.
Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co. advertisement for Chesterfield cigarettes: Life, 20 September 1937 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co. advertisement for Chesterfield cigarettes: Liberty, 8 August 1936 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
American Tobacco Co. advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes: Good Housekeeping, 1 March 1935 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. advertisement for Camel cigarettes: Good Housekeeping, 1 November 1933 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. advertisement for Camel cigarettes: Good Housekeeping, 1 December 1933 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. advertisement for Camel cigarettes: Good Housekeeping, 1 December 1934 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. advertisement for Camel cigarettes: Good Housekeeping, 1 March 1935 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. advertisement for Camel cigarettes: Good Housekeeping, 1 June 1935 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. advertisement for Camel cigarettes: Good Housekeeping, 1 December 1935 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
P. Lorillard Co. advertisement for Old Gold cigarettes: Life, 12 December 1938 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
15 comments:
OH wow, these are great! My debutante daughter really taught me to smoke . . . Very zesty. I think I might just light up now.
The parrot is right out of a Marquez novel.
The generosity of the younger generation is astounding. While at my town house or aboard my yacht, I know how important it is to be gay and vivacious at all times. And these marvelous devices provide that essential "lift", yet, miraculously, without making my nerves jangle overmuch. I just hate that "jumpy" feeling, don't you, darling?
Yes, the brilliant Marquez parrot... it's almost "ducky".
And that's not a lot of quack, my dear, I can assure you.
Third one down...Maureen O'Hara? Deborah Kerr?
Lucky Strike Tin
http://www.etsy.com/listing/83036432/lucky-strike-tin?ref=v1_other_2
David,
Maureen would have been fifteen at the time, Deborah fourteen. I don't think Luckies were cradle-robbers. Their female models were selected less for the status-symbol value (as vs. e.g. Camels) than for the attractiveness. Here's one from the previous year, 1936 -- the girl in red. Sort of a Mary Magdalen-meets-the-Sheik-of-Araby look?
L'Enfant,
Ah, collectibles!
Tom,
My god, why did I ever stop (smoking Camels, that is) -- Mrs. Powell Cabot, Mrs. Hamilton Fish, Mrs. William T. Wetmore, et al., what fine ladies, what a lift they got (where are they all now?). . .
10.19
grey whiteness of clouds above shadowed
plane of ridge, towhee landing on table
in foreground, sound of wave in channel
may be considered “physical”
phenomenon, which was
description, to make object
three-dimensional, in
grey white of fog reflected in channel,
circular green pine on tip of sandspit
Steve, I believe they are all together now, puffing away like so many well-connected little steam locomotives, while serenely playing-through any inconvenient foursome that happens to get in their way, on the links at Murray Bay, Canada.
And now the pieces all begin to fit together...
“Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ça y est. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in the air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday."
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Yet another reason to give up smoking?
All of these gave me a lift at the end of the day. I so clearly and easily remember (and sometimes relive in dreams) the unique, satisfying feeling of pulling the lever mechanism of my college dormitory's cigarette machine (after inserting what seemed like a small, but reasonable number of coins), briefly anticipating, then hearing and seeing the pretty pack of Luckies or Camels (plus a match book) tumbling down and into place and possession. As Chad and Jeremy put it so well, "but that was yesterday, and yesterday's gone." Thanks for these; they remind me of happily trolling though my parents' Playbills, looking at ads like these, when I was young. Curtis
& Bogart as Rick in "Casablanca" with his pack of Chesterfields, asking Dooley Wilson to "play it" while he thinks of Ingrid Bergman.
I must say I took a deep, satisfying drag but while inhaling the sophisticated ambiance of these adverts, I was also taken aback by the non sequitur endings of some of them, to wit, Mrs. Powell Cabot: “She loves flowers and keeps her home filled with them,” (Nothing like having a house filled with silent passive smokers) Mrs. Hamilton Fish, Jr.: “In the summer she goes to Murray Bay, Canada and plays golf,” (Presumably to exercise that hole in one of her lungs).
In the meantime gals, life is somewhat more down-to-earth:
GRAVEYARD SHIFT AT RJ REYNOLDS
Now you get this
And you get it good,
You nicotine pocked hack
Reared asinine son of a dung
Reeking Camel sucker—
That was the last straw.
Now just drag that butt-
Smoking carcass of yours
To the meat wagon—
Pack it in, Slim.
The cigarette advertising images here date from the same period as Dorothea Lange's photos of the people whose miserable labour made all that glamorous death-wooing possible.
The history of women's independence and the history of America's trademark product are intimately and insidiously intertwined. Those who have taken the time to look at Lange's photos will note that while women are prominent in the scenes depicting tobacco sharecroppers' and tenant farmers' lives and work, none of them are to be seen smoking cigarettes.
Perhaps the greatest "triumph" in the history of American advertising was the conversion of attitudes on the issue of women and smoking that took place in the 1920s and 1930s. The suffrage movement gave many women a sense of entitlement and freedom and the tobacco industry took advantage of the marketing opportunity. The American Tobacco Company led the way with its ads specifically targeting women. Among those they hired to this end were some prominent celebrity women like the famous aviatrix Amelia Earhart. The general thrust of the Luckies ads was to suggest that smoking promotes slimming. Lissome young women therefore populated most of their ads. Luckies' most successful campaign, based on the slogan “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”, was a direct challenge to an immediate rival, the candy industry. By the early Thirties Luckies were the most puffed-upon brand in the land. Liggett & Myers Chesterfields and R.J. Reynolds' Camels mounted successful campaigns aimed at specific demographics. The Camels campaign featuring prominent (and rich) society dames must rank among the most repulsive of offensives in the long sordid history of the advertising trade. Autonomy, "class", "style" and simple snobbery were mingled as exploitable motives, conjoined with the overarching manipulation of the fear of weight gain, installed through these ads as a lasting national female phobia.
History suggests that women as well as men were perfectly capable of availing themselves of tobacco, if they pleased, in earlier cultures and times. Consider these Aztec women being handed tobacco flowers and smoking tubes before a banquet (from Florentine Codex, 16th c.).
Indeed, among those, both women and men, who survived the middle part of the last century in this country, there are few who remain free of the stinky taint of tobacco smoke somewhere in the dark rancid regions of the old memory closet.
Halfway down this page of pictures of silly people being silly, if you look closely you'll see a silly poet boy appearing in a Pall Mall advert ("Tom Clark" by George Schneeman,1967).
"Who has carried out more research into this than the good people of the American Tobacco Company? They say it's safe. Why would they lie? If you're dead, you can't smoke"
- Roy Munson.
And those are the words of either an authoritative annotater, or a noted authority.
Ishmael: I don't drink coffee.
Roy: Why not?
Ishmael: Because it's a stimulant.
Roy: What the hell do you think cigarettes are?
Ishmael: They are?
[Roy nods]
Ishmael: All right, make it an extra large, two sugars, lots of cream. Lots of cream.
Tom,
Thanks for all this -- a kind of class warfare -- those thin rich ladies "being (I mean "smoking") toward death, those women in Dorothea Lange's photos. Nice, in any case, to sos GS painting of "Little TC in a prospect of Pall Malls". . .
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