Johnny on the Spot

Twenty three year old Johnny Roventini was employed as a bellboy in the lobby of the New Yorker Hotel in 1933 when his potential for bringing a living presence to Philip Morris’s bellboy brand character was spotted by an advertising executive - they would later refer to him as their human trademark. His high-pitched vocal delivery, youthful and perky manner and  diminutive stature worked to great effect in switching smokers to the Philip Morris brand in radio, cinema and print advertising.  The figure of the bellboy was a stock character in the American repertory - a much used device for switching scenes, instantly curtailing the dialogue with a peremptory call for Doctor/Colonel/Bishop/Professor Hackenbush.  This is the world that Johnny now found himself in, courtesy of his service to Philip Morris, there would be no more carrying calling cards on silver platters around a crowded Manhattan hotel lobby. When he wasn’t posing for the advertising photographer, he was at the radio microphone swapping snappy one-liners with Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball in Morris-sponsored broadcasts.  At the height of his popularity there was a brigade of up to 10 other Johnnys in circulation, bringing Philip Morris to a nationwide audience in multiple simultaneous locations.  The company was and remains a major player in cigarette manufacture and played a significant role in the ruthless campaign to deny any link between smoking and ill health.  A corporate curiosity was the readiness of the business to hire workers from the African American community from the factory floor to senior management at a time when most of their rivals scrupulously avoided integrating their workforces.  This was not quite the enlightened policy it may seem to be - among the large company portfolio there were a number of menthol brands which market research discovered were extremely popular with African American smokers. Later, Philip Morris would become notorious for saturating black neighbourhoods with poster advertising for its menthol products.  At the end of his long and prosperous life in 1998, Johnny Roventini had enjoyed a longevity that few regular smokers of Philip Morris products would have enjoyed and nowhere have I seen any evidence that he ever smoked a single cigarette.

 

Lucky People

 

The American Tobacco Company (manufacturers of the Lucky Strike cigarette brand), unhappy at trailing Camel cigarettes in public popularity turned to Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of the public relations industry) to revitalise their product and encourage female smoking. Bernays pursued his target with two strategies. The first was to overcome the female inhibition about smoking outdoors by breeding the confidence to light up anytime and anywhere on equal terms with men. In 1929 Bernays hired a small army of glamour models to march in the New York City Easter Parade flagrantly and imperiously smoking Lucky Strikes in full view of the assembled public. The subsequent press coverage of this transgressive event was a classic instance of the publicity that money cannot buy.

 

The second strategy was to promote cigarette smoking on the cinema screen by circulating directors and producers with handy guides to the wide range of dramatic possibilities that can be enhanced by the imaginative deployment of a cigarette in the hands or mouths of the cast. Bernays understood that cinema audiences could be depended on to imitate what they saw on screen and obediently smoke their way through moments of emotional stress and tension. Bernays called this process, engineering consent. This was the era of the green Lucky Strike pack and one of Bernays’s greatest concerns was that the female smoker, endowed by nature with a superior sense of colour relationships, might be put off by the shade of green, finding it clashing with their favoured choice of tones and shades. Much energy was expended on a campaign to persuade the couture industry of the wondrous potential of green as a high fashion colour to little effect. The green neurosis persisted until 1941 when Raymond Loewy designed the white pack with the famous target on both front and back. The advertisers congratulated themselves on having doubled the publicity potential of the pack without spending an additional cent.

   

The services of Hollywood stars were always available if the price was right and copywriters carefully crafted the form of words that would help seal the deal with smokers. The comforting fiction that nationally recognised figures from the movies, with their enormous disposable incomes could find nothing better than Lucky Strike placed them, for an instant, on an equal footing with their audience. Every actor had a similar story to tell – without Lucky Strike they could never have survived their punishing work schedule or maintained the expressive tones of their all-important voices. Most participants cultivated a frosty air of hauteur – only a few deigned to look with favour on their admirers but they all agreed that nothing eased throat irritation more effectively than a cigarette.