A swirl of misinformation
You think scary pictures will work? Look at the 1950s, when cigarette firms could make anything look cool
Frank Sinatra, exuding crisp sophistication, a squared pocket handkerchief peeking out of his suit jacket, a fedora tilted back from his forehead, eased into the opening words of I Get a Kick Out of You.
Behind him, in this 1950s black-and-white television appearance, was a giant blowup of what looks like an album cover, with the title Music for Smokers Only.
And Sinatra was smoking, all right, even as he sang. He took deep puffs between phrases; inhaling, exhaling a thick plume of smoke, then: I get no kick from champagne … . He held the cigarette between his first and second fingers throughout the song, sometimes flicking the ash as percussive punctuation; at moments, he was absolutely encased in white smoke. Once he had to briefly turn his head to clear his throat, but then, cigarette aloft, he sang on.
This presentation, included in a new boxed DVD set of vintage Sinatra performances, must have been an unremarkable sight half a century ago: Americas most revered singer, a man who set the tone for how other men wanted to behave, puffing away on national TV even as he worked at his craft. It was a reflection of what life in the United States looked like, what the culture expected.
What might the Sinatra of the 1950s and the men and women who watched and listened to him have made of the pictures that federal regulators now plan to require on every cigarette pack sold in the United States, beginning in 2012? The images, meant to cover fully half the packs surface area, are purposely grim and gruesome: smoke billowing from a tracheotomy hole in a mans neck; a woman blowing smoke in an infants face; a toe tag attached to a corpse; a colourful rendering of a diseased lung; a cancerous lip; a man stricken with an apparent heart attack; another man in a coffin; tombstones in a cemetery.
Because this strategy for discouraging smoking has been building for decades, beginning with the first tepid warning labels in 1966, it is easy to forget the blithesome way cigarettes used to be presented to the public. But a look back at old magazine ads demonstrates how the tobacco industry once could dismiss any suggestion that cigarettes might pose harm. In one ad from 1950, a womans dancing legs protrude from the bottom of an oversized Old Gold pack, which covers her head and torso. No song and dance about medical claims … Old Golds specialty is to give you a treat instead of a treatment!
In another ad, from 1946, a beaming mother and daughter are shown with their family doctor. The text below declares that 113,597 doctors from coast to coast had been asked to name the brand they preferred to smoke. Thousands of responses from general physicians, diagnosticians, surgeons yes, and nose and throat specialists too determined that the most-named brand was Camel.
A 1938 Lucky Strike ad features a testimonial from the movie actress Dolores Del Rio, whose throat was purported to be insured for $50,000. I take no chances on an irritated throat, Del Rio says. No matter how much I use my voice in acting, I always find Luckies gentle.
Smokers were portrayed as willing to do battle for their brands. Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch! says a woman holding a cigarette in a 1964 ad, smiling under a black eye. The tagline: The taste that makes Tareyton smokers so aggressively loyal. Cigarettes were promoted as being calming for family life. A 1950 ad shows a pensive-looking baby below the words, Before you scold me, Mom … maybe youd better light up a Marlboro.
Who, back then, could have foreseen that one day cigarette makers would be required to wrap their own packages in images of suffering and death?
In that long-ago TV appearance, after he had sung the final words you give me a boot, I get a kick out of you Sinatra seemed just about to exit. But first he reached back toward the table and snatched up his pack of smokes.
-Bob Greene