Chapter Sixteen

Selling the Unmentionable, and More

DURING ALBERT Lasker’s two-year tenure at the Shipping Board, Claude C. Hopkins had taken the reins at Lord & Thomas. This added new complexities to their relationship.

Lasker appreciated the flexibility that Hopkins’s willingness to lead the firm gave him. “I can only afford to keep on here,” he wrote to Hopkins from Washington in May 1922, “because I know that you and Mr. [Herbert] Cohn and others on the job back there are making it possible for me to live.”¹ And yet, Lasker returned to Lord & Thomas in September 1923 convinced that his agency urgently needed shaking up—even a rebirth. This sense of urgency came from dramatic changes in both the economy and his industry. A new economic wave was cresting, even bigger than the one that had propelled Lasker and Lord & Thomas to success in the first decade of the new century, and Lasker intended to catch it.

The “Roaring Twenties” ushered in a new era in consumerism. Older companies that had been created to serve mainly business customers—companies like General Electric and Westinghouse—now moved aggressively into the consumer market.² The automobile companies founded in the first decade of the new century had gone through wrenching consolidations, and the survivors were now determined to find new customers. These older giants also were joined by a host of new companies in industries that aimed directly at consumers: pharmaceuticals, motion pictures, travel, special-interest publications, and many others. For all of these businesses, it was critical to reach consumers through national magazines and newspapers—and advertising agencies made that all-important connection.

Public policy, too, helped fuel a boom in advertising. During World War I, the Committee on Public Information—an arm of Woodrow Wilson’s federal government—had undertaken what journalist George Creel had described as “the world’s greatest adventure in advertising” to promote public support for the war. In the immediate aftermath of the war, manufacturers responded to the threat of an excess-profits tax by pouring money into their ad budgets, resulting in a doubling of advertising dollars between 1918 and 1920 (from $1.5 billion to nearly $3 billion).³ In that two-year period, N. W. Ayer’s billings increased from $6.5 million to $13.8 million, and Lord & Thomas’s increased from $5.7 million to $11.3 million.⁴

For the first time in a decade, though, Lord & Thomas was no longer setting the pace for its industry. In each of the first four years after Lasker took control of his agency in 1912, he had beaten out Ayer in terms of billings, establishing his agency as the nation’s largest. Beginning in 1916, however, Ayer reclaimed its former top-ranking status, and it continued to top Lord & Thomas until 1923—the year Lasker returned.

Lord & Thomas couldn’t claim the top position in 1923. Instead, that distinction went to the New York-based firm of J. Walter Thompson, now led by the dynamic husband-and-wife team of Stanley and Helen Resor. Stanley Resor had bought out founder Thompson in 1916, and—with an eye toward increasing profitability by concentrating on national firms—jettisoned more than two-thirds of the agency’s three hundred accounts. A Yale graduate (and the first major agency head with a college degree), Resor was fascinated by psychology and the behavior of populations. Resor loved data, and—in 1922—acted on that passion by hiring marketing professor Paul Cherington away from the Harvard Business School to serve as JWT’s director of research. He also recruited John B. Watson, a behavioralist recently fired by Johns Hopkins University for engaging in an affair with one of his graduate students, to serve as Madison Avenue’s first resident psychologist.⁵

In only a few years under the Resors, Thompson swept past the competition. The revitalized agency offered an innovative style of copy and other services that most established agencies, including Lord & Thomas, couldn’t match. Helen Resor—an accomplished copywriter well before her marriage to Stanley in 1917—wrote an ad for Woodbury’s soap (“A skin you love to touch”) that Lasker considered one of the landmarks in advertising history, mainly because it opened the door to using sex as part of the sell.

New competitors were on the horizon. One of them, BDO, opened its doors in 1919. It was founded by three young veterans of the World War I propaganda machine: Bruce Barton, Roy Durstine, and Alex Osborn. All graduates of prestigious colleges, and nearly a generation younger than Albert Lasker, the three principals at BDO took for granted some of his innovations—such as “reason-why” advertising—and moved beyond them. Focusing less on the manufacturer’s perspective and more on the psychology of the consumer, they met with almost immediate success. Thanks to the prodigious personal connections of Barton, Durstine, and Osborn, BDO had thirty-three corporate accounts the day it went into business, and quickly added more. General Motors and the National Biscuit Company came into the fold in 1922, Macy’s and General Electric in 1923, and Union Carbide in 1924. In only a few short years, BDO had surged to fourth on the list of biggest agencies.⁶

The rise of powerhouses and dynamic upstarts in New York must have worried Lasker. The small office that he had put together there in 1910 was foundering. As the industry became increasingly concentrated in New York, Lasker’s agency was at risk of becoming marginalized. It had a healthy office in Los Angeles (opened in 1916), a San Francisco office (that had opened in 1919, closed briefly for underperformance, and reopened in 1922), and a small London operation (also opened in 1922). But New York remained problematic.

Lasker acknowledged that Lord & Thomas had lost ground during his absence, although he preferred to put it the other way around: other agencies had caught up. “I was out five years in public service,” he told his staff members in 1925, “and during that period . . . advertising began to be so widely understood that we no longer stood out.”⁷ Lasker claimed that he held the company back from soliciting new accounts during his absence, fearing that Lord & Thomas might spin out of his control: “In all the years I was gone, we were not anxious for new business. I knew I had a machine that could give good service to those I had and that would hold them, but I was afraid of the machine if it took on new business . . . so we were not aggressive.”⁸

But by 1923, Lasker had decided it was time to change the formula, especially in terms of shoring up the agency’s Chicago base. If this meant starving (or even closing) the New York office, he told Hopkins, then so be it. Reinforcing Chicago’s operations would be “profit and glory enough,” he wrote to Chicago officer manager Herbert P. Cohn. At the same time, he intended to strengthen his agency’s hand at selling, especially to larger national accounts.⁹ Within months of returning to Lord & Thomas, he secured two enormously important clients, with whom—over the course of the next decade—he would dramatically change the consumer habits of America.

