Wholly Smokes (6 page)
“The Lady Has a Light” – advertisement for Dunkelmeister Grandee Cigars (1894)
Augustus Badcock
Blessington Badcock was succeeded by his brother Augustus, the first head of the firm to glimpse the full power of advertising. Augustus began with the simple idea that “a pretty girl can sell anything,” and he built mightily upon it. He outlined his plan in a 1913 memorandum:
Rudyard Kipling had it wrong when he said that “a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” The plain fact is, women and cigars are very close to the same thing, at least in the masculine mind. For isn’t the enjoyment of a cigar akin to the enjoyment of making love to a woman? That is, a fiery, forbidden pleasure, enjoyed in private, often after a good dinner.
Perhaps smoking is only a substitute for the fires of passion. A man may smoke to show a woman how manly he is, or to cover his embarrassment with her, or because he has only a burning cigar to kiss instead of her blazing beauty. But when he applies his lips to a “sweet postprandial cigar,” (or pipe, or cigarette) you may be sure he is dreaming of finer after-dinner pleasures.
Think of the cigar divans of days gone by – bordellos disguised as smoking rooms. Think of Carmen rolling cigarettes in the factory.
Think of the female apache dancer, sharing a burning cigarette with the man she adores and hates. And as Oscar Wilde put it, “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
We at General Snuff must find a way of selling this dream, the dream of tobacco as a mistress. We must make the customer feel that, when he lifts the lid upon a box of our cigars, he is unlocking the door of a hareem. Should we succeed in conveying this dream, the world is ours.
One way we might do this is at
drinking establishments. We might consider dressing comely young women in fetching uniforms, and have them pass among the clientele, carrying trays full of cigarettes. These sirens, or “cigarette girls,” as we shall call them, would carry their trays in front of them, just below their admirable bosoms. This guarantees that men would at least look at their wares. A certain amount of decolletage might be added, to further entice…
Gibson Girl –
Inspiration for
Augustus?
When the Great War broke out, Augustus recognized it not only as a time of world upheaval, but also a time of business opportunity.
By 1917, American doughboys were encouraged to pack up their old kit bags with General Snuffs new brand of cigarettes,
Lady Fantasy
. Each enameled tin of cigarettes displayed a pouting, handsome lady with auburn hair, gray eyes and rather misty features. There was nothing indefinite, however, about her well-filled shirt-waist. Augustus had insisted on the substantial bosom. “Our boys are far from home,” he wrote to the advertising artist. “They want their girl, they want their mother, they want something to suck on. Let us push it at them.”
Lady Fantasy cigarettes became so popular that the slogan on each pack – “Fragrant and Graceful”, abbreviated F.A.G. – gave rise to “fag”, the First World War nickname for a cigarette. (In the same way, “Lucifer” brand matches – a company which General Snuff tried to acquire – became the nickname for all matches. Both names appeared in the popular song of the time:
Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag
And smile, smile, smile
Long as there’s a lucifer to light your fag
Then smile, ‘cause it’s the style
But General Snuff found a way to make the government help with its advertising. Lady Fantasy and her bosom were to become ever more prominent as the war continued.
A patriotic poster of 1918 was not, strictly speaking, an advertisement for General Snuff. Instead, it purported to sell War Bonds. The tobacco giant had generously devised this patriotic poster and printed thousands of copies at company expense, volunteering to place them in rail-road stations across the land. The War Department, in gratitude, promised to look into larger orders for General Snuff and Tobacco products.
The poster shows an officer in his tent at night, somewhere in France. The orange candle-light gleams on his hair and the cleft in his chin, as he leans back from the letter he is writing to take a pull at his cigarette. On the table before him, along with his pen, the unfinished letter, and his Bible, there stands a prominent tin of Lady Fantasy cigarettes. The smoke rises from his cigarette and curls back to form a cool blue cloud above his head. This cloud contains a vision of home: a cool summer evening, magnolias around the porch, and a lovely woman in
shirtwaist reclining across a white porch swing. The slogan reads:
I
S
S
HE
B
UYING
B
ONDS
F
OR
M
E
?
