As a teenager in the early 1980s, I concluded that the simplest way to mature into a symbol of masculine attainment would be to move to Colorado and buy a cowboy hat.
Barring that, I could smoke Marlboro cigarettes.
Since I was a teenager, with no automobile and a couple hundred bucks in my bank account from a summer job as a Little League umpire, the cigarettes were the obvious choice.
Luckily, Marlboro cigarettes had matured, similar to the way I was hoping to mature.
When the Phillip Morris Company first began advertising Marlboros in the 1920s, the brand was marketed to women. The original ad campaigns featured rich ladies elegantly smoking… and promises that the cigarette wouldn’t smudge their lipstick.
In the 1950s, when filtered cigarettes began to hit the market, the now-filtered Marlboros were still seen as ‘feminine’ — as were all filtered cigarettes, apparently.
Real men smoked unfiltered cigarettes.
Real men didn’t fear things, like lung cancer.
Then in 1954, a marketing director at the Leo Burnett advertising agency had a brilliant idea. Since the vast majority of smokers were men, maybe Marlboro should be marketed to men? Kinda made sense. So ads began to appear, featuring manly dudes smoking a Marlboro. The agency soon noticed that whenever the Marlboro ads featured a photo of a cowboy, there was a slight increase in sales. Hence, the birth of the Marlboro Man.
My hero.
Mostly, I was still too young to grow a mustache, but not too young to buy cigarettes at the corner convenience store, if I bought them when my buddy Dave was tending the cash register. I normally bought two packs. One for me, and one for Dave.
Eventually, the mustache grew in, and the next step was to learn how to rope a sprinting mustang horse, while keeping the cigarette in my mouth. No mean feat.
The dream of becoming a real Marlboro Man pretty much required me to move to Colorado, or, if worse came to worst, Utah or Wyoming.
Turned out that Colorado already had enough cowboys to meet its ‘ropin’ and brandin’ quota. Besides which, have you ever tried sitting on a horse all day? It’s not exactly comfortable. So probably all for the best, that I ended up a journalist. At least I can write about manly men.
Apparently, the advertising campaign dreamed up by Leo Burnett agency catapulted the Marlboro brand from less than one percent of the cigarette market to the fourth-biggest brand in less than a year, ultimately becoming the top cigarette brand in the world, outselling the previous best-seller, Winston.
But it wasn’t just the Marlboro Man who helped me get hooked. In the 1970s, scientists at RJ Reynolds were trying to figure out why their competitor’s cigarette brand was outselling Winston cigarettes, so they ‘reverse engineered’ the Marlboro, and discovered that, by adding ammonia to the tobacco, Phillip Morris was raising the alkalinity and creating “free” nicotine, which was rapidly absorbed — getting to the brain faster than an intravenous injection.
“In essence,” Reynolds’s scientists reported, “a cigarette is a system for delivery of nicotine to the smoker in attractive, useful form.”
Here’s Richard Hurt, a now-retired Mayo Clinic addiction expert who testified during tobacco company litigation, speaking to journalist Jim Carrier:
We knew that nicotine was addicting, but we did not realize that [the Marlboro] cigarette was the most sophisticated drug delivery device that’s ever been invented… This thing looks so harmless, the little white thing that you put in your mouth and puff… It was criminal what they had done to my patients, who, unbeknownst to them, had become addicted to a product that was specially designed to do nothing more than to get them addicted, and to kill them.
One day, my wife Darlene made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
“Louis, you know you’re going to kill yourself if you keep smoking cigarettes. And there’s nothing I can do about it. So I am going to go downtown and buy a life insurance policy on you.
“As you know, a life insurance policy for a smoker is a lot more expensive than a policy for a non-smoker. In fact, you can hardly believe how much this life insurance policy is going to cost our family. And unfortunately, you will not live to enjoy any of the benefits of the policy.
“or… you can quit smoking, and I will reconsider buying the life insurance.”
I quit that very day, cold turkey. It wasn’t hard at all. I simply weighed in my mind how much I enjoyed smoking Marlboros, compared with how much I enjoyed not giving my money to insurance companies.
Now that Darlene and I are divorced, I could easily go back to smoking. But I’ve been reading about the Marlboro Men who have died of lung disease.
Also, I’ve misplaced my cowboy hat.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.