It is not clear exactly when Lasker decided that Claude Hopkins had to go. The correspondence between the two men in the early 1920s was mutually respectful, and even warm. But one tiff that erupted in June 1923, just before Lasker left the Shipping Board, suggests that Lasker had to handle the sensitive Hopkins with care.

Hopkins evidently took to heart some passing comments by Lasker to the effect that Hopkins was not one to do “unselfish favors” and didn’t place much stock in cultivating friends. In what must have been a blistering letter, Hopkins objected furiously to Lasker’s comments. After waiting a few days for passions to cool, Lasker responded in a warmly emotional tone:

I never in the world could have meant that you did not cultivate friends and that you never do unselfish favors, speaking in the larger sense of intimate friends in a close circle, because no such thought could find lodgment in my mind or in my heart. No one could have ever been the recipient of a finer friendship than I have always had from you, but jealously I aver that I have always reciprocated that friendship in the fullest.¹⁰

At Lasker’s urging, Hopkins in 1922 began work on a manuscript called Scientific Advertising. The book, published a year later, is a classic on the fundamentals of the industry in its founding era. Was Scientific Advertising an effort to lend even more luster to Hopkins’s name and burnish Lord & Thomas’s reputation by extension? Or was it, perhaps, Lasker’s way to begin easing Hopkins out the door?¹¹

By the fall of 1923, with Lasker barely reinstalled in Chicago, he and Hopkins began differing fundamentally on how to recruit clients. Caught up in his entrepreneurial visions, Hopkins wanted to buy companies and mount advertising campaigns for them. But Lasker, who knew the discomforts of doing business with companies in which he was also a major shareholder, opposed this approach. Ultimately, they failed to resolve these differences, and in the spring of 1924, Hopkins left to start his own copywriting service. The two were now competitors, and Lasker took Hopkins’s moves as a personal betrayal. He fought Hopkins over the rights to Scientific Advertising, and told Hopkins that writing the book was the mistake of his lifetime.¹²

Hopkins’s agency was not a resounding success, and it didn’t take him long to change his strategy. Although this reversal helped bring about a rapprochement with Lasker, the two never worked together again. Hopkins published the highly readable My Life in Advertising in 1927—annoying Lasker once again, who felt that the book underplayed his role in Hopkins’s success—and died five years later.

One of the first major clients to come into the Lord & Thomas fold after Lasker’s return was the International Cellucotton Products Company, makers of a new women’s sanitary product called “Kotex.” The product presented major challenges to Lasker and his agency.

Cellucotton was first produced in 1915 by the paper products company Kimberly-Clark, and was a result of the diversification of the pulp and paper industry in the early ’teens. Originally, the company hoped to market the wood-based product as a substitute for cotton surgical dressings, but demand for the substitute cotton remained weak until the American entry into World War I in 1918. Kimberly-Clark—on the defensive because of its founders’ German roots—announced that it would provide cellucotton to the War Department and the Red Cross at cost.

But even as cellucotton began to be used to dress wounds, enterprising Army nurses found another use for the product: as the raw material for a homemade sanitary napkin. When the signing of the Armistice led the Army to cancel a 375-ton order for cellucotton, Kimberly-Clark scrambled to find new markets for the product.¹³

The strongest advocate at Kimberly-Clark for the use of cellucotton as a sanitary napkin was a Chicago-based salesman named Walter Luecke. Luecke convinced Kimberly-Clark to start manufacturing sanitary napkins in 1919, and in September of that year, soon after the name “Kotex” was coined, an initial shipment was sent to Woolworth & Company. A full month passed before the first box sold—not surprising, given that the product was unknown, unadvertised, and wasn’t even described on its packaging. (The boxes carried only the Kotex name and the Kimberly-Clark logo.) Luecke and his six assistants began visiting retail shops in New York City in October, pushing Kotex hard—but ran up against the enormous challenge of promoting a new product that, for all practical purposes, couldn’t be talked about.

This effort was followed in 1920 by a more prolonged campaign, again aimed at retailers rather than consumers. Luecke worked with Kimberly-Clark chemist Ernst Mahler to place ads containing a history of the product and basic technical information in a series of specialized trade journals and magazines. Once again, the response was disappointing. In the same year, Kimberly-Clark established International Cellucotton Products Company (ICPC), a wholly owned subsidiary, in part to distance the parent company from its unmentionable product.

Finally, in 1921, ICPC began advertising Kotex directly to consumers. The first text, written by Nichols Advertising, shied away from describing the actual purpose of the product, citing instead its wartime origins and talking obliquely about a “new use” for the product discovered by nurses. By late November 1921, the ads finally contained the words “sanitary napkins,” and throughout the following year, the Nichols agency continued to experiment with different marketing approaches.

ICPC was paying heavily for all of these different marketing attempts—$173,000 in 1921, and a projected $200,000 in 1922—but still, the ads failed to produce results.¹⁴ It was time to look for a new agency.

According to the Lord & Thomas account history, ICPC hired Lasker’s agency “because we created a new style of copy, franker, inspiring greater confidence through trained nurses’ recommendations.”¹⁵ This summary was true enough, but it was by no means the whole story. Lasker acknowledged that the copy that had been generated by Nichols was quite good—even outstanding. A new Lord & Thomas campaign written by Frank Hummert (hired into the New York office in 1920 at a princely $50,000 a year) was better still.¹⁶ But a huge barrier had to be overcome before even the most effective copy could do its job: mainstream magazines had to be persuaded to carry the “franker” advertisements. Edward Bok—publisher of the Ladies Home Journal and other leading magazines—had banned the ads from his family of publications.