Notice that the product is never mentioned. Yet the woman in the dream is of course Lady Fantasy herself, with her auburn hair, mist-gray eyes, not to forget the fantastic bosom. Thus the company contrived not only to hammer home its message without a word, it managed to link the product to patriotism.
But there was even more to the Lady Fantasy campaign. In every tin of cigarettes that went overseas, General Snuff included a trading card showing the same romantic picture as the poster. But here the message was addressed to the troops themselves, using a slightly different slogan:
I
S
S
HE
W
AITING
F
OR
M
E
?
A reassuring subhead added,
“You can always count on Lady Fantasy.”
It might have been a great and wonderful campaign. The poster Lady Fantasy might have become more famous than the finger-pointing Uncle Sam. But alas, the war came to an end. As Augustus wrote in an office memorandum:
This armistice is very bad news indeed. Had we been able to keep the fighting going until 1921 or even 1920, we might have become the top tobacco company in the country. As it is, peace has reared its ugly head, and we must make the best of it. But I cannot help feeling that in ending the war our politicians have, as usual, stabbed us in the back.
The period between the world wars was one of growth and consolidation. The 1918 armistice meant the end of Lady Fantasy. She was far too wholesome and old-fashioned for the Jazz Age. Men no longer dreamed of a Gibson girl – they were beginning to dream instead of a girl who liked to drink gibsons (concocted from bathtub gin), a girl who knew how to flap, how to neck, how to dance the Charleston on the wing of a biplane.
The packet with Lady Fantasy and her slogan “Fragrant and Graceful” (F.A.G.) had to go. Somehow the word “fag” had been debased to a pejorative term for a homosexual. Clearly it was time to scrap Lady Fantasy and start over. But how?
Augustus was getting old. He realized he could not run the company forever, so he began grooming his son LeRoy to take over. He started him in the advertising department. There young LeRoy plunged in, eager to show his stuff.
The trouble was, LeRoy Badcock didn’t have any stuff to show. Under his direction, GST in the 1920s saw many false starts. Lucky Lindy
cigarettes lasted a year, mainly because Lindbergh (who didn’t smoke) never endorsed them. Then came a series of disastrous product names. Charleston Snuff appeared just as interest in the Charleston was disappearing.
LeRoy Badcock
“They’re all dancing something new, called the Black Bottom,” LeRoy complained. “I don’t suppose we could bring out a Black Bottom Snuff?”
“Doesn’t convey quite the right image, sir,” a chorus of advertising lackeys informed him.
“Damn! I suppose we need to rethink.”
Nothing seemed to go right for LeRoy. He launched Houdini cigars in 1926 (the year Houdini died shortly after an escape). He launched Tutanhkamen cut plug (which seemed as popular as a mummy’s curse). Finally in 1929, he launched a new cigar called Wall Street (the crash made it a national joke).
Augustus wasn’t laughing. He informed Le-Roy that he had one more chance to bring a successful product to market. “Son, maybe your problem is all this modernism. We don’t need it. I say, stick to the old tried and trusted products. Remember, a comely young woman can always sell a seegar. Of course it’s your decision, my boy.”
It was 1936 before LeRoy Badcock came up with his next product, a cigar as new, sophisticated, utterly modern as that latest mode of transportation, the airship.
They’re always saying that zeppelins are
cigar-shaped
. By jing, so are our cigars! Why don’t we cash in on that? They say the zeppelins are quiet, smooth, elegant, real tasteful, and just the thing for the upper crust. We too must hammer on those themes. “Relax with a high-class cigar,” stuff like that. We can make our new cigar as exciting as the Graf Zeppelin itself.
Reactions to this odd memo varied. Some thought it was a stroke of genius. The Freudian connotations of zeppelins (the longest objects ever sent into the sky) would perhaps carry over to the new cigar from General Snuff:
