Chapter 3, Part 1

By Frank Tursi, Susan E. White and Steve McQuilkin
JOURNAL REPORTERS
© Winston-Salem Journal

It was a simpler time and a gentler age. There was no Jerry Springer Show, no Melrose Place. Instead, TV viewers in the 1950s had The Last Word, a show about grammar whose host was Bergan Evans, a linguist at Northwestern University. One evening in 1954, Evans asked his panelists to wrestle with the following question: Was it grammatically correct for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. to use ''like'' instead of ''as'' in the slogan ''Winston tastes good like a cigarette should''?

On his way to becoming president of Reynolds, the late Bill Smith had to dress up like a cavalier to promote the new brand. (Journal Photo By Christine Rucker)

Reynolds executives had said that the jingle was colloquial, and Evans agreed. He said that Shakespeare and Keats used ''like'' in a similar fashion.

John Mason Brown, a noted author and drama critic, wasn't buying that argument. He and the other panelists took 20 minutes carping at RJR for butchering the English language. Then Brown ended the discussion. ''You know, I'm sorry, but the sound of this thing gives me physical pain.'' He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of Winstons and lit one. ''But I think the cigarette is great.''

And for RJR it was.

Years later, when RJR had become a distant No. 2, when its cigarettes had become the stuff of lawsuits or, worse, late-night jokes, executives would look back at the introduction of Winston as a marvelous, nearly magical time. Everything clicked, from the marketing to the manufacturing. The company had courted smokers concerned about health without playing to their fears. Like Camel before it, Winston was the right cigarette at the right time.

The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. was once the largest cigarette company in the United States with a powerhouse of best-selling brands: Winston, Salem and Camel. But times changed, and as the case against smoking became more pronounced in the 1960s, RJR failed to adapt to the marketplace. Its rivals would eventually rush past it, and RJR's efforts to catch up would have a profound impact on the company and the cigarette industry.

Bill Hobbs, a former president of Reynolds Tobacco, put it this way: ''When Winston came out we had it all.'' Winston was the bridge between RJR's past and future. Camel had built a tobacco company with a soaring skyscraper in a sleepy Southern city. Winston would do more.

It would establish Reynolds as a powerhouse in American industry, fueling its growth into a multinational company with interests in shipping and energy. And profits from the brand would also help Reynolds diversify into a wide range of well-known consumer products ranging from Grey Poupon mustard to Canada Dry ginger ale.

But the launch of the brand that made Reynolds a mighty company was not a given. One of the most famous consumer brands in American history might not have been born if not for the persistence of a Yankee from Baltimore _ an aging Reynolds sales executive who saw early on that future profits in the cigarette industry were attached to filters.

`A Lousy Smoke'

Edward A. Darr had seen the power of filtered cigarettes while on vacation in Switzerland in 1951. He did an informal survey and found that more than half of the smokers there used filtered brands. The Swiss cigarette manufacturers he visited confirmed the growing clout of filters in the marketplace.

It wasn't just overseas where filters were gaining favor. RJR's rivals were introducing these brands, too, although with mixed success.

Darr knew that RJR needed to get in, but selling the company's conservative leaders on the future of the filter wouldn't be easy.

RJR's executives were hesitant about filters for good reason. There were still questions about whether the health scare would blow over. And, the taste of Swiss smokers aside, the fact of the matter was that each day a third of the cigarettes smoked in the United States _ about 270 million cigarettes _ were Camels.

The brand was a cash cow with a well-known slogan and millions of loyal customers. Any filtered cigarette that RJR introduced would poach some of its smokers from Camel.

Darr, the vice president for sales, saw that as a risk worth taking. Despite its clout in the marketplace, Camel was beginning to slip. Its volume had fallen slightly in 1947 and then remained flat at about 98 billion cigarettes for each of the next three years.

But behind the sales charts and market projections was one other issue that made RJR reluctant to roll out a new brand. The company's last attempt had been a colossal blunder. The brand was called Cavalier, and it left RJR executives wary about messing with their franchise.

Cavalier also had started with a trip. Around 1947, RJR Chairman Clay Williams and his son went to Canada. They smoked some local cigarettes made entirely with flue-cured tobaccos. Williams decided that Reynolds needed a mild cigarette to compete in the growing market for longer, so-called king-size, cigarettes. (Fortune footnote; source on Cavalier and the need for a filter cigarette.)

Reynolds had delayed getting into this end of the business. Its rivals hadn't. American Tobacco introduced Pall Mall Kings in 1937, and executives there watched approvingly as its sales climbed higher each year.

Under Williams' prodding, RJR pushed a king-size brand to market. Cavalier's campaign was built around the phrase ''Extremely mild.''

RJR tested the brand in Providence, R.I., San Francisco, and Peoria, Ill., in 1948 and used testimonials from local smokers in its print ads. The local newspaper campaign sold so many Cavaliers using photos of local people that it looked like the brand was a winner. But when RJR went national, it found out otherwise.

''It was a lousy smoke,'' said Bill Smith, a Reynolds salesman who would later rise to president.

Smith, known as ''Smitty'' to many in the tobacco business, should know. He had the privilege _ or misfortune _ of having to be the Cavalier, dressed up like an extra from The Three Musketeers and plopped down in the events that RJR's marketers cooked up to draw attention to the new brand.

He rode in a Cadillac down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, accompanied by a motorcycle police escort that stopped midday traffic for the Reynolds parade. After the big launch in the nation's capital, Smith traveled the country, making appearances in his swashbuckling regalia.

All the promoting seemed to work. People tried Cavalier. They just didn't come back for a second pack. The blend was too mild. One company executive said it smelled like burning hay.

Even in costume, Smith would sneak back to his car and smoke a Camel just to get the taste of Cavalier out of his mouth.

After Cavalier bombed, Reynolds doctored the blend, changed the packaging and dropped the price. Almost 10 years later, Cavalier still didn't command 1 percent of the market. ''Cavalier,'' Bowman Gray Jr. said, ''was a gigantic blooper.''