Bok was then considered the nation’s leading authority on women’s manners and morals; most advertising executives, upon hearing that his decision not to run an ad was final, would have given up. Not Albert Lasker; instead, he hopped on the Broadway Limited with Hummert’s ads in hand and went straight to Philadelphia to meet with Bok. He later recalled the arguments that he made to the publisher:

I don’t agree with your reservations about the Kotex advertising, Mr. Bok, but I respect them, of course. I know they’re based on your vast knowledge of what American women are thinking and what appeals to them. Because of that, I’d like to ask you if you’ll let me put that knowledge to the test, right here in your office. Would you be willing to call in your secretary and have her read this first Kotex advertisement that we’d like to place in the Journal? If she’s embarrassed or repelled by it, I’ll accept your judgment. There’ll be no further argument.¹⁷

Bok summoned his secretary. The door opened to admit a “dignified, white-haired lady, seemingly around sixty”—the very personification of propriety—and Lasker’s heart sank. Bok explained the situation and handed her the copy, which she quietly began to read. About halfway through Hopkins’s text, the woman looked up. “Why, Mr. Bok, this is a wonderful thing,” she exclaimed. “I certainly think we should run this in the Journal. Women deserve to be told about it.”

In those few short minutes, the biggest obstacle to the distribution of a product vitally important to millions of women vanished.¹⁸

A second formidable hurdle arose: women were reluctant to ask for Kotex at their local druggist. The solution turned out to be the “wrapped box” approach, which (again citing the account history) both reflected and protected the “typical 1923 modesty of women.”

At that time, most retail stores still used a full-service model, in which customers would ask clerks for specific items. But asking a male clerk for a sanitary napkin proved too embarrassing for many women. Talking to his staff several years later, Lasker recounted how Lord & Thomas had identified and solved this seemingly intractable problem. “Now, we didn’t have to make investigations among millions of women,” Lasker said. “Just a few of us talked to our wives and asked them if they used Kotex, and we found out they didn’t, and in almost every case it was because they didn’t like to ask the druggist for it.” The solution, Lasker continued, proved to be relatively simple: “We developed for Kotex the simple idea of putting wrapped packages on the dealer’s counter and of advertising in dailies as well as in magazines—diverting part of the appropriation from the perfectly wonderful magazine copy they had been using before and simply saying something in dailies about Kotex and that you could walk into your dealer and walk away with a wrapped package without embarrassment.”¹⁹

In fact, the self-service concept for Kotex had been pioneered several years earlier by a Wisconsin druggist, who had discovered that women would buy more Kotex if the boxes were “wrapped in plain white paper and tied with blue string and then piled on the counter in a pyramid surmounted by a small neat card reading, ‘Kotex—Take a Box—65 cents.’”²⁰ The enterprising Wisconsin druggist had been uncovered by a Nichols Agency copywriter during his travels, and the innovation was promptly reported to ICPC. In 1922, a full year before Lord & Thomas was retained, the wrapped-box model was implemented widely among retailers carrying Kotex.

Lasker’s assertion that Lord & Thomas invented the self-service idea is, therefore, fiction. Nevertheless, retail sales didn’t jump until 1923, when Lord & Thomas began advertising the unorthodox distribution scheme in daily newspapers as well as magazines, so Lasker can claim some of the credit for the wrapped-box approach—and much of the credit for Kotex’s subsequent success.

The Kotex ad budget increased from $400,000 in 1923 to more than $1 million in 1925. Soon, “Kotex” was in the enviable position of being synonymous with “sanitary napkin,” and although the formidable Johnson & Johnson entered the sanitary napkin market in 1926, ICPC continued to control something like 70 percent of the market through the late 1920s.

Hard on Kotex’s heels was another cellucotton product destined to make history. Its origins can also be traced back to World War I, when researchers at Kimberly-Clark began working on an ultrathin form of cellucotton to line gas masks. It never made its way into production gas masks, but in 1923, one of chemist Ernst Mahler’s assistants suggested using the material as a makeup remover. Lasker and sales agent Luecke met to brainstorm, and came up with the name “Kleenex.”²¹

At first, the advertising strategies for the new product were closely related to that of its sister product, Kotex, but Kleenex soon developed a distinct identity. This was a necessity more than a plan: the amazing success of Kotex conferred almost no “halo effect” on its sister offering. Initial sales of Kleenex fell well below the company’s expectations. Lasker’s unscientific market research suggested that the tissue’s 5-by-6-inch size was hurting the product: “I personally asked half a dozen women who I knew spent a lot of money on cosmetics to use the Kleenex, and these half dozen all said, ‘It may be all right, but I can’t use it, it is too small; it ought to be the size that is now being put out in paper by Elizabeth Arden and the Dennison Company’ . . . So I went to the Cellucotton people and told them, and they changed the size to 9 x 10.”²²

Sales started to grow. In 1930, Lasker and Luecke recommended to ICPC that they make a survey to discover how people were using Kleenex, and the results were surprising. Many more people, it turned out, were using the tissue to wipe noses than to remove makeup. This presented a potential boon to ICPC: the market for the product might well triple if it weren’t purely a makeup-related purchase. Quickly, the product’s name was changed to “Kleenex Disposable Handkerchiefs.”

By 1931, Kleenex and Kotex—products that were effectively unknown a decade earlier—were generating nearly half of Kimberly-Clark’s profits. At the same time, the habits of American consumers, and especially female consumers, changed dramatically. Thanks to the combined efforts of inventive manufacturers and creative marketers, people’s lives—and especially women’s lives—became easier, healthier, and happier. Kimberly-Clark’s grateful management invited Lasker to become a stockholder in the private company, and he happily accepted the offer.

The year 1923 also witnessed the arrival of another influential client on Lord & Thomas’s doorstep: the American Tobacco Company.

American Tobacco was a dominant remnant of the American Tobacco Company owned by James Buchanan Duke, which had enjoyed a near monopoly on tobacco production at the turn of the century. In 1911, at about the same time that Standard Oil was broken up, a Supreme Court decision ruled against the tobacco conglomerate—which then held a 92 percent market share—and broke it up into a number of smaller pieces, including R.J. Reynolds, American Tobacco Company, Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, and Lorillard. American Tobacco emerged from the breakup with a distinct advantage over its sister companies, with 37 percent of the market, compared with 28 percent for Liggett & Myers and only 15 percent for Lorillard.

