Chapter 5, Part 2

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

Bathed by the golden light of chandeliers and engulfed by the intoxicating aroma of white truffles, Frank Colby dined on a roasted apple stuffed with pate de foie gras and spoke in French or German to the waiters hovering nearby.

The Lespanasse in New York is a place where a bowl of soup costs 30 bucks and the cut flowers on each table are changed hourly. Amid the elegance of its hand-woven silk tablecloths and sparkling crystal goblets, an 80-year-old transplanted European with a taste for fine wine and milk-fed veal can be transported to the Tour D'Argent in Paris or the Relais de Jardin in Rome.

In addition to a modern laboratory, Reynolds researchers had access to an exhuastive library of all available published information about tobacco and its possible relation to the health of smokers. (Journal File Photo)

It all raises a question: How did Frank Colby ever survive in Winston-Salem, where the idea of haute cuisine was the chunky outside-brown plate at Mr. Barbecue?

''We ate at home a lot,'' he said.

For more than 30 years, Colby was RJR's minister of information. Among the first scientists Kenneth H. Hoover hired in 1951, Colby became one of the tobacco industry's leading experts on the issue of smoking and health, a researcher whom RJR executives and lawyers relied on for the latest scientific information. Colby helped formulate the company's response to the growing health threat and prepared industry lawyers for their courtroom battles. In turn, he has been dragged into court by tobacco's opponents.

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.

From the beginning his story has never wavered. There is no proof that smoking causes disease, he has written and said time and again. As more scientists outside the industry condemned smoking, Colby's belief in the opposing view only got stronger. ''My formula for survival since I was a little boy, and it's only half of a joke, is very simple: Everybody says so. Therefore, it's wrong,'' he said after the last of the roasted apple disappeared. ''I have been thinking unconventionally all my life.''

Watching the Nazis enforce their brand of truth on Germany bred in Colby a deep distrust for the official version of things. He grew up in Muhlhausen, a small town in the middle of the country. His father, Fritz, was an ophthalmologist and the chairman of the local medical society. Paula, his mother, was an Oppenheimer, one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Germany.

''My mother was much less intelligent than my father, but she perceived the dangers of Nazism the same as I did,'' Colby said. ''I recognized at the very beginning what was going to happen to Jewish people.''

Colby was 15 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, and he urged his parents to leave the country while there was still time. His father refused. The Nazis would need good doctors, he said. Paula wouldn't leave without her husband.

They did agree to send their only child to Switzerland after his graduation from high school the next year, but Colby didn't feel entirely safe. While attending the University of Geneva, he began training to swim the English Channel, practicing in a lake outside the city. If the Germans violated Swiss neutrality, Colby intended to make his way to northern France and swim to safety.

In November 1938, the inevitable arrived. The Nazis hauled Colby's father off to a concentration camp. The cruel irony, Colby said, was that his father was an atheist who rarely attended services in the town's small synagogue.

A crude wooden casket arrived in Muhlhausen a few weeks later, and Paula was threatened with imprisonment if she opened it. The Nazis told her that her husband had died on Nov. 21. They didn't say how. She buried him in the town's small Jewish cemetery.

Many years later, Colby would learn that his father, who was 58 when he was taken, was forced to sleep outside in the approaching winter with no blanket. Each morning he was doused with cold water. The resulting pneumonia was, of course, not treated.

For the first time since leaving, Colby returned to his hometown last year for the commemoration of the old synagogue. He took the opportunity to attend to some unfinished business. He changed the word ''died'' on his father's tombstone to ''murdered.''

''It's something I felt I had to do,'' he said.

So was leaving Switzerland in 1941 after getting his Ph.D. in chemistry. Hitler was too close for comfort.

Colby spent five years in Cuba before arriving in the United States in 1946. He was at Commercial Solvents in Terre Haute, Ind., the next year working under Hoover, who gave him the job of starting the company's science library.

When he needed someone to do the same thing at RJR, Hoover turned to Colby, who arrived in Winston-Salem knowing little about the South that wasn't in a William Faulkner novel. An urbane man who still keeps a season ticket to Lincoln Center, Colby wasn't sure he would like Winston-Salem. Hoover promised him complete freedom and a budget to match. He also said that Colby was free to leave once the library was up and running. But Colby would remain for 32 years.

Staying, he said, became a matter of principle as he began to review the scientific literature and became convinced that the case against tobacco was wrong. The industry's critics, he said, have developed such an irrational dislike for smokers that he's reminded of the anti-Semitism he experienced in Germany.

''When the American Medical Association and the American Cancer Society admit they made a mistake, I'll resign the same day,'' said Colby. At the time of his interview, he was a paid consultant for RJR's lawyers, reviewing scientific studies and working out of an office on New York's Park Avenue. He has since retired.

Neck in a Noose

When Colby set out to build RJR's library, there were no established methods or easy way of gathering the information. Practical computers were years away. Colby selectively searched scientific literature for authors and citations. He attended scientific meetings, bought books, and subscribed to magazines. He kept an office at the New York Public Library for two years, where he copied articles and shipped them south.

In that slow, methodical way, he compiled a library that by 1958 consisted of 10,000 volumes. Colby and his staff were adding about a million pieces of information from the literature each year. They sent much of it out to the company's scientists for their review, and they may have been a little overzealous.

Alan Rodgman, a fellow researcher, once chided Colby for sending him an article whose only mention of tobacco was a ''cigar-shaped dirigible.''

''In the beginning I was responsible for all of tobacco, and smoking and health was a side issue,'' Colby said. ''But with time, smoking and health became so important that I delegated to co-workers the work on tobacco technology and concentrated solely on smoking and health. I knew I was putting my neck in the noose.''

As the first full-time employee at RJR to review and collect smoking and health studies, Colby replaced A. Grant Clarke, a man company lawyers would now rather not talk about. For 11 years before the advent of a real research department at RJR, Clarke ran the company's Medical Relations Division. Its address, One Pershing Square in New York, was the side door of the William Esty Co., RJR's longtime ad agency and Clarke's real employer. His main job was to recruit doctors to support Camel advertising campaigns. Smokers in the 1940s who were curious about ads that ran in medical journals touting the beneficial aspects of smoking Camels were advised to write the ''MRD.'' Clarke sent them doctors' testimonials that backed up the claims

Later, Clarke reviewed health studies for Reynolds, though he didn't have any scientific training.

Colby shared an office with Clarke in the early 1950s and became alarmed that Clarke was misinforming RJR management by failing to send unfavorable studies to Winston-Salem for fear of upsetting executives there. Colby told Hoover that Clarke was a quack.

That didn't prevent company executives from appointing Clarke in 1954 to represent RJR on the search committee that hired a scientific director for the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and screened applicants for the committee's scientific advisers. Clarke was billed as representing Reynolds' Bureau of Research Information. The other tobacco companies sent seven directors of research, a vice president of research and a vice president of manufacturing to the screening committee.

The Medical Relations Division became part of RJR's sales department in 1953, and Clarke left the Esty agency three years later. He died shortly afterward.

''As far as the substance of Grant Clarke's action, the best answer may be that no one is very familiar with what he did, but he was taken off the medical relations program and was eventually `let go,' '' RJR lawyers noted in an internal report in the mid-1980s. ''The most important point is: The less said the better. No response to whatever plaintiffs are able to uncover may be the best response.''