrial designer, who entered a long-standing relationship with the cigarette maker as a packaging consultant about this time.

Pack design in hand, Philip Morris advertising chief Jack Landry decided to turn away from the Burnett agency, its hands full with the booming Marlboro account, and try a tiny new firm, Wells Rich Greene, to invent an altogether different sort of pitch for Benson & Hedges. The agency was headed by one of Madison Avenue’s few women stars, Mary Wells, who had made her mark at New York’s innovative Doyle Dane Bernbach. The latter’s trademark was the witty transformation of a product’s liabilities into a chief selling argument, as with Volkswagen’s funny-looking little beetle of a car, presented as a marvel of efficiency and economy.

After being rebuffed by the company for requesting that the B&H package be redesigned to have more “pop” in ads, Wells Rich Greene did the unthinkable in the tobacco business—it proposed a funny ad campaign based on the
disadvantages of an extra-long cigarette. Infinite variations on the idea, many of which eventually appeared in print and on the air, were sketched out for Landry: how elevator doors closed on a protruding B&H 100, how it got mashed against a car window when a male smoker drew too close to ogle a good-looking female on the far side, and why a reader should “please hold this magazine a little further away if you’re smoking Benson & Hedges 100s.” Like the Pall Mall 100s, the B&H ads spoke of more puffs per pack, but made little of it, proclaiming instead a still greater advantage of the ultra length: “You’ll never have to worry about lighting your nose.”

Joe Cullman, who did not lack a sense of humor, was presented with the unprecedented B&H campaign in mid-1966. “He made clear that he didn’t admire this approach,” Landry recalled. “He didn’t think you could sell a product by making fun of it.” Instead, Cullman urged a campaign featuring a pretty girl in a gold dress, an allusion to the brand’s gold pack, with the hemline 100 mm. above her knee, an alluring way to illustrate the magic dimension. And off the Philip Morris president went on a summer safari in Africa, leaving Landry and his colleagues despondent. They thought that Cullman’s proposal was a far too blatant use of sex appeal for what was intended to be a classy smoke. But with a post-Labor Day launch fast approaching, there was little time to dream up something else, so Landry, with his boss incommunicado, chose insubordination over mindless compliance. He ordered the “disadvantages” campaign to proceed, with the first TV commercial showing elevator doors closing on an unwary B&H customer’s smoke. “We just thought our idea was better,” Landry said.

What happened next depends on whose memory is consulted, but by some accounts, Cullman returned home over a weekend, switched on his television set, saw the funny Benson & Hedges commercial, got furious, but held his fire. Returning to the office on Monday, he left word for Landry to be in his office at 5 p.m. that Friday—a time that the ad director took to be his moment of dismissal, especially since nothing further was said to him about the B&H commercial. A glum Landry spent the week cleaning out his desk and drinking heartily in wait for the executioner’s ax. Upon arriving at Cullman’s office at the appointed hour, Landry was told by the president’s secretary that her boss had left two hours earlier, with no plans to return. “Don’t worry,” said Landry, “he’ll be back.” So he sat and fretted, but Cullman never showed up. The following Monday, it was business as usual. The two most plausible explanations were that (1) Cullman had attended a cocktail party Thursday night, on the eve of his intended sacking of Landry, had had his ears filled with a chorus of praise for his witty new B&H campaign, and naturally had thought better of his decision to dismiss the disobedient ad director, or (2) the party at which this happened was held on the weekend he returned, but Cullman, prepared to concede that perhaps Landry’s advertising instincts were superior to his own,
nevertheless felt he had to teach his subordinate a lesson for defying him and so made him sweat it out for a week.