R.J. Reynolds retained 20 percent of the then-thriving plug tobacco trade. But it lacked a cigarette line, which it immediately began developing. After a six-month advertising campaign called “The Camels Are Coming”—aimed at building momentum for the new brand—Reynolds introduced Camels: a blend of piedmont bright tobacco, flavored Kentucky burley, and Turkish leaf. The blend proved an immediate hit, capturing a third of the market by 1917.²³ Camels were soon followed by another Turkish blend, Chesterfields, produced by Liggett & Myers.

American Tobacco, headed since 1911 by a mild-mannered Harvard graduate named Percival Hill, remained oddly passive in the new blended cigarette department, concentrating instead on marketing the fifty-odd brands that the company already owned. In 1916, the company finally introduced Lucky Strike, a name previously used by a popular American Tobacco brand of pipe tobacco. The famous Lucky Strike motto, “It’s toasted!” appeared on the first package, as the company tried to differentiate Luckies from the other (also toasted) blends. Over the next year, Lucky Strike helped American Tobacco make up some lost ground, but by the time the United States entered World War I, R.J. Reynolds still enjoyed greater market share than either American Tobacco or Liggett & Myers. This proved especially important when the U.S. government used prewar market-share figures to allocate its cigarette purchases for the armed forces fighting in World War I.

The wartime experience (and especially the generous cigarette ration provided to each soldier) turned out to be a boon to all tobacco companies, dramatically increasing consumption among those who served, and—after the doughboys’ return—among the entire wartime generation. All cigarette companies benefited, but the market leaders benefited most. In 1922, R.J. Reynolds captured the lead in the industry from American Tobacco for the first time; by 1923, the Camel brand dominated the market with a 45 percent share. A relative newcomer, Philip Morris & Co., incorporated in 1919, also began to capture market share with its popular Marlboro brand.

By 1923, American Tobacco’s leaders were anxious. R.J. Reynolds had been pouring money into advertising (notably the 1921 campaign which introduced the slogan, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”).²⁴ More and more aggressive players were coming on the scene. Meanwhile, American Tobacco’s advertising budget was stretched across a wide range of products, leaving only a modest amount to promote Lucky Strikes, the company’s top seller.

The advertising accounts were dispersed as well: different brands were handled by different agencies. One of these brands, Blue Boar smoking tobacco, had come to Lord & Thomas by way of Lou Hartman, a Lord & Thomas employee who had previously run his own agency and brought the account with him when he joined Lord & Thomas. Hartman came up with a clever scheme for Blue Boar whereby American Tobacco would reimburse to consumers the price of the government tax on a tin of tobacco. The plan enjoyed immediate success, and American Tobacco head Percival Hill took note. He asked Hartman to arrange a lunch with Lasker, and within weeks, the group was lunching at the Vanderbilt Hotel, along with Percival’s son, George Washington Hill, then in charge of advertising for the company.

Percival Hill told Lasker that he was so impressed with the Blue Boar marketing plan that he wanted Lord & Thomas to take over the Lucky Strike account. Lasker—a nonsmoker with little feel for the tobacco trade—hesitated, pondering this unexpected development.²⁵ He asked Hill with whom Lord & Thomas would be dealing, and Percival told Lasker that his son George would be supervising the account. After further discussion, the group struck a deal. George Washington Hill would come to Chicago for a week and check out Lord & Thomas. If by the end of the week he wanted the agency to take the account, a contract would be signed.

It was a bold stroke on Lasker’s part. He may already have sensed the younger Hill’s fiery temperament and impulsive nature. He surely was sensitive to the plight of the ambitious son laboring in the shadow of a powerful father. And Lord & Thomas would need George as a strong ally if they were to enjoy long-term success as the company’s advertising agents.

The wisdom of Lasker’s move became even more evident in 1925, when Percival Hill died, and George Washington Hill prepared to take the reins of the entire company.

Percival Hill had been a solid, steady, dependable manager, with a good mind for figures and a strong inclination to delegate. His son, however, was a tobacco baron of another stripe.

George Washington Hill’s passion for cigarettes—and especially Lucky Strike cigarettes—knew no bounds. Twenty-one years earlier, during his sophomore year at Williams College, he had dropped out of school and gone to work for American Tobacco.²⁶ His first job involved hauling recently purchased leaf from the company’s warehouse in Wilson, North Carolina, at the unimpressive salary of $5 per week. But he worked his way up through the ranks of the company: making cigarettes in Wilson; going on the road as a “drummer,” or salesman; and eventually becoming head of advertising. Unlike his father—who had made his own reputation with the wildly successful Bull Durham plug tobacco—George believed that manufactured cigarettes (as opposed to hand-rolled cigarettes, cigars, or chewing tobacco) were the future of the company. Now he had the chance to prove himself right.

In an era of grey fedoras, Hill showed up for work every day wearing a broad-brimmed Stetson—white or black—which he rarely removed during business hours. He was chauffeured everywhere, and his staff always knew when he was holding court at American Tobacco’s Fifth Avenue headquarters because his Cadillac limousine, with its stacked cartons of Lucky Strikes visible through the windows, was waiting for him curbside.

Hill was notoriously brusque, short-tempered, and volatile. He might be speaking calmly about some subject when, “without warning, he would explode in a tirade at his stenographer, advertising executive, or anyone else who happened to be there.”²⁷

Hill stayed closely involved in every facet of Lucky Strikes, especially its advertising—an approach that created major headaches for Albert Lasker, who tried many times to pull back from his own deep involvement in American Tobacco; only once was he successful, and then only temporarily. The rest of the time, Lasker and Hill alternately fought, made up, and wore each other down. In a 1935 letter to Lasker, George Washington Hill acknowledged his own excesses—“I know I have tried your soul”—but immediately reverted to form, reminding Lasker that “times like these” (i.e., the Depression) imposed an increased burden on all those in positions of responsibility.²⁸ In other words, Lasker should stop complaining and work harder.

Whatever the psychic costs, Hill and Lasker were extremely successful collaborators, mounting campaign after campaign of innovative advertisements. Lasker claimed that he was the creative sparkplug. “Lasker said to me again and again, in the first years,” recalled Sheldon Coons, head of Lord & Thomas’s New York office in the early 1930s, “that Hill made no contribution to the advertising, that Lasker did it all.”²⁹ But Hill, like Lasker, possessed a native genius for marketing. He embraced the Lord & Thomas mantra of “salesmanship in print,” often expounding its fundamentals in his correspondence and conversations with Lasker. He knew and loved his product and had keen insights about how to talk to consumers who could be persuaded to share that passion.³⁰

Lord & Thomas’s first piece of advice to American Tobacco must have come as a surprise: Stop advertising most of your brands.

Lasker argued that rather than maintaining many modestly successful small brands, the company needed to create one overwhelmingly powerful product that could compete with Camels and Chesterfields. “You can’t live unless you have this one brand,” Lasker recalled saying, “because 80 or 90 percent of the cigarette business in this country today is on this one type of cigarette. These other cigarettes and other products were a different type of goods . . . Instead of spending a little money and a moderate amount of money on each of these fifty products, milk them all. Take what you spend on them and the milking of their profits and put it in a big push behind Luckies.”³¹

Hill agreed. As a result, the money formerly spent advertising Blue Boar—the original Lord & Thomas account—and most of the other minor American Tobacco products was diverted to support Lucky Strike.

The first Lord & Thomas campaign on behalf of the now-favored brand built upon the earlier concept of “toasting,” which attempted to differentiate Luckies based on the preparation of the tobacco. The copy stressed the unique benefits of toasting, including improved flavor and reduced acidity, supposedly making it easier on the throat. It was classic Claude Hopkins: true, the tobacco used in Lucky Strikes was heated to somewhere between 260 and 300 degrees during the manufacturing process—but this was common practice in cigarette manufacturing.³²

The brand still wasn’t doing well enough to satisfy the hugely ambitious Hill, so in 1927, Lord & Thomas began complementing the “toasted” theme with a series of advertisements that became known as the “Precious Voice” campaign. This new campaign argued that, in addition to making cigarettes easier on the throat, the vaunted toasting process actually helped protect the throat and voice.

One thing that distinguished “Precious Voice” was its target audience. At that time, the social stigma against women smoking was still powerful. Although Philip Morris had introduced the first women’s cigarette in 1924 (claiming that it was “mild as May”), few women smoked openly, and most restaurants and other public places prohibited smoking by women. But women were beginning to smoke in the home, and Lasker realized that a vast new market was ready to open up. This was brought home to him one afternoon at the Tip Top Inn, a restaurant near his Chicago home, where he was lunching with his wife. Flora tended toward obesity, and her doctor had suggested that she take up smoking to curb her appetite. But on this particular day, when she attempted to light up after lunch, the restaurant’s proprietor rushed over and said that he could not permit a woman to smoke in the main dining room. If Flora wished to smoke, he continued, the Laskers would have to retire to a private room.

“It filled me with indignation,” Lasker recalled, “that I had to do surreptitiously something which was perfectly normal in a place where I had gone so much. That determined me to break down the prejudice against women smoking.”³³ No doubt the prospect of doubling the potential market for Luckies also influenced his thinking. Lasker took his idea to George Washington Hill, and told him that if American Tobacco acted decisively, the women’s market might be theirs for the asking.

Precious Voice—one of the few postwar campaigns that was largely conceived and directed by Lasker—grew directly out of this decision. Lasker decided that testimonials from well-respected foreign women might start to overcome the prejudice against women smokers, and he started with opera singers. “It was very natural that my mind went to the opera stars,” he explained, “because at that time there were only one or two American stars, and the rest were foreign. And if I [could] get the women of the opera, it [wouldn’t] be long until [I’d] be able to get the women of the stage.”³⁴ The subtext, of course, was that women—sophisticated, worldly, even exotic women—who earned their livelihood by singing were willing to trust their precious voices to Luckies.

Precious Voice was one of the first Lord & Thomas advertising campaigns to rely heavily on testimonials, and very quickly, the campaign expanded to include almost all the stars of New York’s Metropolitan Opera.³⁵ Just as Lasker had anticipated, stage and screen stars (both women and men) also rushed to join the chorus of artists praising Luckies. Incredibly, none of the individuals testifying for Luckies were paid for their contributions; they considered the free publicity compensation enough.

The campaign enjoyed immediate success. “Overnight,” Lasker later boasted, “the business of Luckies went up like the land in a boom field where oil has just been found.”³⁶

But it was another campaign that not only catapulted Luckies to the forefront of the women’s market across the United States but also fundamentally revolutionized the cigarette market. There are differing accounts as to which fertile brain conceived this new effort; George Washington Hill claimed that he came up with the idea and pitched it to Lasker, while the Lord & Thomas accounts state that both men came up with the idea independently.

Hill’s version of the story begins in his chauffeured limo. As he was being driven down New York’s Fifth Avenue, he happened to glance out of his car window and see a heavyset woman on a street corner “munching chocolates” (although alternate versions have her chewing gum). Hill then glanced into a taxicab next to him, where he spied a svelte woman smoking a cigarette. Hill rushed to the office and summoned Lasker.

Lasker—as he told the story—was taking a train through Pittsburgh one day when he noticed an article in one of the morning papers reporting that candy manufacturers meeting in the area had appropriated $150,000 to run an advertising campaign against cigarette smoking. “[The candy manufacturers] wanted to stop the growth of cigarettes,” Lasker recalled, “so that money could be used for candy.”³⁷ The candy manufacturers’ campaign, explained the article, would argue that smoking was bad for the nervous system, and that substituting a piece of candy would help quell the appetite for a cigarette. Reading this account, Lasker remembered that the doctor who was then treating his wife had told her that smoking would suppress her appetite—including her taste for sweets.

Lasker’s account suggests that by the time he and Hill next met in New York, they had both hatched more or less the same scheme. Hill said that he didn’t want to hear about Lasker’s new idea until he had shared his own. He pulled a sheet out of his desk drawer on which was written, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a bon-bon.” Lasker was amazed to see his own concept on the page in front of him, but his trained ear caught one mistake. “I think it could be terrific,” Lasker admitted, “but as it is, it’s no good. One word would have to be changed.” He then took a pencil, crossed out “bon-bon,” and wrote “sweet.”³⁸

At the end of 1928, the slogan was added to the Precious Voice campaign, with the women now testifying that they used Luckies to protect both their voices and their figures. The surge was immediate, and overwhelming. Lucky Strike sales increased by 8.3 billion units in 1928 to capture second place among cigarette brands, and by an additional 10 billion in 1929. In that same year, Lord & Thomas’s billings for Lucky Strike ads totaled $12.3 million, or roughly 30 percent of the agency’s entire billings.³⁹

The candy manufacturers screamed. A Brooklyn-based candy maker, Wallace & Co., organized the “National Food Products Protective Committee” to mount a vigorous protest against the campaign. Newspaper editorials, particularly in conservative parts of the country, condemned American Tobacco for exploiting women. Competitors piled on, with R.J. Reynolds mounting an opportunistic campaign of its own: “With a cigaret as good as Camels, the truth is enough.”⁴⁰

In 1929, the Federal Trade Commission—then investigating American Tobacco for alleged unfair business practices—ordered the tobacco giant to discontinue the mention of “sweets” in its advertisements. The National Better Business Bureau also weighed in, complaining that the Lucky ads had “perverted the judgment and character of the advertising industry.”⁴¹ American Tobacco grumbled and backed down, but by then the point had been made many millions of times over. Subsequent campaigns simply stated, “Reach for a Lucky instead.” Savvy consumers knew what was implied, and Lucky Strike sales continued to soar.

Albert Lasker’s return to Chicago after his stint in Washington reunited him with a large network of friends and business acquaintances. At first, this meant gatherings at his Glencoe mansion, twenty-four miles north of Chicago near Lake Michigan. But in the early 1920s, Lasker—flush with cash and eager to realize a long-standing dream—decided to build a grand estate in the lakeside town of Lake Forest, eight miles north of Glencoe.

The estate, which was eventually named Mill Road Farm, comprised just under five hundred acres of land purchased for about $1,000 an acre from meatpacker Louis Swift, and took three years and uncounted millions to complete.⁴² Lasker impishly suggested that the estate should be called “Nonwentsia”—a play on Onwentsia, an exclusive local country club that barred Jews. When completed, the sprawling estate included an impressive residence, a working farm, several greenhouses, a garage and superintendent’s residence, a swimming pool, an 18-hole golf course, and—eventually—a movie theater.

The mansion was designed by David Adler, a prominent residential architect known for his exquisite country houses, which combined the French classical, English Tudor, and Italian Renaissance styles, and the Mill Road Farm mansion was completed during Adler’s heyday. As the centerpiece of an estate of its size, the residence itself was relatively informal, because Lasker was as much interested in comfort as in grandeur. The mansion was enormous, but many of Adler’s architectural touches were chosen to deemphasize its massive scale.

Edward Lasker, who was a teenager when the family first occupied Mill Road Farm, described the stunning estate:

The drive, which had trees every twenty feet or so on each side, was some three-eighths of a mile curving to the main house, which I would guess was thirty thousand square feet. It contained suites, consisting of bedroom, dressing room, bath, and in mother’s case, a boudoir, for each family member, as well as half a dozen guest rooms, about four sitting rooms, an office for father, a wine cellar, pressing room, silver room, and a dozen or so servant’s rooms . . .

The exterior was white-washed brick with red awnings. To the east of the house was a swimming pool which was 100 feet by 40 feet, flanked by two commodious bath houses with red tile roofs.

South from the house to the end of the property’s end was another drive which bisected the two nines of the golf course, which was generally considered one of the three or four finest championship courses in the United States. There were two tennis courts, a guest house accommodating eight overnight residents and manned by a full-time couple. Adjoining the guest house was a practice tee and a nursery conducted for the U.S. Golf Association to test different types of grasses.

Bordering Old Mill Farm Road were the Farm’s barns, housing seventy Guernsey cattle, my polo ponies, as well as coops for approximately 10,000 white leghorns, and space for ducks and pigeons. The Farm operated a daily route selling milk, chickens, and eggs.⁴³

The estate—and especially the 180-acre golf course designed by William S. Flynn—became a sensation among the Chicago elite. John Hertz, the taxicab magnate and intermittently a close friend of Lasker’s, lived fifteen miles down Old Mill Road. In a 1938 interview, he described the thrill of being invited to play eighteen holes at the Lasker estate: “Of course everyone wants to play on his course. There isn’t anybody in Chicago who doesn’t want to play his course . . . There isn’t any set-up like it in America. He had two, three hundred people out there to play golf, maybe more. He gives them a card, and he has locker rooms for them, and he furnishes them with food at a dollar a head, and good food.”⁴⁴

The “card” deserves a word. According to Edward, Albert devised a scheme to make his friends feel welcome on the course: in the first year that the course was open, Albert sent out “golf membership cards” to his friends. Each card was conspicuously marked “1A,” implying to the recipient that he was first in Albert’s affections. The one-dollar charge for food was also purposeful; Lasker calculated that his guests would feel free to indulge themselves at his sumptuous table if they had “paid for” their meals.

The movie theater was added in the mid-1930s, when Lasker unexpectedly received repayment on a debt that he had considered bad. It accommodated up to sixty people, was air-cooled, and showed several first-run films a week. “There just isn’t a place to compare with it,” said Hertz.⁴⁵

Mill Road Farm, Lasker admitted, was his creation. Unlike her husband, Flora was never interested in the trappings of wealth. “She never wanted it,” Lasker said of the estate. “She got a great deal of pleasure out of it, but . . . her whole life would have been different and happier if we had just always lived on five or six thousand dollars a year.”⁴⁶

Within a few years of returning to Chicago, Lasker could already see the effects of his reinvestment of time and energy in the agency’s Chicago headquarters. Billings had increased almost 30 percent between 1924 and 1926, and the agency’s stable of clients was steadily being upgraded.

But even this substantial progress wasn’t good enough as his agency fell further behind its increasingly potent competitors. In 1926, Lord & Thomas (with billings of $18.8 million) was eclipsed by a resurgent Ayer ($26.1 million) and the steadily expanding J. Walter Thompson ($20.7 million). And although reliable figures aren’t available, Lasker’s agency was now being challenged by a formidable fourth-place finisher: BDO.⁴⁷

Meanwhile, another young agency, Young & Rubicam, was creating a different kind of stir. It was founded in Philadelphia in 1923 by Ray Rubicam—a refugee from the Ayer agency—and John Orr Young, who had spent two years in Lord & Thomas’s Chicago office, where he clashed with the powerful Claude Hopkins. Young & Rubicam won the General Foods account, and—in response to pressure from that key client—relocated their agency to New York, where they built up a respectable book of business ($6 million, by 1927).

But in these early days, the challenge they presented to the industry’s status quo owed more to their unorthodox approach than their billings. Unlike the established agencies, Young & Rubicam was a free-spirited shop, full of unconventional characters who kept odd hours and didn’t respect protocol. And in explicit contrast to the Hopkins model, which counted on constant reiteration of simple themes until those themes were exhausted, Ray Rubicam pushed his creative talents to constantly develop new directions for his clients.⁴⁸ By 1945, Young & Rubicam could boast of $53 million in billings, second only to J. Walter Thompson ($73 million).

Against this turbulent backdrop, Lasker decided to take drastic action. For the first and only time, he brought in a partner, and changed the name of his agency: a step he hadn’t taken even when he assumed control of Lord & Thomas decades earlier.

Through his friend David Sarnoff, head of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Lasker met a rising advertising star named Thomas F. Logan. Logan had been the Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer for ten years before starting his own agency in Manhattan in 1919, quickly becaming known as a “wizard of institutional advertising.”⁴⁹ According to Lasker’s aide-de-camp Ralph Sollitt, Logan was deeply involved in the formation of RCA and had helped bring Sarnoff into the company. “Logan was the man more than anybody else,” Sollitt said, “who picked out Sarnoff, and who sold Sarnoff on the idea of going into the Radio Corporation.”⁵⁰ Sarnoff chose Logan’s agency to represent RCA, and Logan began polishing Sarnoff’s reputation as a major corporate leader.

The relationship between Sarnoff and Logan went well beyond business. Logan once confessed to Sarnoff that it was a “wonderful thing to find in friendship an understanding that permits you to be wholly honest and literally think out loud.”⁵¹ Sarnoff’s relationship with Lasker (whom he first met during the Leviathan’s trial run) was equally close. To an interviewer in 1938, Sarnoff said that he would give “no one a higher rating for character and integrity than Albert Lasker,” and asserted that Lasker had a capacity for friendship “given to very few people in the world.”⁵² For his part, Lasker had enormous respect for Sarnoff, both as an individual and as a businessman, and in the 1930s even offered Sarnoff the presidency of Lord & Thomas at the astounding salary of a million dollars a year. Sarnoff, happy at RCA and well aware of his friend’s reputation for burning through chief lieutenants, politely declined.⁵³

Sarnoff and Lasker talked often about their respective business challenges, including—in Lasker’s case—the struggling New York office. No doubt they also talked about Lasker’s newfound determination to groom a successor to take over the agency. With these two themes in the background, Sarnoff decided that Logan and Lasker should meet, and arranged for the two of them to join him at a Gridiron dinner in Washington. Sarnoff subsequently brought Logan with him to Mill Road Farm, where, according to Sarnoff, “those two fellows fell in love and out of it came the merger of Lord & Thomas and Logan.”⁵⁴

The news, which broke in the spring of 1926, caught the business community by surprise. In a brief article that was kinder to Logan than to Lasker, Time described the merger as an unlikely marriage of opposites:

Thomas F. Logan is just the opposite of the aggressive, hammering, obviously successful Lasker. He is slimmer, fairer, quieter—not smoother, for dynamos of the Lasker type are well-oiled—but gentler, more subtly persuasive . . . The effects of his work are felt quite as intimately by the individual consumer [as are Lasker’s]—in a comfortable, punctual train; a well-appointed ship; a sound security. But the distinction between the Messrs. Lasker and Logan, in what they do and how they do it, is as marked as their conjunction is notable.⁵⁵

Logan brought in a client list that included Anaconda Copper, the shipping giant International Mercantile Marine, RCA, and—most tantalizing—a General Electric subsidiary. On first glance, the initial benefits of the merger flowed mostly to Logan. The Lord & Thomas client list was many times as long as Logan’s, and the Chicago agency’s annual billings dwarfed Logan’s. (Logan before the merger was doing around $5 million a year, compared with Lord & Thomas’s $18.8 million.⁵⁶) But the merger reestablished Lasker’s agency as second only to Ayer, and almost overnight created a strong presence in New York. And thinking long term, Lasker believed Logan had the skills and contacts needed to take over the whole agency.

It was not to be. On August 8, 1928, just over two years into the partnership, the forty-six-year-old Logan died at his summer home of a previously undiagnosed heart condition.⁵⁷

Logan’s premature death left Albert Lasker with two dilemmas. The first was a financial settlement with Logan’s widow; the second was the continuing challenge of the New York office. The anointed miracle worker had been removed from the stage; now what was Lasker going to do about New York?

To tackle the settlement problem, Lasker turned again to Sarnoff. Lasker framed the problem as follows: Lasker and Logan had made a deal whereby Lasker would retire gradually and Logan would take over the company. Now, Logan was dead, and Lasker had yet to gain significant advantage from the partnership. Lasker had to put a value on Logan’s share of the merged company, the accumulated goodwill, client list, and other assets of which “belonged” more to Lasker than to Logan.

“I don’t know how to deal with [Logan’s] widow,” Lasker told Sarnoff. “I don’t want to do anything that would be inequitable or unfair either to her or to me.”⁵⁸ Lasker then made an extraordinary request: Sarnoff would have to figure out how to settle the matter. “I hate to put you in this position,” Lasker said, “but you simply have got to take the job, being the friend of both parties, and probably the one in which his widow has the most confidence.”

Sarnoff didn’t like the prospect of being the intermediary “between a dead friend and a living friend.” Lasker insisted, however, and the RCA head reluctantly agreed to talk to Mrs. Logan. Sarnoff dreaded the prospect of broaching the subject with Logan’s widow, but she spared him that embarrassment by bringing it up herself, and essentially making the same request: could Sarnoff broker a deal with Lasker?

Sarnoff agreed to arbitrate a settlement on two conditions. First, his word would be final; both parties would have to accept whatever he decided. Second, no lawyers would be involved until after he had reached his judgment. Lasker and Mrs. Logan agreed to these conditions.

Sarnoff first developed a complete picture of the net worth of both parties. He was not much surprised by what he had learned. Lasker, as Sarnoff knew full well, was a very wealthy man, and Mrs. Logan was well-off. But there were other factors to weigh, as well. After thinking it through, Sarnoff reached his conclusion, and called for a meeting with Lasker. Before revealing his bottom line, he explained to Lasker how he had reached it:

Albert, there are several things I am taking into consideration. And these are the considerations: (1) That the man who is paying is alive and rich, the person who is to receive this money is a widow, whose husband is dead, and who by comparison certainly has no such wealth as you have. (2) That the man who is paying is a Jew, and the widow and her former husband are not Jews. (3) That whatever mistake is made in this figure, must be a mistake on the side of generosity. Let others criticize you for having paid too much, or her for having accepted too much, or me for having determined too much. But let there be no criticism on the reverse side of the situation.

Based on the purely financial considerations, Sarnoff told Lasker that Logan’s stock was probably worth about $240,000. But that wasn’t the right figure. Instead, he proposed that Lasker pay Logan’s widow $1 million. “You can afford to do it,” he told his friend, “and by paying substantially five times what a court of equity might determine, you will more than answer all the specifications I have laid down.”

Lasker was stunned; he had expected a buyout figure closer to a quarter of a million dollars, and the price Sarnoff named—a million dollars!—seemed exorbitant. Swallowing hard, he said that he would abide by his friend’s judgment. “I think you have decided more than I should be asked to pay, [and] more than she is entitled to,” he said, “but when I asked you to take this job of mediator, which was a labor of love more than anything else, I meant it, and I said I would accept your decision, and if you say one million dollars, one million dollars it is.”

The story had an ironic postscript. Mrs. Logan—an avid horsewoman—turned over $300,000 of her settlement to the exclusive Sleepy Hollow Country Club in Scarborough, New York, so that the club could build a well-appointed stable for its members’ horses. At the time, Sleepy Hollow rigorously excluded Jews.

This stung both men. “The horse was eligible,” Sarnoff grumbled, “but not me.”⁵⁹

Lasker’s second business dilemma involved far higher financial stakes, and took much longer to resolve. The New York office, now largely built around the staff inherited from Logan, was still struggling. Many of Logan’s employees had come to him through clients and were not advertising men. Because New York was home to two major accounts—RCA and American Tobacco—the office was in little danger of being shut down. But Lasker was frustrated at the many people working for him in New York who didn’t appear to be doing much work. “Lasker not only despised these men who were not advertising men,” recalled one associate, “but they were getting dough besides, and his dough.”⁶⁰

Lasker now had to choose a new director for the New York office almost sight unseen—in part owing to the suddenness of Logan’s death, but also to Lasker’s increasingly fragile mental state toward the end of 1928. He first installed Logan’s longtime colleague, Ames Brown, in the job; but Brown didn’t prosper. In the end, Lasker turned to his utility man, Ralph Sollitt.

He took the job reluctantly. “Sollitt never wanted to be head of this business,” Coons recalled. “Sollitt didn’t consider himself an advertising man; he just wanted to help Lasker.”⁶¹ Within several months, however, Sollitt had cleaned house, buying out all of the Logan holdovers—the cost of which reached into the millions of dollars—and bringing in an almost entirely new staff.

Albert Lasker’s record of accomplishment in the 1920s documents a business genius at the height of his creative powers. The second golden era at Lord & Thomas was powered mainly by an amazing burst of creative energy from him.

By 1928, though, Lasker was drained. In that year, he had yet another serious breakdown—at least his third—and spent several months at the Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore recovering. He ventured out from Hopkins only sporadically, and then only to deal with serious crises.

One of these crises was a proposed summit in Washington with George Washington Hill, called at Hill’s urgent request. Everyone understood that when Hill called a meeting with Lord & Thomas, he expected Lasker to attend—a challenge, in this instance, since Lasker was hospitalized and incommunicado. Neither the subject nor the outcome of that meeting was recorded, but one aspect of it remained etched indelibly on the minds of those in attendance.

Sollitt was there. He recalls that against almost incredible odds, considering the depths of his depression, Lasker summoned up his energetic, passionate self. “The part that Mr. Lasker performed,” Sollitt later said, “would have been enough to send most anybody to the hospital, because he was so intense and acting and dramatizing everything.”⁶² After battling his way through a three- or four-hour marathon with the indomitable Hill, Sollitt recalls, Lasker had “fought the thing and got it all shaped around the way he could.”

At the end of the slugfest, an exhausted Lasker announced, “I am glad that is over; now I can go back to Johns Hopkins and finish my breakdown.”

Unlikely heroics like these compelled people to close ranks behind Lasker in his dark periods. Family, employees, and most clients—with the notable exception of George Washington Hill—learned to live without Lasker, when necessary. The brilliance that shone through his creative periods more than made up for the intermittent darkness.